11
Strange Love
The 1951 World Series was an epic sports event. The “subway series” not only
featured two exciting New York teams, the Yankees and the Giants, but it
marked the climax of what became known as “The Season of Change.” Joe
DiMaggio, the legendary “Yankee Clipper,” would bow out of baseball after the
series. And two young future Hall of Famers—Yankees rookie Mickey Mantle
and Giants rookie Willie Mays—would make their World Series debuts. The
twenty-year-old Mays, who idolized DiMaggio, finally had a chance to exchange
a few words with his hero when photographers urged the two sluggers to stand
together for a picture. “It was a dream come true,” said the rookie, who played
the series in a daze. Game 6, which was played on October 10 in front of nearly sixty-two thousand people in Yankee Stadium, would assume mythic proportions in baseball fans’ memories. The Yankees withstood a thrilling ninth-inning comeback charge by the Giants, winning the game 4–3 and taking the series. As DiMaggio trotted off the field to the roar of the crowd, he was already fading into history. “I’ve played my last game,” Joltin’ Joe told his teammates, who gathered around him in the locker room, handing him baseballs, bats, and other mementoes for him to sign. At thirty-six, DiMaggio’s body was failing him and he didn’t want to let down his fans and fellow players. “He quit because he wasn’t Joe DiMaggio anymore,” his brother Tom later said.
Among those sitting in the stands on that bittersweet day at Yankee Stadium were two well-dressed German gentlemen in their forties, accompanied by a younger man who was their CIA handler. Like DiMaggio, the older German, Reinhard Gehlen, was a legendary figure, but his achievements were of a completely different order. Gehlen did not look like an imposing figure. He was slightly built and had a receding hairline, brush mustache, and ears that were as sharply peaked as a bat’s. His skin was so pale that it seemed “translucent” to his CIA companion. Only his striking blue eyes gave any indication of the intense ambition that had driven Gehlen throughout his career.
During the war, Gehlen had served as Hitler’s intelligence chief on the
eastern front. His Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost) apparatus
relentlessly probed for weaknesses in the Soviet defenses as the Nazi juggernaut
made its eastward thrust. Gehlen’s FHO also pinpointed the location of Jews,
Communists, and other enemies of the Reich in the “bloodlands” overrun by
Hitler’s forces, so they could be rounded up and executed by the Einsatzgruppen
death squads. Most of the intelligence gathered by Gehlen’s men was extracted
from the enormous population of Soviet prisoners of war—which eventually
totaled four million—that fell under Nazi control. Gehlen’s exalted reputation as
an intelligence wizard, which won him the Führer’s admiration and his major
general’s rank, derived from his organization’s widespread use of torture.
Though many in the Yankee Stadium crowd that day would have been deeply displeased to learn Gehlen’s identity, the German spymaster, wearing his trademark dark glasses, sat undisturbed in the stands, enjoying the carnival exuberance of the afternoon. The game itself was of little interest to Gehlen—it was his German companion, Heinz Herre, who was the rabid baseball fan. Herre, who had served as Gehlen’s indispensable deputy ever since their days together on the eastern front, became so enamored of America’s favorite pastime after the war that he could spit out players’ statistics like the most obsessive of baseball card collectors. During the war, Herre had studied the Soviet enemy with equal intensity, learning the Russian language and immersing himself in the country’s politics and culture. Now his compulsive curiosity was focused on all things American.
Herre, a tall and lean man with an appealing smile, had a knack for ingratiating himself with his U.S. colleagues. Though the socially awkward Gehlen lacked his deputy’s facility with Americans, he knew it was an essential skill. In the final days of the war, Gehlen astutely concluded that the U.S.-Soviet alliance would inevitably break apart, providing an opportunity for at least some elements of the Nazi hierarchy to survive by joining forces with the West against Moscow. He knew that his own fate depended on his ability to convince his new American masters of his strategic value in the emerging Cold War. Gehlen did this by trekking into the Bavarian mountains, as U.S. forces approached, and burying cases of microfilm containing Nazi intelligence on the Soviet Union. The German spymaster then leveraged his expertise and underground connections in Eastern Europe, convincing U.S. military officials of his indispensability as an authority on the Soviet threat.
Gehlen’s canny maneuvers won him and his top staff a flight out of war ravaged Germany on a DC-3 military transport to the United States, where they were moved into comfortable quarters at Fort Hunt in Virginia. Here Gehlen was introduced to his American intelligence counterparts, including Allen Dulles, who, after listening to the German spymaster’s pitch, decided that the U.S. government should bring the former Nazi intelligence operation under its supervision.
Instead of being handed over to the Soviets as war criminals, as Moscow was demanding, Gehlen and his top deputies were put on a troop ship back to Germany.
Back home, Gehlens spy team was installed by U.S. military authorities in a compound in the village of Pullach, near Munich, that had once served as the headquarters of Hitler confidante Martin Bormann. Gehlens dream of reconstituting Hitler’s military intelligence structure within the U.S. national security system was about to be realized. With the generous support of the American government, the Gehlen Organization—as it came to be known— thrived in Pullach, becoming West Germany’s principal intelligence agency.
In 1948, after a heated internal debate, the CIA decided to take over
supervision of the Gehlen Organization from the U.S. Army, which had growing
concerns about the type of agents Gehlen was recruiting and the quality of their
intelligence work. Gehlen had promised Army officials that he would not hire
former SS or Gestapo officials. But as his organization grew, it absorbed some of
the most notorious figures of the Nazi regime, such as Dr. Franz Six. A former
professor at Berlin University, Six left the classroom to become an intellectual
architect of the Final Solution as well as one of its most enthusiastic enforcers,
personally leading an SS death squad on the eastern front. After the war, Six was
hired by the Gehlen Organization but was later arrested by U.S. Army
counterintelligence agents. Convicted of war crimes, Six served four years in
prison. However, within weeks of his release, Six was back at work in Gehlen’s
Pullach headquarters.
Many in the CIA vehemently opposed any association with such a stigmatized organization, including Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the agency’s first director, who in 1947 strongly urged President Truman to “liquidate” Gehlens operation. The following year, the CIA station chief in Karlsruhe, Germany, expressed his own disgust at the prospect of a merger with Gehlen’s group, calling it an old boy’s network of ex-Nazi officers “who are in a position to provide safe haven for a good many undesirable elements from the standpoint of a future democratic Germany.” But Gehlen had his influential supporters in Washington.
Gehlens backing came primarily from the Dulles faction within the national security establishment—and once again, this faction would prevail. In October 1948, James Critchfield, the new chief of the CIA’s Munich station, was given the task of evaluating Gehlen’s operation and recommending for or against it. The thirty-one-year-old Critchfield was a Dulles man: he had been identified as a talented prospect by Eleanor Dulles while serving with Army intelligence in postwar Vienna, and he was later recruited into the CIA by her brothers. In his final report, Critchfield firmly concluded that the CIA should fold Gehlens group under its wing. It was the beginning of a fateful relationship that would shape Cold War politics for decades to come.
The CIA officially assumed responsibility for the German spy organization in July 1949, with Jim Critchfield taking over as Gehlen’s supervisor. Critchfield moved his base of operations to Pullach, setting up his office in Bormann’s former bedroom. Gehlen had turned Pullach into its own separate world, with over two hundred of his top staff and their wives and children living and working in the compound. Before Critchfield moved in, the German spymaster himself had lived with his wife and four children in Bormann’s two-story house. Known, ironically, as the “White House,” its décor still retained touches of Nazi kitsch, including a stone German eagle looming over the front door, whose claws were now empty after U.S. soldiers chiseled away the swastika they once held.
As Critchfield’s CIA deputies and their families moved into Gehlens gated community, an intimate social fusion began to develop between the former enemies. The Germans and Americans worked and partied together, their children attended the same one-room school, and their families even went on ski trips together in the nearby Bavarian Alps. By 1953, the CIA and Gehlen Organization were so entwined in Germany that some Washington officials, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Roger Keyes, expressed strong concern.
Just a few years before, Gehlen and his top men—who included high-ranking officers of the German General Staff, FHO, and even SS—had been dedicated warriors of the Third Reich. And yet Critchfield convinced himself that, except for “some borderline cases who worked in peripheral areas of the organization . . . Gehlens key people . . . had come out of the war and the Nuremberg Trials with reasonably clean slates.”
Critchfield was the son of a small-town North Dakota doctor and schoolteacher, graduating from North Dakota State University and joining the Army on the eve of the war. He had the thick, wavy hair and dark good looks of a central casting military hero. Critchfield served in North Africa and Europe, rising through the ranks to become one of the Army’s youngest colonels and winning the Bronze Star twice and the Silver Star for gallantry. Crossing the Rhine in the final weeks of the war as the commander of a mobile task force, the young colonel was one of the first American officers to witness firsthand the results of Hitler’s Final Solution. In late April, his unit came across an annex of Dachau. The camp was nearly empty, but there was evidence all around of the horror that had taken place there. At one point, the young Army colonel and his soldiers watched in “shocked silence” as two skeletal camp survivors chased after an escaping SS guard, wrestled him to the ground, and choked him to death.
Despite his war experiences, Critchfield prided himself on keeping an open mind about the ex-Nazi commanders with whom he later worked. “Gehlen and his senior staff, and their wives (many of whom also worked in Pullach), all impressed us as being unusually intelligent and well educated,” Critchfield observed. “In personal characteristics, apparent values, and thoughts about the future of Germany and Europe, these [ex-Nazi] officers did not seem to me significantly different from my contemporaries in the U.S. Army.”
Critchfield knew from the beginning of his professional relationship with Gehlen that he was dealing with a “difficult personality.” Gehlen once subjected his CIA supervisor to a three-hour “harangue” against U.S. interference in his spy organization’s affairs. Despite Gehlens occasional histrionics, Critchfield expressed admiration for his German colleague’s pragmatic, businesslike style and his welcome habit of “getting right to the point.” If Gehlen had not been rescued by U.S. intelligence authorities after the war, he almost certainly would have been convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg. But Critchfield graciously overlooked Gehlens past. “He had a high standard of morality,” Critchfield later observed, without a hint of irony, “with Christian beliefs that were evident and reinforced by his wife Herta and their family.” This simple, trusting American attitude made Critchfield an easy mark for Gehlen and the other quick-witted Nazi veterans whom he supervised.
Reinhard Gehlen was a man of ratlike cunning. He had managed to work his way up through the Wehrmacht’s intelligence hierarchy; to survive a falling-out with Hitler late in the war over his increasingly dire intelligence reports; and not only to avoid the hangman’s noose at Nuremberg but to persuade the Americans to give him a leading role in their shadow war against the Soviet Union. His overriding goal was to rebuild the Nazi power network and return Germany to a dominant role on the European stage. Gehlen harbored deeply mixed feelings about Germany’s American conquerors; he had a cringing respect for their power and money but was deeply resentful about being forced to answer to them. He often treated his handlers, including Critchfield, more as enemies than allies, keeping them in the dark about his operations and even putting them under surveillance.
Late in his life, Critchfield admitted to a Washington Post reporter, “There’s no doubt that the CIA got carried away with recruiting some pretty bad people.” In a secret 1954 memo, later declassified, the agency acknowledged that at least 13 percent of the Gehlen Organization was made up of former hard-core Nazis. But, to the end of his life, Critchfield insisted that Gehlen was not one of these “bad people.”
“I’ve lived with this for nearly 50 years,” Critchfield told the Post in 2001. “Almost everything negative that has been written about Gehlen, in which he has been described as an ardent ex-Nazi, one of Hitler’s war criminals—this is all far from the fact.”
Happily deluded about Gehlen’s true character, Critchfield worked hard to develop a good rapport with the German spymaster throughout their six-year partnership at Pullach. It was Critchfield who arranged the trip to America for Gehlen and his alter ego Heinz Herre in the fall of 1951, highlighted by the final game of the World Series. Gehlens CIA caretaker saw the American odyssey— which was scheduled to include high-level meetings in Washington, as well as a train trip west to California—as a way to cement the agency’s relationship with the cagey German and strengthen his bond with America.
As Critchfield put together the itinerary for Gehlen and Herre, the CIA hierarchy realized that the Germans’ trip was fraught with potential problems. Gehlen remained a controversial figure within U.S. national security circles, where some were still pushing to fire him. An October 1950 CIA report on Gehlen, remarking on his tendency to throw fits and make demands on his American overseers, dismissed the German as “a runt, and, even as runts go, a rather unimpressive one . . . he suffers from a ‘runt complex.’” A flurry of interoffice CIA memos on the eve of Gehlen’s U.S. junket fretted that “his trip can obviously produce a variety of political embarrassments” and predicted that “Gehlen will be somewhat difficult to control on this trip.”
In the end, the trip was a triumph for Gehlen and his supporters in the CIA. After Gehlen and Herre arrived in New York on September 23, 1951, Critchfield escorted them on their railway tour of America. On their way to the West Coast, they stopped over in Chicago, dropping by a 1930s-era speakeasy one night where, “much to the surprise of all of us,” recounted Critchfield, “we were greeted by a famous member of the Mafia.” As they rolled westward on the rails, the three men shed their business skins and eased into the lazy pace of tourists. But the Germans could not drop all their espionage training. “We looked out on the Rockies from the top of Pike’s Peak and walked among the great redwoods outside San Francisco,” recalled Critchfield. “Gehlen was an insatiable photographer and Herre, like the General Staff officer that he was, equipped himself with maps and sought out the highest observation point for surveying each tourist objective.”
Returning to Washington, D.C., on October 8, they checked into a suite at the Envoy, an ornate, old-world hotel in the leafy Adams Morgan neighborhood. Dulles arranged for Gehlen and Herre to meet with CIA director Beetle Smith. Dulles hosted a private dinner at the Metropolitan Club for the Germans and several CIA officers with whom they felt comfortable, including Richard Helms, who had run U.S. intelligence operations in Germany after the war.
The 1951 trip to America sealed the relationship between “UTILITY,” as Gehlen was code-named by the Americans, and the CIA. Over the years, the agency would occasionally wrestle with its conscience over the alliance. But CIA officials invariably suppressed these doubts and moved on. In 1954, an unsigned CIA memo to the chief of the agency’s Eastern Europe division acknowledged that a number of individuals employed by Gehlen “appear from a qualitative standpoint particularly heinous.” By way of illustration, the author of the memo attached biographical summaries on several of Gehlens most repellent recruits, including Konrad Fiebig, who was later charged with murdering eleven thousand Jews in Belarus during the war. Nonetheless, the memo concluded, “We feel it is a bit late in the game to do anything more than remind UTILITY that he might be smart politically to drop such types.”
But the CIA’s intimate relationship with Gehlen came with a price in the global arena. Soviet propagandists made much of the arrangement, and even British intelligence allies vented their outrage. In an August 1955 memo to Dulles, the chief of the CIA’s Eastern European division reported on a diplomatic luncheon in Bonn, during which British officials freely aired their disgust to their American friends. “They were quite blunt in expressing their feelings that the Americans had sold their souls to the Germans because of their frantic and hysterical desire to thwart Soviet military strength,” the CIA official informed Dulles.
Allen Dulles was unruffled by the controversy that swirled around his German colleague. He airily dismissed concerns about Gehlen’s wartime record. “I don’t know if he’s a rascal,” Dulles remarked. “There are few archbishops in espionage. . . . Besides, one needn’t ask him to one’s club.” But, in fact, Dulles and Helms did invite Gehlen to their clubs—including the Metropolitan and the Chevy Chase Club—whenever the German spymaster visited Washington. Dulles had no reservations about working with such men, so why shouldn’t he also drink and dine with them? Dulles even brought along Clover on those occasions when Gehlens talkative wife, Herta, accompanied him to America.
Dulles went to generous lengths to maintain a congenial relationship with Gehlen, sending him gifts and warm greetings on Christmas and his birthday, and even on the anniversaries of their professional alliance. One of Gehlens favorite gifts from Dulles was a small wooden statuette of a cloak-and-dagger figure that the German spymaster described as “sinister” looking, but nonetheless kept on his desk for the rest of his life. Gehlen, in turn, cabled his own chummy messages to the U.S. intelligence chief, and once sent him a gold medallion of St. George slaying the dragon—the Gehlen Organization’s emblem —“as a symbol of our work against bolshevism.”
Dulles knew that Gehlen was a devoted family man. The German intelligence chief closely managed the affairs of his extended family, installing a number of them in positions with “the firm,” as his organization was known by its employees. In late 1954, when Dulles heard that Gehlen was seeking to get his oldest daughter, Katharina, into a good U.S. college, the CIA director immediately began making inquiries on her behalf. Radcliffe, where his own daughter Joan had gone, made it clear that it was not inclined to give the daughter of a former Nazi commander special treatment. But Katharina Gehlen did win admission to Hunter College in New York City.
She later followed family tradition and went to work for her father, acting as a junior spy on occasion and carrying confidential packages across borders. Gehlen proudly confided to American colleagues that on one such mission, Katharina had the foresight to hide her diplomatic pouch “below a layer of soiled feminine niceties” in her suitcase when crossing the border. In those more decorous times, the inquisitive customs official promptly terminated his inspection as soon as he came to the young woman’s dirty underwear.
In 1955, as the CIA prepared to transfer the Gehlen Organization to the West German government, the agency generously continued to back Gehlen, giving him enough money to buy a lakeside estate near Pullach, where he enjoyed sailing his boat on weekends. Critchfield claimed that Gehlen bought the manor with a modest interest-free loan of 48,000 deutsche marks (about $12,000) from the CIA, which Gehlen himself insisted he repaid in full. But reports in the Soviet bloc press characterized the estate as a gift from Dulles that was worth as much as 250,000 DM.
Gehlen was deeply grateful to Dulles, whom he code-named “The Gentleman,” for his unflagging support. “In all the years of my collaboration with the CIA, I had no personal disputes with Dulles,” Gehlen wrote in his memoir. “He pleased me by his air of wisdom, born of years of experience; he was both fatherly and boisterous, and he became a close personal friend of mine.”
Despite the deep affection he had for Dulles, Gehlen felt free to air his complaints about U.S. government policy whenever he suspected that America’s Cold War vigilance was softening. The Gehlen Organization saw the Cold War as the final act of the Reich’s interrupted offensive against the Soviet Union. In August 1955, after Eisenhower’s tentative peace efforts at the Geneva summit, a CIA memo reported that “UTILITY was blunt in his criticism of the U.S. position at Geneva. He expressed the opinion that in the realm of international politics one should never tell a Russian that one will not shoot him, and should under no circumstances be as convincing in this position as President Eisenhower was at Geneva.”
Western leaders negotiated with Moscow at their own peril, Gehlen firmly believed. The Soviet Union enticed you with this and that, but underneath its skirt, “one will see the cloven hoof of the devil,” he said.
Gehlen kept up his martial drumbeat throughout his intelligence career. Thomas Hughes, who served as director of foreign intelligence in the Kennedy State Department, recalled an evening early in the Kennedy presidency when Dulles gave Gehlen a platform for his militarism. “Allen Dulles had a soft spot in his heart for the ‘good Germans,’ expansively defined,” said Hughes. “One of my first social events in the Kennedy administration’s intelligence community was a dinner given by Allen Dulles one night at the Chevy Chase Club in honor of Gehlen, who was visiting from his Munich headquarters. Gehlen led the discussion, advising us how to deal with ‘the Bear,’ his term for the Soviet menace. J. Edgar Hoover, sitting next to me, kept murmuring, ‘The Bear, the Bear. That’s it. The Bear.’”
Gehlen liked to say that his cold-steel view of the Soviet adversary came from his hard-won experience on the eastern front. But it was also calculated to please American hard-liners, particularly his masters, the Dulles brothers. Some critics in Western security circles attacked the ideological bias of the Gehlen Organization’s intelligence reports, which exaggerated the Soviet bloc’s military strength and nuclear capability. But the “cooked” intelligence served the Dulles's by giving them more ammunition for their militant Cold War stance.
The covert Cold War in the West was, to an unsettling extent, a joint operation between the Dulles regime and that of Reinhard Gehlen. The German spy chief’s pathological fear and hatred of Russia, which had its roots in Hitler’s Third Reich, meshed smoothly with the Dulles brothers’ anti-Soviet absolutism. In fact, the Dulles policy of massive nuclear retaliation bore a disturbing resemblance to the Nazis’ exterminationist philosophy—a link that would be darkly satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, with its Führer saluting doomsday scientist. No other cultural artifact of the period captures so perfectly the absurd morbidity of the Cold War, and its Wagnerian lust for oblivion. We live “in an age in which war is a paramount activity of man,” Gehlen announced in his memoir, “with the total annihilation of the enemy as its primary aim.” There could be no more succinct a statement of the fascist ethos.
In the months leading up to the CIA’s transfer of the Gehlen Organization to the government of West Germany, there was another flurry of debate about Gehlen in Washington and Bonn, which grew so heated that it spilled into the press. At the same time, the Federal Republic of Germany, under the rigid leadership of the elderly, conservative Catholic Konrad Adenauer, was also involved in delicate negotiations with the United States over West Germany’s proposed entry into NATO. In October 1954, during a visit by Adenauer to Washington, General Arthur Trudeau, chief of U.S. Army intelligence, met privately with the chancellor to discuss the Gehlen problem, telling the German leader that he did not trust “that spooky Nazi outfit at Pullach.” Trudeau advised Adenauer to clean house before Germany was admitted into NATO.
All hell broke loose in Washington when Dulles learned that Trudeau had trespassed on his turf. Although the Joint Chiefs of Staff continued to back their man, it soon became clear (if it wasn’t already) who was running the intelligence show under Eisenhower. Trudeau found himself transferred out of military intelligence to a remote post in the Far East, and a few years later he quietly retired from his country’s service.
During this turbulent, transitional period in West German affairs, Reinhard Gehlen was confronted with a strong domestic challenger for his espionage throne. In fact, Otto John—the head of BfV, West Germany’s internal security organization (the equivalent of the FBI)—was the only serious rival Gehlen would face during his long reign at Pullach. British intelligence saw Otto John as a far superior alternative to Gehlen. As a survivor of the ill-fated Valkyrie plot against Hitler, John lacked Gehlen’s unsavory baggage. After the coup failed, John narrowly escaped with his life to London, where he worked with British MI6 for the remainder of the war, returning to Germany after Hitler’s defeat to assist with the prosecution of Nazi war criminals.
A self-described liberal, John worried about the “re-Nazification” of Germany, as he witnessed the growing power of Gehlen and the many other former Third Reich officials who were finding key positions in Bonn. High among these officials was Chancellor Adenauer’s right-hand man, Hans Globke, who had helped draft the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the racial identification system that served as the basis for the extermination of German Jews.
A CIA comparative analysis of Gehlen and Otto John unsurprisingly found that “John is the more moral of the two.” But, the report continued, John was “no match for UTILITY in the knock-about of German intelligence politics”—as was soon to be revealed.
In May 1954, John flew to the United States to meet with Eisenhower officials and discuss his democratic vision for postwar Germany. Dulles invited him to lunch at his Georgetown house, and afterward they walked and chatted in his garden. Dulles was eager to hear John’s thoughts on the rearmament of West Germany, a hotly debated issue at the time that Cold Warriors like Dulles strongly supported. John assured the CIA director that he, too, favored rearmament, but only if it was done in a grassroots, democratic way by forming local defense units, instead of “from the top downwards,” which would further empower the militaristic types from Germany’s past. Dulles was not pleased with what he heard. “My whole impression of John,” he wrote in a memo later that year, “was that he was not a very serious character.”
Dulles was predisposed against John to begin with. Gehlen had filled the CIA director’s ears with venomous reports about his German intelligence rival, calling him “unsteady and rootless,” professionally inexperienced, and even prone to alcoholism. What Gehlen clearly found most disturbing about John, however, was his heroic past as an anti-Nazi resister. His moral stature, particularly among the British allies, made him a powerful threat to Gehlen.
John’s meeting with Dulles probably sealed his fate. After he returned home, the BfV chief became the target of a covert campaign engineered by Gehlen to politically undermine him. Soon, Otto John’s life would take a sensational turn. In July, while on a trip to West Berlin to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the failed putsch against Hitler, John disappeared. The news that West Germany’s security chief had vanished sent shock waves around the world. But the story grew even stranger when John later surfaced in East Germany, denouncing Adenauer’s rearmament policy and his administration’s weakness for ex-Nazis. Gehlen gloated over his political enemy’s exit from the Bonn stage. “Once a traitor, always a traitor,” remarked the man who still considered opposition to Hitler as treason.
Then came the final twist in the bizarre spy drama. In December 1955, as the Bundestag (West Germany’s parliament) launched an inquiry into the John affair, he suddenly reappeared in West Germany, claiming that he had been drugged and bundled off to East Berlin against his will. West German authorities did not buy John’s story, and he was arrested and convicted of working on behalf of East Germany’s Communist government, serving four years in prison. But for the rest of his life, John insisted that he was the victim of political treachery, and he strongly implied that it was Reinhard Gehlen, the man who benefited the most from his downfall, who was responsible.
The elimination of Otto John paved the way for Gehlen to consolidate his power. In February 1956, the West German government formally moved to create a foreign intelligence service, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), and soon after, with Dulles’s strong endorsement, Gehlen was officially named its first chief. Gehlens triumph was complete: through ruthless determination he had transformed his Nazi intelligence apparatus into the Gehlen Organization and finally into the BND, giving him an official power base and legitimacy that made him the envy of his fellow Wehrmacht warriors.
In March 1956, Reinhard Gehlens staff prepared to lower the Stars and Stripes, which had flown over the Pullach compound ever since Hitler’s defeat, and replace it with the black-red-gold tricolors of the Federal Republic of Germany. But as Jim Critchfield and his wife packed their family belongings in preparation for his transfer to the Middle East, there was one more urgent piece of business for the departing CIA station chief to handle. On March 13, after returning from a week of secret government meetings in Bonn, Gehlen requested that Critchfield come alone to his office to discuss “a matter of some importance and considerable sensitivity.” The German spymaster was suffering from a cold and he seemed worn down, but he was too anxious to speak with Critchfield to delay their meeting.
Gehlen quickly dispensed with the usual pleasantries and proceeded to present an urgent report on the state of European security. France and Italy, he said, seemed to be moving toward “the reestablishment of [left-center] Popular Front governments.” Likewise, political trends in West Germany could lead to the fall of Adenauer’s conservative government and its replacement by a coalition including the Social Democratic Party and “anti-Adenauer elements of the Right.” Though not Communistic itself, such a government would inevitably take a softer, “neutralist” line toward the Soviet Union, Gehlen predicted, and he himself “would not survive” in this pro-détente atmosphere. If a government like this took over in Bonn, Gehlen warned, it would be “vulnerable to political penetration and eventual control by the East.”
After painting this ominous portrait, Gehlen got to the heart of the matter. He was prepared to take drastic action to prevent such a political scenario from unfolding in Bonn—going as far as to overthrow democracy in West Germany if necessary. Critchfield immediately reported on his startling conversation with Gehlen in a cable sent directly to Dulles in Washington. In the event of a leftward shift in Bonn, Critchfield informed the CIA director, “UTILITY would feel morally justified in taking all possible action, including the establishment of an illegal apparatus in the Federal Republic, to oppose elements in Germany supporting a pro-Soviet policy.” Gehlen, Critchfield added, would like to “discuss a plan for such an eventuality” with his friend Dulles, “in great privacy.”
It is unlikely that Dulles was shocked by Gehlen’s proposal to reinstitute fascism in Germany, since CIA officials had long been discussing such authoritarian contingency plans with the Gehlen Organization and other right wing elements in Germany. In 1952, West German police discovered that the CIA was supporting a two-thousand-member fascist youth group led by ex-Nazi officers who had their own alarming plans for terminating democracy. Police investigators revealed that the CIA-backed group had compiled a blacklist of people to be “liquidated” as “unreliable” in case of a conflict with the Soviet Union. Included on the list were not just West German Communists but leaders of the Social Democratic Party serving in the Bundestag, as well as other left- leaning government officials. There were cries of outrage in the German parliament over the revelations, but the State Department worked strenuously behind the scenes to suppress the story, and similar alarming measures continued to be quietly contemplated throughout the Cold War.
These authoritarian plans were part of a sweeping covert strategy developed in the earliest days of the Cold War by U.S. intelligence officials, including Dulles, to counter a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe by creating a “stay-behind network” of armed resisters to fight the Red Army. Code-named Operation Gladio, these secret CIA-funded networks attracted fascist and criminal elements, some of which later played subversive roles in West Germany, France, and Italy, disrupting democratic rule in those countries by staging terrorist acts and plotting coups and assassinations.
In the end, Gehlen didn’t feel the need to overthrow democracy in Bonn, but his organization did undertake a variety of secret activities over the years that seriously undermined democratic institutions in Germany. Backed by U.S. intelligence, Hitler’s former spymaster implemented wide-ranging surveillance of West German officials and citizens, including opening private mail and tapping phones. Gehlen defended the snooping as an internal security measure aimed at ferreting out Soviet and East German spies, but his net grew wider and wider until it was cast across an increasingly broad spectrum of the population, including opposition party leaders, labor union officials, journalists, and schoolteachers. Gehlen even used his spy apparatus to investigate survivors of the Valkyrie plot against Hitler, including Dulles’s wartime comrade Hans Gisevius, all of whom he suspected of being Soviet agents.
One of Gehlen’s more ethical deputies complained, “Gehlen is becoming a megalomaniac. He actually wants to play Gestapo for the Americans.” Gehlen was acting not just on behalf of his U.S. patrons, but his clients in Bonn. Even some CIA officials worried that Gehlen was being improperly used by Hans Globke to gather information on political opponents and fortify the Adenauer administration’s power. Gehlen, warned a CIA dispatch from Bonn, “has let himself be used most indiscriminately by Globke to further the latter’s quest for power.” On one occasion in the 1950s, the savvy Globke paid a visit to Gehlen’s Pullach headquarters, poring over the dossiers of various German political figures—and taking the opportunity to remove his own file.
Ironically, while justifying his political snooping as a necessary countermeasure against enemy infiltration, Gehlens own organization became notorious for its penetrability. The Heinz Felfe affair was the most notorious Soviet mole case during Gehlens career—and, indeed, one of the biggest scandals in Cold War espionage history. Felfe, a former Nazi bully boy who had led rampaging gangs on Kristallnacht in 1938, was recruited into the Gehlen Organization in 1951. Not long after, the adaptable Felfe became a Soviet double agent. Fed a steady stream of inside tips by his Russian handlers, Felfe began to impress Gehlen as a master spy, and he rose quickly through the Pullach ranks. Finally, the bedazzled Gehlen named Heinz Felfe head of all anti-Soviet counterintelligence operations, a position that put the double agent in ongoing contact with the CIA and other Western spy agencies. Felfe’s reign as a top-level Soviet mole in the Gehlen Organization stretched for over a decade. By the time he was finally caught, he had wreaked inestimable damage on the West German apparatus, resulting in the arrest of dozens of senior Gehlen agents behind the Iron Curtain, as well as the breaking of numerous codes and secret channels of communication. A significant swath of German and American intelligence fieldwork had to be uprooted and started all over again.
After the Felfe scandal exploded in the press in 1963, Gehlen tried to minimize the importance of the deep breach. But though he would hold on to power by the skin of his teeth for the next several years, the spymaster never fully recovered from the political fallout. Adenauer never forgave Gehlen. For the “runt” Gehlen, who craved the approval of Germany’s father figure, the falling-out with the chancellor was a grievous blow. The spymaster was already in Adenauer’s doghouse for another scandal that had broken the previous year, when Gehlen was accused of leaking classified information about West Germany’s nuclear armament plans to the magazine Der Spiegel. The leak— which was calculated to damage Adenauer’s defense minister, yet another rival of Gehlen—made the chancellor so furious that he had considered ordering Gehlen’s arrest, finally deciding against it out of fear that it would only add to his administration’s political embarrassment.
But Adenauer was still in a foul mood about Gehlen in June 1963, when Allen Dulles dropped by the chancellor’s office in Bonn for a visit. By then, Dulles himself had been forced out of office by President Kennedy. But the former CIA director still traveled the world like he was running the show, and whatever capital he stopped in, Dulles found open doors. That day in Bonn, Adenauer asked Dulles point-blank what he thought of Gehlen. According to a CIA memo, Dulles “replied, as usual, that he had known [Gehlen] long and well and regarded him as a stout and honest fellow.”
Adenauer was not satisfied by the answer. The aging leader, who felt Dulles had imposed Gehlen upon him, was in no mood to be manipulated again by the American spymaster. The chancellor responded “surprisingly,” the agency memo continued, “by asking Dulles if anybody involved in his business could be really honest. Dulles asked if Adenauer did not regard him as an honest fellow.” The chancellor offered an elusive reply.
The following month, Adenauer was still fuming about Gehlen. One afternoon in July, he ordered the U.S. ambassador to be dragged out of a Bonn luncheon so that the chancellor could give him an earful about Gehlen. In his opinion, said Adenauer, Gehlen “is and always was stupid,” which the Felfe fiasco had underlined in red. There was only one reason, said the chancellor, that he had put up with the spymaster all these years: because of Dulles’s “personal interest” in Gehlen.
After Dulles left the CIA, the relationship between the agency and Gehlen was never as congenial. The German stopped visiting America, and the old tensions began to resurface. By 1966, Gehlen was even airing his suspicions that the CIA had put his family residence under surveillance. He expressed these fears, according to one CIA official, “apparently more in sorrow than anger.”
But by the time he retired, all this unpleasantness had been forgotten and the agency threw itself into planning an elaborate farewell for its longtime comrade. In September 1968, an illustrious crowd of CIA and U.S. military officials gathered for a Washington banquet to honor Gehlen. In the months leading up to the farewell ceremony, the CIA mulled over the proper medal to bestow on the German—the agency’s Intelligence Medal of Merit, or the National Security Medal. Dulles was among those who attended the gala event. He later sent a warm note to his old colleague Dick Helms, who by then was running the CIA, thanking Helms for including him in the Gehlen dinner and expressing how much he had enjoyed “the opportunity to see so many old and mutual friends of the General.”
Reinhard Gehlen lived out the rest of his years at his lakeside retreat, surrounded by his family—including his son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren, who moved into one of two houses on the estate—and his German shepherds, who provided the only security he felt he needed. On windy days, he still enjoyed soaring back and forth across the lake in his sailboat, another gift from the CIA.
The occasional journalists who dropped by found him in good spirits, happy to relive his past and to share his thoughts about the state of world affairs. During his reign at Pullach, he had maintained an abstemious regimen, drinking only mineral water or soda at meals. But now he would indulge in a glass of sherry with his visitors. Gehlen had no qualms when the conversation turned to the war years; he seemed to enjoy talking about his exploits on the eastern front.
The journalists who came by for sandwiches and sherry tended to be a generous sort. They asked the kinds of questions usually directed at retired statesmen or business leaders.
“When you look back on your life, how do you see it?” asked a reporter from a Danish newspaper, as she and Gehlen strolled in the garden that sloped down to the lake.
“I can only be grateful to fate,” he replied thoughtfully. “Everybody makes mistakes here in life. But I don’t at the present moment know what fundamental mistakes I have made.” What made him “especially” happy, said Gehlen, was that he had been able to give so much “human help” to the world.
Dulles reported that the Soviets were engaging in sick science, seeking to control human consciousness by “washing the brain clean of the thoughts and mental processes of the past” and creating automatons of the state who would speak and act against their own will.
Dulles’s speech, which he made sure received wide media distribution, marked an ominous new phase in the Cold War, a militarization of science and psychology aimed not simply at changing popular opinion but at reengineering the human brain. What Dulles did not tell his audience in Hot Springs was that several days earlier, he had authorized a CIA mind control program code-named MKULTRA that would dwarf any similar efforts behind the Iron Curtain. In fact, at the same time that he was condemning Soviet “brainwashing,” Dulles knew that U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been working for several years on their own brain warfare programs. This secret experimentation would balloon under the CIA’s MKULTRA program. Launched by Dulles with a $300,000 budget, this “Manhattan Project of the Mind” would grow into a multi million dollar program, operating for a quarter of a century, and enlisting dozens of leading universities and hospitals as well as hundreds of prominent researchers in studies that often violated ethical standards and treated their human subjects as “expendables.”
Dick Helms, who oversaw MKULTRA, advised Dulles that the scientific research underwritten by the program would have to be carried out in complete secrecy, explaining that most credible scientists would be very “reluctant to enter into signed agreements of any sort which connect them with this activity, since such a connection would jeopardize their professional reputations.” Many of the MKULTRA projects involved the use of experimental drugs, particularly LSD, which Helms saw as a potential “A-bomb of the mind.” The goal was to bend a subject’s mind to the agency’s will.
Most undercover recruits in the spy trade were sketchy, undependable characters who were motivated by greed, blackmail, revenge, lust, or other less than honorable impulses. But the CIA’s spymasters dreamed of taking their craft to a new technological level, one that flirted with the imaginative extremes of science fiction. They wanted to create human machines who would act on command, even against their own conscience. Dulles was particularly keen on finding out if LSD could be used to program zombielike saboteurs or assassins. He kept grilling Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s top drug expert, asking him if the psychedelic compound could be used to make “selected individuals commit acts of substantial sabotage or acts of violence, including murder,” recalled the scientist.
The Manchurian Candidate, the 1959 bestselling thriller by Richard Condon that was later adapted for the screen, dramatized this concept of a flesh-and blood robot, a man so deeply programmed that he could be turned into a coldblooded assassin. It was a paranoid fantasy that had its roots in the Korean War, that confusing debacle in a remote Asian land that would continue to haunt the American public until another Asian misadventure came along. During the war, three dozen captured American pilots confessed to dropping biological weapons containing anthrax, cholera, bubonic plague, and other toxins on North Korea and China. The charges were hotly denied by the U.S. government, and when the airmen returned home after the war, they retracted their charges—under the threat of being tried for treason—alleging that they had been subjected to brainwashing by their Communist captors.
The Korean War “brainwashing” story worked its way deeply into America’s dream state, through the aggressive promotional efforts of CIA-sponsored experts like Edward Hunter, who claimed to have coined the term. Writing bestselling books on the alleged Communist technique and testifying dramatically before Congress, Hunter “essentially modernized the idea of demonic possession,” in the words of one observer. The self-described “propaganda specialist” described how all-American boys fell victim to an insidious combination of Asian mesmerism and Soviet torture science, which turned each captured pilot into a “living puppet—a human robot . . . with new beliefs and new thought processes inserted into a captive body.”
In the end, the Korean brainwashing story itself—the seedbed of so much creeping, Cold War fantasy—turned out to be largely fictitious. Dulles made much of it in his Hot Springs speech, invoking in outraged tones the image of “American boys” being forced to betray their own country and “make open confessions—fake from beginning to end” about how they had waged germ warfare on China and North Korea. But a study later commissioned by Dulles himself—conducted by two prominent Cornell Medical Center neurologists, including Harold Wolff, a friend of the CIA director—largely debunked the brainwash panic. They rejected reports that the Communists were using esoteric mind control techniques, insisting that there was no evidence of drugs or hypnosis or any involvement by psychiatrists and scientists in the Soviet or Chinese interrogation procedures.
Most of the abuse meted out to POWs and political prisoners in Communist countries, Wolff and his colleague observed, amounted to nothing more sophisticated than isolation regimens and stress positions, like being forced to stand in the same spot for hours, and the occasional application of brute force. “There is no reason to dignify these methods by surrounding them with an aura of scientific mystery, or to denote them by terms such as ‘menticide’ or ‘brain washing’ which imply that they are scientifically organized techniques of predictable effectiveness,” concluded the Cornell scientists.
In response to the brainwashing bugaboo that the CIA itself had conjured, the agency constructed its own intricate mind control machinery that was part Orwell and part Philip K. Dick. In Hot Springs, Dulles bemoaned the fact that, unlike the ruthless Soviets, the United States had no easy access to “human guinea pigs” for its brain experimentation. But, in fact, the CIA was already subjecting helpless victims to its “brain perversion” techniques. Dulles began by feeding Soviet prisoners and captured double agents into this merciless psychological apparatus; then drug addicts, mental patients, prison inmates, and other “expendables.” By the end, Allen Dulles would put his own family members in the hands of the CIA’s mad scientists.
In June 1952, Frank Olson—a balding, forty-one-year-old CIA biochemist with a long face, mournful eyes, and a smile that revealed an upper deck of prominent incisors—flew to Frankfurt, where he was picked up at the airport and driven twelve miles north to Camp King, an extreme interrogation center of the sort that would later be known as a “black site.” Olson helped oversee the Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick in Maryland, the biological weapons laboratory jointly operated by the U.S. Army and the CIA. The top secret work conducted by the SO Division included research on LSD-induced mind control, assassination toxins, and biological warfare agents like those allegedly being used in Korea.
Olson’s division also was involved in research that was euphemistically labeled “information retrieval”—extreme methods of extracting intelligence from uncooperative captives. For the past two years, Olson had been traveling to secret centers in Europe where Soviet prisoners and other human guinea pigs were subjected to these experimental interrogation methods. Dulles began spearheading this CIA research even before he became director of the agency, under a secret program that preceded MKULTRA code-named Operation Artichoke, after the spymaster’s favorite vegetable. CIA officials later purged their files of evidence of the program, but in one of the few surviving documents, dated February 12, 1951, Dulles wrote to his ever-accommodating deputy Frank Wisner about “the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc. . . . The enclosed folder, ‘Interrogation Techniques,’ was prepared in my Medical Division to provide you with a suitable background.”
It was in secret overseas detention centers like Camp King where the CIA found many of the subjects for its Artichoke interrogations: defectors, double agents, and other unfortunates from the East who had fallen into U.S. hands. Some of the captives had been delivered to the CIA by the Gehlen Organization, which for a time operated out of Camp King until relocating to Pullach. During the war, Camp King had been a Nazi interrogation center for captured U.S. and British fliers. Afterward, the U.S. military turned the camp into a stockade for notorious Nazi POWs like the propagandist “Axis Sally” and the swashbuckling commando Otto Skorzeny. But by 1948, the camp was operating as an extreme interrogation center for Soviet prisoners, a program jointly administered by an unscrupulous alliance of CIA scientists and ex-Nazi doctors who had presided over medical experiments on concentration camp inmates during the war. At Camp King, CIA scientists and their German colleagues subjected victims to dangerous combinations of drugs—including Benzedrine, Pentothal-Natrium, LSD, and mescaline—under a research protocol that stipulated, “Disposal of the body is not a problem.” More than sixteen hundred of the Nazi scientists recruited for U.S. research projects like this would be comfortably resettled with their families in America under a CIA program known as Operation Paperclip.
One of the CIA-sponsored researchers who worked on the Artichoke
interrogations in Germany, a Harvard-trained physician named Henry Knowles
Beecher, was brought to Camp King by the agency to advise on the best way to
induce amnesia in Soviet spies after they had been subjected to the agency’s
interrogation methods. Beecher, the chief of anesthesiology at Massachusetts
General Hospital in Boston, was an outspoken proponent of the Nuremberg
Code, which forbade medical experimentation on humans without their informed
consent. But he was one of many prominent American doctors and scientists
who lost their moral direction during the Cold War, enticed by the generous CIA
patronage that featured virtually unlimited funding and unrestricted research
parameters. Lured into a world where nearly everything was permitted in the
name of national security, Beecher even began drawing on the work done by
Nazi doctors at Dachau.
After reading a captured Gestapo report in 1947 that indicated that mescaline could be an effective interrogation tool, Beecher set off on a decade long search for a magical “truth serum” that would compel prisoners to reveal all, a quest that later focused on LSD and would involve unwitting subjects in Germany as well as at his own Boston hospital. Urging the government to expand its research into LSD as an “offensive weapon,” Beecher subjected his involuntary subjects to severe overdoses of the hallucinogen, despite knowing that it caused “acute panic,” “paranoid reactions,” and other trauma in his victims—a “psychosis in miniature,” he coolly observed in one government report, that “offers interesting possibilities.”
Ever since the Nuremberg trials, international legal authorities had moved to formally condemn the physical and psychological abuse of the powerless. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly emphatically stated in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The following year, the third Geneva Convention reiterated this fundamental commandment: “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.” But by defining the Cold War as a ruthless struggle outside the norms of military conduct and human decency, the national security regime shaped by men like Dulles was able to brazenly defy international law. Few of those involved in CIA brain warfare expressed any ethical concerns about their work. “I never gave a thought to legality or morality,” one agency case officer readily acknowledged after he retired. “Frankly, I did what worked.”
But Frank Olson did suffer profound moral anxieties about his work, and the result was a serious crisis within the CIA itself. Dr. Olson began having serious doubts after traveling to various CIA research centers in England, France, Norway, and West Germany, and observing the human experiments being conducted at these black sites. Olson’s trip to Germany in summer 1952—during which he visited Haus Waldhof, a notorious CIA safe house on a country estate near Camp King—left him particularly shaken. Soviet prisoners were subjected to especially severe interrogation methods at Haus Waldhof, which sometimes resulted in their deaths. The cruelty he witnessed reminded Olson of Nazi concentration camps. After returning home to the United States, Olson began wrestling with his conscience, according to his wife and colleagues. “He had a tough time after Germany . . . drugs, torture, brainwashing,” recalled Norman Cournoyer, a Camp Detrick researcher with whom Olson had worked on projects that had once made him proud, like designing protective clothing for the soldiers landing at Normandy on D-day.
Olson and Cournoyer had also collaborated on projects that made them less proud. After the war, they had traveled around the United States, supervising the spraying of biological agents from aircraft and crop dusters. Some of the tests, which were conducted in cities like San Francisco as well as rural areas in the Midwest, involved harmless chemicals, but others featured more dangerous toxins. In Alaska—where the two men sought to stage their experiments in an environment that resembled wintertime Russia—“we used a spore which is very similar to anthrax,” Cournoyer recalled. “So to that extent we did something that was not kosher.” One of their research colleagues, a bacteriologist named Dr. Harold Batchelor, learned aerial spray techniques from the infamous Dr. Kurt Blome, director of the Nazis’ biological warfare program. Years later, a congressional investigation found these open-air experiments conducted by Camp Detrick scientists “appalling.”
Olson began to worry about how his airborne spray research was being utilized by the military. His wife, Alice, said that, in addition to being deeply disturbed by the interrogation procedures he witnessed in Germany, her husband was also haunted by the suspicion that the United States was practicing biological warfare in Korea. By the time he returned from Germany, Olson was suffering a “moral crisis,” according to his family, and was seriously considering abandoning his science career and becoming a dentist.
Olson’s objections to the CIA’s brain warfare research apparently began to raise alarms within the Camp Detrick bureaucracy. One document in Olson’s personnel file, dated after his return from Germany, indicated that his behavior was causing “fear of a security violation.”
In November 1953, before Frank Olson could change his life, he became one more unwitting victim of the CIA’s mind control program. A week before Thanksgiving, Olson and several other SO Division scientists were invited to a weekend retreat at a secluded CIA facility near Deep Creek Lake, a lushly forested resort area in western Maryland. The scientists were greeted by Sidney Gottlieb, the chief wizard of the CIA’s magic potion division, the Technical Services Staff. Gottlieb was one of the agency’s more unique characters, a stuttering, clubfooted biochemist whom friends described as a kind of untethered genius. Despite his infirmity, Gottlieb threw himself into such passionate, if unlikely, recreations as folk dancing and goat herding. The son of Orthodox Hungarian Jews, he rejected Judaism and spent his lifetime searching for his own form of enlightenment, experimenting with Zen Buddhism and becoming an early celebrant in the cult of LSD. Gottlieb devoted himself enthusiastically to the CIA’s mind-manipulation program, subjecting hundreds of unsuspecting Americans to experimental drugs. The CIA chemist preyed on “people who could not fight back,” as one agency official put it, such as seven patients in a federal drug hospital in Kentucky who were dosed with acid for seventy-seven straight days by a Gottlieb-funded doctor who ran the hospital’s addiction treatment program. Gottlieb also excelled at cooking up rare toxins and clever delivery mechanisms in his laboratory to eliminate people the CIA deemed political enemies. Gottlieb strongly adhered to the Dulles ethic that there were no rules in war. “We were in a World War II mode,” said a CIA psychologist who was close to Gottlieb. “The war never really ended for us.”
After dinner on the second night of the Deep Creek retreat, Gottlieb’s deputy spiked a bottle of Cointreau and offered it to the unsuspecting Olson and his colleagues. It was the beginning of a nightmarish ordeal for Olson, which would end a week later when the scientist went crashing through the window of the tenth-floor hotel room in midtown Manhattan where he was being held by the CIA and plunged to his death. After being dosed at Deep Creek, Olson never seemed to recover; he remained anxious and confused throughout the week leading up to his fatal fall. The CIA officials who took charge of him that week later claimed they were planning to put him in psychiatric care. But instead they shuttled him around from place to place, taking him to a New York City allergist on the CIA payroll named Dr. Harold Abramson, who had conducted LSD tolerance experiments for the agency, and even to a magician named John Mulholland, who taught CIA agents how magic techniques could improve their spycraft. As the days went by, Olson became increasingly agitated, telling Dr. Abramson—not without reason—that the CIA was trying to poison him.
Shortly after Olson fell to his death from the Statler Hotel (now the Hotel Pennsylvania), someone placed a brief phone call from the scientist’s hotel room to Dr. Abramson. “Well, he’s gone,” said the caller. “Well, that’s too bad,” Abramson responded, and then the caller hung up.
Agents from the CIA’s Office of Security—the department made up of former FBI agents and cops that cleaned up the spy agency’s messes—quickly descended on the hotel, nudging aside New York police investigators. James McCord, later known for his role in the Watergate break-in, was one of the security agents who took charge of the Olson “investigation” for the CIA. The agency termed Olson’s death a suicide, the tragic end of an emotionally unstable man, and the case was buried for over two decades.
In 1975, the case resurfaced during the Rockefeller Commission investigation of CIA abuses ordered by President Gerald Ford. Olson’s widow and grown children were invited to the White House by President Ford, who apologized to them on behalf of the government. The Olson case would become enshrined in history as one of the more outrageous examples of CIA hubris and mad science. But as the years went by, the Olson family became convinced that Frank Olson’s death was more than simply a tragic suicide; it was murder.
“Frank Olson did not die as a consequence of a drug experiment gone awry,” the family declared in a statement released in 2002. He died, they said, because he knew too much, and he had become a security risk.
In 1994, Frank’s eldest son, Eric, decided to have his father’s body exhumed and a second autopsy performed. The team of pathologists was led by James Starrs, professor of law and forensic science at George Washington University. The panel (with one dissenter) found evidence that Olson had suffered a blunt force trauma to the head and a chest injury before his fall—evidence that was called “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.” While acknowledging that his team had not found “any smoking gun,” Starrs told the press, “I am exceedingly skeptical of the view that Dr. Olson went through the window on his own.”
But Olson’s children failed in their efforts to reopen the case on the basis of the new evidence. In 2012, a federal judge dismissed the family’s lawsuit against the CIA, in which they asked for compensatory damages as well as access to documents related to their father’s death. In ruling against the family, primarily on technical grounds, the judge nonetheless noted “that the public record supports many of the allegations against the CIA, farfetched as they may sound.”
Allen Dulles was coldly efficient when it came to ridding his agency of security problems. On the night of March 31, 1953, several months before Frank Olson met his end, Dulles invited an old friend and protégé named James Kronthal to his Georgetown house for dinner. The CIA director said he had business to discuss. But it turned out that the evening’s most pressing item of business was Kronthal’s own fate.
The forty-two-year-old Kronthal was a rising star at the CIA, where his profile fit the mold for Dulles’s “very best men.” The son of a prominent New York banker, Kronthal was educated at Yale and Harvard, and served under Dulles in the Bern OSS station during the war. Before the war, he had rejected the banking career that his family had planned for him in favor of teaching art history at Harvard. But Kronthal brought a keen business instinct to the art trade, establishing himself in Germany during the 1930s as a broker for Goering, Himmler, and other Nazi leaders who were selling art treasures stolen from Jewish collectors. After the war, he sought to redeem himself by trying to track down the looted art pieces and return them to their rightful owners.
The slightly built, brilliant young man became a favorite of Dulles, who helped Kronthal take over the Bern station in 1947, after it became one of the CIA’s first overseas outposts. When Dulles took charge of the agency in 1953, he brought Kronthal back to the Washington headquarters, with big plans for the younger man’s intelligence career.
Kronthal wasn’t a charming extrovert like Dulles, but his superiors recognized a rare intelligence behind his reticence. Helms was one of those who shared Dulles’s admiration for the up-and-coming agent, writing that Kronthal was a “top flight intelligence officer who commands respect from his subordinates more through demonstrated knowledge and IQ than through personal warmth and affability. He is rather retiring as a person but this does not affect his leadership or firmness of purpose.”
Kronthal, whom Dulles fondly referred to as “Jimmy,” reminded the CIA director of his only son, Allen Jr., another sensitive, highly intelligent young man whose life once held so much promise. But in November 1952, young Dulles had suffered a serious head wound while fighting with the Marines in Korea, a brain injury from which he would never fully recover. For the rest of Dulles’s life, his son would rotate in and out of hospitals, sanitariums, and private nursing care, growing increasingly remote from his father. And, on that night in March 1953, Dulles would also lose Kronthal, a man the spymaster had considered a member of the family and even a possible successor.
Kronthal’s proclivity for the espionage game derived, in part, from a lifetime of hiding his own personal secrets. He was a gay man with a weakness for young boys. The Gestapo discovered his sexual tastes while he was working in the German art market before the war. Later, while Kronthal was running the CIA station in Bern, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police agency, got access to Kronthal’s Gestapo files after penetrating the Gehlen Organization. The Soviets set up a “honey trap” for Kronthal in Switzerland, with Chinese boys as bait. He was secretly filmed and blackmailed, and by the time he returned to Washington in May 1952, Jim Kronthal was a double agent in the iron grip of the NKVD.
It was Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the former Army intelligence officer who ran the CIA’s Office of Security, who informed Dulles that his protégé had been turned. Edwards’s internal security department was tasked with protecting the CIA against enemy penetration. The security unit was also in charge of what was delicately called “enforcement,” providing the muscle to eliminate any potential threats or embarrassments to the agency.
On the night of March 31, as Dulles confronted Kronthal with the Office of Security’s revelations over dinner at his home, two agents from Edwards’s department were quietly eavesdropping in an adjoining room. The sense of betrayal was certainly overwhelming for Dulles. But the CIA director, whose fits of rage were legendary, held his fury in check that evening. The spy chief sounded sadly contemplative as he spoke with the traitor in whom he had invested so much hope, remarking on the mystery of personal demons and how they could set flame to the most promising careers.
After the two men reviewed Kronthals impossible position and his dismal options, the shattered agent walked back home—a white brick townhouse with a small garden of spring daffodils in front, just two blocks from Dulles’s residence. He was followed by the two CIA security men. When Kronthals housekeeper arrived the next morning, his bedroom door was still closed and he had left a note that he was not to be disturbed. Later that morning, two men who identified themselves as colleagues of Kronthal appeared at his house and told the housekeeper they needed to bring him to an urgent meeting. When they opened his bedroom door, they found a lifeless Kronthal splayed across his bed, fully clothed, with an empty vial near his body.
The investigation into Kronthal’s death was quickly taken over by Lieutenant Lawrence Hartnett of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police, a homicide detective with a history of helping tidy up CIA-related problems. Hartnett revealed that Kronthal had left a letter for Dick Helms, in which he revealed that he was “mentally upset because of pressure connected with work,” as well as a letter for Dulles. An autopsy concluded that Kronthal had taken his own life, but the report left more questions lingering than it answered, failing to determine the cause of his death or the contents of the vial found in his bedroom. Sometime before his death, Kronthal had mailed a letter to his sister, revealing his homosexuality (which came as no surprise to her) and referring to the “tremendous difficulties” that his sexual identity posed for him. He then signed off in a perplexing way. Kronthal’s final words to his sister were, “I can’t wait till 1984. Love, Jim.” Was it his mordant way of saying that for him, Big Brother’s suffocating authoritarianism was already an unbearable reality?
The James Kronthal case was, like the Frank Olson matter later that year, another mess that Dulles’s Office of Security had to clean up. If Kronthal’s death was a suicide, it appeared to be assisted. This is what one high-ranking CIA official, Robert Crowley, later suggested. One way or another, said Crowley— who was interviewed after he retired by journalist Joseph Trento—Kronthal was induced to do the right thing for the good of the agency and of the men who had been his professional benefactors. “Allen probably had a special potion prepared that he gave Kronthal should the pressure become too much,” Crowley speculated. “Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and the medical people produced all kinds of poisons that a normal postmortem could not detect.”
Dulles never spoke in public about Kronthal after he was gone. Kron-thal’s sister’s efforts to extract more information from the CIA about his death proved futile; the press made little effort to investigate the case. James Kronthal was dropped down the dark well where CIA complications disappeared.
Until he was wounded in Korea, Allen Macy Dulles Jr. was the brightest hope of his family. A brilliant student, he excelled at Exeter, sped through Princeton in three years, and then took himself off to Oxford, where he completed his degree in history, writing his thesis on the permanent undersecretary system of the British Foreign Office. “Sonny,” as his father called him, intellectually outshone the elder Dulles, whose own academic performance had been indifferent.
If Dulles took pride in his son’s educational achievements, he never showed it. At some point in their young lives, Dulles’s two daughters, Toddie and Joan, gave up any expectation that their father would shine his attention on them. But they kept hoping that Dulles would finally acknowledge their brother’s extraordinary mind. “Both my sister and I would have liked my father to recognize him and tell him that here was this next generation [of the family] producing special people,” Joan remarked late in her life.
“I would imagine,” she said on another occasion, “that my brother, especially my brother, would have felt badly about having no special attention from his father.”
Allen Jr. was closer to his mother, sharing her sensitive and perceptive temperament. He was acutely aware of Clover’s moods and the strains in his parents’ marriage. To one family observer, it seemed as if Dulles felt judged by his son.
Sonny had thrived in the cloistered boys’ world of Exeter. But unlike his father, young Dulles recoiled from the hearty, fraternity-centered social life at Princeton. He was not elected to any of Princeton’s men’s clubs, and he dismissed the university’s intellectual atmosphere as insufficiently challenging.
One of Allen Jr.’s classmates at Exeter, a friend with whom he remained in touch even after his life-altering war wound, was gay. There were rumors that Sonny, too, was similarly inclined.
“Well, there could have been all kinds of experimentation at prep school,” Joan observed. “I know nothing except [my brother] professed interest in girls and had a girlfriend. . . . I never saw him with girls, but there was somebody he liked—I can’t think of her name right now. . . . Of course that was still an era when you didn’t come out in any way.”
Even before his brain injury, Allen Jr. seemed to inhabit his own world. “He was very introverted,” said Joan. “He took after my mother in that respect. And he was someone who wasn’t that aware of people. I mean . . . you’d go out in New York walking with him, and he’d be ten feet ahead.”
In 1950, shortly after getting his degree at Oxford, Sonny stunned his family by announcing he was joining the Marines, as war broke out in Korea. His uncle Foster used his connections to line up a comfortable stateside desk job for him, far from harm’s way. But the twenty-two-year-old enlistee volunteered instead for duty in Korea. It was as if he were still trying to win his father’s admiration by outperforming the old man. The senior Dulles had fought both world wars in bars and hotels, surrounded by suave foreign agents and accommodating mistresses, and never firing a gun. Sonny would show him what real heroes were made of.
Sonny’s letters to his father from the Marine Corps were filled with a new assertiveness. He lectured the senior Dulles about the deficiencies of the military, filling page after page with detailed critiques of the wasteful and corrupt supply system and the unfairness of the commendation process. He even made suggestions on how to improve the CIA’s recruiting methods. Dulles’s letters of reply, which he signed “Affectionately, Allen W. Dulles,” were not particularly warm, but they showed respect for his son’s intricate line of thinking.
By summer 1952, Allen Jr. found himself on the front lines in Korea as a second lieutenant with the First Marine Division. He displayed a gung ho attitude in combat that was sometimes reckless. On the night of November 14, the young lieutenant took charge of a rifle platoon that was dug into an advanced position. Despite being nicked in the leg by a North Korean shell fragment, he charged an enemy sniper’s nest by himself, braving intense fire. His gun was shot out of his hand and he was wounded in the wrist, but that day he was lucky. “He didn’t have to do any of that, but I guess he felt he had something to live up to,” said Robert Abboud, one of Sonny’s commanding officers, who had known young Dulles ever since they were prep school debate opponents. “He never wanted to be treated differently from the rest of us.”
The next morning, after he was patched up, Lieutenant Dulles returned to the embattled outpost. Once again defying heavy machine gun and mortar fire, Dulles crawled within thirty yards of the enemy position, armed with rifle grenades, and began to direct a Marine mortar attack on the North Koreans. Shortly before the enemy soldiers began to pull back, the lieutenant was hit in the head by fragments from an 81 mm mortar shell, which lodged in his brain. “I was there when they brought him back in,” recalled Abboud. “He kept trying to get off the stretcher and go back. Some of his men were crying. I’ve never really known anyone quite like him.”
Allen Jr. was evacuated to a U.S. naval hospital in Japan, where he underwent brain surgery. Clover, who was on one of her Jungian sojourns in Switzerland at the time, flew to her son’s bedside. His surgeons told her that they were not able to remove all the deeply embedded shrapnel from Sonny’s brain and that he would never fully recover.
By late February 1953, young Dulles was strong enough to be flown home. His father, who was to be confirmed the following day as CIA director, greeted Sonny at Andrews Air Force Base. Dulles was photographed hovering solicitously over his son, as he was unloaded from the plane on a stretcher, with his head swathed in bandages. “How do you feel, son?” he asked. “You’re looking good.” Sonny’s soft reply was inaudible.
As the young man underwent further treatment at Bethesda Naval Hospital, he seemed to recover some of his old self. He recognized people, made jokes, and inquired about the latest world events. But other times, he stared off into the distance, began shaking with fear, or erupted in angry outbursts at those around him.
When Sonny was discharged to his parents’ home in Georgetown, it soon became clear that Clover would need help to care for him. A young marine was recruited as a companion for Allen Jr., and the injured young man tried to resume something resembling a normal life. Dulles arranged an undemanding clerical job for his son in the State Department, and he even began taking road trips with friends. But these experiments in independence did not turn out well. In August 1953, Dulles wrote an apologetic letter to the American consul general in Montreal, explaining that his brain-damaged son had forgotten his car registration when he left on a driving trip to Canada, and asking the diplomat’s help in relaying the document to Sonny, which he needed to reenter the United States. The following year, Dulles had to intervene to sort out a car insurance problem when Sonny was involved in a collision, the details of which could not be recalled by the young man. “My son was very severely wounded in the head and has only partially regained his memory and certain other mental faculties,” Dulles explained in a letter to the United Services Automobile Association.
Allen Jr. still showed flashes of his brilliance. He continued to read voraciously, but he had trouble retaining information. Once familiar geography was now a mystery to him. He felt most comfortable in New York City, and his parents experimented with letting him stay there for brief periods. They rented a room for him in “a lovely, old brownstone that was lived in by an older lady,” recalled Joan. But the young man had lost what doctors called his “executive function.” He had a hard time organizing his thoughts and making his way through life. “He couldn’t really think, and he couldn’t really put two and two together,” Joan said. “And he began to get really depressed, and crazy.”
Sonny’s debilitated mental condition placed an emotional and financial strain on the family. For the next two decades, he would go back and forth between expensive institutions and home care. Unlike his brother, Allen Dulles was not a wealthy man. His salary as CIA director, $14,800 [about $130,000 today], was healthy enough for him to maintain the family’s comfortable home on Long Island, but he had long since burned through his partner’s equity from Sullivan and Cromwell, and he could only afford to rent his second home in Washington because the owner, the relative of an old colleague, charged a token sum. The family’s finances were soon stretched by the cost of private treatments and medical consultations for Sonny, which ate away at the family’s savings, including Clover’s modest inheritance.
Though Dulles himself rarely showed it, Sonny’s gravely reduced abilities wore down the family’s spirit too. Allen Jr. had been headed for a distinguished career in academia or public life, but now he had trouble finding his way home when he went out for lunch. Now and then, Sonny would stare at his father—and at Uncle Foster and Aunt Eleanor, too—with a look of such rage that it made Dulles shudder. He sometimes launched into angry denunciations of his father as a Hitler-lover and Nazi collaborator, outbursts that the family labeled “paranoid,” but were close enough to the truth to unnerve the senior Dulles. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with him,” Dulles began saying to Clover.
By 1954, Dulles turned in desperation to MKULTRA-sponsored doctors for help with Sonny. It is unclear whether Dulles paid for his son to be treated by these CIA-connected physicians, or whether their compensation came in the form of the generous agency research contracts that they received.
Among the first CIA-funded medical experts the spymaster enlisted to treat his son was the eminent Dr. Harold Wolff, chief of the neurology department at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center and former president of the American Neurology Association, who became one of the agency’s leading experts on mind control. Wolff was a sophisticated and cultured medical scientist with an international reputation for his research on migraine headaches, which he himself sometimes suffered. His global roster of patients included both the shah of Iran and the shah’s political nemesis, Prime Minister Mossadegh.
An intense and tightly wound man, Wolff set himself the goal of a new experiment every day. Dr. Donald Dalessio, who interned with the renowned neurologist and later worked with him as a research associate, remarked that Wolff’s “relentless drive for accomplishment epitomized the migraine personality that he so vividly documented in hundreds of patients.” He ordered his life around a “strict attention to the clock,” said Dalessio, “so that he was always on time, always prepared.” Trained by the renowned Russian father of behavior science, Ivan Pavlov, Wolff spent long hours in his sixth-floor laboratory at New York Hospital researching the mysteries of the brain. The lab was simple and “not cluttered with gear and impedimenta which characterize today’s [scientific facilities],” observed Dalessio, “for it was made to study people, not animals or molecules or other subunits, but functioning human beings.”
The wiry, balding neurologist brought an obsessive drive even to his recreational life, swimming every day at his athletic club, mountain climbing, and challenging his younger colleagues to slashing squash games on the rooftop court of his hospital—“an eerie place,” recalled Dalessio, “where the wind would shriek about the stone battlements.” The son of an artist, Wolff also married an artist, and he and his wife listened to classical music every day and visited a museum or art gallery every week.
Wolff was a supremely confident man. After his death, another migraine specialist commented that his career was marked by a “mixture of greatness and narrowness.” The narrowness came from “a desire to be on top and to win, and from an intellectual point of view, his dogmatism” and over certainty about his medical theories. When Wolff was asked by a colleague why he had never bothered to be board-certified in neurology, he looked puzzled for a moment, and then replied, “But who would test me?” When Wolff was asked by the CIA to take a leading role in its MKULTRA program, he had no moral qualms. He himself would set the ethical boundaries of his mind control experimentation.
Wolff was sufficiently aware of the professional, and perhaps legal, pitfalls of the MKULTRA research to make sure that the CIA would assume responsibility for the most risky procedures. In a revealing passage in Wolff’s CIA grant proposal, he wrote that his Cornell research team would test “potentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures)” on behalf of the agency, “to ascertain [their] fundamental effect upon human brain function and upon the subject’s mood.” But Wolff carefully stipulated that any dangerous experiments would have to be conducted at CIA facilities, not in his hospital. “Where any of the studies involve potential harm to the subject, we expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of necessary experiments.”
In 1955, Wolff agreed to become president of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, the primary CIA front for channeling research funds to a wide array of mind control researchers in medicine, psychology, and sociology. Wolff’s prestige became a major asset for the CIA as the agency attempted to bend the science profession to its Cold War aims. The neurologist also benefited greatly from the relationship, garnering CIA grants of up to $300,000 for his own research projects, and steering millions more to academic colleagues in various disciplines.
Wolff became a friend of Dulles and was an occasional dinner guest at his Georgetown home. His dominating personality made him one of the few men who could hold his own in Dulles’s company. It was only natural for the CIA director to ask the prominent neurologist if there was anything he could do for his son. Wolff, of course, readily agreed to treat Allen Jr.—it was the least he could do for such an important benefactor. But, as a result, Sonny became another victim of his father’s MKULTRA program.
Joan has disturbing memories of visiting her brother at New York Hospital, where he was subjected to excruciating insulin shock therapy, one of the experimental procedures employed on the CIA’s “human guinea pigs.” Used primarily for the treatment of schizophrenia, insulin overdoses were meant to jolt patients out of their madness. The procedure resulted in coma, and sometimes violent convulsions. The most severe risks included death and brain damage, though one study at the time claimed that this mental impairment was actually beneficial because it reduced patients’ “tension and hostility.”
“They used insulin at New York Hospital,” recalled Joan. “I think those initiatives—God knows if they were from my father. I don’t know, but I’ve always wondered about that, because it didn’t sound like a good idea.
“When I went to visit my brother, it was hard for me, because he kept saying, ‘Can’t you do something for me? I’m going mad.’ At the time, I didn’t know what he was getting at, or what I could do. I was just visiting him.”
It was not until years later, when Joan read exposés about MKULTRA, that she realized how far her father had gone—even with his own son—in the name of brain research. “Once you go to the dark side, there seems to be no limit.”
Sonny showed no signs of improvement after enduring the insulin treatments, although he did write his father a poignant letter from New York, indicating a new docility and a strong desire not to cause his family any more trouble. “Dear Father,” he wrote, “I have just understood the nature of the psychological structure that was built around me, and will work to free myself. I realize that I have not been given correct information, but will try to learn the truth anyhow. Love to you and Mother and anyone else we know. I want to be united with you all soon and will do anything convenient for you.”
Despite Wolff’s lack of success, Dulles next reached out to Dr. Wilder Penfield, a prominent neurosurgeon at Montreal’s McGill University, whose psychiatric facility, the Allan Memorial Institute, became a major center of CIA mind control research. To Dulles’s great gratitude, Penfield agreed to consult on Allen Jr.’s case, which he continued to do until he retired in 1960.
Like Wolff’s operation at New York Hospital–Cornell, Penfield’s academic medical complex also benefited from its relationship with the CIA. Penfield brought in a prominent, Scottish-born psychiatrist named Donald Ewen Cameron, who had known Dulles since the war, to run McGill’s new Allan Institute for psychiatry. Cameron, who had met Dulles while consulting on the Rudolf Hess insanity case at the Nuremberg Trials, would become the most notorious scientist in the MKULTRA program. By 1957, Cameron was receiving a steady stream of CIA funding, through Dr. Wolff’s Society for Human Ecology, to conduct brainwashing experiments at McGill that would later be widely condemned as barbaric.
Despite his impeccable credentials, Cameron saw himself as an iconoclastic innovator, pushing psychiatry to embrace the latest pharmaceutical technology and the most cutting-edge developments in the newly influential behavioral sciences. Cameron’s experiments in the Allan Institute’s notorious “Sleep Room” involved putting subjects into “electric dream” states, as one victim put it, through insulin overdoses, massive infusions of hallucinogens like LSD and other experimental drugs, and alarming amounts of electroshock therapy—a process he called “de-patterning,” to wipe the brain clean of “bad behavior patterns.” After blasting away these negative thoughts, Cameron sought to replace them with “good ones,” through what he called “psychic driving”— playing taped messages encouraging positive behavior to his nearly comatose victims for between sixteen and twenty hours a day, week after week, as they slipped in and out of consciousness. In one case, a patient underwent reprogramming in Cameron’s Sleep Room for 101 days.
The people who came to Cameron were generally seeking relief from everyday psychological ailments like depression and anxiety, even for help dealing with marital problems. But as author Naomi Klein later wrote, Cameron’s “shock and awe warfare on the mind” brought only much deeper misery to the patients—many of them women—in his care. “Though he was a genius at destroying people, he could not remake them,” Klein observed. “A follow-up study conducted after Cameron left the Allan Memorial Institute found that 75 percent of his former patients were worse off after treatment than they were before they were admitted.”
Cameron himself indicated that the true aim of his CIA-funded research was not to improve patients’ lives but to contribute to the Cold War effort by perfecting the science of mind control. He compared his patients to prisoners of war who were undergoing interrogation, saying that they, “like prisoners of the Communists, tended to resist [treatment] and had to be broken down.”
Gail Kastner, a promising young McGill nursing student, was one of the victims of Cameron’s experimentation. She had come to Cameron for help with anxiety issues stemming from her relationship with her emotionally overbearing father. A tall man with pale blue eyes, Cameron exuded a paternal warmth, addressing female patients as “lassie” in his soft brogue. But in the end, Kastner would come to think of the doctor as “Eminent Monster”—he was the distinguished man in the white coat who loomed over her, as she was lit up with so much electrical voltage that she broke teeth and fractured her spine while convulsing on the table.
Years later, Kastner told Klein what it felt like to be held in the Sleep Room. “I hear people screaming, moaning, groaning, people saying no, no, no. I remember what it was like to wake up in that room, I was covered in sweat, nauseated, vomiting—and I had a very peculiar feeling in the head. Like I had a blob, not a head.”
Patients’ minds were made blank slates; they lost much of their memory, and thus, much of their lives. “They tried to erase and remake me,” said Kastner. “But it didn’t work.”
Val Orlikow, a young mother suffering from postpartum depression, was another patient whose life was emptied out by Cameron. After she came home from the Allan Institute, Orlikow could not remember her husband, David, who was a member of Canada’s parliament, or their children. Her mind had been reduced to that of a toddler. She could not use a toilet.
In the mid-1970s, after Cameron had died, the secrets of the Sleep Room and other inhumane MKULTRA research centers began to emerge, as journalists filed Freedom of Information requests and Congress opened investigations into the CIA horror chambers. Eventually, the CIA paid out $750,000 in damages to nine families whose lives were turned upside down by Cameron’s experiments— the largest settlement against the agency at the time. The agency made it seem as if its mind control experiments were isolated relics of the past. Testifying before a Senate hearing in 1977, CIA psychologist John Gittinger called MKULTRA “a foolish mistake . . . a terrible mistake.”
But the work of Cameron and other MKULTRA scientists lives on at the agency, incorporated into a 1963 CIA torture manual titled Counterintelligence Interrogation that would be used to extract information from prisoners during the wars in Vietnam and Central America, and at black sites operated by the agency after 9/11. U.S. agencies and their overseas allies have continued to run their own versions of Cameron’s Sleep Room, where captives are subjected to similar types of sensory deprivation, electroshock, and drug overdoses, until their psychological resistance has been broken.
Allen Dulles was fully aware of the experiments being conducted at McGill when he sent his own son there. Joan doesn’t think her brother fell into the hands of Dr. Cameron while he was a patient there. Yet, whatever was done to Sonny in Montreal was not a pleasant experience for him.
When Allen Jr. began treatment at McGill, Dr. Wilder Penfield insisted that the young man could improve. But Sonny knew his limitations by then, and the medical regimen imposed on him only made him feel worse. “He thought my brother could do better,” recalled Joan. “But my brother was furious, because he realized he couldn’t.”
In the end, Penfield finally admitted that Sonny was beyond even the medical wizardry of McGill. In February 1959, the year before he retired, the neurosurgeon wrote Dulles a letter, conceding defeat. “I wish I could help him,” Penfield told Dulles. “What a loss this mind derailment is—to him, to his parents and indeed to the world, for he had a splendid brain.”
After Penfield pronounced Allen Jr.’s condition hopeless, Clover continued to agonize over his care. She often confided her troubles to Mary Bancroft, who by then was living in New York. Caring for Allen Jr. was a never-ending job, Clover wrote Bancroft in November 1961. She felt “joy” at having her son “accessible,” but when he was home with his parents in Georgetown, there was “such an unbelievable amount of planning, telephoning and hi-jinks of everything connected with his comings and goings—engaging Georgetown University students to help etc., etc. Will not burden you with a recital.”
In another letter to Mary, Clover wrote, “Here everything is all right and all wrong, whichever way you wish to take it. Great Allen very tense and no wonder with everything he carries, young Allen none too well, great Allen all too busy to attend to all the things I have to try to get Sonny to do and too pulled to pieces by it all. You know it’s always everything too much or nothing enough and me so full of fear all the time and nothing to do about it.”
From time to time, Sonny would explode in frightening rages. After weathering one such outburst in February 1960, Clover wrote Joan, “It wasn’t exactly terrifying but almost.” She assured her daughter that there was “nothing broken,” but confessed there was a “terrific uncertainty [to] how everything is going to turn out. One of our Georgetown med. students was here and one of Father’s aides and another came up from the office. I telephoned the hospital but first they said they couldn’t come over the District line and then they said the aide would have to have half an hour for dinner before starting!”
Allen Jr. was “endlessly patient in general,” remembered Joan. But he violently rebelled when his family tried to return him to an institution. Sometimes “it would take three people to hold him down when he would get really angry—not wanting to go back to the hospital.”
Her sensitive, wounded son reminded Clover of her lost brother, Paul, who had found life too daunting a challenge. They had the same artistic temperaments, the same physical awkwardness. Paul had “the hands of a person who thinks and does not do,” she once wrote in her journal. “My son has them.” In 1959, Reverend John Sutherland Bonnell, a prominent New York Presbyterian minister who for a time offered young Allen pastoral guidance, informed his parents that Sonny “believes that he has latent within himself the tendency that was ‘active in Paul Todd and which led him to kill himself.’” It was one more emotional burden for Clover to bear, the fear that the family tragedy would repeat itself.
Allen Jr. wasn’t the only family member Clover worried about. Her oldest daughter, Toddie, started to suffer from manic depression in early adulthood, a condition she thought Toddie inherited from her, and began undergoing shock treatments. It is unknown whether CIA doctors were involved in Toddie’s electroshock therapy. But Dulles was quite willing to steer suffering relatives toward MKULTRA-connected physicians.
Lobotomies were among the more extreme mind control measures undertaken in the CIA program. At one point, Dulles arranged for his niece Edith —the daughter of his sister Margaret—to be lobotomized by a CIA brain surgeon. “She had cancer and was in great pain,” recalled Joan. “They tried lobotomy on her—all that came from my father, he was the one who suggested the doctor. It didn’t work at all, it didn’t stop the pain. It just made her odd.”
Sometimes Clover thought that all the sadness and anxiety in her life was about to crush her. She felt that she was “walking on the bottom of the sea,” she wrote Mary in 1961. “It isn’t funny to feel all the time so impossible,” Clover told her confidante on another occasion. “I envy the manic depressives having their turn to be up.” Her husband’s secretive life—which, she suspected, continued to involve other women—and his emotional remoteness only made Clover feel more alone with her misery.
At one low point in Clover’s life, a well-meaning CIA doctor recommended that she see Dr. Cameron. She knew Cameron from her husband’s CIA dinner parties, and for some reason always felt uneasy in his presence. But out of desperation, she agreed to have lunch with the McGill psychiatrist at the Mayflower Hotel during his next visit to Washington. Over lunch, she related her life’s many laments to Cameron—including her husband’s affairs—while he stared intently at her. After she finished, Cameron explained to her that her husband’s sexual transgressions were a natural outgrowth of his complex and driven personality, and that she must not take them personally. He suggested that she come to Montreal, where he could treat her in his clinic and help her develop a more positive outlook on her life. Clover spent days agonizing over the decision, but in the end she decided not to go. She did not know that by avoiding Cameron’s Sleep Room, she was likely preserving her sanity.
By 1962, a newly determined Clover had taken full control of her son’s well being. On the advice of Jolande Jacobi, her longtime Jungian analyst, she arranged to have Allen Jr. admitted to the Bellevue Sanatorium, a venerable, family-run institution on the Swiss side of Lake Constance, whose directors had strong ties to the Jung Institute in nearby Zurich and to the great man himself. After all the frustrating and harrowing treatments that Allen Jr. had been put through for the past ten years, Clover was convinced that it was time to try a softer, Jungian approach, based on talk therapy, artistic expression, and dream analysis.
Sonny’s mother and father accompanied him on the trip to Kreuzlingen, the quiet lakeside village where the sanitarium was located. Before they left for Switzerland, Dulles wrote to Dr. Heinrich Fierz, the facility’s medical director, telling him that the family realized there was little hope for the young man. “It is a difficult case,” Dulles wrote, “and with the extent of the wound and the brain damage, we can only hope for limited results.” Dulles wasn’t even sure that he could get his son to take the flight to Switzerland. “At the last minute, he might refuse to make the trip,” he told Fierz. By that point, Sonny’s faith in the psychiatry profession—and in his father’s judgment—was extremely low.
But Allen Jr. did move into Bellevue, and he found the facility so soothing an environment that he stayed there for over ten years. Like Hans Castorp’s “magic mountain” retreat in the novel by Thomas Mann, the Swiss sanitarium became Sonny’s refuge from a hostile world. Bellevue was built on a “beautiful, great, old estate,” recalled Joan, who often visited her brother there, and it had treated a wide range of patients over the years, including Freud’s famous case study, “Anna O” (Bertha Pappenheim). There was, Joan said, “a leisurely sort of European grace about your situation”—as long as you went on paying, she added. American institutions had a different attitude, she observed. “America is ‘You’ve got to be doing something, buddy,’ whereas in Europe, you can just ‘be.’”
Young Dulles worked with Jacobi and some of her most promising protégés, including William Willeford, an American who had graduated from the Jung Institute. Willeford later recalled that he made a “connection” with Sonny despite his severe brain impairment, taking time to write his parents each month about his daily routine and assure them that their son “had some kind of life.” The young analyst met with Sonny’s parents once in person at the Swiss clinic. He found Clover so insistent about communicating her views of young Allen that he asked her to leave his office so he could hear her husband’s take on Sonny. But Allen Sr. had nothing of interest to say about his son, recalled Willeford. “He didn’t have any insights.” Later, Dulles passed word to Willeford that if he was interested in joining the CIA, he should let him know. Apparently Dulles had been impressed when the analyst had cut off Clover during their meeting in his office. “He liked it when I said, ‘Let’s hear what the father has to say.’”
The work that Willeford later published revealed a strong interest in the father-son dynamic, that primal and fateful relationship that had weighed so heavily on Allen Jr.’s life. “Whether the son comes to experience his father as Saturn eating his children, depends on the kind of father the son has and the kind of male society he is being asked to join,” Willeford wrote in one book. “But it also depends very significantly on his mother’s sense of the value of her own femininity, and on her way of mediating the values of the Father World.”
After Sonny had been in Bellevue for some time, his father suggested that it might be time for him to return to the United States, but he recoiled violently at the idea. “Never!” he shouted. “I’m never coming home to you, ever!”
Bellevue was his mother’s world—a humane, Jungian oasis far from the cruel science of New York Hospital and McGill University and the other institutions associated with his father’s world.
Allen Jr. did not leave Bellevue until he heard that his father was dead. Joan eventually arranged to take him out of the sanitarium and move him to Santa Fe, where she had found her own sanctuary and was able to look out for her brother. Sonny never returned to an institution. Joan became his legal guardian. The two elderly siblings still live in Santa Fe, in the same house now, both trying to make sense of their past, in their own ways.
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Dangerous Ideas
Though many in the Yankee Stadium crowd that day would have been deeply displeased to learn Gehlen’s identity, the German spymaster, wearing his trademark dark glasses, sat undisturbed in the stands, enjoying the carnival exuberance of the afternoon. The game itself was of little interest to Gehlen—it was his German companion, Heinz Herre, who was the rabid baseball fan. Herre, who had served as Gehlen’s indispensable deputy ever since their days together on the eastern front, became so enamored of America’s favorite pastime after the war that he could spit out players’ statistics like the most obsessive of baseball card collectors. During the war, Herre had studied the Soviet enemy with equal intensity, learning the Russian language and immersing himself in the country’s politics and culture. Now his compulsive curiosity was focused on all things American.
Herre, a tall and lean man with an appealing smile, had a knack for ingratiating himself with his U.S. colleagues. Though the socially awkward Gehlen lacked his deputy’s facility with Americans, he knew it was an essential skill. In the final days of the war, Gehlen astutely concluded that the U.S.-Soviet alliance would inevitably break apart, providing an opportunity for at least some elements of the Nazi hierarchy to survive by joining forces with the West against Moscow. He knew that his own fate depended on his ability to convince his new American masters of his strategic value in the emerging Cold War. Gehlen did this by trekking into the Bavarian mountains, as U.S. forces approached, and burying cases of microfilm containing Nazi intelligence on the Soviet Union. The German spymaster then leveraged his expertise and underground connections in Eastern Europe, convincing U.S. military officials of his indispensability as an authority on the Soviet threat.
Gehlen’s canny maneuvers won him and his top staff a flight out of war ravaged Germany on a DC-3 military transport to the United States, where they were moved into comfortable quarters at Fort Hunt in Virginia. Here Gehlen was introduced to his American intelligence counterparts, including Allen Dulles, who, after listening to the German spymaster’s pitch, decided that the U.S. government should bring the former Nazi intelligence operation under its supervision.
Instead of being handed over to the Soviets as war criminals, as Moscow was demanding, Gehlen and his top deputies were put on a troop ship back to Germany.
Back home, Gehlens spy team was installed by U.S. military authorities in a compound in the village of Pullach, near Munich, that had once served as the headquarters of Hitler confidante Martin Bormann. Gehlens dream of reconstituting Hitler’s military intelligence structure within the U.S. national security system was about to be realized. With the generous support of the American government, the Gehlen Organization—as it came to be known— thrived in Pullach, becoming West Germany’s principal intelligence agency.
Many in the CIA vehemently opposed any association with such a stigmatized organization, including Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the agency’s first director, who in 1947 strongly urged President Truman to “liquidate” Gehlens operation. The following year, the CIA station chief in Karlsruhe, Germany, expressed his own disgust at the prospect of a merger with Gehlen’s group, calling it an old boy’s network of ex-Nazi officers “who are in a position to provide safe haven for a good many undesirable elements from the standpoint of a future democratic Germany.” But Gehlen had his influential supporters in Washington.
Gehlens backing came primarily from the Dulles faction within the national security establishment—and once again, this faction would prevail. In October 1948, James Critchfield, the new chief of the CIA’s Munich station, was given the task of evaluating Gehlen’s operation and recommending for or against it. The thirty-one-year-old Critchfield was a Dulles man: he had been identified as a talented prospect by Eleanor Dulles while serving with Army intelligence in postwar Vienna, and he was later recruited into the CIA by her brothers. In his final report, Critchfield firmly concluded that the CIA should fold Gehlens group under its wing. It was the beginning of a fateful relationship that would shape Cold War politics for decades to come.
The CIA officially assumed responsibility for the German spy organization in July 1949, with Jim Critchfield taking over as Gehlen’s supervisor. Critchfield moved his base of operations to Pullach, setting up his office in Bormann’s former bedroom. Gehlen had turned Pullach into its own separate world, with over two hundred of his top staff and their wives and children living and working in the compound. Before Critchfield moved in, the German spymaster himself had lived with his wife and four children in Bormann’s two-story house. Known, ironically, as the “White House,” its décor still retained touches of Nazi kitsch, including a stone German eagle looming over the front door, whose claws were now empty after U.S. soldiers chiseled away the swastika they once held.
As Critchfield’s CIA deputies and their families moved into Gehlens gated community, an intimate social fusion began to develop between the former enemies. The Germans and Americans worked and partied together, their children attended the same one-room school, and their families even went on ski trips together in the nearby Bavarian Alps. By 1953, the CIA and Gehlen Organization were so entwined in Germany that some Washington officials, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Roger Keyes, expressed strong concern.
Just a few years before, Gehlen and his top men—who included high-ranking officers of the German General Staff, FHO, and even SS—had been dedicated warriors of the Third Reich. And yet Critchfield convinced himself that, except for “some borderline cases who worked in peripheral areas of the organization . . . Gehlens key people . . . had come out of the war and the Nuremberg Trials with reasonably clean slates.”
Critchfield was the son of a small-town North Dakota doctor and schoolteacher, graduating from North Dakota State University and joining the Army on the eve of the war. He had the thick, wavy hair and dark good looks of a central casting military hero. Critchfield served in North Africa and Europe, rising through the ranks to become one of the Army’s youngest colonels and winning the Bronze Star twice and the Silver Star for gallantry. Crossing the Rhine in the final weeks of the war as the commander of a mobile task force, the young colonel was one of the first American officers to witness firsthand the results of Hitler’s Final Solution. In late April, his unit came across an annex of Dachau. The camp was nearly empty, but there was evidence all around of the horror that had taken place there. At one point, the young Army colonel and his soldiers watched in “shocked silence” as two skeletal camp survivors chased after an escaping SS guard, wrestled him to the ground, and choked him to death.
Despite his war experiences, Critchfield prided himself on keeping an open mind about the ex-Nazi commanders with whom he later worked. “Gehlen and his senior staff, and their wives (many of whom also worked in Pullach), all impressed us as being unusually intelligent and well educated,” Critchfield observed. “In personal characteristics, apparent values, and thoughts about the future of Germany and Europe, these [ex-Nazi] officers did not seem to me significantly different from my contemporaries in the U.S. Army.”
Critchfield knew from the beginning of his professional relationship with Gehlen that he was dealing with a “difficult personality.” Gehlen once subjected his CIA supervisor to a three-hour “harangue” against U.S. interference in his spy organization’s affairs. Despite Gehlens occasional histrionics, Critchfield expressed admiration for his German colleague’s pragmatic, businesslike style and his welcome habit of “getting right to the point.” If Gehlen had not been rescued by U.S. intelligence authorities after the war, he almost certainly would have been convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg. But Critchfield graciously overlooked Gehlens past. “He had a high standard of morality,” Critchfield later observed, without a hint of irony, “with Christian beliefs that were evident and reinforced by his wife Herta and their family.” This simple, trusting American attitude made Critchfield an easy mark for Gehlen and the other quick-witted Nazi veterans whom he supervised.
Reinhard Gehlen was a man of ratlike cunning. He had managed to work his way up through the Wehrmacht’s intelligence hierarchy; to survive a falling-out with Hitler late in the war over his increasingly dire intelligence reports; and not only to avoid the hangman’s noose at Nuremberg but to persuade the Americans to give him a leading role in their shadow war against the Soviet Union. His overriding goal was to rebuild the Nazi power network and return Germany to a dominant role on the European stage. Gehlen harbored deeply mixed feelings about Germany’s American conquerors; he had a cringing respect for their power and money but was deeply resentful about being forced to answer to them. He often treated his handlers, including Critchfield, more as enemies than allies, keeping them in the dark about his operations and even putting them under surveillance.
Late in his life, Critchfield admitted to a Washington Post reporter, “There’s no doubt that the CIA got carried away with recruiting some pretty bad people.” In a secret 1954 memo, later declassified, the agency acknowledged that at least 13 percent of the Gehlen Organization was made up of former hard-core Nazis. But, to the end of his life, Critchfield insisted that Gehlen was not one of these “bad people.”
“I’ve lived with this for nearly 50 years,” Critchfield told the Post in 2001. “Almost everything negative that has been written about Gehlen, in which he has been described as an ardent ex-Nazi, one of Hitler’s war criminals—this is all far from the fact.”
Happily deluded about Gehlen’s true character, Critchfield worked hard to develop a good rapport with the German spymaster throughout their six-year partnership at Pullach. It was Critchfield who arranged the trip to America for Gehlen and his alter ego Heinz Herre in the fall of 1951, highlighted by the final game of the World Series. Gehlens CIA caretaker saw the American odyssey— which was scheduled to include high-level meetings in Washington, as well as a train trip west to California—as a way to cement the agency’s relationship with the cagey German and strengthen his bond with America.
As Critchfield put together the itinerary for Gehlen and Herre, the CIA hierarchy realized that the Germans’ trip was fraught with potential problems. Gehlen remained a controversial figure within U.S. national security circles, where some were still pushing to fire him. An October 1950 CIA report on Gehlen, remarking on his tendency to throw fits and make demands on his American overseers, dismissed the German as “a runt, and, even as runts go, a rather unimpressive one . . . he suffers from a ‘runt complex.’” A flurry of interoffice CIA memos on the eve of Gehlen’s U.S. junket fretted that “his trip can obviously produce a variety of political embarrassments” and predicted that “Gehlen will be somewhat difficult to control on this trip.”
In the end, the trip was a triumph for Gehlen and his supporters in the CIA. After Gehlen and Herre arrived in New York on September 23, 1951, Critchfield escorted them on their railway tour of America. On their way to the West Coast, they stopped over in Chicago, dropping by a 1930s-era speakeasy one night where, “much to the surprise of all of us,” recounted Critchfield, “we were greeted by a famous member of the Mafia.” As they rolled westward on the rails, the three men shed their business skins and eased into the lazy pace of tourists. But the Germans could not drop all their espionage training. “We looked out on the Rockies from the top of Pike’s Peak and walked among the great redwoods outside San Francisco,” recalled Critchfield. “Gehlen was an insatiable photographer and Herre, like the General Staff officer that he was, equipped himself with maps and sought out the highest observation point for surveying each tourist objective.”
Returning to Washington, D.C., on October 8, they checked into a suite at the Envoy, an ornate, old-world hotel in the leafy Adams Morgan neighborhood. Dulles arranged for Gehlen and Herre to meet with CIA director Beetle Smith. Dulles hosted a private dinner at the Metropolitan Club for the Germans and several CIA officers with whom they felt comfortable, including Richard Helms, who had run U.S. intelligence operations in Germany after the war.
The 1951 trip to America sealed the relationship between “UTILITY,” as Gehlen was code-named by the Americans, and the CIA. Over the years, the agency would occasionally wrestle with its conscience over the alliance. But CIA officials invariably suppressed these doubts and moved on. In 1954, an unsigned CIA memo to the chief of the agency’s Eastern Europe division acknowledged that a number of individuals employed by Gehlen “appear from a qualitative standpoint particularly heinous.” By way of illustration, the author of the memo attached biographical summaries on several of Gehlens most repellent recruits, including Konrad Fiebig, who was later charged with murdering eleven thousand Jews in Belarus during the war. Nonetheless, the memo concluded, “We feel it is a bit late in the game to do anything more than remind UTILITY that he might be smart politically to drop such types.”
But the CIA’s intimate relationship with Gehlen came with a price in the global arena. Soviet propagandists made much of the arrangement, and even British intelligence allies vented their outrage. In an August 1955 memo to Dulles, the chief of the CIA’s Eastern European division reported on a diplomatic luncheon in Bonn, during which British officials freely aired their disgust to their American friends. “They were quite blunt in expressing their feelings that the Americans had sold their souls to the Germans because of their frantic and hysterical desire to thwart Soviet military strength,” the CIA official informed Dulles.
Allen Dulles was unruffled by the controversy that swirled around his German colleague. He airily dismissed concerns about Gehlen’s wartime record. “I don’t know if he’s a rascal,” Dulles remarked. “There are few archbishops in espionage. . . . Besides, one needn’t ask him to one’s club.” But, in fact, Dulles and Helms did invite Gehlen to their clubs—including the Metropolitan and the Chevy Chase Club—whenever the German spymaster visited Washington. Dulles had no reservations about working with such men, so why shouldn’t he also drink and dine with them? Dulles even brought along Clover on those occasions when Gehlens talkative wife, Herta, accompanied him to America.
Dulles went to generous lengths to maintain a congenial relationship with Gehlen, sending him gifts and warm greetings on Christmas and his birthday, and even on the anniversaries of their professional alliance. One of Gehlens favorite gifts from Dulles was a small wooden statuette of a cloak-and-dagger figure that the German spymaster described as “sinister” looking, but nonetheless kept on his desk for the rest of his life. Gehlen, in turn, cabled his own chummy messages to the U.S. intelligence chief, and once sent him a gold medallion of St. George slaying the dragon—the Gehlen Organization’s emblem —“as a symbol of our work against bolshevism.”
Dulles knew that Gehlen was a devoted family man. The German intelligence chief closely managed the affairs of his extended family, installing a number of them in positions with “the firm,” as his organization was known by its employees. In late 1954, when Dulles heard that Gehlen was seeking to get his oldest daughter, Katharina, into a good U.S. college, the CIA director immediately began making inquiries on her behalf. Radcliffe, where his own daughter Joan had gone, made it clear that it was not inclined to give the daughter of a former Nazi commander special treatment. But Katharina Gehlen did win admission to Hunter College in New York City.
She later followed family tradition and went to work for her father, acting as a junior spy on occasion and carrying confidential packages across borders. Gehlen proudly confided to American colleagues that on one such mission, Katharina had the foresight to hide her diplomatic pouch “below a layer of soiled feminine niceties” in her suitcase when crossing the border. In those more decorous times, the inquisitive customs official promptly terminated his inspection as soon as he came to the young woman’s dirty underwear.
In 1955, as the CIA prepared to transfer the Gehlen Organization to the West German government, the agency generously continued to back Gehlen, giving him enough money to buy a lakeside estate near Pullach, where he enjoyed sailing his boat on weekends. Critchfield claimed that Gehlen bought the manor with a modest interest-free loan of 48,000 deutsche marks (about $12,000) from the CIA, which Gehlen himself insisted he repaid in full. But reports in the Soviet bloc press characterized the estate as a gift from Dulles that was worth as much as 250,000 DM.
Gehlen was deeply grateful to Dulles, whom he code-named “The Gentleman,” for his unflagging support. “In all the years of my collaboration with the CIA, I had no personal disputes with Dulles,” Gehlen wrote in his memoir. “He pleased me by his air of wisdom, born of years of experience; he was both fatherly and boisterous, and he became a close personal friend of mine.”
Despite the deep affection he had for Dulles, Gehlen felt free to air his complaints about U.S. government policy whenever he suspected that America’s Cold War vigilance was softening. The Gehlen Organization saw the Cold War as the final act of the Reich’s interrupted offensive against the Soviet Union. In August 1955, after Eisenhower’s tentative peace efforts at the Geneva summit, a CIA memo reported that “UTILITY was blunt in his criticism of the U.S. position at Geneva. He expressed the opinion that in the realm of international politics one should never tell a Russian that one will not shoot him, and should under no circumstances be as convincing in this position as President Eisenhower was at Geneva.”
Western leaders negotiated with Moscow at their own peril, Gehlen firmly believed. The Soviet Union enticed you with this and that, but underneath its skirt, “one will see the cloven hoof of the devil,” he said.
Gehlen kept up his martial drumbeat throughout his intelligence career. Thomas Hughes, who served as director of foreign intelligence in the Kennedy State Department, recalled an evening early in the Kennedy presidency when Dulles gave Gehlen a platform for his militarism. “Allen Dulles had a soft spot in his heart for the ‘good Germans,’ expansively defined,” said Hughes. “One of my first social events in the Kennedy administration’s intelligence community was a dinner given by Allen Dulles one night at the Chevy Chase Club in honor of Gehlen, who was visiting from his Munich headquarters. Gehlen led the discussion, advising us how to deal with ‘the Bear,’ his term for the Soviet menace. J. Edgar Hoover, sitting next to me, kept murmuring, ‘The Bear, the Bear. That’s it. The Bear.’”
Gehlen liked to say that his cold-steel view of the Soviet adversary came from his hard-won experience on the eastern front. But it was also calculated to please American hard-liners, particularly his masters, the Dulles brothers. Some critics in Western security circles attacked the ideological bias of the Gehlen Organization’s intelligence reports, which exaggerated the Soviet bloc’s military strength and nuclear capability. But the “cooked” intelligence served the Dulles's by giving them more ammunition for their militant Cold War stance.
The covert Cold War in the West was, to an unsettling extent, a joint operation between the Dulles regime and that of Reinhard Gehlen. The German spy chief’s pathological fear and hatred of Russia, which had its roots in Hitler’s Third Reich, meshed smoothly with the Dulles brothers’ anti-Soviet absolutism. In fact, the Dulles policy of massive nuclear retaliation bore a disturbing resemblance to the Nazis’ exterminationist philosophy—a link that would be darkly satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, with its Führer saluting doomsday scientist. No other cultural artifact of the period captures so perfectly the absurd morbidity of the Cold War, and its Wagnerian lust for oblivion. We live “in an age in which war is a paramount activity of man,” Gehlen announced in his memoir, “with the total annihilation of the enemy as its primary aim.” There could be no more succinct a statement of the fascist ethos.
In the months leading up to the CIA’s transfer of the Gehlen Organization to the government of West Germany, there was another flurry of debate about Gehlen in Washington and Bonn, which grew so heated that it spilled into the press. At the same time, the Federal Republic of Germany, under the rigid leadership of the elderly, conservative Catholic Konrad Adenauer, was also involved in delicate negotiations with the United States over West Germany’s proposed entry into NATO. In October 1954, during a visit by Adenauer to Washington, General Arthur Trudeau, chief of U.S. Army intelligence, met privately with the chancellor to discuss the Gehlen problem, telling the German leader that he did not trust “that spooky Nazi outfit at Pullach.” Trudeau advised Adenauer to clean house before Germany was admitted into NATO.
All hell broke loose in Washington when Dulles learned that Trudeau had trespassed on his turf. Although the Joint Chiefs of Staff continued to back their man, it soon became clear (if it wasn’t already) who was running the intelligence show under Eisenhower. Trudeau found himself transferred out of military intelligence to a remote post in the Far East, and a few years later he quietly retired from his country’s service.
During this turbulent, transitional period in West German affairs, Reinhard Gehlen was confronted with a strong domestic challenger for his espionage throne. In fact, Otto John—the head of BfV, West Germany’s internal security organization (the equivalent of the FBI)—was the only serious rival Gehlen would face during his long reign at Pullach. British intelligence saw Otto John as a far superior alternative to Gehlen. As a survivor of the ill-fated Valkyrie plot against Hitler, John lacked Gehlen’s unsavory baggage. After the coup failed, John narrowly escaped with his life to London, where he worked with British MI6 for the remainder of the war, returning to Germany after Hitler’s defeat to assist with the prosecution of Nazi war criminals.
A self-described liberal, John worried about the “re-Nazification” of Germany, as he witnessed the growing power of Gehlen and the many other former Third Reich officials who were finding key positions in Bonn. High among these officials was Chancellor Adenauer’s right-hand man, Hans Globke, who had helped draft the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the racial identification system that served as the basis for the extermination of German Jews.
A CIA comparative analysis of Gehlen and Otto John unsurprisingly found that “John is the more moral of the two.” But, the report continued, John was “no match for UTILITY in the knock-about of German intelligence politics”—as was soon to be revealed.
In May 1954, John flew to the United States to meet with Eisenhower officials and discuss his democratic vision for postwar Germany. Dulles invited him to lunch at his Georgetown house, and afterward they walked and chatted in his garden. Dulles was eager to hear John’s thoughts on the rearmament of West Germany, a hotly debated issue at the time that Cold Warriors like Dulles strongly supported. John assured the CIA director that he, too, favored rearmament, but only if it was done in a grassroots, democratic way by forming local defense units, instead of “from the top downwards,” which would further empower the militaristic types from Germany’s past. Dulles was not pleased with what he heard. “My whole impression of John,” he wrote in a memo later that year, “was that he was not a very serious character.”
Dulles was predisposed against John to begin with. Gehlen had filled the CIA director’s ears with venomous reports about his German intelligence rival, calling him “unsteady and rootless,” professionally inexperienced, and even prone to alcoholism. What Gehlen clearly found most disturbing about John, however, was his heroic past as an anti-Nazi resister. His moral stature, particularly among the British allies, made him a powerful threat to Gehlen.
John’s meeting with Dulles probably sealed his fate. After he returned home, the BfV chief became the target of a covert campaign engineered by Gehlen to politically undermine him. Soon, Otto John’s life would take a sensational turn. In July, while on a trip to West Berlin to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the failed putsch against Hitler, John disappeared. The news that West Germany’s security chief had vanished sent shock waves around the world. But the story grew even stranger when John later surfaced in East Germany, denouncing Adenauer’s rearmament policy and his administration’s weakness for ex-Nazis. Gehlen gloated over his political enemy’s exit from the Bonn stage. “Once a traitor, always a traitor,” remarked the man who still considered opposition to Hitler as treason.
Then came the final twist in the bizarre spy drama. In December 1955, as the Bundestag (West Germany’s parliament) launched an inquiry into the John affair, he suddenly reappeared in West Germany, claiming that he had been drugged and bundled off to East Berlin against his will. West German authorities did not buy John’s story, and he was arrested and convicted of working on behalf of East Germany’s Communist government, serving four years in prison. But for the rest of his life, John insisted that he was the victim of political treachery, and he strongly implied that it was Reinhard Gehlen, the man who benefited the most from his downfall, who was responsible.
The elimination of Otto John paved the way for Gehlen to consolidate his power. In February 1956, the West German government formally moved to create a foreign intelligence service, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), and soon after, with Dulles’s strong endorsement, Gehlen was officially named its first chief. Gehlens triumph was complete: through ruthless determination he had transformed his Nazi intelligence apparatus into the Gehlen Organization and finally into the BND, giving him an official power base and legitimacy that made him the envy of his fellow Wehrmacht warriors.
In March 1956, Reinhard Gehlens staff prepared to lower the Stars and Stripes, which had flown over the Pullach compound ever since Hitler’s defeat, and replace it with the black-red-gold tricolors of the Federal Republic of Germany. But as Jim Critchfield and his wife packed their family belongings in preparation for his transfer to the Middle East, there was one more urgent piece of business for the departing CIA station chief to handle. On March 13, after returning from a week of secret government meetings in Bonn, Gehlen requested that Critchfield come alone to his office to discuss “a matter of some importance and considerable sensitivity.” The German spymaster was suffering from a cold and he seemed worn down, but he was too anxious to speak with Critchfield to delay their meeting.
Gehlen quickly dispensed with the usual pleasantries and proceeded to present an urgent report on the state of European security. France and Italy, he said, seemed to be moving toward “the reestablishment of [left-center] Popular Front governments.” Likewise, political trends in West Germany could lead to the fall of Adenauer’s conservative government and its replacement by a coalition including the Social Democratic Party and “anti-Adenauer elements of the Right.” Though not Communistic itself, such a government would inevitably take a softer, “neutralist” line toward the Soviet Union, Gehlen predicted, and he himself “would not survive” in this pro-détente atmosphere. If a government like this took over in Bonn, Gehlen warned, it would be “vulnerable to political penetration and eventual control by the East.”
After painting this ominous portrait, Gehlen got to the heart of the matter. He was prepared to take drastic action to prevent such a political scenario from unfolding in Bonn—going as far as to overthrow democracy in West Germany if necessary. Critchfield immediately reported on his startling conversation with Gehlen in a cable sent directly to Dulles in Washington. In the event of a leftward shift in Bonn, Critchfield informed the CIA director, “UTILITY would feel morally justified in taking all possible action, including the establishment of an illegal apparatus in the Federal Republic, to oppose elements in Germany supporting a pro-Soviet policy.” Gehlen, Critchfield added, would like to “discuss a plan for such an eventuality” with his friend Dulles, “in great privacy.”
It is unlikely that Dulles was shocked by Gehlen’s proposal to reinstitute fascism in Germany, since CIA officials had long been discussing such authoritarian contingency plans with the Gehlen Organization and other right wing elements in Germany. In 1952, West German police discovered that the CIA was supporting a two-thousand-member fascist youth group led by ex-Nazi officers who had their own alarming plans for terminating democracy. Police investigators revealed that the CIA-backed group had compiled a blacklist of people to be “liquidated” as “unreliable” in case of a conflict with the Soviet Union. Included on the list were not just West German Communists but leaders of the Social Democratic Party serving in the Bundestag, as well as other left- leaning government officials. There were cries of outrage in the German parliament over the revelations, but the State Department worked strenuously behind the scenes to suppress the story, and similar alarming measures continued to be quietly contemplated throughout the Cold War.
These authoritarian plans were part of a sweeping covert strategy developed in the earliest days of the Cold War by U.S. intelligence officials, including Dulles, to counter a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe by creating a “stay-behind network” of armed resisters to fight the Red Army. Code-named Operation Gladio, these secret CIA-funded networks attracted fascist and criminal elements, some of which later played subversive roles in West Germany, France, and Italy, disrupting democratic rule in those countries by staging terrorist acts and plotting coups and assassinations.
In the end, Gehlen didn’t feel the need to overthrow democracy in Bonn, but his organization did undertake a variety of secret activities over the years that seriously undermined democratic institutions in Germany. Backed by U.S. intelligence, Hitler’s former spymaster implemented wide-ranging surveillance of West German officials and citizens, including opening private mail and tapping phones. Gehlen defended the snooping as an internal security measure aimed at ferreting out Soviet and East German spies, but his net grew wider and wider until it was cast across an increasingly broad spectrum of the population, including opposition party leaders, labor union officials, journalists, and schoolteachers. Gehlen even used his spy apparatus to investigate survivors of the Valkyrie plot against Hitler, including Dulles’s wartime comrade Hans Gisevius, all of whom he suspected of being Soviet agents.
One of Gehlen’s more ethical deputies complained, “Gehlen is becoming a megalomaniac. He actually wants to play Gestapo for the Americans.” Gehlen was acting not just on behalf of his U.S. patrons, but his clients in Bonn. Even some CIA officials worried that Gehlen was being improperly used by Hans Globke to gather information on political opponents and fortify the Adenauer administration’s power. Gehlen, warned a CIA dispatch from Bonn, “has let himself be used most indiscriminately by Globke to further the latter’s quest for power.” On one occasion in the 1950s, the savvy Globke paid a visit to Gehlen’s Pullach headquarters, poring over the dossiers of various German political figures—and taking the opportunity to remove his own file.
Ironically, while justifying his political snooping as a necessary countermeasure against enemy infiltration, Gehlens own organization became notorious for its penetrability. The Heinz Felfe affair was the most notorious Soviet mole case during Gehlens career—and, indeed, one of the biggest scandals in Cold War espionage history. Felfe, a former Nazi bully boy who had led rampaging gangs on Kristallnacht in 1938, was recruited into the Gehlen Organization in 1951. Not long after, the adaptable Felfe became a Soviet double agent. Fed a steady stream of inside tips by his Russian handlers, Felfe began to impress Gehlen as a master spy, and he rose quickly through the Pullach ranks. Finally, the bedazzled Gehlen named Heinz Felfe head of all anti-Soviet counterintelligence operations, a position that put the double agent in ongoing contact with the CIA and other Western spy agencies. Felfe’s reign as a top-level Soviet mole in the Gehlen Organization stretched for over a decade. By the time he was finally caught, he had wreaked inestimable damage on the West German apparatus, resulting in the arrest of dozens of senior Gehlen agents behind the Iron Curtain, as well as the breaking of numerous codes and secret channels of communication. A significant swath of German and American intelligence fieldwork had to be uprooted and started all over again.
After the Felfe scandal exploded in the press in 1963, Gehlen tried to minimize the importance of the deep breach. But though he would hold on to power by the skin of his teeth for the next several years, the spymaster never fully recovered from the political fallout. Adenauer never forgave Gehlen. For the “runt” Gehlen, who craved the approval of Germany’s father figure, the falling-out with the chancellor was a grievous blow. The spymaster was already in Adenauer’s doghouse for another scandal that had broken the previous year, when Gehlen was accused of leaking classified information about West Germany’s nuclear armament plans to the magazine Der Spiegel. The leak— which was calculated to damage Adenauer’s defense minister, yet another rival of Gehlen—made the chancellor so furious that he had considered ordering Gehlen’s arrest, finally deciding against it out of fear that it would only add to his administration’s political embarrassment.
But Adenauer was still in a foul mood about Gehlen in June 1963, when Allen Dulles dropped by the chancellor’s office in Bonn for a visit. By then, Dulles himself had been forced out of office by President Kennedy. But the former CIA director still traveled the world like he was running the show, and whatever capital he stopped in, Dulles found open doors. That day in Bonn, Adenauer asked Dulles point-blank what he thought of Gehlen. According to a CIA memo, Dulles “replied, as usual, that he had known [Gehlen] long and well and regarded him as a stout and honest fellow.”
Adenauer was not satisfied by the answer. The aging leader, who felt Dulles had imposed Gehlen upon him, was in no mood to be manipulated again by the American spymaster. The chancellor responded “surprisingly,” the agency memo continued, “by asking Dulles if anybody involved in his business could be really honest. Dulles asked if Adenauer did not regard him as an honest fellow.” The chancellor offered an elusive reply.
The following month, Adenauer was still fuming about Gehlen. One afternoon in July, he ordered the U.S. ambassador to be dragged out of a Bonn luncheon so that the chancellor could give him an earful about Gehlen. In his opinion, said Adenauer, Gehlen “is and always was stupid,” which the Felfe fiasco had underlined in red. There was only one reason, said the chancellor, that he had put up with the spymaster all these years: because of Dulles’s “personal interest” in Gehlen.
After Dulles left the CIA, the relationship between the agency and Gehlen was never as congenial. The German stopped visiting America, and the old tensions began to resurface. By 1966, Gehlen was even airing his suspicions that the CIA had put his family residence under surveillance. He expressed these fears, according to one CIA official, “apparently more in sorrow than anger.”
But by the time he retired, all this unpleasantness had been forgotten and the agency threw itself into planning an elaborate farewell for its longtime comrade. In September 1968, an illustrious crowd of CIA and U.S. military officials gathered for a Washington banquet to honor Gehlen. In the months leading up to the farewell ceremony, the CIA mulled over the proper medal to bestow on the German—the agency’s Intelligence Medal of Merit, or the National Security Medal. Dulles was among those who attended the gala event. He later sent a warm note to his old colleague Dick Helms, who by then was running the CIA, thanking Helms for including him in the Gehlen dinner and expressing how much he had enjoyed “the opportunity to see so many old and mutual friends of the General.”
Reinhard Gehlen lived out the rest of his years at his lakeside retreat, surrounded by his family—including his son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren, who moved into one of two houses on the estate—and his German shepherds, who provided the only security he felt he needed. On windy days, he still enjoyed soaring back and forth across the lake in his sailboat, another gift from the CIA.
The occasional journalists who dropped by found him in good spirits, happy to relive his past and to share his thoughts about the state of world affairs. During his reign at Pullach, he had maintained an abstemious regimen, drinking only mineral water or soda at meals. But now he would indulge in a glass of sherry with his visitors. Gehlen had no qualms when the conversation turned to the war years; he seemed to enjoy talking about his exploits on the eastern front.
The journalists who came by for sandwiches and sherry tended to be a generous sort. They asked the kinds of questions usually directed at retired statesmen or business leaders.
“When you look back on your life, how do you see it?” asked a reporter from a Danish newspaper, as she and Gehlen strolled in the garden that sloped down to the lake.
“I can only be grateful to fate,” he replied thoughtfully. “Everybody makes mistakes here in life. But I don’t at the present moment know what fundamental mistakes I have made.” What made him “especially” happy, said Gehlen, was that he had been able to give so much “human help” to the world.
12
Brain Warfare
On April 10, 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles delivered an alarming speech
about Russia’s latest secret weapon—an insidious mind control program that
Dulles labeled “brain warfare.” Dulles chose an idyllic setting for his remarks,
speaking to a Princeton alumni conference sprinkled with old friends, held in
Hot Springs, Virginia, a fashionable resort in a verdant bowl of the Allegheny
Mountains where Thomas Jefferson once took the waters. “I wonder,” Dulles
told the gathering, “whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds
has become in Soviet hands. . . . The human mind is the most delicate of all
instruments. It is so finely adjusted, so susceptible to the impact of outside
influences that it is proving a malleable tool in the hands of sinister men. The
Soviets are now using brain-perversion techniques as one of their main weapons
in prosecuting the Cold War. Some of these techniques are so subtle and so
abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them.” Dulles reported that the Soviets were engaging in sick science, seeking to control human consciousness by “washing the brain clean of the thoughts and mental processes of the past” and creating automatons of the state who would speak and act against their own will.
Dulles’s speech, which he made sure received wide media distribution, marked an ominous new phase in the Cold War, a militarization of science and psychology aimed not simply at changing popular opinion but at reengineering the human brain. What Dulles did not tell his audience in Hot Springs was that several days earlier, he had authorized a CIA mind control program code-named MKULTRA that would dwarf any similar efforts behind the Iron Curtain. In fact, at the same time that he was condemning Soviet “brainwashing,” Dulles knew that U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been working for several years on their own brain warfare programs. This secret experimentation would balloon under the CIA’s MKULTRA program. Launched by Dulles with a $300,000 budget, this “Manhattan Project of the Mind” would grow into a multi million dollar program, operating for a quarter of a century, and enlisting dozens of leading universities and hospitals as well as hundreds of prominent researchers in studies that often violated ethical standards and treated their human subjects as “expendables.”
Dick Helms, who oversaw MKULTRA, advised Dulles that the scientific research underwritten by the program would have to be carried out in complete secrecy, explaining that most credible scientists would be very “reluctant to enter into signed agreements of any sort which connect them with this activity, since such a connection would jeopardize their professional reputations.” Many of the MKULTRA projects involved the use of experimental drugs, particularly LSD, which Helms saw as a potential “A-bomb of the mind.” The goal was to bend a subject’s mind to the agency’s will.
Most undercover recruits in the spy trade were sketchy, undependable characters who were motivated by greed, blackmail, revenge, lust, or other less than honorable impulses. But the CIA’s spymasters dreamed of taking their craft to a new technological level, one that flirted with the imaginative extremes of science fiction. They wanted to create human machines who would act on command, even against their own conscience. Dulles was particularly keen on finding out if LSD could be used to program zombielike saboteurs or assassins. He kept grilling Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s top drug expert, asking him if the psychedelic compound could be used to make “selected individuals commit acts of substantial sabotage or acts of violence, including murder,” recalled the scientist.
The Manchurian Candidate, the 1959 bestselling thriller by Richard Condon that was later adapted for the screen, dramatized this concept of a flesh-and blood robot, a man so deeply programmed that he could be turned into a coldblooded assassin. It was a paranoid fantasy that had its roots in the Korean War, that confusing debacle in a remote Asian land that would continue to haunt the American public until another Asian misadventure came along. During the war, three dozen captured American pilots confessed to dropping biological weapons containing anthrax, cholera, bubonic plague, and other toxins on North Korea and China. The charges were hotly denied by the U.S. government, and when the airmen returned home after the war, they retracted their charges—under the threat of being tried for treason—alleging that they had been subjected to brainwashing by their Communist captors.
The Korean War “brainwashing” story worked its way deeply into America’s dream state, through the aggressive promotional efforts of CIA-sponsored experts like Edward Hunter, who claimed to have coined the term. Writing bestselling books on the alleged Communist technique and testifying dramatically before Congress, Hunter “essentially modernized the idea of demonic possession,” in the words of one observer. The self-described “propaganda specialist” described how all-American boys fell victim to an insidious combination of Asian mesmerism and Soviet torture science, which turned each captured pilot into a “living puppet—a human robot . . . with new beliefs and new thought processes inserted into a captive body.”
In the end, the Korean brainwashing story itself—the seedbed of so much creeping, Cold War fantasy—turned out to be largely fictitious. Dulles made much of it in his Hot Springs speech, invoking in outraged tones the image of “American boys” being forced to betray their own country and “make open confessions—fake from beginning to end” about how they had waged germ warfare on China and North Korea. But a study later commissioned by Dulles himself—conducted by two prominent Cornell Medical Center neurologists, including Harold Wolff, a friend of the CIA director—largely debunked the brainwash panic. They rejected reports that the Communists were using esoteric mind control techniques, insisting that there was no evidence of drugs or hypnosis or any involvement by psychiatrists and scientists in the Soviet or Chinese interrogation procedures.
Most of the abuse meted out to POWs and political prisoners in Communist countries, Wolff and his colleague observed, amounted to nothing more sophisticated than isolation regimens and stress positions, like being forced to stand in the same spot for hours, and the occasional application of brute force. “There is no reason to dignify these methods by surrounding them with an aura of scientific mystery, or to denote them by terms such as ‘menticide’ or ‘brain washing’ which imply that they are scientifically organized techniques of predictable effectiveness,” concluded the Cornell scientists.
In response to the brainwashing bugaboo that the CIA itself had conjured, the agency constructed its own intricate mind control machinery that was part Orwell and part Philip K. Dick. In Hot Springs, Dulles bemoaned the fact that, unlike the ruthless Soviets, the United States had no easy access to “human guinea pigs” for its brain experimentation. But, in fact, the CIA was already subjecting helpless victims to its “brain perversion” techniques. Dulles began by feeding Soviet prisoners and captured double agents into this merciless psychological apparatus; then drug addicts, mental patients, prison inmates, and other “expendables.” By the end, Allen Dulles would put his own family members in the hands of the CIA’s mad scientists.
In June 1952, Frank Olson—a balding, forty-one-year-old CIA biochemist with a long face, mournful eyes, and a smile that revealed an upper deck of prominent incisors—flew to Frankfurt, where he was picked up at the airport and driven twelve miles north to Camp King, an extreme interrogation center of the sort that would later be known as a “black site.” Olson helped oversee the Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick in Maryland, the biological weapons laboratory jointly operated by the U.S. Army and the CIA. The top secret work conducted by the SO Division included research on LSD-induced mind control, assassination toxins, and biological warfare agents like those allegedly being used in Korea.
Olson’s division also was involved in research that was euphemistically labeled “information retrieval”—extreme methods of extracting intelligence from uncooperative captives. For the past two years, Olson had been traveling to secret centers in Europe where Soviet prisoners and other human guinea pigs were subjected to these experimental interrogation methods. Dulles began spearheading this CIA research even before he became director of the agency, under a secret program that preceded MKULTRA code-named Operation Artichoke, after the spymaster’s favorite vegetable. CIA officials later purged their files of evidence of the program, but in one of the few surviving documents, dated February 12, 1951, Dulles wrote to his ever-accommodating deputy Frank Wisner about “the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc. . . . The enclosed folder, ‘Interrogation Techniques,’ was prepared in my Medical Division to provide you with a suitable background.”
It was in secret overseas detention centers like Camp King where the CIA found many of the subjects for its Artichoke interrogations: defectors, double agents, and other unfortunates from the East who had fallen into U.S. hands. Some of the captives had been delivered to the CIA by the Gehlen Organization, which for a time operated out of Camp King until relocating to Pullach. During the war, Camp King had been a Nazi interrogation center for captured U.S. and British fliers. Afterward, the U.S. military turned the camp into a stockade for notorious Nazi POWs like the propagandist “Axis Sally” and the swashbuckling commando Otto Skorzeny. But by 1948, the camp was operating as an extreme interrogation center for Soviet prisoners, a program jointly administered by an unscrupulous alliance of CIA scientists and ex-Nazi doctors who had presided over medical experiments on concentration camp inmates during the war. At Camp King, CIA scientists and their German colleagues subjected victims to dangerous combinations of drugs—including Benzedrine, Pentothal-Natrium, LSD, and mescaline—under a research protocol that stipulated, “Disposal of the body is not a problem.” More than sixteen hundred of the Nazi scientists recruited for U.S. research projects like this would be comfortably resettled with their families in America under a CIA program known as Operation Paperclip.
After reading a captured Gestapo report in 1947 that indicated that mescaline could be an effective interrogation tool, Beecher set off on a decade long search for a magical “truth serum” that would compel prisoners to reveal all, a quest that later focused on LSD and would involve unwitting subjects in Germany as well as at his own Boston hospital. Urging the government to expand its research into LSD as an “offensive weapon,” Beecher subjected his involuntary subjects to severe overdoses of the hallucinogen, despite knowing that it caused “acute panic,” “paranoid reactions,” and other trauma in his victims—a “psychosis in miniature,” he coolly observed in one government report, that “offers interesting possibilities.”
Ever since the Nuremberg trials, international legal authorities had moved to formally condemn the physical and psychological abuse of the powerless. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly emphatically stated in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The following year, the third Geneva Convention reiterated this fundamental commandment: “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.” But by defining the Cold War as a ruthless struggle outside the norms of military conduct and human decency, the national security regime shaped by men like Dulles was able to brazenly defy international law. Few of those involved in CIA brain warfare expressed any ethical concerns about their work. “I never gave a thought to legality or morality,” one agency case officer readily acknowledged after he retired. “Frankly, I did what worked.”
But Frank Olson did suffer profound moral anxieties about his work, and the result was a serious crisis within the CIA itself. Dr. Olson began having serious doubts after traveling to various CIA research centers in England, France, Norway, and West Germany, and observing the human experiments being conducted at these black sites. Olson’s trip to Germany in summer 1952—during which he visited Haus Waldhof, a notorious CIA safe house on a country estate near Camp King—left him particularly shaken. Soviet prisoners were subjected to especially severe interrogation methods at Haus Waldhof, which sometimes resulted in their deaths. The cruelty he witnessed reminded Olson of Nazi concentration camps. After returning home to the United States, Olson began wrestling with his conscience, according to his wife and colleagues. “He had a tough time after Germany . . . drugs, torture, brainwashing,” recalled Norman Cournoyer, a Camp Detrick researcher with whom Olson had worked on projects that had once made him proud, like designing protective clothing for the soldiers landing at Normandy on D-day.
Olson and Cournoyer had also collaborated on projects that made them less proud. After the war, they had traveled around the United States, supervising the spraying of biological agents from aircraft and crop dusters. Some of the tests, which were conducted in cities like San Francisco as well as rural areas in the Midwest, involved harmless chemicals, but others featured more dangerous toxins. In Alaska—where the two men sought to stage their experiments in an environment that resembled wintertime Russia—“we used a spore which is very similar to anthrax,” Cournoyer recalled. “So to that extent we did something that was not kosher.” One of their research colleagues, a bacteriologist named Dr. Harold Batchelor, learned aerial spray techniques from the infamous Dr. Kurt Blome, director of the Nazis’ biological warfare program. Years later, a congressional investigation found these open-air experiments conducted by Camp Detrick scientists “appalling.”
Olson began to worry about how his airborne spray research was being utilized by the military. His wife, Alice, said that, in addition to being deeply disturbed by the interrogation procedures he witnessed in Germany, her husband was also haunted by the suspicion that the United States was practicing biological warfare in Korea. By the time he returned from Germany, Olson was suffering a “moral crisis,” according to his family, and was seriously considering abandoning his science career and becoming a dentist.
Olson’s objections to the CIA’s brain warfare research apparently began to raise alarms within the Camp Detrick bureaucracy. One document in Olson’s personnel file, dated after his return from Germany, indicated that his behavior was causing “fear of a security violation.”
In November 1953, before Frank Olson could change his life, he became one more unwitting victim of the CIA’s mind control program. A week before Thanksgiving, Olson and several other SO Division scientists were invited to a weekend retreat at a secluded CIA facility near Deep Creek Lake, a lushly forested resort area in western Maryland. The scientists were greeted by Sidney Gottlieb, the chief wizard of the CIA’s magic potion division, the Technical Services Staff. Gottlieb was one of the agency’s more unique characters, a stuttering, clubfooted biochemist whom friends described as a kind of untethered genius. Despite his infirmity, Gottlieb threw himself into such passionate, if unlikely, recreations as folk dancing and goat herding. The son of Orthodox Hungarian Jews, he rejected Judaism and spent his lifetime searching for his own form of enlightenment, experimenting with Zen Buddhism and becoming an early celebrant in the cult of LSD. Gottlieb devoted himself enthusiastically to the CIA’s mind-manipulation program, subjecting hundreds of unsuspecting Americans to experimental drugs. The CIA chemist preyed on “people who could not fight back,” as one agency official put it, such as seven patients in a federal drug hospital in Kentucky who were dosed with acid for seventy-seven straight days by a Gottlieb-funded doctor who ran the hospital’s addiction treatment program. Gottlieb also excelled at cooking up rare toxins and clever delivery mechanisms in his laboratory to eliminate people the CIA deemed political enemies. Gottlieb strongly adhered to the Dulles ethic that there were no rules in war. “We were in a World War II mode,” said a CIA psychologist who was close to Gottlieb. “The war never really ended for us.”
After dinner on the second night of the Deep Creek retreat, Gottlieb’s deputy spiked a bottle of Cointreau and offered it to the unsuspecting Olson and his colleagues. It was the beginning of a nightmarish ordeal for Olson, which would end a week later when the scientist went crashing through the window of the tenth-floor hotel room in midtown Manhattan where he was being held by the CIA and plunged to his death. After being dosed at Deep Creek, Olson never seemed to recover; he remained anxious and confused throughout the week leading up to his fatal fall. The CIA officials who took charge of him that week later claimed they were planning to put him in psychiatric care. But instead they shuttled him around from place to place, taking him to a New York City allergist on the CIA payroll named Dr. Harold Abramson, who had conducted LSD tolerance experiments for the agency, and even to a magician named John Mulholland, who taught CIA agents how magic techniques could improve their spycraft. As the days went by, Olson became increasingly agitated, telling Dr. Abramson—not without reason—that the CIA was trying to poison him.
Shortly after Olson fell to his death from the Statler Hotel (now the Hotel Pennsylvania), someone placed a brief phone call from the scientist’s hotel room to Dr. Abramson. “Well, he’s gone,” said the caller. “Well, that’s too bad,” Abramson responded, and then the caller hung up.
Agents from the CIA’s Office of Security—the department made up of former FBI agents and cops that cleaned up the spy agency’s messes—quickly descended on the hotel, nudging aside New York police investigators. James McCord, later known for his role in the Watergate break-in, was one of the security agents who took charge of the Olson “investigation” for the CIA. The agency termed Olson’s death a suicide, the tragic end of an emotionally unstable man, and the case was buried for over two decades.
In 1975, the case resurfaced during the Rockefeller Commission investigation of CIA abuses ordered by President Gerald Ford. Olson’s widow and grown children were invited to the White House by President Ford, who apologized to them on behalf of the government. The Olson case would become enshrined in history as one of the more outrageous examples of CIA hubris and mad science. But as the years went by, the Olson family became convinced that Frank Olson’s death was more than simply a tragic suicide; it was murder.
“Frank Olson did not die as a consequence of a drug experiment gone awry,” the family declared in a statement released in 2002. He died, they said, because he knew too much, and he had become a security risk.
In 1994, Frank’s eldest son, Eric, decided to have his father’s body exhumed and a second autopsy performed. The team of pathologists was led by James Starrs, professor of law and forensic science at George Washington University. The panel (with one dissenter) found evidence that Olson had suffered a blunt force trauma to the head and a chest injury before his fall—evidence that was called “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.” While acknowledging that his team had not found “any smoking gun,” Starrs told the press, “I am exceedingly skeptical of the view that Dr. Olson went through the window on his own.”
But Olson’s children failed in their efforts to reopen the case on the basis of the new evidence. In 2012, a federal judge dismissed the family’s lawsuit against the CIA, in which they asked for compensatory damages as well as access to documents related to their father’s death. In ruling against the family, primarily on technical grounds, the judge nonetheless noted “that the public record supports many of the allegations against the CIA, farfetched as they may sound.”
Allen Dulles was coldly efficient when it came to ridding his agency of security problems. On the night of March 31, 1953, several months before Frank Olson met his end, Dulles invited an old friend and protégé named James Kronthal to his Georgetown house for dinner. The CIA director said he had business to discuss. But it turned out that the evening’s most pressing item of business was Kronthal’s own fate.
The forty-two-year-old Kronthal was a rising star at the CIA, where his profile fit the mold for Dulles’s “very best men.” The son of a prominent New York banker, Kronthal was educated at Yale and Harvard, and served under Dulles in the Bern OSS station during the war. Before the war, he had rejected the banking career that his family had planned for him in favor of teaching art history at Harvard. But Kronthal brought a keen business instinct to the art trade, establishing himself in Germany during the 1930s as a broker for Goering, Himmler, and other Nazi leaders who were selling art treasures stolen from Jewish collectors. After the war, he sought to redeem himself by trying to track down the looted art pieces and return them to their rightful owners.
The slightly built, brilliant young man became a favorite of Dulles, who helped Kronthal take over the Bern station in 1947, after it became one of the CIA’s first overseas outposts. When Dulles took charge of the agency in 1953, he brought Kronthal back to the Washington headquarters, with big plans for the younger man’s intelligence career.
Kronthal wasn’t a charming extrovert like Dulles, but his superiors recognized a rare intelligence behind his reticence. Helms was one of those who shared Dulles’s admiration for the up-and-coming agent, writing that Kronthal was a “top flight intelligence officer who commands respect from his subordinates more through demonstrated knowledge and IQ than through personal warmth and affability. He is rather retiring as a person but this does not affect his leadership or firmness of purpose.”
Kronthal, whom Dulles fondly referred to as “Jimmy,” reminded the CIA director of his only son, Allen Jr., another sensitive, highly intelligent young man whose life once held so much promise. But in November 1952, young Dulles had suffered a serious head wound while fighting with the Marines in Korea, a brain injury from which he would never fully recover. For the rest of Dulles’s life, his son would rotate in and out of hospitals, sanitariums, and private nursing care, growing increasingly remote from his father. And, on that night in March 1953, Dulles would also lose Kronthal, a man the spymaster had considered a member of the family and even a possible successor.
Kronthal’s proclivity for the espionage game derived, in part, from a lifetime of hiding his own personal secrets. He was a gay man with a weakness for young boys. The Gestapo discovered his sexual tastes while he was working in the German art market before the war. Later, while Kronthal was running the CIA station in Bern, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police agency, got access to Kronthal’s Gestapo files after penetrating the Gehlen Organization. The Soviets set up a “honey trap” for Kronthal in Switzerland, with Chinese boys as bait. He was secretly filmed and blackmailed, and by the time he returned to Washington in May 1952, Jim Kronthal was a double agent in the iron grip of the NKVD.
It was Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the former Army intelligence officer who ran the CIA’s Office of Security, who informed Dulles that his protégé had been turned. Edwards’s internal security department was tasked with protecting the CIA against enemy penetration. The security unit was also in charge of what was delicately called “enforcement,” providing the muscle to eliminate any potential threats or embarrassments to the agency.
On the night of March 31, as Dulles confronted Kronthal with the Office of Security’s revelations over dinner at his home, two agents from Edwards’s department were quietly eavesdropping in an adjoining room. The sense of betrayal was certainly overwhelming for Dulles. But the CIA director, whose fits of rage were legendary, held his fury in check that evening. The spy chief sounded sadly contemplative as he spoke with the traitor in whom he had invested so much hope, remarking on the mystery of personal demons and how they could set flame to the most promising careers.
After the two men reviewed Kronthals impossible position and his dismal options, the shattered agent walked back home—a white brick townhouse with a small garden of spring daffodils in front, just two blocks from Dulles’s residence. He was followed by the two CIA security men. When Kronthals housekeeper arrived the next morning, his bedroom door was still closed and he had left a note that he was not to be disturbed. Later that morning, two men who identified themselves as colleagues of Kronthal appeared at his house and told the housekeeper they needed to bring him to an urgent meeting. When they opened his bedroom door, they found a lifeless Kronthal splayed across his bed, fully clothed, with an empty vial near his body.
The investigation into Kronthal’s death was quickly taken over by Lieutenant Lawrence Hartnett of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police, a homicide detective with a history of helping tidy up CIA-related problems. Hartnett revealed that Kronthal had left a letter for Dick Helms, in which he revealed that he was “mentally upset because of pressure connected with work,” as well as a letter for Dulles. An autopsy concluded that Kronthal had taken his own life, but the report left more questions lingering than it answered, failing to determine the cause of his death or the contents of the vial found in his bedroom. Sometime before his death, Kronthal had mailed a letter to his sister, revealing his homosexuality (which came as no surprise to her) and referring to the “tremendous difficulties” that his sexual identity posed for him. He then signed off in a perplexing way. Kronthal’s final words to his sister were, “I can’t wait till 1984. Love, Jim.” Was it his mordant way of saying that for him, Big Brother’s suffocating authoritarianism was already an unbearable reality?
The James Kronthal case was, like the Frank Olson matter later that year, another mess that Dulles’s Office of Security had to clean up. If Kronthal’s death was a suicide, it appeared to be assisted. This is what one high-ranking CIA official, Robert Crowley, later suggested. One way or another, said Crowley— who was interviewed after he retired by journalist Joseph Trento—Kronthal was induced to do the right thing for the good of the agency and of the men who had been his professional benefactors. “Allen probably had a special potion prepared that he gave Kronthal should the pressure become too much,” Crowley speculated. “Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and the medical people produced all kinds of poisons that a normal postmortem could not detect.”
Dulles never spoke in public about Kronthal after he was gone. Kron-thal’s sister’s efforts to extract more information from the CIA about his death proved futile; the press made little effort to investigate the case. James Kronthal was dropped down the dark well where CIA complications disappeared.
Until he was wounded in Korea, Allen Macy Dulles Jr. was the brightest hope of his family. A brilliant student, he excelled at Exeter, sped through Princeton in three years, and then took himself off to Oxford, where he completed his degree in history, writing his thesis on the permanent undersecretary system of the British Foreign Office. “Sonny,” as his father called him, intellectually outshone the elder Dulles, whose own academic performance had been indifferent.
If Dulles took pride in his son’s educational achievements, he never showed it. At some point in their young lives, Dulles’s two daughters, Toddie and Joan, gave up any expectation that their father would shine his attention on them. But they kept hoping that Dulles would finally acknowledge their brother’s extraordinary mind. “Both my sister and I would have liked my father to recognize him and tell him that here was this next generation [of the family] producing special people,” Joan remarked late in her life.
“I would imagine,” she said on another occasion, “that my brother, especially my brother, would have felt badly about having no special attention from his father.”
Allen Jr. was closer to his mother, sharing her sensitive and perceptive temperament. He was acutely aware of Clover’s moods and the strains in his parents’ marriage. To one family observer, it seemed as if Dulles felt judged by his son.
Sonny had thrived in the cloistered boys’ world of Exeter. But unlike his father, young Dulles recoiled from the hearty, fraternity-centered social life at Princeton. He was not elected to any of Princeton’s men’s clubs, and he dismissed the university’s intellectual atmosphere as insufficiently challenging.
One of Allen Jr.’s classmates at Exeter, a friend with whom he remained in touch even after his life-altering war wound, was gay. There were rumors that Sonny, too, was similarly inclined.
“Well, there could have been all kinds of experimentation at prep school,” Joan observed. “I know nothing except [my brother] professed interest in girls and had a girlfriend. . . . I never saw him with girls, but there was somebody he liked—I can’t think of her name right now. . . . Of course that was still an era when you didn’t come out in any way.”
Even before his brain injury, Allen Jr. seemed to inhabit his own world. “He was very introverted,” said Joan. “He took after my mother in that respect. And he was someone who wasn’t that aware of people. I mean . . . you’d go out in New York walking with him, and he’d be ten feet ahead.”
In 1950, shortly after getting his degree at Oxford, Sonny stunned his family by announcing he was joining the Marines, as war broke out in Korea. His uncle Foster used his connections to line up a comfortable stateside desk job for him, far from harm’s way. But the twenty-two-year-old enlistee volunteered instead for duty in Korea. It was as if he were still trying to win his father’s admiration by outperforming the old man. The senior Dulles had fought both world wars in bars and hotels, surrounded by suave foreign agents and accommodating mistresses, and never firing a gun. Sonny would show him what real heroes were made of.
Sonny’s letters to his father from the Marine Corps were filled with a new assertiveness. He lectured the senior Dulles about the deficiencies of the military, filling page after page with detailed critiques of the wasteful and corrupt supply system and the unfairness of the commendation process. He even made suggestions on how to improve the CIA’s recruiting methods. Dulles’s letters of reply, which he signed “Affectionately, Allen W. Dulles,” were not particularly warm, but they showed respect for his son’s intricate line of thinking.
By summer 1952, Allen Jr. found himself on the front lines in Korea as a second lieutenant with the First Marine Division. He displayed a gung ho attitude in combat that was sometimes reckless. On the night of November 14, the young lieutenant took charge of a rifle platoon that was dug into an advanced position. Despite being nicked in the leg by a North Korean shell fragment, he charged an enemy sniper’s nest by himself, braving intense fire. His gun was shot out of his hand and he was wounded in the wrist, but that day he was lucky. “He didn’t have to do any of that, but I guess he felt he had something to live up to,” said Robert Abboud, one of Sonny’s commanding officers, who had known young Dulles ever since they were prep school debate opponents. “He never wanted to be treated differently from the rest of us.”
The next morning, after he was patched up, Lieutenant Dulles returned to the embattled outpost. Once again defying heavy machine gun and mortar fire, Dulles crawled within thirty yards of the enemy position, armed with rifle grenades, and began to direct a Marine mortar attack on the North Koreans. Shortly before the enemy soldiers began to pull back, the lieutenant was hit in the head by fragments from an 81 mm mortar shell, which lodged in his brain. “I was there when they brought him back in,” recalled Abboud. “He kept trying to get off the stretcher and go back. Some of his men were crying. I’ve never really known anyone quite like him.”
Allen Jr. was evacuated to a U.S. naval hospital in Japan, where he underwent brain surgery. Clover, who was on one of her Jungian sojourns in Switzerland at the time, flew to her son’s bedside. His surgeons told her that they were not able to remove all the deeply embedded shrapnel from Sonny’s brain and that he would never fully recover.
By late February 1953, young Dulles was strong enough to be flown home. His father, who was to be confirmed the following day as CIA director, greeted Sonny at Andrews Air Force Base. Dulles was photographed hovering solicitously over his son, as he was unloaded from the plane on a stretcher, with his head swathed in bandages. “How do you feel, son?” he asked. “You’re looking good.” Sonny’s soft reply was inaudible.
As the young man underwent further treatment at Bethesda Naval Hospital, he seemed to recover some of his old self. He recognized people, made jokes, and inquired about the latest world events. But other times, he stared off into the distance, began shaking with fear, or erupted in angry outbursts at those around him.
When Sonny was discharged to his parents’ home in Georgetown, it soon became clear that Clover would need help to care for him. A young marine was recruited as a companion for Allen Jr., and the injured young man tried to resume something resembling a normal life. Dulles arranged an undemanding clerical job for his son in the State Department, and he even began taking road trips with friends. But these experiments in independence did not turn out well. In August 1953, Dulles wrote an apologetic letter to the American consul general in Montreal, explaining that his brain-damaged son had forgotten his car registration when he left on a driving trip to Canada, and asking the diplomat’s help in relaying the document to Sonny, which he needed to reenter the United States. The following year, Dulles had to intervene to sort out a car insurance problem when Sonny was involved in a collision, the details of which could not be recalled by the young man. “My son was very severely wounded in the head and has only partially regained his memory and certain other mental faculties,” Dulles explained in a letter to the United Services Automobile Association.
Allen Jr. still showed flashes of his brilliance. He continued to read voraciously, but he had trouble retaining information. Once familiar geography was now a mystery to him. He felt most comfortable in New York City, and his parents experimented with letting him stay there for brief periods. They rented a room for him in “a lovely, old brownstone that was lived in by an older lady,” recalled Joan. But the young man had lost what doctors called his “executive function.” He had a hard time organizing his thoughts and making his way through life. “He couldn’t really think, and he couldn’t really put two and two together,” Joan said. “And he began to get really depressed, and crazy.”
Sonny’s debilitated mental condition placed an emotional and financial strain on the family. For the next two decades, he would go back and forth between expensive institutions and home care. Unlike his brother, Allen Dulles was not a wealthy man. His salary as CIA director, $14,800 [about $130,000 today], was healthy enough for him to maintain the family’s comfortable home on Long Island, but he had long since burned through his partner’s equity from Sullivan and Cromwell, and he could only afford to rent his second home in Washington because the owner, the relative of an old colleague, charged a token sum. The family’s finances were soon stretched by the cost of private treatments and medical consultations for Sonny, which ate away at the family’s savings, including Clover’s modest inheritance.
Though Dulles himself rarely showed it, Sonny’s gravely reduced abilities wore down the family’s spirit too. Allen Jr. had been headed for a distinguished career in academia or public life, but now he had trouble finding his way home when he went out for lunch. Now and then, Sonny would stare at his father—and at Uncle Foster and Aunt Eleanor, too—with a look of such rage that it made Dulles shudder. He sometimes launched into angry denunciations of his father as a Hitler-lover and Nazi collaborator, outbursts that the family labeled “paranoid,” but were close enough to the truth to unnerve the senior Dulles. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with him,” Dulles began saying to Clover.
By 1954, Dulles turned in desperation to MKULTRA-sponsored doctors for help with Sonny. It is unclear whether Dulles paid for his son to be treated by these CIA-connected physicians, or whether their compensation came in the form of the generous agency research contracts that they received.
Among the first CIA-funded medical experts the spymaster enlisted to treat his son was the eminent Dr. Harold Wolff, chief of the neurology department at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center and former president of the American Neurology Association, who became one of the agency’s leading experts on mind control. Wolff was a sophisticated and cultured medical scientist with an international reputation for his research on migraine headaches, which he himself sometimes suffered. His global roster of patients included both the shah of Iran and the shah’s political nemesis, Prime Minister Mossadegh.
An intense and tightly wound man, Wolff set himself the goal of a new experiment every day. Dr. Donald Dalessio, who interned with the renowned neurologist and later worked with him as a research associate, remarked that Wolff’s “relentless drive for accomplishment epitomized the migraine personality that he so vividly documented in hundreds of patients.” He ordered his life around a “strict attention to the clock,” said Dalessio, “so that he was always on time, always prepared.” Trained by the renowned Russian father of behavior science, Ivan Pavlov, Wolff spent long hours in his sixth-floor laboratory at New York Hospital researching the mysteries of the brain. The lab was simple and “not cluttered with gear and impedimenta which characterize today’s [scientific facilities],” observed Dalessio, “for it was made to study people, not animals or molecules or other subunits, but functioning human beings.”
The wiry, balding neurologist brought an obsessive drive even to his recreational life, swimming every day at his athletic club, mountain climbing, and challenging his younger colleagues to slashing squash games on the rooftop court of his hospital—“an eerie place,” recalled Dalessio, “where the wind would shriek about the stone battlements.” The son of an artist, Wolff also married an artist, and he and his wife listened to classical music every day and visited a museum or art gallery every week.
Wolff was a supremely confident man. After his death, another migraine specialist commented that his career was marked by a “mixture of greatness and narrowness.” The narrowness came from “a desire to be on top and to win, and from an intellectual point of view, his dogmatism” and over certainty about his medical theories. When Wolff was asked by a colleague why he had never bothered to be board-certified in neurology, he looked puzzled for a moment, and then replied, “But who would test me?” When Wolff was asked by the CIA to take a leading role in its MKULTRA program, he had no moral qualms. He himself would set the ethical boundaries of his mind control experimentation.
Wolff was sufficiently aware of the professional, and perhaps legal, pitfalls of the MKULTRA research to make sure that the CIA would assume responsibility for the most risky procedures. In a revealing passage in Wolff’s CIA grant proposal, he wrote that his Cornell research team would test “potentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures)” on behalf of the agency, “to ascertain [their] fundamental effect upon human brain function and upon the subject’s mood.” But Wolff carefully stipulated that any dangerous experiments would have to be conducted at CIA facilities, not in his hospital. “Where any of the studies involve potential harm to the subject, we expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of necessary experiments.”
In 1955, Wolff agreed to become president of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, the primary CIA front for channeling research funds to a wide array of mind control researchers in medicine, psychology, and sociology. Wolff’s prestige became a major asset for the CIA as the agency attempted to bend the science profession to its Cold War aims. The neurologist also benefited greatly from the relationship, garnering CIA grants of up to $300,000 for his own research projects, and steering millions more to academic colleagues in various disciplines.
Wolff became a friend of Dulles and was an occasional dinner guest at his Georgetown home. His dominating personality made him one of the few men who could hold his own in Dulles’s company. It was only natural for the CIA director to ask the prominent neurologist if there was anything he could do for his son. Wolff, of course, readily agreed to treat Allen Jr.—it was the least he could do for such an important benefactor. But, as a result, Sonny became another victim of his father’s MKULTRA program.
Joan has disturbing memories of visiting her brother at New York Hospital, where he was subjected to excruciating insulin shock therapy, one of the experimental procedures employed on the CIA’s “human guinea pigs.” Used primarily for the treatment of schizophrenia, insulin overdoses were meant to jolt patients out of their madness. The procedure resulted in coma, and sometimes violent convulsions. The most severe risks included death and brain damage, though one study at the time claimed that this mental impairment was actually beneficial because it reduced patients’ “tension and hostility.”
“They used insulin at New York Hospital,” recalled Joan. “I think those initiatives—God knows if they were from my father. I don’t know, but I’ve always wondered about that, because it didn’t sound like a good idea.
“When I went to visit my brother, it was hard for me, because he kept saying, ‘Can’t you do something for me? I’m going mad.’ At the time, I didn’t know what he was getting at, or what I could do. I was just visiting him.”
It was not until years later, when Joan read exposés about MKULTRA, that she realized how far her father had gone—even with his own son—in the name of brain research. “Once you go to the dark side, there seems to be no limit.”
Sonny showed no signs of improvement after enduring the insulin treatments, although he did write his father a poignant letter from New York, indicating a new docility and a strong desire not to cause his family any more trouble. “Dear Father,” he wrote, “I have just understood the nature of the psychological structure that was built around me, and will work to free myself. I realize that I have not been given correct information, but will try to learn the truth anyhow. Love to you and Mother and anyone else we know. I want to be united with you all soon and will do anything convenient for you.”
Despite Wolff’s lack of success, Dulles next reached out to Dr. Wilder Penfield, a prominent neurosurgeon at Montreal’s McGill University, whose psychiatric facility, the Allan Memorial Institute, became a major center of CIA mind control research. To Dulles’s great gratitude, Penfield agreed to consult on Allen Jr.’s case, which he continued to do until he retired in 1960.
Like Wolff’s operation at New York Hospital–Cornell, Penfield’s academic medical complex also benefited from its relationship with the CIA. Penfield brought in a prominent, Scottish-born psychiatrist named Donald Ewen Cameron, who had known Dulles since the war, to run McGill’s new Allan Institute for psychiatry. Cameron, who had met Dulles while consulting on the Rudolf Hess insanity case at the Nuremberg Trials, would become the most notorious scientist in the MKULTRA program. By 1957, Cameron was receiving a steady stream of CIA funding, through Dr. Wolff’s Society for Human Ecology, to conduct brainwashing experiments at McGill that would later be widely condemned as barbaric.
Despite his impeccable credentials, Cameron saw himself as an iconoclastic innovator, pushing psychiatry to embrace the latest pharmaceutical technology and the most cutting-edge developments in the newly influential behavioral sciences. Cameron’s experiments in the Allan Institute’s notorious “Sleep Room” involved putting subjects into “electric dream” states, as one victim put it, through insulin overdoses, massive infusions of hallucinogens like LSD and other experimental drugs, and alarming amounts of electroshock therapy—a process he called “de-patterning,” to wipe the brain clean of “bad behavior patterns.” After blasting away these negative thoughts, Cameron sought to replace them with “good ones,” through what he called “psychic driving”— playing taped messages encouraging positive behavior to his nearly comatose victims for between sixteen and twenty hours a day, week after week, as they slipped in and out of consciousness. In one case, a patient underwent reprogramming in Cameron’s Sleep Room for 101 days.
The people who came to Cameron were generally seeking relief from everyday psychological ailments like depression and anxiety, even for help dealing with marital problems. But as author Naomi Klein later wrote, Cameron’s “shock and awe warfare on the mind” brought only much deeper misery to the patients—many of them women—in his care. “Though he was a genius at destroying people, he could not remake them,” Klein observed. “A follow-up study conducted after Cameron left the Allan Memorial Institute found that 75 percent of his former patients were worse off after treatment than they were before they were admitted.”
Cameron himself indicated that the true aim of his CIA-funded research was not to improve patients’ lives but to contribute to the Cold War effort by perfecting the science of mind control. He compared his patients to prisoners of war who were undergoing interrogation, saying that they, “like prisoners of the Communists, tended to resist [treatment] and had to be broken down.”
Gail Kastner, a promising young McGill nursing student, was one of the victims of Cameron’s experimentation. She had come to Cameron for help with anxiety issues stemming from her relationship with her emotionally overbearing father. A tall man with pale blue eyes, Cameron exuded a paternal warmth, addressing female patients as “lassie” in his soft brogue. But in the end, Kastner would come to think of the doctor as “Eminent Monster”—he was the distinguished man in the white coat who loomed over her, as she was lit up with so much electrical voltage that she broke teeth and fractured her spine while convulsing on the table.
Years later, Kastner told Klein what it felt like to be held in the Sleep Room. “I hear people screaming, moaning, groaning, people saying no, no, no. I remember what it was like to wake up in that room, I was covered in sweat, nauseated, vomiting—and I had a very peculiar feeling in the head. Like I had a blob, not a head.”
Patients’ minds were made blank slates; they lost much of their memory, and thus, much of their lives. “They tried to erase and remake me,” said Kastner. “But it didn’t work.”
Val Orlikow, a young mother suffering from postpartum depression, was another patient whose life was emptied out by Cameron. After she came home from the Allan Institute, Orlikow could not remember her husband, David, who was a member of Canada’s parliament, or their children. Her mind had been reduced to that of a toddler. She could not use a toilet.
In the mid-1970s, after Cameron had died, the secrets of the Sleep Room and other inhumane MKULTRA research centers began to emerge, as journalists filed Freedom of Information requests and Congress opened investigations into the CIA horror chambers. Eventually, the CIA paid out $750,000 in damages to nine families whose lives were turned upside down by Cameron’s experiments— the largest settlement against the agency at the time. The agency made it seem as if its mind control experiments were isolated relics of the past. Testifying before a Senate hearing in 1977, CIA psychologist John Gittinger called MKULTRA “a foolish mistake . . . a terrible mistake.”
But the work of Cameron and other MKULTRA scientists lives on at the agency, incorporated into a 1963 CIA torture manual titled Counterintelligence Interrogation that would be used to extract information from prisoners during the wars in Vietnam and Central America, and at black sites operated by the agency after 9/11. U.S. agencies and their overseas allies have continued to run their own versions of Cameron’s Sleep Room, where captives are subjected to similar types of sensory deprivation, electroshock, and drug overdoses, until their psychological resistance has been broken.
Allen Dulles was fully aware of the experiments being conducted at McGill when he sent his own son there. Joan doesn’t think her brother fell into the hands of Dr. Cameron while he was a patient there. Yet, whatever was done to Sonny in Montreal was not a pleasant experience for him.
When Allen Jr. began treatment at McGill, Dr. Wilder Penfield insisted that the young man could improve. But Sonny knew his limitations by then, and the medical regimen imposed on him only made him feel worse. “He thought my brother could do better,” recalled Joan. “But my brother was furious, because he realized he couldn’t.”
In the end, Penfield finally admitted that Sonny was beyond even the medical wizardry of McGill. In February 1959, the year before he retired, the neurosurgeon wrote Dulles a letter, conceding defeat. “I wish I could help him,” Penfield told Dulles. “What a loss this mind derailment is—to him, to his parents and indeed to the world, for he had a splendid brain.”
After Penfield pronounced Allen Jr.’s condition hopeless, Clover continued to agonize over his care. She often confided her troubles to Mary Bancroft, who by then was living in New York. Caring for Allen Jr. was a never-ending job, Clover wrote Bancroft in November 1961. She felt “joy” at having her son “accessible,” but when he was home with his parents in Georgetown, there was “such an unbelievable amount of planning, telephoning and hi-jinks of everything connected with his comings and goings—engaging Georgetown University students to help etc., etc. Will not burden you with a recital.”
In another letter to Mary, Clover wrote, “Here everything is all right and all wrong, whichever way you wish to take it. Great Allen very tense and no wonder with everything he carries, young Allen none too well, great Allen all too busy to attend to all the things I have to try to get Sonny to do and too pulled to pieces by it all. You know it’s always everything too much or nothing enough and me so full of fear all the time and nothing to do about it.”
From time to time, Sonny would explode in frightening rages. After weathering one such outburst in February 1960, Clover wrote Joan, “It wasn’t exactly terrifying but almost.” She assured her daughter that there was “nothing broken,” but confessed there was a “terrific uncertainty [to] how everything is going to turn out. One of our Georgetown med. students was here and one of Father’s aides and another came up from the office. I telephoned the hospital but first they said they couldn’t come over the District line and then they said the aide would have to have half an hour for dinner before starting!”
Allen Jr. was “endlessly patient in general,” remembered Joan. But he violently rebelled when his family tried to return him to an institution. Sometimes “it would take three people to hold him down when he would get really angry—not wanting to go back to the hospital.”
Her sensitive, wounded son reminded Clover of her lost brother, Paul, who had found life too daunting a challenge. They had the same artistic temperaments, the same physical awkwardness. Paul had “the hands of a person who thinks and does not do,” she once wrote in her journal. “My son has them.” In 1959, Reverend John Sutherland Bonnell, a prominent New York Presbyterian minister who for a time offered young Allen pastoral guidance, informed his parents that Sonny “believes that he has latent within himself the tendency that was ‘active in Paul Todd and which led him to kill himself.’” It was one more emotional burden for Clover to bear, the fear that the family tragedy would repeat itself.
Allen Jr. wasn’t the only family member Clover worried about. Her oldest daughter, Toddie, started to suffer from manic depression in early adulthood, a condition she thought Toddie inherited from her, and began undergoing shock treatments. It is unknown whether CIA doctors were involved in Toddie’s electroshock therapy. But Dulles was quite willing to steer suffering relatives toward MKULTRA-connected physicians.
Lobotomies were among the more extreme mind control measures undertaken in the CIA program. At one point, Dulles arranged for his niece Edith —the daughter of his sister Margaret—to be lobotomized by a CIA brain surgeon. “She had cancer and was in great pain,” recalled Joan. “They tried lobotomy on her—all that came from my father, he was the one who suggested the doctor. It didn’t work at all, it didn’t stop the pain. It just made her odd.”
Sometimes Clover thought that all the sadness and anxiety in her life was about to crush her. She felt that she was “walking on the bottom of the sea,” she wrote Mary in 1961. “It isn’t funny to feel all the time so impossible,” Clover told her confidante on another occasion. “I envy the manic depressives having their turn to be up.” Her husband’s secretive life—which, she suspected, continued to involve other women—and his emotional remoteness only made Clover feel more alone with her misery.
At one low point in Clover’s life, a well-meaning CIA doctor recommended that she see Dr. Cameron. She knew Cameron from her husband’s CIA dinner parties, and for some reason always felt uneasy in his presence. But out of desperation, she agreed to have lunch with the McGill psychiatrist at the Mayflower Hotel during his next visit to Washington. Over lunch, she related her life’s many laments to Cameron—including her husband’s affairs—while he stared intently at her. After she finished, Cameron explained to her that her husband’s sexual transgressions were a natural outgrowth of his complex and driven personality, and that she must not take them personally. He suggested that she come to Montreal, where he could treat her in his clinic and help her develop a more positive outlook on her life. Clover spent days agonizing over the decision, but in the end she decided not to go. She did not know that by avoiding Cameron’s Sleep Room, she was likely preserving her sanity.
By 1962, a newly determined Clover had taken full control of her son’s well being. On the advice of Jolande Jacobi, her longtime Jungian analyst, she arranged to have Allen Jr. admitted to the Bellevue Sanatorium, a venerable, family-run institution on the Swiss side of Lake Constance, whose directors had strong ties to the Jung Institute in nearby Zurich and to the great man himself. After all the frustrating and harrowing treatments that Allen Jr. had been put through for the past ten years, Clover was convinced that it was time to try a softer, Jungian approach, based on talk therapy, artistic expression, and dream analysis.
Sonny’s mother and father accompanied him on the trip to Kreuzlingen, the quiet lakeside village where the sanitarium was located. Before they left for Switzerland, Dulles wrote to Dr. Heinrich Fierz, the facility’s medical director, telling him that the family realized there was little hope for the young man. “It is a difficult case,” Dulles wrote, “and with the extent of the wound and the brain damage, we can only hope for limited results.” Dulles wasn’t even sure that he could get his son to take the flight to Switzerland. “At the last minute, he might refuse to make the trip,” he told Fierz. By that point, Sonny’s faith in the psychiatry profession—and in his father’s judgment—was extremely low.
But Allen Jr. did move into Bellevue, and he found the facility so soothing an environment that he stayed there for over ten years. Like Hans Castorp’s “magic mountain” retreat in the novel by Thomas Mann, the Swiss sanitarium became Sonny’s refuge from a hostile world. Bellevue was built on a “beautiful, great, old estate,” recalled Joan, who often visited her brother there, and it had treated a wide range of patients over the years, including Freud’s famous case study, “Anna O” (Bertha Pappenheim). There was, Joan said, “a leisurely sort of European grace about your situation”—as long as you went on paying, she added. American institutions had a different attitude, she observed. “America is ‘You’ve got to be doing something, buddy,’ whereas in Europe, you can just ‘be.’”
Young Dulles worked with Jacobi and some of her most promising protégés, including William Willeford, an American who had graduated from the Jung Institute. Willeford later recalled that he made a “connection” with Sonny despite his severe brain impairment, taking time to write his parents each month about his daily routine and assure them that their son “had some kind of life.” The young analyst met with Sonny’s parents once in person at the Swiss clinic. He found Clover so insistent about communicating her views of young Allen that he asked her to leave his office so he could hear her husband’s take on Sonny. But Allen Sr. had nothing of interest to say about his son, recalled Willeford. “He didn’t have any insights.” Later, Dulles passed word to Willeford that if he was interested in joining the CIA, he should let him know. Apparently Dulles had been impressed when the analyst had cut off Clover during their meeting in his office. “He liked it when I said, ‘Let’s hear what the father has to say.’”
The work that Willeford later published revealed a strong interest in the father-son dynamic, that primal and fateful relationship that had weighed so heavily on Allen Jr.’s life. “Whether the son comes to experience his father as Saturn eating his children, depends on the kind of father the son has and the kind of male society he is being asked to join,” Willeford wrote in one book. “But it also depends very significantly on his mother’s sense of the value of her own femininity, and on her way of mediating the values of the Father World.”
After Sonny had been in Bellevue for some time, his father suggested that it might be time for him to return to the United States, but he recoiled violently at the idea. “Never!” he shouted. “I’m never coming home to you, ever!”
Bellevue was his mother’s world—a humane, Jungian oasis far from the cruel science of New York Hospital and McGill University and the other institutions associated with his father’s world.
Allen Jr. did not leave Bellevue until he heard that his father was dead. Joan eventually arranged to take him out of the sanitarium and move him to Santa Fe, where she had found her own sanctuary and was able to look out for her brother. Sonny never returned to an institution. Joan became his legal guardian. The two elderly siblings still live in Santa Fe, in the same house now, both trying to make sense of their past, in their own ways.
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