Blood Ties, Mystery and LSD: A Review of Paul Vidich's The Coldest Warrior

Paul Vidich’s The Coldest Warrior is a spy novel that teeters the line between reportage and fiction, history and the imagined. In the novel, Vidich writes the character of Charles Wilson to reflect former real-life CIA employee and biological warfare scientist Frank Olson. In the novel’s world of CIA cover ups and LSD experiments, the plot anchors itself in the true events of Frank Olson’s life and death after the CIA administered psychedelics to him against his knowledge and will in the 1950s.

In the novel’s opening chapter, Charles Wilson is murdered by CIA, and his character and all he knows of the truth, is silenced for the rest of the story. The following chapter picks up twenty years later with Jack Gabriel, a former colleague and friend of Wilson. The new director of intelligence asks Gabriel to find out what really happened to his late friend: who was there the night he was given LSD, what lead to his death, was Wilson’s death more than a suicide and how can the CIA keep whatever they find quiet.

Throughout the novel, Gabriel fights to know the truth, and—much like what happened in reality—Charles Wilson becomes a ghost of sorts, haunting those who remain through guilt, tightly-kept secrets, and a reminder of what can happen when one questions an organization like the CIA. With ever-political and self-serving motives, most of Wilson’s killers hide under the mask of do-gooders and innocent country club goers, but those whose conscience still eats away at them decades later, find themselves facing a fate unlike that of Charles Wilson himself.

The Coldest Warrior defies the ordinary spy thriller genre as Vidich grounds the novel deeply in the life story of Frank Olson, a CIA employee and scientist overseas. After growing concern and questioning of the CIA’s newest projects such as those having to do with biological warfare and mind control, Frank Olson was given LSD during a weekend trip with his colleagues at the CIA. This psychedelic experiment was a small part of the CIA’s MK Ultra project, a biological warfare project with the goal of testing and utilizing various substances for mind control. This drug-induced weekend sparked a series of tragic and many still unknown events which lead to Olson’s death in New York City, November 1953 when his hotel room window was found broken and he was found dead on the city sidewalk.

The Netflix documentary Wormwood tells Frank Olson’s story, all that we know of it, through Olson’s son, Eric. Eric Olson has spent his life digging for the truth: figuring out how, why, and because of whom his father plunged to that New York City sidewalk that November. For decades now, Eric Olson has dedicated his existence to definitively answering the question: a suicide, a slip or a murder? Despite a lifetime of searching, even digging up his father’s body, Eric Olson has been unable to uncover the whole truth due to the silence and secrets of the CIA.

By taking inspiration from true events for his latest novel, how does Vidich defy not just the spy thriller genre but the ordinary spy thriller author? Through his blood.

Paul Vidich, author of the The Coldest Warrior, is Eric Olson’s cousin and Frank Olson’s nephew. Vidich utilizes his uncle’s story as the grounding plot point for this new novel and incorporates verbatim quotations from Wormwood, press conferences and his cousin, Eric Olson, into the text. The novel touches upon the primary twists and turns of the actual Olson story: the question of jump or full, the politics of exhumation and CIA insiders with the tight-lipped truth.

Though Vidich utilizes his family history to write The Coldest Warrior and the character of Charles Wilson, Vidich doesn’t tell the story of the internal psychical turmoil that lead up to Olson or his character Wilson’s death. While Vidich touches upon the dark side of the CIA’s LSD use, he focuses more on the aftermath of what such secretive and unethical operations do to those involved: how it changes it their lives, catapults their career, and can even, years later, still get them killed, birthing a whole new set of secrets to be unveiled.

The Coldest Warrior reminds us that there are not only two sides to a story, but many intersecting sides to an infinitely-sided story that was ripped and torn apart, some of its contents buried for safe secret-keeping, some of them never having existed in the first place. Between the lines of his story, Vidich seems to ask: in the pursuit of truth, how can we piece together an infinitely-sided unfinished story? We can’t…or at least we can’t without getting some blood on our hands.

With Eric Olson’s life-deteriorating search for the truth and Vidich’s imagining of the truth, one could see The Coldest Warrior as a writing therapy of sorts, an exercise in filling in the blanks, imagining the unknown in order to help the family reckon with the mysterious death of their loved one. Paul Vidich’s The Coldest Warrior makes me wonder: can we heal from the pain of the unknown by writing light into the darkness?