Just Another PSYOP

 Just Another Psyop

Originally published Sun, 19 Feb 2012 20:48:55 +0000

I'll begin this post by quoting what I consider to be the one of the most seminal passages in A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Cold War Experiments. Keep in mind I did not read this book nor know any of these details until mid-2011.

In 1952, a twenty-four year old American named Stanley Milton Glickman was pursuing a promising career as an artist in France. Glickman, the son of a successful New York furrier, had moved to Paris in the summer of 1951 to study painting at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, and about seven months later, as an apprentice in the studio of renowned French modernist Fernand Leger. (In the 1940s, Leger had decorated the New York City apartment of Nelson A. Rockefeller.) By early autumn 1952, Glickman had his own studio on the outskirts of Paris and already had one of his paintings displayed in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

One evening in mid-October, about thirteen months after the peculiar outbreak at Pont-St.-Esprit, the young artist went into Paris to meet a friend at the Café Select. They were soon joined by two American men who Glickman did not know. After some casual conversation and several glasses of wine, the two strangers fell into a heated debate with Glickman about politics, power, and patriotism. The debate went on for hours. The men told Glickman that he was a näive bohemian unmindful of the real ways of the world. Glickman told the two conservatively dressed men that their attitudes of political superiority were offensive to all that he felt was right with the world. When it grew late and Glickman was preparing to leave, one of the men offered him a drink as a conciliatory gesture. Glickman had been drinking only coffee, but reluctantly accepted. The man got up from the table and went to the bar, returning with a glass of Chartreuse for the artist. As the man moved back to the table, Glickman noticed that he walked with a pronounced limp.

Glickman sipped the drink slowly, and the conversation turned to other subjects. One of the men remarked that France was fascinating for its many religious miracles. Midway through his liqueur, Glickman began to feel strange. A tremendous feeling of anxiety filled his chest. The anxiety quickly gave way to the sensation that he was floating above the table. His perception of objects and their dimensions became distorted. Sounds took on an odd resonance, some painful to his ears. The two men watched him intently. One of them leaned toward him and said, "Surely a man of your many talents can perform his own miracles. Can't you?"

Believing that he had been poisoned, Glickman fled into the street, leaving his friend behind. When he woke up the next morning he realized he had lost several hours of time. He was also hallucinating wildly. For two weeks he wandered about Paris "in the pain of madness, delusion, and terror." He returned to the Café Select, went to the same table as before, and sat with his eyes closed, irrationally waiting "for someone to come and tell me what had happened." When he refused to leave, he was taken away to the American Hospital of Paris and given electroshock treatment. After his release, he lived in a state of "stress, terror, and hallucination" for eight months, until his family learned of his condition and brought him back to the United States in July, 1953.

A psychiatrist treated Glickman for the next twenty-five years. He lived in New York's East Village, never again painted, and ran a small antiques shop. His closest friends were his three dogs, Charlie, Gent, and Kuma. Sometimes he told people his name was Paul Galen.

{A Terrible Mistake, pp. 643, 644}.