He told the internal inquiry that Olson's death was ''just one of the risks running with scientific experimentation.'' For that matter to the contrary. It did not spontaneously appear among the youth of the Western world as a gift from the God of Gettin High. The number of scientists who de to participate in the CIA prograrn suggests the agency must have known from the start that its program would be viewed as shocking in many academic quarters. By then, Olson had become increasingly paranoid, as the CIA report put it, and was convinced that the Agency was putting Benzadrine or some other stimulant into his coffee to keep him awake. Eric Olson lives in his childhood home, the place he lived when he was 9 years old and learned of his fathers death. Teachers have influenced students; upperclassmen have influenced lower classmen. Calling this a trickle-down phenomenon, the authors seem to have correctly analyzed how LSD got around the country. Thus, psychotic episodes, attempted suicide, and actual suicide were more common among psychotherapy patients than among persons taking LSD under medical supervision. In safe assassinations, the assassin needs the usual qualities of a clandestine agent. Gibson must be dreaming, but, rather, a suggestion that either Lashbrook had spoken to someone else (not Gibson) or that someone else (not Lashbrook) had spoken to Gibson. He also had a son, Stephan, by a woman he never married. We also learned that the priest who came to the site for the purpose of giving Dr. Olson the Last Rites was quietly moved aside. The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject. The headline was misleading. A later report from the C.I.A., which Eric Olson had brought to my attention, disclosed that the operator had overheard a call from Lashbrook to Dr. Harold Abramsons clinic on Long Island Abramson was the man charged with overseeing Olsons treatment in New York City. By PHILIP SHENON Hitherto acceptable longstanding concepts of fair play must be reconsidered. The two politicians who collaborated in the conspiracy in 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney, are back in power. There were 429 tests of this type reported on normal and psychotic individuals in the first year of MK-ULTRA. I think that it might have involved hypnosis and that hypnosis experiment may have been continued in New York in John Mulhollands office and possibly in Dr. Harold Abramsons office., If Albarelli is right, the films narrator Bill Kurtis concludes, themethod of special interrogation was both the secret Olson was worried about and the technique that two of its leading practitioners John Mulholland and Harold Abramson then used on him., The problem with this theory is that there is no evidence that Mulholland was skilled as a hypnotist. But it has admitted what might be called negligent manslaughter. Forty-one years agoon June 26, 1961Nils (then twelve years old) and Eric (then sixteen) set out on our bicycles from this house and began cycling to California. Ruwet reassured him that everything would be all right. Alice Olson roused her nine-year-old son, Eric, from bed and led him into the living room. Within the inner circles of American government, they were regarded as the best and the brightest. Eric, Nils and Alice, now recovered from alcoholism, tracked down Sidney Gottlieb in his ecologically correct home in Culpeper, Va., where the retired spymaster was raising goats, eating yogurt and preaching the values of peace and environmentalism. It was agreed that the trip should be made the following day. Miniccino adds, So if Frank Olson expressed serious doubts about the MK-ULTRA project to Sargant, then he signed his own death warrant.. Automobile accidents are a less satisfactory means of assassination. Nobody was home, so I spent half an hour looking in the windows, taking pictures, trying to imagine what might have occurred there those many years ago. If I can be of any assistance to you, please do not hesitate to call upon me. The most useful line of thought on this problem comes, I think, from philosopher Susanne Langer who in her multivolume studyMind: An Essay on Human Feelingemphasizes that perception is a complex act which consists of many components or phases, not all of which are synchronized and integrated with each other. DiMaio said that Robert Lashbrook, when questioned by the medical examiners stenographer, Max Katzman, failed to say anything about Olson having taken LSD or that he was under psychiatric treatment. According to Ruwet, Abramson prescribed the use of sedatives and a high-ball to relieve Olsons mental distress. I did eight years for the Feds because I refused to rat when I got busted for pot.. When an investigation of CIA abuses exposed the facts in 1975, two White House aides named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld helped set up a meeting at which President Gerald Ford apologized to the Olson family. Your father, Cournoyer explained, was horrified to discover that the Americans were using biological warfare in Korea. Even more frightful discoveries were aborning. After his death the Olson family was told that Frank Olsons body was too disfigured to be seen. The statements contained in this confession were false they were obtained under duress from Chinese communists. On the left side of the body, there was an indication of hitting something hard with the bottom of the foot. By early 1953, Gottlieb had been given control of the Agencys newly minted mind-control program, MK-ULTRA. ''Fine. orchestrated project that had involved the administration of psychoactive drugs to numerous unsuspecting Americans. He had been an agent in a powerful position and possessing detailed covert information. Yet Jack Frost thought that if Olson had been hit with a blunt force object in the room, he would expect to find some indication on the skulls surface. code named Project Pelican, in which Blauer was used as a guinea pig. The supervisor of the project was Dr. Paul H. Hoch, director of experimental psychiatry and, according to Albarelli and Kelly, an associate of Harold Abramsons. We have estimated Eric Olson's net worth, money, salary, income, and assets. Was the anthrax terrorist one of our own? Baltimore Sun Colonel Edwards reported that the men had assembled at a twostory log cabin in the Deer Creek Lake area of Fort Detrick. (Erics own collages often featured images of men tumbling from buildings.) CRISPR-Cpf1 correction of muscular dystrophy mutations in human cardiomyocytes and mice. To maintain absolute secrecy, the participants had been instructed to remove all Camp Detrick tags from their automobiles, and to adopt the occupational camouflage of sports journalists. In late November 1953, Frank Olson, then 43, joined a group of government officials at a conference at Deep Creek Lodge in western Maryland. By 1938, he had written a book on the subject,Beware Familiar Spirits,which traced the history of modern spiritualism and described its techniques. Not all of Whites diary entries involved clandestine meetings with narcoties or CIA agents or addicts and prostitutes, for that matter. Some of the stuff George White and I tested, he explained. I recall him telling me that in many ways the staged death was almost classic. [45]Affidavit of Lt. Col. Vincent L. Rewet,CIA Documents Concerning the Death of Dr. Frank Olson, CNSS, Box 8, C-35, Document 15, undated, National Security Archive, Washington, DC, [46]Robert Gibson interview with Eric Olson, December 20, 1999, Olson notes in authors files, [47]Joseph Treaster,CIA Hired Magician in Behavior ProjectNew York Times, August 3, 1977, [48]Agents Report, Case record #73317, December 3, 1953,CIA Documents Concerning the Death of Frank Olson, CNSS, Box 8, C-35, National Security Archive, Washington, DC, [51]These files were released by the Olson family in 1976 and can be found in the Kennedy subcommittee hearings on Biomedical and Behavioral Research, pp. Director William Colby to cooperate with them. His recollection of the location of Dr. Olsons body on the sidewalk fronting the hotel was quite fresh and keen, giving us a base from which to synthesize a computer animation of the event. In it, under a section headed The Testing of Behavior-Influencing Drugs on Unsuspecting Subjects Within the United States, the suicide of an unnamed man who jumped from a New York hotel after being given LSD without his knowledge while he was attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on the drug project was briefly mentioned. Thats all I knew about it at first. The Man Who Knew Too Much.Gentlemens Quarterly, January 2000. Note: The Soviet Memorial for the Victims of the Second World War. ), TO: Eric Olson It was a process not unlike the collage method piecing together seemingly fragmentary data, but often uncovering deeper or hidden connections. My real memories of my father are not very many or very clear, because the trauma of his death really darkened a lot of these memories. At least one person committed suicide after becoming an unwitting subject of a CIA LSD test, crashing through a highstory plate-glass window in a New York hotel as his Agency guardian watched. Not the man from the CIA who was in room 1018A with Olson when the 43-year-old biochemist and father of three crashed through a closed, shuttered window and tumbled to the cold sidewalk below. I realized I could not go on forever and for the past several years I have been searching for some individual, or group, qualified to take over the editing and publication ofThe Sphinxand maintain its standards. Eric never bought that argument. denied any knowledge of them, but one man appeared to be related to several assassination cases, and therefore no one was going to talk. We called it `LK thats what wed put on the log sheets for each run, Walter said. The caller said that he had awakened in the middle of the night, whereupon he saw his friend standing in the middle of the room. IfThe Very Best Men who made up the CIA were to the magicians liking, the converse was also true. Dr. Margaret Ferguson was not the only one who refused to be interviewed. SHIPWRECK (with Max MorganWitts) In the end it was impossible not to read the CIAs assassination manual as anything but a blueprint for the murder of Frank Olson. His education had included a year at an exclusive Swiss boarding school and another year in Germany. Mr. Mulholland seems well qualified to execute this study. As the investigations progressed others would be added to the list of interviewees, including the C.I.As mandarin for clandestine research projects, Sidney Gottlieb. That the CIA had much to hide became dramatically evident during the summer of 2001, when Eric obtained documents from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In fact, the body had been embalmed, and it was in nearly perfect condition. in 1998 1 wrote and presented for Britains Channel 4, The Spying Machine, a major television documentary in which for the first time key members of Mossad appeared, describing their work. The veterans still slip into biowarrior-speak, in which good means good-and-lethal. Even the nails are clipped or retained in full. Dr. Gibson is certain that he then asked whether the friend to be admitted was currently under the care of a physician, or was receiving any sort of treatment. While not dismissing the analysts report entirely, the Defense Department has said it has no clear evidence that any Americans are being held against their will in North Korea, although it has pledged to continue to investigate accounts of defectors and others who say they have seen American prisoners there. (ii) Dr. Olsons job is so sensitive that it is highly unlikely that we would submit relevance to the court on the issue of his duties. What sorts of contingency plans did Detrick (or any other Cold War facility) have for a situation where a key scientist threatens to pose a security risk? Russell says that after his book was published, a former CIA counter-intelligence expert called him and said Oswald had been viewed by the CIA as fitting the psychological profile of someone they were looking for in their MK-ULTRA program, and that he had been mind-conditioned to defect to the USSR. H. as Morgan Hall, Whites undercover name. Bruce has been at his side throughout his years of research. White apparently knew Abramson, because a Sept. 20, 1954, diary entry contained a reference to Gottlieb and Abramson. But that appearance is deceiving. At about 3 A.M., with Lashbrook asleep, Frank Olson crashed through the closed window of room 1018A and disappeared below the ledge. This sub-galeal hematoma necessarily resulted from the hemorrhage of a blood vessel over the left eye. In 1952 Frank Olson was acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick; at the time of his death in 1953 he was SODs director of planning and evaluations. There is a piece missing and I am not sure that I am the one to give it to you. Contrary to conventional press accounts, CIA-employee Olson was not a simple research scientist with SOD but was a high-ranking division administrator holding the titles assistant division chief and director of plans and assessments. This is a biological warfare story. To state this positively: all (covert techniques) described would be adaptations of acts usually performed for other purposes. Having identified the room as 1018A, he proceeded to check the hotel records and found that two people were staying in that room: Frank Olson and Robert Lashbrook. For this reason the time estimates are difficult to make in advance and it is apparent at this time that the estimate was too short for the adequate preparation of this manual. And yet some things in this tightly woven tale that led to my fathers death must have occurred by mere chance. staged suicide. Since we are, at CIA, a proud and secretive people, we felt not unlike a convention of Methodist ministers who are sued by a fine hotel for infesting the bed linen with crab lice. Molecular Biology, Graduate Programs Genetics, Development and Disease, Copyright 2023. The plane crashed, and everyone on board was killed. Under this cover story, MK-ULTRs research team was nothing but a bunch of ineffectual eccentrics. While Gottlieb was looking for better sources of LSD, the CIAs ARTICHOKE committee developed concern that for-agency personnel might, Lill &I t h e influence of drugs, reveal top-secret information to outsiders. Conversations and correspondence with Eric Olson. The CIA hired prostitutes to pour LSD into their customers drinks. One stoned night, he and a girlfriend got down on their knees in her apartment and began cutting pictures out of magazines and gluing them down. From my reading of the documents, it sounds as if Isbells research could just as easily have been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, says Dr. Sidney Cohen of UCLA, a respected LSD researcher. I went in. A contra-coup hemorrhage is the consequence. We decided to turn for assistance to the only governmental institution that might be able to help us. The timing of the memo was interesting. Yes, she said, two. As it turned out, he did not react well. C.I.A. 2001H.P. And this is what my mother was seizing on when she talked to Gottlieb. His failure to recall whether he kept a record of the event in his patrolmans notebook was a challenge to his credibility as was his memory lapse on whether this was the one and only jumper he had investigated. Doctors say a person with inhalation anthrax who is given intravenous antibiotics might soon show no live bacteria, even though the person might still die of toxin produced earlier by the bacteria. The story of Frank Olsons death, illuminated for a moment with the anonymous news from the Rockefeller Report, seemed to return to inky darkness. Pentagon strategists began to envision a day when battles would be fought on psychic terrain in wars without conventional weaponry. (see pp Chap 4, Journey into Madness). These questions remained for my scientific team to try to answer, and once the victims family asked for my aid, told me what they knew, and then warned me, Now of course, you know youre taking on the C.I.A, I began walking with my back to the wall, any wall would do for cover. Reliability is not satisfactory unless the building is isolated and highly combustible. He espied a window shade sticking out through one of the windows in the upper floors a window that was broken. 40.27 At every point there seems to be a convergence of the evidence, Nils Olson says. The Agency examined both the active and the retired files of all the branches of the CIA considered likely to have had an association with the project, but never looked into the Budget and Fiscal Section retired records. In the war on terror, America again appears tempted to use extreme measures. It was hoped the media attention would pressure the C.I.A. 12.12 Chapter Eleven of Simpsons book, Guerrillas for World War III, deals with the recruitment of former Nazis to carry out American-ordered assassinations in Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, in the 1970s, after the Washington Posts revelations, his ire over learning that he had been misled resulted in his contemplating revisiting the death of Dr. Olson. Albarelli, a writer-researcher with contacts among retired C.I.A. I have to do whats necessary to get the story.. Bogle, a brilliant scientist, had told friends that he was about to go to the US to work on scientific research of great military importance. The contrast between the failure of the government to notify us when the anonymous story about our father was being released, and the scurrying around at the highest levels to apologize to us once we identified ourselves, could not have been more stark. But dogs were not the primary target of the SO Divisions creative efforts. Its intended victim: Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. As he put it, he had been taken in by the reports he received that this death was an uncomplicated out-and-out suicide. But the D.A.s attempts to question Sidney Gottlieb who was to become a central target of the investigation hit a terminal snag in 1999 when the ailing Gottlieb died, taking whatever secrets he still guarded to his grave. And sometimes hit a Tree But, if security was a concern, as it would have had to have been, then the question arises as to why the Agencys secure mental health facility in Massachusetts was not considered. 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