After six months, in March 1953, Olson reverted back to his former position at his own request. But the memoranda we obtained show that the real concern at the White House was that if we went to court we it might become necessary to disclose highly classified information. The memos show that the government would refuse to disclose such information. . The Frank Olson story, Suicide Revealed, is on the left side, about half-way down. The manual, declassified by the CIA in 1997, contained the following eerie passage: The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Secret agent man: Allen Dulles (top), the former director of the CIA, who authorized the purchase of Sandoz LSD; George White (middle) examines opium pipes as he takes over as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Boston in 1951; Harry Anslinger (bottom), circa 1954, then head of FBN. I learned that most of this stuff was necessary for the United States, he said, and even though it may have hurt somebody in the beginning, in the long run it was important. Does all this rest on the word of one man, your fathers friend?. The hotel management had refused my request to disclose the identity of any person resident on November 27, 1953 in the adjoining room. (Like me!) Eric Nelson is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Government at Harvard University. According to this interpretation, Olsons fatal fall was the result of a bad trip, a tragic, yet accidental, consequence of the CIAs Cold War wet dream of developing a magical brainwashing elixir. He was a protg of the Americans, and had been a concentration camp doctor. For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. Either they wanted to talk about narcotics, security or crime. This contributed to a feeling that Frank Olson had not so much died as disappeared. Certainly going through an open window would be one feasible explanation, because if it had been closed, it is reasonable to expect that the glass would have cut his skin at some place or other. The vehicle for this effort was the Central Intelligence Agency. Erics avocation had become a fixation that had eclipsed his career; having returned to the United States for good, he gave up his work as a clinical psychologist to focus full-time on his fathers case. The knock once again came at my office door from a member of the Olson family. I can't wait for the new school year to start, and I'm excited to meet all the new freshmen. 47.44 On July 17, 1953, Olson celebrates his 43rd birthday with friends. Mulholland learned his lessons well. What sort of medical practitioner would prescribe with such reckless abandon? Injuries are generally categorized as blunt-force trauma, gunshot, and sharp-force trauma. If the sheep jumped, that meant people were going to jump, too, said Pannier, now living a quiet life tending his flowers and shrubs in Frederick. They were biowarriors in the U.S. Armys Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick. Right there! These data stress the point that LSD is safe only when it is taken under adequate medical supervision. House of Representatives, 94th Congress, First Session. In the transcript of the hearing, Abzug presses the ex-CIA lawyer to explain the genesis of the memo. Used to live: San Tan Valley AZ, Queen Creek AZ . A long chapter on Frank Olson, calledThe Case of Dr. Frank Olsonforms the centerpiece of that book. Actually they are better described as State Secrets. The Eighty Greatest Conspiracies of All Time: Historys Biggest Mysteries, Coverups, and Cabals. You couldnt help but be impressed.. Meanwhile, Murray, already addicted to amphetamines, continued to flirt with hallucinogens. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care; MultiPlan * Please verify . It was a mystery, solved a week later when searchers found his decomposing remains on a Chesapeake Bay island. Due to the fact that your letter was addressed to (a former address), it was delayed in reaching me. I hope this helps to set the record straight. This firsthand information fixed the location of Dr. Olsons fall and enabled us to reverse his travel for reenactment from that point back to the room. The family home had been built three years earlier, and his father Frank was still putting the finishing touches to it, but now he was in New York on business. It was a work-related accident, said one of the men. At the urging of Eric and Harry Huge I took a train to New York City accompanied by Olsons boxed skull. They later received $750,000 in compensation. No standard contract will be signed.[11], On May 5, Gottlieb, in accordance with this procedure, wrote the magician that The project outlined in your letter of April 20 has been approved by us, and you are hereby authorized to spend up to $3,000 in the next six months in the execution of this work. No contract or formal agreement was enclosed or ever signed per CIA policy. So you can imagine the amount of work they did on these people., 43.10 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson There is a piece missing and I am not sure that I am the one to give it to you. . He delivered a prepared statement and admitted to having destroyed perhaps one set of files. 26.01 His conclusion was that the evidence was starkly suggestive of homicide.. It all points to my fathers being murdered.. Let me now turn to the specific information that both William Sargant and Bill Buckley provided me with on separate occasions over a number of years. had taken an allegedly psychotic man to a hotel room situated on a high floor rather than to a safe house or hospital. (In fact, Eric Olson would later discover that the doctors at Chestnut Lodge had no special security clearance, a fact that begs the question, Why did the CIA lie about this?) By that time the name Frank Olson had started to achieve the almost mythical status it subsequently acquired. At the same time the actual skull from our exhumation was forwarded to Dr. McDowell. Medicating Dr. Olson with two interacting central nervous system depressants had the real potential of killing him, as columnist Dorothy Kilgallen learned to her fatal distress. Im here to tell you, he said, that the government has paid the Olson family close to a million dollars for their wrongdoing in causing the death of Frank Olson.. Anyone can read what you share. But today, he sees that material from a different point of view. Fifty years after the fact, conventional history records Dr. Frank Olsons death as perhaps the most infamous repercussion of MK-ULTRA, the CIAs illegal quest to modify an individuals behavior by covert means using hypnosis, electroshock treatment and psychotropic drugs such as LSD. As for the question of whether security could have been guaranteed at Chestnut Lodge, Dr. Gibson gives a clear negative response. 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. The conversations at Oberursel pointed up () signs The documents were obtained by the House National Security subcommittee on military personnel. He had apparently been the victim of a boating accident. Marks, John. 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. The recent terror attacks involving anthrax were a shock to Eric. The CIA had already begun crafting this counter. The next year, without alerting local officials, SO Division agents staged a mock attack on the New York subway, shattering light bulbs packed with BG powder on the tracks. He was choking. Incredible as it sometimes seemed, in both cases, the place one finally got to was still part of America. One of the CIAs overseas locations for LSD and mindcontrol experiments was Atsugi Naval Air base in Japan where Oswald served as a Marine radar technician. 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? It was made immediately after Frank Olson went out of the window. But it is impossible to be certain, they say, because the program was strictly compartmented: One worker didnt know what another was doing, let alone what CIA or Special Forces did with the bioweapons. To gain a measure of certainty on this matter, we would have to experiment with a number of five-foot-ten inch bodies (or simulations of them in the form of mannequins) hurtling through a window of the dimensions and the location of the one in Room 1018A. The fact is, it will never be possible to bury all of Frank Olson again. Indeed, Gottlieb had observed some of this work firsthand and was well acquainted with the hypnotists involved. agents in Florida, he said, and some of them had told him they knew who had killed Frank Olson in Room 1018A that night. The solids, gases and liquids were not harmless substances. 3. 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. Now, California history professor Kathryn Olmstead says she has found documents written by Cheney and Rumsfeld which show how far the White House went to conceal information about Olsons death. Eric Olson is the founding chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at UTSouthwestern. The pad, as White called the CIA safe house, resembled a playboys lair, circa 1955. 2. John Marks chapter, combined with the spin that was put on the story of my fathers death by the CIA in 1975, formed the basis for the publics belief that Frank Olson committed suicide after being drugged with LSD in a secret CIA experiment. Magnum, .270 Winchester, .30 106 p.s., 8 x 60 MM Magnum, 9.3 X 62 KK and others of this type. John Mulholland was precisely kind of person the Agency wanted and needed. Whats this about? Feldman demanded. Mysterious characters from Fort Bragg and the CIA came and went at the SO Division, leaving wish-lists and checking progress. Onward! In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. I was reading your website yesterday and was quite amazed to find out about the circumstances of Colbys death on the eve of being called up to testify before a Grand Jury! The bloody battles of Pork Chop Hill, Eerie and Old Baldy were headline news. But White found out what he wanted to know. Of course it bears mention that it could be random broken glass on the sidewalk having no connection to Dr. Olsons death. This is how Regis tells the story of Olsons death in New York three days later: Just in case Olson should try to leave the room and wander about the neighborhood as hed done two nights earlier, Lashbrook took the bed next to the door. 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. That had to be avoided at any cost. Where did Dr. Olson fit into all this? Eric, he said, youve got everything right except for one thing., Eric asked him to elaborate but the old man demurred. This was obviously a huge problem in many areas of Cold War research and industry, one which in many cases would have posed horrendous dilemmas for a democracy which did not have the equivalent of a Gulag prison system in which to dispose of people. He hadnt been hurt the way they said he had.. But could the Frank Olson story have an even simpler, albeit darker, explanation? Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. What was in the minds of the men who for two decades pursued the dream of a mind-control drug? 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