The Window

For 70 years, people have debated what happened to Frank Olson at the Hotel Statler. Did the CIA’s grand experiment with LSD lead to the sanctioned execution of a government employee? For George White, Frank Olson’s death would change everything.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
When the Hotel Statler opened, it had twenty two hundred
rooms in nineteen nineteen, that made it the largest hotel
in the world. Just across from Penn Station on Seventh
Avenue in New York City, the hotel had a real
old school charm for decades. Guests could put their clothing
and shoes in a servador, essentially a special cabinet that

(00:27):
allowed items to be passed to and from rooms without
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

(00:48):
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

(01:10):
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,

(01:33):
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,

(01:54):
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,

(02:16):
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

(02:37):
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

(03:00):
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

(03:23):
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

(03:46):
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

(04:09):
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

(04:31):
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.

(05:16):
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

(05:37):
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

(05:58):
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

(06:20):
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

(06:42):
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

(07:06):
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.

(07:28):
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

(07:48):
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.

(08:13):
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.

(08:35):
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

(08:58):
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

(09:18):
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.

(09:39):
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

(10:01):
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

(10:23):
be allowed back to Porton Down. He was a security risk.
Anyone with a conscience was a security risk. As an

(10:50):
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

(11:10):
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.

(11:33):
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

(11:56):
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.

(12:17):
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

(12:40):
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

(13:02):
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

(13:27):
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

(13:50):
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

(14:12):
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

(14:36):
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

(14:57):
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

(15:18):
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,

(15:39):
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

(16:03):
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

(16:26):
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

(16:48):
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

(17:12):
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

(17:34):
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

(17:59):
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

(18:22):
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

(18:43):
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

(19:06):
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

(19:26):
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

(19:47):
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

(20:10):
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

(20:30):
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

(20:54):
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

(21:14):
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

(21:35):
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

(21:56):
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.

(22:19):
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.

(22:40):
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

(23:01):
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.

(23:23):
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

(23:44):
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

(24:06):
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,

(24:26):
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

(24:48):
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.

(25:09):
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

(25:30):
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,

(25:53):
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

(26:15):
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,

(26:40):
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

(27:01):
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

(27:21):
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

(27:45):
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

(28:06):
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

(28:27):
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,

(28:49):
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.

(29:10):
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

(29:31):
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

(29:55):
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

(30:16):
away on the estate of a renowned mafioso for an
indeterminate period of time. Part three shut it down. The

(30:40):
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

(31:02):
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

(31:23):
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,

(31:44):
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

(32:06):
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

(32:29):
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.

(32:49):
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

(33:11):
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,

(33:36):
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

(33:59):
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

(34:22):
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

(34:45):
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

(35:09):
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

(35:33):
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

(35:55):
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,

(36:19):
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

(36:42):
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.

(37:04):
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.

(37:28):
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.

(37:49):
George White's climax was still ahead of him. H Operation

(38:20):
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

(38:42):
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.