Perhaps Frank Olson had voiced his dismay and disgust over this inhumane behavior and was for that reason considered a potential security risk. On June 13, experiments are conducted with Patient No. The CIA cooperated with each investigation., Olson family attorney Harry Huge said, We are monitoring these developments closely and are very encouraged that we may now have the means to pursue things further. and Fort Detrick scientists at Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland on Nov. 19,1953, Sidney Gottlieb of the C.I.A. Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons., It adds: For secret assassination the contrived accident is the most effective technique. After two hours of digging, Starrs men hauled the rusted casket out of the hole and transported it to a nearby police lab. Biological agents can really cover more territory than nuclear weapons, Walter said. Then Eric said, Think of how much could have been different if he was alive to tell any of this. One of those scientists lived just across the highway from where we are sitting today, about a quarter of a mile from here. At various stages in our friendship the question of Frank Olsons death came up. One clue came from Armand Pastore, the assistant night manager at the Statler in 1953. He might have been the best they had available at the moment, and, also, the only guy with an adequate security clearance to handle what they wanted. According to Eric Olson, his father was eliminated because he posed a threat to the agencys top secret drug experiments, including some that may have been conducted abroad. So its not possible to know for sure whether she had any specific reason other than a well-oiled suspicion of the CIA to suspect that Frank Olson had been murdered. Ask yourself when you last remember an American President calling a family to the Oval Office to receive an apology for the unintended effects of a United States government policy. While the U.S. sub-machine guns fire the most lethal cartridges, the higher cyclic rate of some foreigh weapons enable the gunner to cover a target quicker with acceptable pattern density. But in fact this was a family haunted by fear, shame, uncertainty, and insecurity. Sheikh Mohammed is considered the architect of two attempts on the World Trade Center: the one that failed, in 1993, and the one that succeeded so catastrophically, eight years later He was flown to an undisclosed location (a place the CIA calls Hotel California) presumably a facility in another cooperative nation, or perhaps a specially designed prison aboard an aircraft carrier. In 1975, a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller issued a report on CIA abuses, Days later, the family was invited to the White House to meet President Ford. For example, when I asked whether any of the eight unwitting participants in the LSD experiment had been pre-screened for any medical disabilities that might put them at risk, he unhesitatingly said, No. When I inquired whether any medical personnel had been in attendance at the Deep Creek meeting in the eventuality that some one of the LSD subjects would have an untoward reaction requiring immediate medical attention, he again replied, No. Yet his own prior use of LSD, which he openly admitted, had not been so devoid of medical supervision. And then one day he was transferred to working on hot agents. These are preferable to ordinary military calibers, since ammunition available for them is usually of the expanding bullet type, whereas most ammunition for military refles is full jacketed and hence not sufficiently lethal. U.S. employment of biological weapons in the Korean War. The rest of the world had learned that we were ready to kill Patrice Lumumba as well, and had gone in for LSD experiments in brainwashing so exuberantly that one of our subjects, a Dr. Frank Olson (on government contract), had jumped out the window. ''Once and for all'' meant returning to the hotel and checking into Room 1018A. Dell, 1979. Detailed descriptions of(covert techniques) in all those operations outlined to me. (Before you get too pissed off, recognize that I mean it.) Even Marks, who exercises the journalistic wisdom to stick only to what he can back up with hard documentation, readily acknowledges that the clandestine researchers probably planted electrodes in the brains of men. I used to be part of your world, I answered. Once, in the summer of 1975, the American government didnt hesitate to see to it that the truth was not made known. I have written a number of non-fiction books dealing with the activities of various intelligence agencies. First, as indicated earlier, we discovered that Frank Olson was not simply an Army scientist. He was a CIA officer associated with projects so heavily guarded that the term top secret gives only scant indication of their sensitivity. Army bosses would ask: Are you keeping them happy? cit. They mailed letters to Ruwet and Colby. I find it interesting. It had not been noted in Dr. Di Maios first autopsy report. Hairs from a number of bodily locations on Dr. Olson, some fitted with a root structure, were also submitted to Dr. Caplan. My purpose was to see that we got guys up there we wanted to talk and through other people we got prostitutes to talk to these guys and each prostitutes would put something which I found out later was LSD into their drink and made them talk. But the darkest episode may well have been one in which John Mulholland found himself personally involved during the very first year of his MKULTRA work: the death of Dr. Frank Olson[44]. . Then in June 1975 a special commission chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller released the findings of its investigation into illegal CIA domestic operations. Most often, users have been introduced to the drug by persons of high status. That condition, for good or for ill, was the most uncertain and the most significant aspect of this as it is in any exhumation, especially where the time elapsed since burial is prolonged. Elmore Leonard,BE COOL. Eric was nine years old at the time. The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. His photographs also primarily show private moments. Eric Christian Olsen was born on 31 May 1977 in Eugene, Oregon, USA. One of them was Professor Kurt Blome. He was a CIA man too. Suspected double agents were the most common targets for execution. After trying and rejecting several substances the OSS scientists settled on a highly concentrated liquid extract of cannabis indica, a particularly potent strain of marijuana. VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED (with Max MorganWitts) He said, Harold senior is not here but Harold junior is here., We said, Thats fine, well take Harold junior., Pretty soon out strides this dude in a fancy cowboy suit. December 23, 2001. BILL BUCKLEY, Station Chief of the CIA in Beirut (1983). If such concealment is desirable the operation will be called secret; if concealment is immaterial, the act will be called open; while if the assassination requires publicity to be effective it will be termed terroristic.. We were able to grow [the anthrax bacteria] right up. In short, here are instructions in deception.[31]. By the time I returned to New York in early June, my father appeared to me to be fully recovered. This version of events comprises the core chapter of John Marks 1979 book. He told the internal inquiry that Olson's death was ''just one of the risks running with scientific experimentation.'' As Lee and Shlain explain: Nearly every drug that appeared on the black market during the 1960s marijuana, cocaine, heroin, PCP, amyl nitrite, mushrooms, DMT, barbiturates, laughing gas, speed and many others had previously been scrutinized, tested, and in some cases refined by CIA and army scientists. That voice having had its strongly voiced say the door was opened and Joseph Gustafeste stepped out on the porch having turned on a bare bulb over my head. Alice Olson had always insisted that Frank had been very worried that the United States may have been employing biological weapons in Korea. Then on June 11, 1975, a front-page article in the Washington Post engaged his excited attention. He assigned the case to Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb, seasoned prosecutors on the cold cases unit. Upon my returning to Gustafestes home in the darkness I noted a light was on in the dimly lighted interior. Blome was the Third Reichs Deputy Surgeon General and the man behind German research into biological weapons. Attorney. 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. We took a drive over to Muir Woods out by Stinson Beach. Dr. Frank Olson worked in this area. Thats why Im here. By relieving reality of its rules of the game, collage presents designs for experimentation patterns which are new, unused, and possibly valid only for the moment. On reading the article, Alice Olson instantly realized the man described in the morning paper was her husband. Nicky leave a suicide note? The turning point came during the summer of 1953. What Olson says he knows is this: His father was not a civilian scientist at nearby Fort Detrick, as the family had been told. Not only had the elite government scientist whose death was in questionnotdied in the manner officially described, his body did not bear the injuries stated in his autopsy report. A document issued on June 11 described the essential elements in the program as physiological research leading to a better understanding of the constituent factors in human behavior and physiological and pharmacological research leading to a better understanding of the action or effectiveness of various agents used in connection with efforts to control human behavior.. Eric turned the corner to see the family doctor sitting there. Dave Dickenson, Tim Hauck, Kroy Biermann, Trumaine Johnson, Dante Olson. The remarkable example of Evan Thomas failure to see what he himself placed in front of his own eyes on page 212 ofThe Very Best Menis not the only case where an author has blinked when faced with the Frank Olson story. It was during that period (1968169), that I first began to explore with him his own relationship with both M15/6 and the CIA. What we call the beginning is often the end While these myriad investigations were occurring around me, I was not quiescent. Marks book ran 264 pages. Experiments. U.S. News & World Report. Project MKULTRA was eventually brought to a close in 1964. The old training group PQ 31 is doing all right for itself, even if PQ has to stand for peculiarwhich is what I can say about my work now. There is always the risk that it may get out of control and attack not only the enemy but those who decided to employ it in the first place. On more than one occasion, White sent me to the airport to pick up John Roselli and bring him to the office, said Feldman. Did that Grand Jury meet and mark recommendations about investigating your fathers death? The result is that the issue of the vast territory that falls between the poles of these extreme cases, what we might call plain old everyday national security terminations, has been effectively omitted from the discourse of Cold War history (except of course in Stalins Russia where the end justified the means.) From the perspective of analyses like that of Michel Foucault one might ask not only about the occasional necessity for such acts, but also about the role such terminations would have played in disciplining a democratic population for fighting a Cold War in which covert operations and plausible deniability were the key weapons. The man was given the drug while attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on a test project that involved the administration of mind-bending drugs to unsuspecting Americans. Feldman claimed the CIA used Africa as a staging ground to test germ warfare because no one gave a goddamn about any of this crap over there.. Having experienced what Ellen Herman called a collapse of faith in the rational appeal and workability of democratic ideology and behavior, the generation of scholars that emerged from World War II had sought to perfect the tools of social control by which the elite would save democracy. Mulholland immediately set about the task of researching and writing the manual. Only the bones -- and not all of them -- remain intact. That contact, by phone and mail, was cordial and cooperative in the sense that no court order approving the exhumation was deemed necessary. To be sure, as a CIA scientist working on some of the nations most secret Cold War projects, Frank Olson was in a position to know things that, if exposed publicly, would prove embarrassing to the government. 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. He did not give a damn. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. There were so many ways for Eric to recount his new version of the story at the press conference. A letter he had sent to the CIA declining cooperation with a study had turned up in the hands of the Scientology Church. Ruwet decided that Olson needed psychiatric attention. But instead of sending him to the base hospital, Ruwet called Lashbrook at the CIA. However the voluminous literature on the hallucinogenic effects of LSD, compiled from a time before that of Dr. Timothy Leary, the LSD guru of his time, to the present, demonstrates well-nigh conclusively that during flashbacks LSD users do not commit violent acts such as throwing themselves through a closed window. No sooner had MK-ULTRA been established than Gottlieb proceeded to organize 13 subprojects that called for the support of LSD research for the purposes of disturbance of memory, discrediting by aberrant behavior, altering sex patterns, eliciting information, enhancing suggestibility, and creating dependence. But now, having reached what we were now convinced was the truth about the murder, how could we ever learn the truth about the renewal of the coverup in 1975? These drugs could be administered surreptitiously with food or drink, and given the bleakness of his existence, they might even offer a brief period of relief and pleasure, thereby creating a whole new category of longingand new leverage for his interrogators.. Notes on my meeting with Dr. Robert Gibson It was titledSome Operational Applications of the Art of Deception. Only geniuses need applyhow did they ever miss you? In her grief Alice Olson took drinking to excess, ultimately becoming an alcoholic. Uncovering this story has been a decades-long agony for us as well. When a colony of bacteria grew on growth medium, he recalled, it came out like a little comma, perfectly spherical.. Enhancer is the focus of his Transcription factor research. The Strange Story of Frank Olson.Weekly Planet(Tampa, FL), December 6, 2000. It was only then that Lashbrook dialed the front desk and reported the incident to the operator. He told me that. As our understanding of Frank Olsons work grew, our attention was again drawn back to the Colby documents, and we became aware of another gaping hole in the story we had been given. Eric Olson is the founding Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. The Colby documents reveal that an experiment was tried on Olson, involving the use of some drug. They will also be affected by whether or not the assassin is to be killed with the subject. Olson seems to have concentrated on counter- biological warfare, trying to find vaccines and special clothing that would protect against attack. We joked about it., He said, Theyre trying to find out what kind of guy I am. Salary in 2022. He conceded that no x-rays had been taken at the time of his examining the remains. Using Pastores information and our measurements, we had the engineers from Engineering Animation, Inc. create a computer simulation of the fall, figuring in the height in feet to room 1018A with the location of the beds in the room and the floor measurements in room 1013A to determine both the horizontal and vertical velocity of Olsons exiting the room and falling to the street. Eleven months later, the CIA claimed another victim. Originally published by, WorldNet Daily, Friday, July 6, 2001 They might survive, they might not. He was also a consultant to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI5/6), largely because of his work in the eliciting of confessions by the Soviets. A condition of complete simplicity After returning, Cournoyer recalls, Olson asked, Have you ever seen a man die?, He actually called it torture, Cournoyer recalls. [69]It included over 200 pages of material directly linked to Mulholland and his involvement with the intelligence community. Hereafter, assassinations in which the subject is unaware will be termed simple; those where the subject is aware but unguarded will be termed chase; those where the victim is guarded will be termed guarded., If the assassin is to die with the subject, the act will be called lost. If the assassin is to escape, the adjective will be safe. It should be noted that no compromises should exist here. At the army headquarters in Berlin, Olson apparently witnessed brutal interrogation methods. After some forty years in the grave, despite embalming, one expects that the coffins interior dampness from the moisture resulting from the release of body fluids would have produced some mildew and that the body would have begun to putrefy. 1985. The Olsons discovered documents in Michigans Gerald Ford Library that indicated that the government had been extremely concerned upon learning that Frank Olsons family was questioning the official explanation of his death. He wielded a fat unlit cigar like a baton, pulled out a wad of bills that could have gagged a drug dealer, slipped a 20 to the waitress and told her to take good care of us. I hope this helps to set the record straight. Never was there any indication of pessimism.. These guys went crazy. Firearms 3. Note: It was primarily Soviet agents and defectors from East Germany who were kept here, people the CIA considered to be communist spies. Thomas, whose books include a 1988 study of the CIAs forays into mind-control. It doesnt much matter where, because the place would not have been familiar or identifiable to him. But the condition of the body meant that precise identification was impossiblemaking the area a conspiracy blackspot. What evidence was concealed, the memo does not reveal. Ruwet and Lashbrook claimed to have found Olson sitting in the Statler lobby early the next morning. Blows should be directed to the temple, the area just below and behind the ear, and the lower, rear portion of the skull. Once outside, he could be an acute embarrassment. Saracco has already offered Lashbrook immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony. The program began in 1953 amid growing fear of the Soviet Unions potential for developing alternative weaponry. I said, Whos smokin a pipe? Gittinger, one of those CIA nuts, was there with two of my girls. Seven years after that, Joel E. Willard, 53, an electrician who worked in the hot areas where animals were dosed with deadly germs, died of the same inhalational form of the disease. Far larger than the U.S. effort, the Soviet biowarfare program was also secretly continued after 1972, when the nations signed a treaty banning such work. Calling it a work-related accident, Ruwet explained that the family would be eligible for government compensation. Im one of the had-help people., So is James Starrs, a George Washington University forensic pathologist who examined Olsons exhumed corpse in 1994 and called the evidence rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide., Based on that finding, the Manhattan district attorneys office opened a homicide investigation in 1996. Unsuspecting clients were served cocktails laced with powerful doses of LSD and other concoctions the CIA sent out to be tested. Numerous others lost their grip on reality. 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