There are many indications that the cruel experiments involving human beings Operation Artichoke took place in this isolated CIA safe house near Camp King, at the edge of a town called Kronberg. Yet it would not be until 1975 that they would learn some of the circumstances of his death, and even then not apparently the whole story. As it happens, Eric Olson told me, the CIAs declassified assassination manual for 1953 specifies a faked suicidal jump as a preferred means of elimination. We must remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD, spoke no less an authority figure on matters psychedelic than John Lennon. Dulles convened a high-level committee of CIA and Pentagon officials who agreed the agency should buy the entire Sandoz LSD supply lest the KGB acquire it first. We want to emphasize at the outset, however, that our purpose was never to prove that Frank Olson was murdered. He and Alice spent much of that weekend sitting on the couch, holding hands, quietly looking out the window at the obscuring mist. Had Frank Olson said or done something that was as he himself feared a breach of security? Feldman leveled a cold, lizard-like gaze on me when we sat down for lunch. Although the men who were investigated had claimed that Frank Olson was in a suicidal frame of mind, they had roomed him on a high floor. The same concerns are evident in a memo that was written by White House Deputy Staff Director Dick Cheney to his boss Donald Rumsfeld on July 11, 1975, the day after our family press conference. He had obviously jumped out of the window, just another suicide in a city where the plunge from skyscraper to pavement was a shocking but not unusual event. My letter to the New York City police departments pension division seeking to contact him was forwarded to him but I received no reply from him. Only geniuses need applyhow did they ever miss you? Thus, psychotic episodes, attempted suicide, and actual suicide were more common among psychotherapy patients than among persons taking LSD under medical supervision. Buckley described both men as expert in hiding or destroying evidence. As the numbers of people using LSD multiplied, so did sensationalized accounts of its effects. I never signed any goddamn secrecy agreement.. And they both hung up. His death was so dark and so unmentionable. Before doing so, the three men made another stop. In 1976, Erics sister Lisa, her husband, and her two-year-old son took off from Frederick in a small plane, bound for the Adirondacks, where they planned to invest Lisas share of the settlement money in a lumber mill. But the concept interested him. At the end of the lunch, Colby handed the family an inch-thick sheaf of declassified documents relating to Frank Olson's death. Eric wants to tell his friend Bruce about the latest evidence. Baltimore Sun Staff Roy Meachums columnFredericks Candidate'(News-Post, Aug. 4) makes a very useful contribution to the burgeoning literature on the death of my father, Dr. Frank Olson. On further examination, the forensic team, led by James Starrs of George Washington University, discovered a blow to Olson's temple, on the left side, which caused a fist-size bleed under the otherwise unbroken skin. CLASSIFICATIONS After Eric left the lab, Starrs began his autopsy. It works. Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. 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. This tragedy stayed with me as did my questioning the reason for the fate that had saved me. Eric stared down at a face he had last seen 41 years before. In November 1953 Dr. Gibson, then a young doctor of twenty-five, was working as an admitting psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland. And Ted Kaczynski would participate. All these anomalies Eric Olson has duly recorded on a Web site devoted to his fathers memory: www.frankolsonproject.org. Pogue Distinguished Chair in Research on Cardiac Birth Defects; The magic drug is in the ideology! That hardly seems shocking in the context of an accidental LSD dosing. It was apparent that John Mulhollands files had been gone through and sanitized by someone who knew the Agency and knew how to eradicate any hint of its presence.[67], Despite these efforts and unbeknownst to Gottlieb and his staff, some MKULTRA documents still remained. Olson and the CIA agent take a room in the famous Hotel Pennsylvania. He then described what had happened. Through Gordon Thomas, a British journalist and author of numerous books on intelligence matters, Eric learned that during a trip to London his father had apparently confided in William Sargant, a consultant psychiatrist who advised British intelligence on brainwashing techniques. This coincidence was extremely convenient for Lashbrook, the Chemical Corps and the CIA. Robert Lashbrook, Ph.D. who was with Olson on that fateful night, recounted his version of the events leading up to and occurring at the tragic moment many times: Lashbrook and Olson were together in Room 1018A on the 10th floor, actually the 13th when the first three unnumbered floors are counted, when Dr. Olson suddenly went out the rooms only window. A request for a re-review of these files is still pending. He was 80 years old . Several days later, he jumped from a tenth-floor window of his room and died as a result.. The first lesson I learned during what has been a quarter of a century of writing about secret intelligence is that deception and disinformation are its stock-in-trade, along with subversion, corruption, blackmail and sometimes assassination. No, Feldman replied with a wave of his cigar, Im a goddamn CIA agent.. Colonel Edwards reported that the men had assembled at a twostory log cabin in the Deer Creek Lake area of Fort Detrick. Some say he had help, Walter says. Artichoke techniques to individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or plants and subjects having known reasons for deception.. Like other leading psychologists of his generation, he was a beneficiary of the Rockefeller Foundations efforts to promote psychology in public policy. He said, that he was going to leave. ORGAN HUNTERS Was he standing on a ledge and he jumped? asked Eric. Helms later became CIA director and gained a measure of notoriety for his Watergate lying to Congress conviction and a touch of immortality in Thomas Powerss aptly named biography,The Man Who Kept the Secrets. The confluence of scientific fact and investigative fact points unerringly to the death of Frank Olson as being a homicide, deft, deliberate and diabolical. Dr. Gibson then went into his office to take the call. We had a hell of a time with that because we had to get Russian cans, he said. Ruwet decided that Olson needed psychiatric attention. But instead of sending him to the base hospital, Ruwet called Lashbrook at the CIA. Frank Olson was one of these. 2022-02 to present | Product Manager (Infrastructure Team) Employment. agents had bundled Frank Olson off to a New York City hotel rather than a hospital. Everest was conquered. It was the centre of covert biological warfare and as such the record of its activities are deeply buried. Frank Olson also used photography. Lashbrook carried with him a check for $115.00 a travel advance for an upcoming trip that Mulholland was making to Chicago on behalf of the CIA. (Terminal interrogations and biological weapons in the Korean War). (Picador Books, Sept. 2004; Simon and Schuster, April, 2005.). With this information in hand, Saracco and Bibb prepared to see him. There was an extensive amount of self-experimentation for the reason that we felt that a firsthand knowledge of the subjective effects of these drugs [was] important to those of us who were involved in the program, Gottlieb explained at a Senate Subcommittee hearing years later. Dr. Frank Olson arrived in Frankfurt on June 12, 1952, from Hendon Military Airport near London. On the day before Erics press conference, Eric and I watched old 8mm home movies of his father playing in the garden with his children. One project was designed to turn people into programmed assassins who would kill on automatic command. Eric Olson in California 520 people named Eric Olson found in Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange County, San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose and 15 other cities. Eric Olson says, "The Cold War is over and there are now ongoing national debates about the future of the CIA and about unethical medical testing on humans. Eric Olson Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) is a lethal muscle disease caused by mutations in the dystrophin gene. Would he be unable to resist revealing secrets? There are rent bills for cabins at state parks a favorite site for secret meetings. I suspect that Lashbrook and company would have concluded, however that this storm could be weather. The Chinese broadcast their statements around the world. The real story is a story that no one wanted to know. What a brilliant cover story, he thought. Fischer, Mary A. But with the postwar revelations of Nazi atrocities in the name of science, the need for formal ethical guidelines became painfully clear, The Nuremberg code was the most important document of this period. When the casket was opened that day it had been closed during the funeral years before because the family had been told Frank Olsons body was too disfigured from his fall Eric Olson recognized his father. As he lay on his back one of his legs was twisted at a terrible angle. (TV Guides movie review database gives Martin Luther 2/5 stars and says, It is not entertainment in the usual sense of the word. Of the other known psychogenic drugs, mescaline produces reactions that are the most similar to those of LSD-25. Mulhollands task was to evaluate this and other claims of telepathy and clairvoyance. It was a front-page story, and the headline read: A civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test, then jumped 10 floors to his death less than a week later, according to the Rockefeller commission report released yesterday., (The Rockefeller Commission had been created to investigate CIA misdeeds in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.). Albarelli Jr. and John F. Kelly. Room C14, 45 Victoria Street Full contact details . I think a journalist is making a big mistake in trying to get somebody to talk over the phone.. We used that information to assist in a reconstruction. At best it would motivate some energetic journalist to take the challenge and find an unequivocal smoking gun that proved Frank Olson was pushed out of the window. The CIA hushed up Olsons death. It takes me a while after I leave Eric to grasp one salient fact that may make resolution difficult. All right. But I could see he was reluctant. However, I cannot now work on this project every week and would hesitate to promise completion prior to the first of May, 1954.[20], Mulholland estimated that it would cost $1800 to finish the project. Ignatieff, Michael. Yes! If desired, I am prepared to start work on this project immediately. What are you doing with these crazy cocksuckers? I spent most of the80s in prison for smuggling marijuana. As part of the police investigation Lashbrook was taken to the 14th Precinct station house, spending only a brief period there. The only remaining option is some form of disposal. This places the architects of such experiments in a position more like that of Mafia dons than traditional administrators of military research. Dave Dickenson, Tim Hauck, Kroy Biermann, Trumaine Johnson, Dante Olson. Or, anthrax spores, which are not killed by antibiotics, might have been found in his lungs after death. 37.10 Biological agents would appear to be well adapted to subversive use since very small amounts of such agents can be effective, the report said. The central character in the documentary is Olson's son Eric who spent most of his life researching his father's untimely passing. The CIA officially took the position that Olsons death was indeed a suicide, triggered by the LSD given to him by Gottlieb and Lashbrook. Frost to Dr. Yale Caplan, one of our forensic toxicologists who had established a private, commercial toxicology lab in Baltimore. Official Washington moved quickly to end the furor. Under ordinary circumstances, the 5MG shold be used as a fully automatic weapon. 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. 40.52 A saw (often a Stryker saw) is used to cut through the ribs so that the ribcage can be lifted away as one piece from the soft internal organs. Dr Sargant was engaged by me as a consultant for a number of programmes. Murray expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support., Leary had taken LSD for the first time at Harvard in 1959, where, traveling in Abramsons orbit, he had attended Fremont-Smiths Macy Foundation conferences on the drug. When Eric had his fathers body exhumed in 1994, the pathologist, Dr James Starrs, found a hole in Franks head that he concluded came from the butt of a gun and not a fall from a 10th floor window. On his arrival the secretary informed him that a call had just come in concerning the admission he had discussed the previous day. The full extent of the CIAs activities under the rubric of MK-ULTRA may never be known. His books include one on E. Howard Hunt, Jr., Compulsive Spy (Viking), and a study of Nixons foreign policy to appear in January, The Illusion of Peace (Viking), LSD-25 was the 25th in a series of compounds derived from the rye fungus ergot in routine research at Switzerlands Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories. Just like every year. And why, when he went out the window, had Lashbrook failed to summon help or even notify the hotels staff? Whites diaries indicate that Gottlieb continued to visit, flying out from Washington several times a year at least until 1961. There are no other terms for Frank Olsons bizarre death, and for the elaborate disinformational edifice that has been erected to obscure it. He could not imagine how anyone could have gotten a running start in such a room without awakening the person in the next bedthe man who was posted there to watch Erics supposedly delusional and suicidal father. One of the outcomes of the The New York District Attorneys investigation has been confirmation of anallegationthat had earlier seemed too extreme to be taken seriously. It has been eight years since the exhumation. This work was so various, so widespread, and so secret that even today it is impossible to grasp its full dimensions. Within the TSS, MKULTRA was assigned to the Chemical Division (TSS/CD), a component with functions few others even within the Technical Services Staff knew about. higher-up Sidney Gottlieb, Ph.D., who was officially reprimanded for the handling of the Olson incident, had been involved in C.I.A. In fact the 1970s version of the Frank Olson story was a story that everyone could love. I always wanted chickens, Feldman recalled, so I bought a chicken ranch. Fremont-Smith organized the conferences that spread the word about LSD to the academic hinterlands. 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). What was spelled out in that Assassination Manual was almost letter for letter what happened to Doctor Olson and it was a protocol, as we call it, for an assassination, which fit like the fingers in a glove.. Also present were Gottlieb, 1 two CIA scientists-a man named Hughes and Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook and four members of the Armys Chemi cal Corps Special Operations team. The C.I.A. And I am sure thats why in the end I came to take on this task trying to figure out what had become of him.. But the CIAs interest in drugs and behavioral research was, during the 1950s, awakened by reports that the Soviet Union had made giant strides in developing chemical compounds for brainwashing. The mystery of the death cant be solved until that body is reinserted into the sprawling network of crime, corruption, and power that motivated the murder. Meanwhile, Murray, already addicted to amphetamines, continued to flirt with hallucinogens. He told me lie had visited Langley several times and had met with Dr Sydney Gottlieb, Richard Helms and other senior CIA officials. Two agents were dispatched to Switzerland with a black bag containing $240,000. 23.56 Then they became alert and they pulled their guns out and said: You open the door and well go in. I opened the door with my key and they rushed in. In late November 1953, Frank Olson, then 43, joined a group of government officials at a conference at Deep Creek Lodge in western Maryland. White wanted to know all kinds of crap, but they werent talking. Eric wants clarity, once and for all. But records show that even CIA bosses were stymied as they tried to get the facts on the SO Division. The documents were obtained by the House National Security subcommittee on military personnel. He says he believes he knows what happened, even if he doesnt know details of perpetrators and motives. Oh my God, he said. This memo sets out the information provided by both Dr William Sargant, consultant psychiatrist, and William Buckley, former Station Chief of the CIA in Beirut, Lebanon. All planning must be mental; no papers should ever contain evidence of the operation. And if you lack provable truth, you do not get justice. Such a third person could have been positioned to enter from the room next door through a door from that room to room 1018A. 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