Pannier spent a night on the roof of the Pentagon taking air samples to rule out a bioattack before a visit by President John F. Kennedy. His goal, he would later say, was to ascertain the effect clandestine application (of LSD) would have on a meeting or conference.After dinner on the second night of the retreat, he had his assistant, Dr. Robert Lashbrook, place a very small dose of LSD in a bottle of Cointreau. When my fathers colleague told me about the use of biological weapons in Korea, I responded by saying. In this particular case the patient died. This would mean that the government would have no defense at all against claims for information that the Olson family might legitimately make. Detective James Ward initially referred to the case as a possible homocide in his report. It is only in the last decade or so that formal codes of ethics have become widely accepted in the psychiatric community.. To their friends, they would explain that their father had died of a fatal nervous breakdown.. Right there! I think a journalist is making a big mistake in trying to get somebody to talk over the phone.. Dr. Frank Olson worked in this area. In the transcript of the hearing, Abzug presses the ex-CIA lawyer to explain the genesis of the memo. At one point he apparently gave Olson bourbon and the sedative nembutal both central nervous system depressants whose adjuvant affect could have killed Olson. The symptoms observed appear to be identical with those observed in groups of non-addicts or for different composition with respect to race, age, social and economic status, and personality types. Here was a top government scientist, engaged in some of the most secret projects at the height of the Cold War. 31.41 Voice of Ira (Ike) Feldman/Former CIA agent Absolute reliability can nearly always be achieved at a distance of one hundred yards. Each made treachery and duplicity his byword. Could be. He also believed that, from his own meetings with Frank Olson, there was a very real possibility that your father could become a whistle-blower if he believed that what was happening was wrong. The drug, say the investigative journalists H. P. Albarelli, Jr., and John Kelly, was administered as part of a top-secret Army-funded experimental program . This is what we do. White thought they were all assholes. 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. He says were all stuck in 1953, in a sense, because the events of that year have a continual and overwhelming impact on our lives. A single Congressman had decided to oppose the settlement, so it was enacted in drastically reduced form. If so, it would appear that Maryland waters are particularly unkind to retired members of the CIA. https://doi.org/10.1093/cvr/cvz298 The laugh was an attractive and alarming trait, because sometimes he would laugh about things that weren't funny at all. ''When it is over. Youd shut off curiosity. (paperback edition, p. 212), The interesting thing, the amazing thing really about this quote is that it occurs on the very same page (p. 212) wherejust eight lines earlierThomas tells the story of the death of Frank Olson, who, Thomas says, worked with Gottlieb, also experimented with LSD and fell to his death from the window of a New York hotel in 1953.. It looked like a family holiday, except the family werent with him. But Eric, the eldest, couldnt settle down. Our rate and the Russian rate was the same about 7 kilograms of dry anthrax a week.. 15.30 The essential point is this: it is necessary to insert the notion of psychological discrediting into theManchurian Candidate scenarioas it applies to the Frank Olson story. Detrick was established a decade later during World War II as a response to the infamous Japanese BW program in Manchuria (Unit 731) which used thousands of Chinese as live, human guinea pigs for biological warfare experimentation. Which is why in summary he sounds like nothing but pieces and parts. Ira Ike Feldman is the only person still alive who worked directly under the legendary George Hunter White in MK-ULTRA. 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. Then in June 1975, a blue-ribbon commission chaired by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller submitted a report on CIA domestic crimes to President Gerald Ford. New evidence in Olson case suggests similarities with other incidents by H.P. But neither the magician nor the Agency were completely satisfied with the product. What this means for me is that a national security homicide is not only a possibility, but really it is a necessity, when you have a certain number of ingredients together. The aim of the drugging at Deep Creek was apparently to assess the extent of Frank Olsons disaffection and alienation, given the depth of his ethical qualms. So I hid out at a nearby Hooters, courtesy of a CBS camera crew, who were following me about. The equipment included four DD4 microphones disguised as wall outlets. In documents from the Gerald Ford Library we were about to discover the extreme concern in the 1975 White House that highly classified national security information was at stake in the death of Frank Olson. We joked about it., He said, Theyre trying to find out what kind of guy I am. Fort Detricks Special Operations Division was the top-secret Chemical Corps branch that was Olsons assigned place of work at the time of his death. Its tough on everyone when they die.. Its the rock called failure.. And althoughas we already knowSargant wanted the British government to distance itself from the CIAs work with MK-ULTRA, Miniccino says he nevertheless was committed to the principle of mind control and became the link between the British Secret Intelligence Service and MK-ULTRA. And third, the motive for murder turned out to be far more substantial than we had dared to imagine. All of the team members agreed that it was most likely that it had occurred as the result of some incident in the room, not from hitting the sidewalk nor in Olsons descent. One sued the government and won an out-of-court settlement in 1988. These data stress the point that LSD is safe only when it is taken under adequate medical supervision. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death. Thomas, whose books include a 1988 study of the CIAs forays into mind-control,Journey into Madness: Medical Torture and the Mind Controllers, says Sargant told me that he had urged the British government to distance this country from it. In the midst of all this hubbub what nobody seemed to notice was that the story of Frank Olsons death hadnt changed at all. Did you tell the reporter from the Fredrick News Post that you had no evidence to suggest that Frank was murdered by the CIA? I asked. The end is where we start from. Or, to use the words of CIA terminology that we would later discover, he was dropped.. It seemed to unfurl the winding processes of a person's unconscious and lay them out flat on paper. I was prepared to dive into the dark depths, but, of course, as soon as I finished training, they wrapped me in cotton. As most had been Nazis, their entry into the United States was prohibited by law. They wanted to know the wherewithal of those details. written all over it. Whos there? came a gruff and uninviting male voice. The couple stopped for lunch at a coffee shop just outside the Capitol, but Olson wouldnt touch his coffee. Of course he only failed in a judgment call. According to the terms, Mr. Deakins was to receive 600 acres of land anywhere in Western Maryland he chose. At the same, the Agency had begun to rely increasingly on Mulholland for his advice and expertise. Were it not for The Shadow all that might have been true. I watched them, and then I watched a home movie that a friend of Erics had shot on June 2nd 1994, the day Eric had his fathers body exhumed. This individual was not made aware he had been given LSD until about 20 minutes after it had been administered, the commission said. Trained as a biochemist, he had been employed since 1943 in the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was associated with a CIA secret research unit known at the time as MK-ULTRA, and came to Britain frequently between 1950-53 to work at the British Microbiological Research Establishment (MRE) at Porton Down. The program noted that the New York City district attorneys office has reopened the 1953 case as a homicide investigation. If it were impossible to employ nuclear weapons without assuring mutual total destruction, what other weapons could the boffins come up withgiven virtually unlimited funds and no moral restraintsthat would win any future war? Gottlieb later testified and Richard Helms confirmed that in ordering the destruction of the papers, Gottlieb was carrying out then-CIA Director Helms verbal orders. Theres too much bullshit in the world, Feldman said. And then Erics mother became hysterical. 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. Published by Carol Pubishing Group For almost half a century, his son Eric, a psychologist, has insisted his father as murdered on orders from the highest level. It had held the family suspended in a kind of weightless limbo, captives to the pull of their own unrevealed and unresolved history. Dr. Frank Olson was an expert for anthrax and other biological weapons and had top security clearance. Was this conversation still relating to the Olson case? This was, he felt, a classic example of sophisticated misdirection, using a skill from the magicians toolkit to protect a clandestine operation. That had to be avoided at any cost. Lashbrook and special agent Walter P. T. Jr. went together to Abramsons office at 9:15 in the evening of the 28th. We really kept that thing hush-hush, he said. He also had a son, Stephan, by a woman he never married. Mind warfare, he said, is the great battlefield of the Cold War and we have to do whatever it takes to win this.. The CIA was able to secretly buy small amounts from Sandoz, but this was not considered sufficient. Four years ago he had his first breakthrough when he won a court order to exhume his fathers body. He spent one night wandering the streets, and at one point he discarded his wallet and his identification papers asking to be allowed to disappear. Ruwet said that Olson did not want to go home to face his wife. His deputy, Richard Helms, had a different personality but similar roots. As Eric would later recall, In that moment when I learned that my father had gone out a window and died, it was as if the plug were pulled from some central basin of my mind and a vital portion of my consciousness drained out., Yet Alice knew that her husband had been troubled by something of late. I am eighty-two years old and Im no longer afraid, he said. He soon broadened this to debunk and denounce other forms of occultism. Yesterday, from the same picnic table, Eric Olson, now 57, spoke again to reporters, this time saying he knows how his father was killed, and why enough answers to allow him to move on. He is kept in a hotel. Dr. Gibson reported to us the statement that had been made to him by the CIA official who contacted him on the morning of Frank Olsons deatha statement identical to one Robert Lashbrook made to Alice Olson, but in direct contradiction to the story told in the Colby documents. We were biking companions, and also went rock climbing and rappelling. apnews.com. Mulholland wrote Gottlieb back on May 11. Another was Hydes group at Boston Psychopathic. New evidence in Olson case suggests similarities with other incidents, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA, The Biology of Doom: The History of Americas Secret Germ Warfare Project. Nobody would think to call Chestnut Lodge, and Chestnut Lodge would not think to get involved as they would never hear the new version of the story. Your remembrances of Dr. Olsons death in a fall from the Hotel Statler in November 1953 is what brings me to you, I answered in an unquavering voice. For a quarter of a century, a close friend of mine, a Harvard classmate, has believed that the Central Intelligence Agency murdered his father, a United States government scientist. Harvard University / Harvard Corporation Trustees: huge amounts of elites. On this issue, until this query is put to rest by adequate scientific testing, I am a diehard skeptic. On the other hand both versions deflected attention from the most troubling issue inherent in the conduct of the kind of BW and mind-control research in which my father and his colleagues were engaged. The bosses demanded a dart so fine that it could penetrate clothing and skin unnoticed, then dissolve, leaving no trace in an autopsy. We heard it went all the way! Four tests were begun on unsuspecting persons in 1953, then expanded two years later under what the commission called an unfortunate arrangement with the federal Bureau of Dug Abuse Control. Basically, he said, this is a story about a guy who had a simple moral code and a nave view of the world. Sincerely The message was cryptic, but it characterized Frank Olson as having no inhibitions.. Further the fact that no autopsy had been performed on Olson militated in favor of our discovering new and possibly determinative evidence to shed new light on his death. Their families regularly spent their summer vacation together. His casket was at all times kept closed due, so the family was informed, to the massive injuries he sustained in his fatal fall. I went through each and every document page by page. He pointed out that Olson had witnessed harsh interrogations of former Nazis and Soviet spies, and that sometimes these persons had died as a result of those procedures. And at that point my fathers colleague looked at me as if to say read-my-lips: it wasnt all brainwashing.. 40.05 Eric Nelson is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Government at Harvard University. He had been a C.I.A. In an attempt to preempt foreign attacks and even wage its own assaults, the CIA funded a group of renegade agents to experiment with ways to derail a human being. George called me in because I had this whore, one of my whores was this Cuban girl and we were gonna send her down to see Castro with a box of LSD-soaked cigars.. Castro survived. Magnum, .270 Winchester, .30 106 p.s., 8 x 60 MM Magnum, 9.3 X 62 KK and others of this type. Then on to Paris. We may never know the full truth about projects ARTICHOKE and MK-ULTRA, and, if we do, it probably wont come from Gottlieb. Mulhollands name appears nowhere on the document, but consciously or not he did leave a subtle trace: the illustrations he sketched detailing facial expressions look very much like self-portraits. The purpose of our press conference in 1975 was to say that the unidentified man referred to in that article was Frank Olson. He reacts badly to the drug, becomes unstable, and is taken to New York for treatment. No matter how gentle the language, this was to be a guide for agents in the field to perform dangerous, provocative and even lethal acts. A condition of complete simplicity And Murray made much of his supposed transformation into peace activist following Hiroshima. He was going to have to create real world solutions to real world problems. 16.22 We were contacted by George White, Jones said in an interview. When other-people who ingested the drug reported similar effects, the chemical became something of a pharmaceutical curiosity: a mysterious drug searching for something to cure. When he returned, his former boss recommended him to the SO Division, sort of a little Detrick within Detrick.. He pointed to the table and said, I dug out some old photographs for you.. Only geniuses need applyhow did they ever miss you? Click on the image above to read the chapter on the Olson story from the previous edition, now part of a re-edited Chapter 1 of the new edition. To the contrary, he appears to have been extremely skeptical of its practicality, dismissing many exhibitions of hypnosis as merely magic shows.[61]Moreover, the Agency had access to a wide range of individuals with true expertise in the area. It would also explain the low exit velocity that allowed Olson to hit the wooden impediment on the sidewalk below. In the immediate aftermath of Olsons death in 1953 Lashbrook told Alice Olson that he had seen her husband plunge through the hotel window. In his spare time Eric continued his labors to decode the meaning of the Colby documents. How would this ex-agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (BBN), forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) take to a retired outlaw writing a story about M K-ULTRA, the CIAs highly secretive mind-control and drug-testing program? I am exceedingly skeptical of the view that Frank Olson went through that window on his own, Starrs said at the end of his investigation. There is a piece missing and I am not sure that I am the one to give it to you. I was, however, able to add it without necessitating extension of the number of weeks requested for the writing. Alice joined her husband during the 30plus mile trip to Washington, where she saw her husband enplane for New York. Could be.. These were not formal patient/doctor consultations but rather Sargent trying to establish what Frank Olson had seen and done in Europe. This interest grew to an obsession after the Stalin show trials with the robotic, apparently artificially-induced confessions made by the accused. The Olson family had never heard this name, and would not learn of Dr. Gibsons role until 1994. 40.42 Regarding this hematoma, however, we must address another matter. They dont know yet whether Ill be one of the linchpins in Europe or the Far East., Now the man in the pencil-strip suit began his counteroffensive. He's a veteran of numerous campaigns, having led Marco Rubio's digital team during his 2016 campaign for president, served as digital director of Ed Gillespie's campaign for Virginia Governor in 2017 and US Senate in 2014, and advised on digital strategy for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign in 2016 . How widespread the practice was of testing new listening devices on unsuspecting people also will remain a mystery. 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. As Pastore placed his pass-key into the door, the police drew their guns as a precautionary measure. This position put him on the boundary between biological warfare and interrogation research, precisely the strange boundary zone evoked in the term germ warfare confessions. The conventional wisdom alleges that in November 1953 he threw himself out of a 13th floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) after having himself been drugged with LSD by the CIA in a mind control experiment. According to the documents Colby had given the family, Olson spent an agonized night wandering the streets of New York, discarding his wallet and identification cards. So we went into a drugstore. But Olson became agitated during the first act, believing, according to Ruwet, that people were waiting outside the theater to arrest him. But there were other unanticipated results as well. The scope of this subproject is the collection, in the form of a concise manual, of as much pertinent information as possible in the fields of(magic as it relates to covert activities). Eric leaned up against the wire fence that surrounded his swimming pool and he grinned at his friends and his family, who were listening intently to this broadcast. And when youre done, slip it under the sill., Ill read in this room, I said, and if anybody unfamiliar knocks, anyone official, that is, Ill put the letter under your door before I go to answer.. Even the nails are clipped or retained in full. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method. On June 13, experiments are conducted with Patient No. Or something in the sight. Norman lives in a large white bungalow in an upmarket suburban street. Disraeli, the British Prime Minister under Queen Victoria, born of Jewish parents, but they say he had the best upper-class English accent of anyone in the British Isles. The circumstances surrounding the death are taught as a case study at the Mossad Training School outside Tel Aviv. He and Gottlieb discussed the challenge. Notwithstanding, the DAs men had learned that two men had gone into Olsons room the night of his death. The hearing Tuesday of the subcommittee will include potentially explosive testimony from a Czech defector, Jan Sejna, who now works for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency. Eric Olson is the founding Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Eric recalls that Lashbrook was uncommunicative and nervous, claiming to have forgotten key details. The U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and other defense agencies financed their own experiments as well, often duplicating each others efforts, sometimes at the same institutions. [51], While the CIA was now admitting that Frank Olsons death was a suicide brought on by the after-effects of CIA-administered LSD, Eric Olson was never fully convinced. It was impossible for him for anyone to know how to do it in the most coherent and still entertaining way. Sargant believed that Frank Olson could also have been given a cocktail of drugs that included more than LSD. This is the question of timing: why were arrangements for hospitalization made so late in the week, and so late in the day? (Gibson went on to a very distinguished career in medicine: he became director of Shepherd-Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, and President of the American Psychiatric Association.) 39.37 9.33 Originally published by, WorldNet Daily, Friday, July 6, 2001 Other questions gave rise to answers sufficient to stand plausibility on its head. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly.) Eliot writes: This is a moment like that, a moment when the circle closes. But he also borrowed money from friends and family, maxed out half a dozen credit cards, and began to sink into debt. He was carrying out experiments involving the injection of Mescalin [sic] derivatives into patients. The CIA staffer was still in his underwear, on the telephone in the bathroom. Instead we will fast forward to key the key moments that have, piece by piece, eviscerated the 1975 story and left a very different one in its place. The patriotic community surrounding Fort Detrick has long been reluctant to believe such a possibility. Of course violent, and even self-destructive, acts are not uncommon in the immediate aftermath of LSD use, while tripping, as it is colloquially said. This was supposedly to spare his family from seeing how badly mutilated his face and body were from crashing through a plate glass window and falling ten stories to the concrete below. Part of that assumption was formed by Sargent because he had come to see Frank Olson as a somewhat naive man: locked up in his lab mentality was, I recall, one of the phrases Sargant used. What Meachum does not explain is that the spurious link of Frank Olsons death to the whole notion of mind control and LSD in short the link to the Manchurian scenario was actually a major stumbling block in arriving at a lucid account of what really happened. I want to travel to Long Island to interview a former narcotics agent who worked undercover for the CIA dosing people with LSD. My parole officer would have ordered a urine test on the spot. In 1960, for instance, Gottlieb himself had hand-delivered an assassination kit to the CIA station chief in the Congo, with instructions that it be used to eliminate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Did he come back from Europe looking very upset? I asked. Because the death occurred in New York we presented a, memorandum to the New York District Attorneys Office, One of the outcomes of the The New York District Attorneys investigation has been confirmation of an, A Cold War context in which unethical research was being absorbed and sponsored was bound to see extreme forms of discipline and sanction applied to those who raised ethical questions or who might be likely to do so. However, when my parents returned to London several weeks later, my father became anxious, and he and my mother returned to Moscow. I spent a lot of time at Erics house, reading his documents and looking though his photos and watching his home movies. Professor & Chair Endowed Title Annie and Willie Nelson Professorship in Stem Cell Research; Pogue Distinguished Chair in Research on Cardiac Birth Defects; The Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Science Department Molecular Biology Graduate Programs Genetics, Development and Disease Education Undergraduate To bankroll his investigation, he became adept in the art of nonprofit fundraising. He spent the night at the Hotel Pennsylvania, along with a CIA agent who was there to guard him. The casket, draped with an American flag, remained closed at the funeral four days later. In the present state of our factual knowledge about the death of Dr. Olson, I would venture to say that the sub-galeal hematoma is singular evidence of the possibility that Dr. Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of Room 1018A, a person or persons with a homicidal frame of mind The convergence of this physical evidence from our scientific investigations with the results of our non-scientific inquiries raises this possibility from the merely possible to the realm of real and incontestable probability. ' The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. This information from Cournoyer fit well with what we already knew and with what we would soon learn. So there it is: the elephant in the room finally named, even if its features remain entirely unexplored. They also noted my interview with Gottlieb and my unshakeable feeling that he was concealing information. As a freshman, Eric Olson ('77, Ph.D. '81, DSc '03) planned to follow his chemist-father into a career as a research scientist when he hit an obstacle that forced a profound reckoning. Olson phoned his wife I talked to Vin, he said I didnt make a mistake, everything is fine and Im not going to resign.But Tuesday morning saw a return of his anxiety and depression.