. 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. Eric lives on foundation grants, book advances and some help from his brother and others. 17.00 Clearly, in its post-mortem investigation, the CIA had attempted to conceal the fact that Olson was one of its own. In accordance with the requirements of federal statute, some 16,000 pages of evidence had to be released to Marks. denied any knowledge of them, but one man appeared to be related to several assassination cases, and therefore no one was going to talk. Meachums column becomes even more informative when combined with the two long articles by Scott Shane on Detricks Special Operations Division and on the Olson case that ran in the Baltimore Sun three days earlier, on August 1. 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. This is particularly impressive since so many LSD recipients actually received the drug in psychotherapy. The Rockefeller Commissions account of the suicide of an Army scientist not only neglected to add the mans name and his CIA affiliation; it omitted any reference to his high position in the countrys most secret biological weapons laboratory. The mythical Deep Creek cabin: why had it taken me forty five years to go looking for it? Eric Olson. The D.A. After the family agreed not to sue the CIA, it was awarded a $750,000 settlement. Forty years later, at the Institute for Forensic Sciences at George Washington University. That a special edition of his bookThe Art of Illusionhad been printed in a format so that its 160 page text could fit into the shirtpockets of World War II servicemen gave him great satisfaction. He also had a son, Stephan, by a woman he never married. Given what we knew about Lashbrooks immediate reaction that night, I thought a straight-forward uncomplicated interpretation was likely to be the correct one. Although George White operated a CIA safe house in Greenwich Village, only minutes from the Hotel Statler, where Olson and Lashbrook had taken lodging, they apparently did not visit it. ], Lashbrook told the police that Olson had come to New York on 24th November to seek help for mental illness. Today five decades after it was written the tricks and approaches set forth in this manual are still classified top secret.. Eight years ago, questions unanswered, Frank Olsons body was exhumed from the Frederick cemetery where it had lain for more than 40 years. 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. They afforded him the moral consideration and human dignity that he seems not to have granted those who were unfortunate enough to be unwitting participants in his experiments. He left a computer running in his home, a glass of wine on the table, and the lights and radio on. This impression is strengthened by information we now have that proves that the purpose of Presidential apology our family received in 1975 was to deflect our intention to sue, which might have led to our discovering the true nature of my fathers job. They were not C.I.A. Then there were some films Frank Olson had shot himself during a trip to Europe a few months before he died. At the time, Lashbrook was in the room with Olson, who had gone to New York to be treated by Dr. Harrold Abramson, a psychiatrist who had worked for the CIA.According to CIA documents, Lashbrook called Gottlieb, his supervisor at the time, and then went to the police station to identify the body. THEY GOT BACK It also explains why the Agency was unable to find these MKULTRA documents in response to a subsequent U.S. Senate Select Committee investigation of CIA abuses in 1975. Colonel in the Chemical Corps and a man who described himself as a close personal friend of the Olson family. We accompanied Dr. Lashbrook, at Dr. Lashbrooks suggestion, on an official visit he had to make, Ruwet would later disclose in a confidential CIA affidavit. The sub-machine gun is especially adapted to indoor work when more than one subject is to be assassinated. If distance was supposed to heal him, however, the cure didn't work. The long-term aim of these experiments with mind-altering drugs is thought by those who have studied the MK-ULTRA programme to have been to ensure the dominance of Anglo-American civilisation in the war of all against allthe key to evolutionary success. Brain-washing would be used not only to defeat the enemy but to ensure compliance and loyalty of ones own population. Unsuspecting clients were served cocktails laced with powerful doses of LSD and other concoctions the CIA sent out to be tested. I had the security of this country in my hands. He did not say more, nor need he have done so nor did I, dumb-founded, offer a rejoinder. He took his movie camera. [66], At some point, John Mulhollands personal files were also apparently vetted to remove any connection between him and the Agency. What was someone like Sidney Gottlieb, a poisoner, an assassin (albeit a not particularly good one), the man indirectly responsible for the death of Frank Olson, doing in the middle of this other, funny, psychic story? I kept thinking Harolds Club or Bust. Just west of Frostberg I turned south on Route 219. But why would a quiet scientist like Frank Olson be murdered? Sargant believed that for the first time Olson had come face to face with his own reality. People arent bad, merely sick. Supplyingbackground facts in order that a complete novice in the subject can appreciate the underlying reasons for the procedures suggested. The assistant district attorney handling the homicide investigation in New York put it even more strongly. In order to prevent worse things from happening. If Olson was murdered, the question is why? According to my records, your initial estimate was six months, which would expire about October 11, I am initiating a six month extension of the original estimate, which should more than take care of the time factor. After my book was published, I continued to meet with Dr Sargent. In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. Other questions gave rise to answers sufficient to stand plausibility on its head. While in Europe, according to his son, Eric, Frank Olson also learned that the Americans were deploying Anthrax against enemy troops in Korea. American policy-makers decided that other means covert means would have to be instituted to stop the expansion of communism. Rather than saving democracy, they created tools for coercion, and many people were hurt. Frank Olson often uses the Air Force to test germ warfare in the field, for example on the Caribbean island of Antigua. It is rare when even spouses know of these connections. Nor is there an explanation of the 1B sub-strains origin a break with the standard practice in describing sub-strains derived from passage through animals. The CIA agent dictated it to Dr. Abramson. White always wanted to try everything himself, Feldman remembered. There were pictures of the teenage Eric and his younger brother Nils standing by their bikes. Thus, their refusal can legitimately be read as evidence of concealment, and conceivably, even more incriminating mirrorings. The study offered the best rationale to date for tests on humans. On the one hand the CIA has admitted to unsuccessful (and ill-advised) attempts at assassinating foreign leaders, while, on the other hand, the notion of domestic involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy has been effectively marginalized as conspiracy theory (i.e., lunacy). . This bizarre story has the power to make a lot of different people feel that way. We joked about it., He said, Theyre trying to find out what kind of guy I am. But Saracco, now retired, found plenty to fuel his suspicions: a hotel room so cramped it was hard to imagine Olson vaulting through the closed window; motives to shut Olson up; the ambiguous autopsy; and the CIA assassination manual. In the hands of a capable gunner, a high cyclic rate is a distinct advantage, as speed of execution is most desirable, particularly in the case of multiple subjects. Sweden gave me a great deal of distance from the whole CIA business, he explained. His daughter Kristin is 17. That night he died in New York City. This unit was headed by Sidney Gottlieb, then a 34-year old Bronx native with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. Heavily censored documents I have already received under the Freedom of Information Act confirm that my father was under intense surveillance by the FBI and the CIA in 1960 and 1961, because he was planning to visit China and Cuba, in violation of US passport restrictions. The sill was high and there was a radiator right in front of it. On his return he told a colleague and friend, former BBC television producer, Gordon Thomas, that what Cameron and Gottlieb were up to was as bad as anything going on in the Soviet gulags. The family now came to the painful realization that Frank Olson might have been murdered. Politics, religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives. In the standard autopsy, the pathologist makes a Y incision, cutting into the body from shoulder to shoulder, with the arms of the Y meeting at the sternum (breast plate) and then going straight down the abdomen to the groin. (visual texts) Olson was mildly impatient with the questioning conducted during the course of this interview. During the six and a half weeks of our journey we were propelled by a powerful and simple idea, which boiled down to the notion just keep peddling. We knew that Route 40, the old National Pike just a few hundred yards from here at the end of the lane, went all the way to the West Coast. In this connection, you should know that the CIA and the Counsels office both strongly recommend that the evidence concerning his employment not be released in a civil trial. He told her he had made a terrible mistake but wouldnt elaborate. As may or may not be characteristic with professional performers, these deductions are often questioned by the Internal Revenue people, and Mr. Mulholland is frequently called on to justify some of his deductions. Then Eric recalled that the family had never been told any of the details, that they had been callously deceived, and that they wanted to know why a cover-up had been in place all these years. Four years ago he had his first breakthrough when he won a court order to exhume his fathers body. The President promised the Olsons full disclosure, and the CIA provided the family, and America, with a flurry of details, each more unexpected than the last. My mother, acting on the ill-considered advice of a close family friend, allowed a hastily recommended English physician to sign my father into the Priory psychiatric hospital near London. As information on MK-ULTRA entered the public domain, people who had known White only in his official FBN capacity were stunned to learn of his undercover role as Morgan Hall. And they got angry because you wouldnt tell em what was going on., When Pannier hitchhiked to Fort Detrick to take up his new assignment in 1946, he saw so many guard towers that he thought he had been sent to a prison. He explained to me that he sometimes did work on Saturdays, so that it is plausible that he would have been at the hospital on Saturday November 28. What are you talking about? Eric asked them, crossly. It became clear to them that there was something darker in this tragic incident than a failed LSD experiment. ARTICHOKE had involved extreme methods of interrogation and an attempt to develop a way to produce complete amnesia in questioned subjects or in agents who had seen too much and could no longer be trusted. Its version: that Frank Olson crashed through the window in a suicidal depression nine days after he was given LSD without his knowledge in a CIA mind-control experiment. In what was undoubtedly a remarkable coincidence, the doctor who served as the admitting physician for was Dr. Robert W. Gibson the 25-year old son of Walter Gibson. During this period (1953/5), Dr Sargant had met several more times with Dr Ewan Cameron, both in Washington and in Montreal, Canada. Notes on Evan Thomas book, At this point, the agency seemed to be looking for a method of inducing amnesia in persons from whom information had been obtained under the effect of special drugs or hypnotism. Endowed Title Its director, Dr. Gottleib, sought help from his Scottish hero, Cameron, and set him up with cover organisations to distance the CIA from some of the more abbhorent aspects of MK-ULTRAs work. I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vinyards because it was fun, fun, fun. The question was, did it happen in the room prior to his going out the window or did it happen at the window when he went out? His description of that setting, I later came to learn, matched the conditions prescribed by the CIA for drugging an unsuspecting victim, and the physical psychological symptoms he experienced matched those of an LSD trip. In both cases one reached the goal by small continuous increments of motion along a single strand. But what about the social manifestation of this mechanism in the form of learning to ignore that which (perhaps despite its strangeness) has been made to appear normal or usual? In an exclusive interview, Ike Feldman, one of the operations kingpins, talks to Richard Stratton about deadly viruses, spy hookers, and bad trips. General Manager. And this latest account came from the recollections of an unimpeachable reporter, a psychiatrist of impeccable credentials who had gone on to become the director of the esteemed Sheppard, Enoch and Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. (New York: Dell, 1999). (New York: Henry Holt, 1999; paperback 2000). In 1969, John Marks reports. My fathers case covers both. The Colby documents locate Olsons death in the context of a CIA operation calledARTICHOKE. Eric Nelson is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Government at Harvard University. With the information concerning biological weapons in the Korean War on the one hand and the information about the White House coverup in 1975 on the other, the story of the death of Frank Olson finally hit bottom. Olsen Lab. The CIA knows it. Gottliebs own deputy stayed with VICTIM in a New York hotel room. Then there were several contradictory statements made by Abramson in the report. It was clearly illegal to test potentially dangerous drugs on unsuspecting United States citizens.. Jones also sold White a portable toilet for observation post.. He paid girls $50 to $100 a night to lure johns to a safe house apartment that White had set up on Telegraph Hill with funds provided by the CIA. Armed with Starrs startling findings, the Olson brothers retained high-powered Washington, D.C., attorney Harry Huge of Powell, Goldstein, Frazer, & Murphy, to convince Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to open a murder investigation. White drank so much booze, he couldnt feel his fucking cock. Congratulations. Starrs was even more puzzled to discover that Olsons body lacked any lacerations on the face and neck. In fact, it had only been a week since Gottlieb authorized Mulholland to proceed on these two additional chapters. The Americans have other plans for him. Marks points out that the electrode experiments went far beyond giving monkeys orgasms, one of the researchers early achievements. page one, Perspectives section Dr. Gibson explained that Chestnut Lodge did not have security-cleared psychiatrists on its staff at that time, and that security would indeed have been a problem had psychotherapeutic treatment begun at Chestnut Lodge. Theirs, after all, is a world of secrets. But the cottage those guys from the CIA usedthats still there.. A hammer may be picked up almost anywhere in the world. Born in Hungary and schooled in psychiatry in Germany, Hoch came to the U.S. in 1933 on a visitors visa and soon legally immigrated with the assistance of then-attorney and future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. As American prisoners of the Chinese were repatriated, authorities discovered to their horror that 70 percent had either made confessions of guilt for participating in the war or had signed petitions calling for an end to the U.S. war effort in Asia. It was calculated that for Dr. Olson to have struck the sidewalk-level wooden barrier causing him to land where Pastore said, his exit velocity would have had to have been no more than 1.5 miles per hour, because a greater speed would have propelled his body beyond striking range of the barrier. The forensic team discovered this hematoma, and concluded it must have come from a blow to the head in the room, a full three years before we found the CIAs assassination manual. It was also clear that all of the immediate family supported this project. 30:21 Voice of Bennie E. Hackley/Chemical Corps US Army: But the CIA station chief balked and pitched the poison into a river, a congressional investigation later revealed. Our perception of the world has withered away, what has remained is mere recognition., The poetic image makes strange the habitual and its linguistic devices, to use the favorite Formalist expression, are laid bare., (Victor Erlich, Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations. Some 50,000 American servicemen had already lost their lives in the conflict and more than 7,000 were prisoners of war. Dr. Frank Olson worked in this area. I didnt think that if knowledge is knowledge of murder, then its not enough because then you want justice. Down at reception, Pastore asked the hotel telephone operator whether she had overheard any calls from 1018A. The CIA man with the shifting story was Robert Lashbrook, deputy to the spy agencys wizard of mind-control and exotic assassinations. The Nazis confiscated it in 1934, and the Americans took it over after the war. The CIA would purchase all of Sandozs potential output of LSD. The Americans save Kurt Blome, seen here on the left, from death by hanging. a. The obvious answer is that termination, not a secured facility was the course chose. Mulholland, a hard-nosed skeptic, was right at home investigating the paranormal. Getting it right was imperative. By the time Olson returned home Friday evening, things had changed radically. Born with two clubfeet, Gottlieb spent much of his life almost compulsively adapting himself to the external world. This was tried with predictable lack of success on Trotsky. Not tall, but big. A. It covered how to administer pills, liquids, gasses and loose solids surreptitiously. Eric Olson has returned to live in the house his father built for the family in Frederick in 1950. It was always referred to as the pad, never the apartment, and was modeled after Playboy magazine, 1955 . Upon arriving in New York City I had my usual professional difficulty of finding my way successfully from Point A, Grand Central Station, to Point B, the District Attorney office where I was to meet a member of the Medical Examiners staff. (Visual text!) Twenty-five seconds after it was shot, the sheep just fell to the ground, said Baronian, 73. Vast quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, could now be produced with reasonable ease in any sophisticated chemistry laboratory.At about the same time, a subculture of researchers began to experiment on themselves. I telephoned Dr. Bruce Goldberger, Dr. Caplans associate and the man from whose testing these results were derived. 28.32 Portions of this article were taken from the forthcoming book,A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIAs Cold War Experimentsby H.P. Ironically, Erics retreat to a neutral and very quiet country only sharpened his resolve to exorcise the old family ghosts. 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