Author: H P Albarelli Jnr
Publisher: Trine Day, 2009
Price: £16.99 (hardback)
Isbn: 9780977795376

In 1951, the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit was affected by what was thought to have been either an outbreak of botul­ism from contaminated wheat or poisoning from seeds treated with mercury. (There is a brief Wiki­pedia entry on the event.) Four (or was it seven?) people died, hundreds were hospitalised and some went mad. HP Albarelli Jnr offers another explanation: the CIA used the village to try out LSD on a large group of people. The experiment was just one of many the Agency had been conducting using LSD and other chemicals. Among the Americans involved in the project was a biochemist called Frank Olsen. Olsen got an attack of conscience and went into a depression. Fearing that he might talk, the CIA got a couple of thugs from its allies in organised crime to kill Olsen by throwing him out the window on the 10th floor of a New York hotel in 1953. (The author names the killers.) Olsen’s death was ruled a suicide.

Baldly, that is Albarelli Jnr’s core thesis; and yes, he stands it all up pretty convincingly. But his 900-page book is more than that. In part it is an account of the various attempts since the 1970s to investigate Olsen’s ‘suicide’ and the US state’s attempts to keep the cover-up in place; and in part it is the most complete account yet of the Cold War experiments the Agency were conducting, loosely gathered together today under the heading of ‘mind control’. The result is a both a riveting parapolitical detective story and an enormously detailed account of some of the grubbiest pages in the history of America’s role in the Cold War. Tremendous.