The Window

guests having to interact with employees. It wasn't great for tipping, since it eliminated the social presence of an outstretched hand, but the servador service was clandestine private fitting since the Statler was also a popular hangout for CIA operatives, including one who checked out through a window. Every story you read or here about Frank Olsen starts just like this with his body pitching out of a tenth story win dough at the Hotel Statler. It happens around two thirty

am on November ninety three. Olsen is a biological warfare scientist working for the United States Army and the CIA, and he's not well. He's in the city to get treatment. Olsen has been exhibiting suspicious behavior enough to make him a security risk. So Olsen is at the Statler, but he's not alone. Robert Lashbrook, sleeping in the bed nearby, is there to look out for his welfare. He doesn't do a very good job of it, because one moment Olsen is in bed, the next he's going out the window. Well,

that's not quite accurate. He goes out the window, yes, but first he goes through the glass pane of the window, shattering it. He doesn't even bother pulling up the blinds, so he goes through those two. He falls for a few seconds, then lands on the sidewalk below. Pedestrians crowd around him, horrified. He's on his back and still in his undershirt and shorts. He would soon succumb to his injuries,

but he wasn't dead yet. After he passes, and for the next seventy years, Olsen's family, journalists, and even intelligence operatives will search for the words he didn't have the strength to utter. Did Frank Olsen die by suicide? Was in an accident? Or did the CIA's grand experiment with LSD finally go too far and prompt the sanctioned execution

of a government employee. The information may have been on the tip of Frank Olson's tongue, but he couldn't answer, and if his death was indeed a homicide, that silence was the whole point. Frank Olson had seemed too much and was in danger of unmasking the whole affair. Olsen wasn't the only death on the pavement that night. Many secrets of the Cold War, of cruel and outrageous human experimentation,

died with him. That's where Frank Olsen's story always ends, and where it always begins, through the window and down to the pavement. In a movie, the camera would pan down as he fell. Instead, it should pan back up. It should move past the windows and brick exterior of the hotel Statler, past the curtains and flagpoles, and right back into the room ten eighteen A, where Robert Lashbrook is sitting bolt upright in his bed, confused, or at

least seemingly confused at what had just happened. When he gets dressed and follows the police to the station, they'll find a small slip of paper inside his pants pocket. The camera should zoom in on it so you can see the ink stains on the paper, the indentations of the pen strokes, the paper is important. According to HP Albarelli, the paper has a set of initials on it. G W for George White, MH for Morgan Hall, White's alter ego.

And then address one Bedford Street, where George White was conducting an illicit LSD campaign just a mile and a half away. Maybe Frank Olson had been there, maybe he was going there. Either way, his death would change everything. Yeah. For I Heart Radio, this is Operation Midnight Climax and I Heeart original podcast, I'm Noel Brown and this is

episode five The Window, Part one, a Living Nightmare. When the CIA's chief chemist, Sidney Gottlieb hired George White, he was looking for a psychedelic mercenary, a predator he could unleash on the general population. When White sent back details of his experiments in Greenwich Village, Gottlieb devoured them. But those weren't enough for him. In Gottlieb's head, for America to emerge victorious the Cold War, he had to know everything about LSD and how it would affects people in

the intelligence field, starting with himself. On the surface, it sounds almost ethical, Gottlieb claimed he'd administered asset to himself. More than two hundred times. It was like a physician following his own prescribed diet, But there was a key difference. Gottlieb was a consenting subject. He knew exactly what he was ingesting. But the drug works differently on people who don't know they're being dosed, and as George White found out,

acid had an unpredictable effect on subjects. Bad trips sent some people to rooftops to contemplate suicide, or landed them in sanitariums LSD was a kind of psychic scalpel. In the right hands, it could be beneficial. In the wrong hands,

it was assault, and make no mistake. In November nineteen fifty three, Sidney Gottlieb committed widespread assault, and even though George White wasn't anywhere near the CIA retreat where it happened, the consequences would eventually shut down his whole New York operation. That weekend, Gottlieb but organized retreat at Deep Creek Lodge in Maryland for some of the CIA's chemists as well as those who worked for the Army's Special Operations Division.

The two groups often worked together on various biochemical projects. This was a world beyond drugs, one in which the CIA sought ways to kill or incapacitate enemies using biological warfare. If George White was a mercenary. The chemists of the government supplied the weapons, and Frank Olsen was one of the people who was there that weekend. As a chemist, Frank Olsen had been recruited into the Army's Chemical Development Division,

though he was technically a CIA employee. He studied ways to weaponize germs, obscuring them in shaving creams or insect repellents. There was a lighter that, once flicked, would dispense a lethal gas in a pocket spray that could induce pneumonia. Olsen sometimes went to a secret Army base on Plumb Island off of Long Island, where chemicals too dangerous for

the mainland were studied. In nineteen fifty, intelligence operatives released a cloud of traceable but harmless bacteria over San Francisco using large aerosol hoses. They called it Operations Sea Spray. They wanted to see how far a chemical attack could travel. Before long, eleven people checked into hospitals with urinary tract infections. The microbe wasn't as harmless as they thought. When American soldiers captured in Korea confessed to using biological weapons. The

CIA insisted it was brainwashing. Frank Olsen believed they were telling the truth, that the anther acts and other deadly pathogens he brewed in his lab were being used on the enemy. He knew the chemicals were in the hands of the United States because he had held them in his own hands. Olsen was a lab geek, a man of science. He was quiet and reserved, A family man

with a wife and three children. He didn't have the kind of callousness intelligence operatives developed over time, yet he was often called to the scene of experiments that would rattle his conscience. Toxic clouds were administered to laboratory animals like monkeys, their bodies being added to a rising pile. Olsen witnessed fierce interrogations in foreign countries where humans writhed in pain in response to experimental chemicals that would burn

their eyes or disrupt their breathing before killing them. Once Olsen had visited a microbiological research lab at Porton Down in Wiltshire, England. Volunteers had agreed to be dosed with nerve gases. Olsen watched as one man collapsed in front of him, foaming at the mouth before he died. Olson later told a British psychiatrist named William Sergeant that he had been to American and British testing sites in Frankfurt, Germany,

and that he'd seen something awful. Sergeant recommended Olsen never be allowed back to Porton Down. He was a security risk. Anyone with a conscience was a security risk. As an expert in biological warfare, Olsen had been summoned to examine the fallout of a mass hysteria event that occurred in the small French town of Point Saint Aspri in August. It's one of the strangest chapters in twentieth century history and foreshadows the worst of George White's domestic exploits in

the years to come. Point Santa Spree is the kind of small town in France people describe as idyllic. Classic architecture is everywhere. A bridge made of stone extends over the Rhone River, and the tiny streets act as arteries for the residents to exist in a kind of suspended state of simple living that sustained them for hundreds of years. The Bouvier family hails from here, one of their own.

Jacqueline Bouvier became Jacqueline Kennedy. That simplicity, that isolation, may have been why someone turned the dream of Point Santa Spree into a living nightmare. A postal worker was in the middle of his shift when he began to feel it, a sensation. He was shrinking, growing smaller and smaller as the small town around him grew larger and larger. He saw and felt fire raging all around him. Snakes crawled up his legs and around his arms, dragging them down.

He was descending into madness, and so were hundreds of other residents. The townspeople began shrieking, crying, moaning. A man was convinced he had transformed into a plane and jumped out of a second story window, arms spread like wings. He broke both of his legs, then stood up and kept running, more terrified of whatever was chasing him than the pain of his broken bones. Many grew so manic they had to be herded away. The postal worker was brought to a hospital and put in a straight jacket.

Three teens were chained to a bed. They were fighting their own demons, and nothing could soothe them. Their mettal bed frames shook as they struggled. Over the next few days, more and more people were hospitalized or put in asylums with hallucinations. One villager put it this way, I am dead, and my head is made of copper, and I have snakes in my stomach and they are burning me. At

least four people died. No one has ever conclusively proven what happened in Point Santa Spree, but some blamed ergot poisoning ergot, which is highly toxic, and large amounts may have gotten into the bread in the local bakeries. Others of theorized the CIA made Point Santa Spree one huge chemical trial, which is why Olsen was in the vicinity

to assess the outcome. It was just another chapter, and what he feared was a madness, not on the part of the people, but in the corridors of American intelligence. George White mentioned Point Cenisprie briefly in a letter to a friend in nineteen fifty four. He called it the Little French Villages Stormy epidemic. Stormy was a George White slang term for LSD that was the dark side of

intelligence work, and Olsen's mood grew darker with it. Two years later, Frank Olsen was one of the employees invited to Sydney Gottlieb's retreat. Gottlieb wanted to make sure the CIA and the army scientists at Fort Dietrich were working in tandem, that they were on the same page. But, and this was usually the case with Gottlieb, he had another motive. He wanted to dose everyone there with LSD.

Gottlieb gathered the men in the lodge and gestured for his colleague Robert Lashbrook to begin pouring drinks from a bottle of Quantros, an orange flavored liqueur. Lashbrook filled glasses with Quantros and then, of great discretion, added an ampule of LSD to each. He handed the glasses to the gathered scientists, and he and Gottlieb watched as they began ingesting the concoction. Within twenty minutes, the men began to

experience the expected early symptoms confusion, hallucinations, fear. The severed and mounted heads of hunted and captured deer in the lodge began to stare them down their lips moving, gentlemen, I assure you what you are feeling is completely normal. You've all been administered a dose of LSD. Gottlieb spoke calmly, like he was informing a group of people to proceed to a fire exit. The men went off into their own corners of consciousness, grappling with the newly open borders

of their minds. But unlike George white seemingly random drugging of Linda King and Barbara Smythe, Gottlieb took a special interest in how Frank Olson reacted. He'd been earmarked as a possible problem. Gottlie pulled Olson aside and began asking him questions, Questions that might one day be posed to Olsen by enemy agents, the invisible Soviets who loomed large in the American imagination of the day, Questions that might wear down someone under the influence of both drugs and morality.

What exactly was said in those hours, only Sidney Gotlieb could answer, and when he was eventually asked years later, he wouldn't. But we know what happened. After the retreat came to an end, Frank Olson returned home and Withdrew his wife and children were greeted by a husband and father who seemed more uncertain about his work than ever Brad. It was simply the accumulation of horrors Frank Olsen had witnessed, or maybe it was the LSD tearing down walls he

had erected in his mind to compartmentalize his responsibilities. Something had shifted and Olsen wanted out. He went to his immediate supervisor, Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Ruett, and said he was resigning. Ruett begged him to reconsider, not to do anything. Rash ru had also phoned Gottlieb to express his concern. Remember, Olsen was one of perhaps only two dozen people in the world who had knowledge of the CIA's top secret experiments like mk Ultra. For one of them to abruptly

announced they were finished done well, it wasn't possible. It was akin to a mafia member turning up one day and saying, is giving up the life. Some places don't have an exit door. Gottlieb told Ruett and Lashbrook to take Olson to New York City, where he saw a doctor named Harold Abramson. He was an allergist who was giving LSD to his patients on behalf of the CIA. If Olsen revealed something he shouldn't it would be okay. Abramson was one of them. He prescribed sedatives in Bourbon,

but Olson's mood didn't improve. He didn't want to see his family, He kept insisting he wanted to, in his words, disappear. They went to Long Island to see Abramson again, this time at his home, then went back to New York. One night, Olsen wandered out into the streets, throwing away his wallet and identification cards, a gesture that seemed to indicate he wanted to throw away his government identity, but

he couldn't. Gottlieb would never allow that. They convinced Olsen he would be best off in a sanitarium in Maryland to get round the clock care. He seemed agreeable, if you believe Lashbrook. He even seemed happy. The two men planned to drive back to Maryland the next day to check Olson into a facility. They got a room at the Hotel Statler. They went to bed. When Lashbrook woke up, Olsen was already on the pavement where he would never

regain consciousness. A flurry of phone calls followed, which the hotel's telephone operator overheard. Lashbrook called Abramson's telling that Olson was quote gone, not that he had died by suicide or jumped or fell out of a window, but just gone. The authorities were called. They talked to Lashbrook, who told them he awoke to the sound of crashing glass. At the police station. He emptied his pockets, which had a slip of paper with George White's address and initials on it.

Frank Olson's family was notified. No one told them Olson had been dosed with LSD days prior to his death. The whole affair was documented as a suicide. Olsen had either fallen or jumped out of the window. No one said he was pushed. But if he had been pushed, If Sydney gottlie But decided Frank Olsen had become too dangerous to try and contain, and arranged for someone to

push him, who would it be. Certainly not Gotlei himself, who was nowhere near the Hotel Statler that night, and certainly not Robert Lashbrook, who was a CIA employee, not a field operative, not someone with experience, nothing out of life. If you were Sydney Gottlieb and you needed to dispose of Frank Olson, whose number would you call at his federal Bureau of Narcotics Office, George White kept a photo

of a corpse on the wall, a real corpse. When people would ask why an obvious as many people did, White explained that the photo was of a spy he had been forced to kill with his bare hands during the war. He was, after all, a graduate of Camp X, the school of mayhem and murder. To take a human life in the name of national security was nothing to be ashamed of. To White, it was something to put in a frame. When Sydney Gottley decided Frank Olsen was

a problem, he had to have called someone. And while there was no shortage of CIA assassins, Godly had few men he could trust, even fewer who knew about him k Ultra and the effects of LSD on the mind, and only one with a photo of a dead man on his wall. Part two, The Coincidence. So where was George White during all of this? Frank Olson's trip to New York, his visits with Robert Lashbrook, his wandering the city streets, and its plunge from a ten story window.

If Sydney Gottlieb had his way, White would have been glued to Olson the entire time. Got Leave had called White to ask him to do exactly that, to escort Olson back to Maryland and right into a mental health facility. The conversation got far enough along that White scribbled down Frank Olsen's home telephone number. But then White told Godle

something he had never told him before. I can't said, mind you, this wasn't necessarily an assignment to get rid of Frank Olsen, just escorting him around at the time. But White said no, and the reason was something Godlie couldn't argue with. George White's mother was dying, so White got on a plane on November eleven nine and headed straight for Carl's Bad, California. Her funeral was novemb He

didn't return to New York until December. That meant White had missed the Deep Creek Lodge meeting, Frank Olsen's slow descent into despair and his death by weeks. On both sides. If anyone could claim they had virtually nothing to do with Olson's death, it would have to have been George White. But here's a recurring thing about White. He didn't need to be on the scene to be involved. White could

put wheels in motion. He was, after all, not physically present for dozens of arrests in the famous Hip Sing Tong drug ring case that made his career, But none of those arrests would have been possible without him. So if White couldn't have been around Frank Olsen in the last weeks of his life, what could he have done? Hello, Pierre, It's g Pierre Lafitte. The name sounds like a French capper lar in a detective novel, and that wouldn't be too far off. Lafitte was a narcotics agent and a

close ally of Whites. He was instrumental in making Whites New York lsd pad a hopping social scene, recruiting guests for White to dose and then watching from behind a two way mirror for the effects to materialize. White trusted Lafitte enough to bring him into an exclusive inner circle, one in which he got c I a security clearance. He knew a lot of the government's dirty secrets. He was a world traveler, having helped White on drug excursions overseas.

Pierre Lafitte was the kind of man who might need to keep track of which name he was using on any given day. There was something else about Lafitte Earlier that year, White had made arrangements for Lafitte to begin working as a bell captain at a hotel, the Hotel Statler. Could it have been a simple moonlighting job. That seems unlikely. Just a month earlier, Lafitte had made national headlines for his undercover work recovering paintings stolen from a church in Kentucky.

This was something else White might have wanted to keep watch on the drug investigation there. He might have suspected hotel employees of some kind of wrongdoing. He needed a pair of eyes the Statler for reasons that have never explicitly been spelled out. So out of the dozens or even hundreds of hotels in New York City, why did Robert Lashbrook book himself and Frank Olsen into the Hotel Statler the night of Olsen's death? Of all the hotels in Manhattan, why did those two just happen to be

in the one hotel. Pierre Lafitte had the freedom to roam where he was a familiar face to hotel employees, where he could, if he wanted, unlock any hotel room door that had something he wanted on the other side. When White had to turn down got leave because he had to be in California. He asked Lafitte to keep an eye on Olsen to monitor the situation. We know Lashbrook had White's initials and pad address, as though he expected to make contact with White at some point during

the trip. Maybe White was expected back earlier. Then Olsen died by suicide. Allegedly, it was always a strange premise to begin with the idea he would launch himself through a window. No matter how despondent someone becomes. They're easier ways, and most people would at least bother to pull up the blinds. First. Decades later, Frank's son Eric Olsen would walk into room ten eighteen A and see how small it was, how unlikely it was that anyone could get

a running start to launch themselves out the window. Olsen had even tracked down a long retired Sidney Gottlieb, asking him what had happened to his father. Gottlieb would say only that everyone, Gottlieb the CIA Olson had perhaps gone too far in their search for mind control, but he still insisted Olsen had died by suicide. He even suggested Eric find a support group for children whose fathers had

taken their own lives. Eric took another approach in he had his father's body exhumed so a professor of law and forensic science could examine him. Eric had wanted to wait until his mother had passed away before pursuing his hunch that there was something amiss about his father's death that Sydney Gottlieb was lying. The autopsy was a fascinating look at the final moments of Frank Olston's life, articulating

more and more of the words he couldn't speak. It revealed Olsen had a previously undis closed head injury, ahematoma on the left side. He may have been struck by a blunt object before landing on the pavement. Who hit him, not Lashbrook, probably, but someone could have opened the door to ten eighteen A that night. Someone who confronted Olsen, who wanted to orchestrate something that looked like a suicide.

Someone who was following a CIA manu on the Ideal Methods of Eliminating a target, a document that was later declassified in and described preferred method of murder. The most efficient accident in simple assassination is a fall of seventy five ft or more onto a hard surface, elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows, and bridges will serve. In chase cases, it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject

before dropping him. Care is required to en No wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death. The facts of Frank Olsen's death or that he was dosed with LSD in November of nine and didn't react well to it, He had already been concerned about the kind of work he was being asked to do. He was checked into a hotel that was very familiar to the CIA, with a former Bell captain who would have done virtually anything George White or Sydney Gottlieb would have

told him to do. It doesn't mean Pierre Lafitte murdered Frank Olson. It's a theory, maybe even a fanciful one, And if we stopped there, maybe we could say it's all a bit strange but mostly circumstantial, if we stopped there. Following Olson's death, White felt compelled to make sure his friend and colleague Pierre Lafitte got out of town. White arranged Lafitte to travel to St. Petersburg, Florida, and stay at a property owned by one of White's friends, a

well known drug kingpin. If Lafitte had nothing to do with Frank Olson's murder, why was George White so insistent that Lafitte get out of the state and stash himself away on the estate of a renowned mafioso for an indeterminate period of time. Part three shut it down. The months following Frank Olsen's death were memorable for everyone. The Olsen's got repeated visits by Vincent Ruett, Olson's former boss, who tried to console the family. The CIA could tell

them only that Olsen had gone out the window. That he had been dosed with LSD would not be disclosed for another twenty years. When The Washington Post obtained classified documents that referred to a CIA employee who had fallen out of a window. The Olsen's knew immediately the story referred to Frank. In nineteen five, the same year chevy Chase was impersonating Gerald Ford as a clumsy incompetent, the President invited the Olsen family to the White House to

make an apology. They accepted a financial settlement in exchange for agreeing not to sue the government. Over the death. This was before the autopsy, before it looked more and more like Olsen had been scrubbed from the world with great deliberation. Of course, Sidney Gottlieb knew what had happened, and while his superiors the CIA were fuzzy on the details, they knew that Olsen's death was related to god Leave's increasingly out of control LSD program. People began asking Gotleib questions,

questions he didn't particularly care to answer. He was used to autonomy, to being left to his own devices. Now there was a threat of oversight. He and Lashbrook were given a reprimand Lashbrook left the agency. Gottlieb stayed, but the CIA's psychological warfare program had been put on notice. Gottlieb wasn't prone to panic, but in light of the controversy surrounding Frank Olsen, the idea of George White drugging hapless civilians all over New York City suddenly seemed unwise.

Gottlieb phoned White shut it down. George said, I've only just gotten started. It's we need to shut it down. White broke his lease at eighty one Bedford Street, where he'd been doing brisk business as Morgan Hall LSD provocateur, and it probably broke his heart a little too. He'd been at it for only six months before Godli pulled the plug. It struck him as slightly unfair. It was Godlib,

after all, who had dosed Frank Olsen, not White. Even though White had himself released countless people into the streets of the city suffering from hallucinations, he'd covered his tracks well. He hadn't gotten sloppy and targeted a high profile government intelligence operative the way Godly pad. For a time, White

focused on his narcotics work. He was still an employee with the Narcotics Bureau, working to erase the scourge of marijuana, opium, heroin, cocaine and other drugs being delivered into the country by day, even as he distributed them to innocent people at night. But the past few months had been extremely hard on White. His mother had died, Frank Olsen had disrupted his LSD projects. For a brief period, George White seemed to submit to

a few feeling of melancholy. It comes through in the correspondence he wrote to friends and colleagues at the time, some of which resides at Stanford University. There's a sense of loss, not only for his mother but for his work. Without the pad the CIA safe house, White was just another cop. He had once again become what he had always feared. Average His letters, hundreds of them, are often innocuous in the extreme, speaking of travel and inquiring about

mutual friends. At first glance, none seem particularly incriminating, But if you know about Pierre Lafitte and the Hotel Statler and Frank Olsen, some passages take on a different meaning. In October n White wrote a letter to Garland Williams, one of the supervisors at the Narcotics Bureau and White's good friend. It's cryptic, deliberately so and unsettling. White makes two mentions of what he calls the Oldsen thing and how it's behind him. Of course, he could just mean

the pressure over the incident was winding down. But then he writes, our friend decided that his term at the Statler was overextended. White seems to be referring to Pierre Lafitte because he goes on to say, maybe after our friend returns from his jaunt out west, he can return to France for a few weeks. I suspect his moonlighting work at NYC Hotels is over once and for all. Teen loved him in his Bellman's office. Involved or not,

George White was profoundly affected by Frank Wilson's death. It meant his work as a man possessed of secret knowledge was her. People have never stopped asking questions about Frank Olson's death, but they stopped asking enough in nineteen fifty four for Sydney Gottleib to feel like the worst was behind him. The CIA had forced him to pause mk Ultra, but not to dismantle it. The CIA was able to enter into a new contract with drug maker Eli Lily

for more LSD and tonnage quantities mass amounts. So in late nineteen fifty four, a rejuvenated Sydney Gottleib traveled to New York to pay a visit to his dejected friend, George White. Gottlieb explained that the LSD experiment in New York was done and done for good. There would be no grand reopening of eighty one Bedford Street. Naturally, White was disappointed. Let me ask you something, Geo. You're from California, aren't you born and raised? You want to go back?

The CIA didn't want to get rid of George White. They just needed to get rid of New York City. George White could relocate to another hip community, one bursting with liberal thinkers, an entire population full of people who were probably high on drugs already. We want you to move to San Francisco. White was ecstatic, and then Gottlieb took out a manual, one written exclusively for the CIA. This wasn't the assassination manual, but something new. White looked

down at the cover. It was an academic primer on the best way to extract information using drugs and sex. Gottlieb smiled, sid this is the greatest day of my life. George White's climax was still ahead of him. H Operation Midnight Climax is hosted by Noel Brown. This show is written by Jake Rosson, editing, sound design and mixing by Ernie Indradette and Natasha Jacobs. Original music by Aaron Kaufman. Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson and Maurica Brown.

Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Special thanks this episode to David Crumholtz and Ted Ramy. Julian Weller is our supervising producer. Our Executive producers are Jason English and Mangesha ticket Ter See you next week.