So you can imagine the amount of work they did on these people., 43.10 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson Yes they tried to take care of our father, my brother and sister and I always thought. He had come home early from a meeting at a mountain retreat and he had said something to his wife, Alice, about a terrible mistake he had made while presenting a paper at the meeting. Cournoyer had recently seen an article about Eric in the New York Times Magazine. He approached the family in 1975 to report what hed heard from the hotel switchboard operator that night. George White addressed this letter to his boss, the very same CIA man who had spiked Frank Olsons Cointreau: an ecology-obsessed Buddhist named Sidney Gottlieb. According to a cousin, in the hospital when the blanket covering his feet was removed, his mother screamed. (New York: Dell, 1999). Less than two weeks after their backyard press conference, the Olsons were summoned to White House for a personal meeting with President Ford. 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. Mental health professionals recognize that in certain persons suffering from mental distress the ingestion of LSD can have consequences that are reflected in altered personality traits and behavior. Another time, I come back to the pad and the whole joint is littered with these pipe cleaners, Feldman went on. His arthritis had become very severe, but ulcers and other stomach problems prevented him from taking even aspirin to relieve it. The real story is not a simple or short one, and we will not be able to tell all of it in detail in this statement. 1005-1132; see alsoCIA Documents Concerning the Death of Dr. Frank Olsonabove, [52]Eric Olsen email to author, January 26, 2001, [53]Mulholland letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Central Intelligence Agency, MKULTRA document 4-29, April 20, 1953, authors files, [54]Memorandum for the Record, Project MKULTRA, Subproject 15, Central Intelligence Agency, MKULTRA document 15-2, August 3, 1953, authors files, [55]Memorandum for the Record,Project MKULTRA, Subproject 19, Central Intelligence Agency,MKULTRA document 19-5, November 17, 1953, authors files, [56]Mulholland invoice for Dec. 3-4, 1953 trip to Chicago, Central Intelligence Agency, MKULTRA document 15-6, authors files, [57]Mulholland receipt for travel advance, Central Intelligence Agency, MKULTRA document 15-6, authors files, [58]John MarksThe Search for the Manchurian Candidate, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1979, p. 87, [59]Eric Olson e-mail to author, January 25, 2001, authors files, [60]A&E Investigative Reports:Mind Control Murder, Principal Films (London) and Arts & Entertainment Network, 1999, Videotape AE-17604, [61]John Mulholland and George GordonThe Magical Mind, Hastings House, 1967, p. 77, [62]Testimony of Admiral Stansfield Turner, op. Then he laughs, and the look on his face is wild, bitter and full of pain. 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. On the day of his admission, my mother was pressured into consenting to ECT, and the treatment began just thirty-six hours later. But whether the Nuremberg Principles were binding or not on the U.S., many Americans would consider the research dangerous from both an ethical and political viewpoint. Eric, who is now 54,was never very convinced by this version of events but kept quiet so as not to distress his mother. TECHNIQUES Sargent said he knew that Frank Olson and Cameron knew each other and that Frank Olson also shared his (Sargants) view that some of the work Dr Gottlieb was funding Cameron to do through the Human Ecology Foundation (a CIAfront Organisation, was bordering on the criminal. What sort of medical practitioner would prescribe with such reckless abandon? Because the death occurred in New York we presented amemorandum to the New York District Attorneys Officeoutlining the many reasons for believing that the death of Frank Olson was a murder. The neighbors, the community didnt know who it was, what this place was, because the military personnel going in and out of the house werent in uniform, they wore civilian clothing. There was no explanation in these pages, for example, about why the C.I.A. denied any knowledge of them, but one man appeared to be related to several assassination cases, and therefore no one was going to talk. Frank Olson loves life and has little interest in following rules. He is a former foreign correspondent of the New York Times and also covered the CIA in Washington for the Times. Whats this about? Feldman demanded. [16]He soon found, however, that if it were to meet the CIAs expectations, his manual would have to be far more than a hypothetical extension of existing magic tricks, principles and methods to covert activities. He was CIA and they took it to the end.. Before General Stubblebine came along, the secret psychic spies had another administrator: Sidney Gottlieb. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly-cased location. Three years later, Eric would discover that a CIA assassination manual written in late 1953 the period of his fathers death prescribed exactly that technique. Stunned by this I pressed Gibson for an explanation. At the third level are memoranda by Dr. Howard Abramson and Lt. 12.45 Hamlet has become like a friend to me. He said, Theyre getting very, very uptight now because of what they believe I am capable of. He really thought they were picking on him because he was the man who might give away the secrets.. No, but it has to be my father. . 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.. Olson was tasked to develop new and secret biological means for effective interrogation and warfare. During the ensuing uproar, the scientist was identified as Frank Olson. files still available, that his associate Dr. Margaret Ferguson was still alive in 1993. Indeed, it was. I was no pimp, Feldman insisted. By the time Olson returned home Friday evening, things had changed radically. As the precursor to MK-ULTRA, ARTICHOKE concerned the search for a truth drug to aid in interrogation. One of these was Richard Helms, then special assistant for clandestine operations to CIA director Walter Bedell Smith. Because of the resemblance between an LSD trip and psychosis, much of the early research was focused on mental illness. The total came to fifteen. Perhaps the most famous single case of CIA mind control experiments was that of Frank Olson, the scientist who has long been said to have committed suicide by jumping out of a New York City hotel room window after being given LSD without his knowledge. One such drug, called papavarine, is injected directly into the penis with a half-inch needle containing about two raindrops worth of the medicine. A document Eric later saw from his father's personnel file confirmed that doubts had been raised about Olson's security clearance before his death, possibly because of Sargant's warning. This was tried with predictable lack of success on Trotsky. It was also his recollection that there was a barrier in front of the Penn Bar during steam cleaning of the buildings street level stone facing. Sometime around 1973, right before MK-ULTRA founder and, by then, CIA director Richard Helms hung up his trenchcoat and stepped down from the CIAs top post, he ordered the majority of secret MK-ULTRA documents destroyed due to a burgeoning paper problem. Among the eradicated material, Lee and Shlain report, were all existing copies of a classified CIA manual titledLSD: Some UnPsycbedelic Implications.. 2. That night he died in New York City. 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. Lashbrook had also given Lt-Col Ruwet the impression that Olson was coming to New York to see a psychiatrist. The fear that I was being used by Harlot in careless fashion had just been confirmed. As with edge weapons, blunt weapons require some anatomical knowledge for effective use. The meeting continued until about 1:00 a.m., when the participants retired for the evening. As I have found in other states the Maryland statutory provisions governing exhumations are haphazard, spotty and unclear. Two decades passed. Now he has them making these little figurines out of the pipe cleaners-men and women screwing in all these different positions. Public figures or guarded officials may be killed withgreat reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion. employee. He said he planned to leave the Army and retrain as a dentist. Thats too bad, Abramson reportedly answered. Frank Olson had spent a weekend on an office retreat in a cabin called the Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland. 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. Social historians and political satirists immediately labelled these events a great historical irony, and Eric repeated these words to me through gritted teeth because he doesnt appreciate the fact that his fathers death has become a fragment of an irony. 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. No devious or long-term tracking was necessitated in this instance. CIA Director Allen Dulles immediately dispatched agents of the Security Branch what some have termed the CIAs fixit men to contain the situation. Was it suicide? All the time, Ruwet had been there for her, keeping her company. 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. The stamps on the passport, which declare that the bearer was on official business for the Department of the Army indicate a pattern of travel that took Olson between various British military airfields, France, Occupied Germany, Scandanavia and the United States between May 1950 and August 1953. 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. payroll, who may have tried to hypnotize him. Nine years after unearthing Frank Olsons body, Eric and Nils Olson put their fathers cursed bones back into the ground (the tissue remains in Professor Starrs lab). The assassin must not fall into enemy hands. 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. According to the minutes of a committee meeting held in July 1953, one of the participants stated that some individuals in the Agency had to know tremendous amounts of information and if any way could be found to produce amnesias for this type of information-for instance, after the individual had left the Agency-it would be a remarkable thing.. 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. After examining and describing wounds for the documentary record, the ME takes swabs from all orifices and cuts pieces from the organs to place on slides for further trace evidence, including firearms, toxicological (poisons), histological (cellular) studies. When they returned to the States these same pilots made statements recanting their former confessions. He still has an office here in Fort Detrick, in the US armys center for biological weapons. Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it. A June 8, 1953, entry said: Gottlieb brings $4,123.27 for Hall Deposit $3,400. A Sept. 16 entry added: Lashbrook at 81 Bedford Owen Winkle and LSD surprise can wash.. Americas intelligence chiefs were interested in some kind of truth drug as far back as 1943, when the wartime Office of Strategic Services ~OSS~ experimented with marijuana. Your new story is not as much fun, I agreed. After my book was published, I continued to meet with Dr Sargent. [39]Gottlieb mailed a monogrammed handkerchief doctored with brucellosis to Iraqi colonel Abd a-Karim Qasim[40]and he developed poisoned cigarettes intended for Jamal abd an-Nasir of Egypt. A socialist in his youth and a Buddhist as an adult, he was on a constant search for meaning in his life. Colleagues were astonished to spot Olson chatting with the pacifists who protested outside Detricks gates. Walter, the former Detrick anthrax maker, calls the Big Five hair-raising. CRISPR-Cpf1 correction of muscular dystrophy mutations in human cardiomyocytes and mice. and tell Harold that we cycled all the way from, She said, These people are very smart. The magic drug is in the ideology! He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment. The knock once again came at my office door from a member of the Olson family. Would the information be coherent? He had remained close to Erics father after the war, when Olson had been recruited into the CIA. The assistant district attorney handling the homicide investigation in New York put it even more strongly. One element in this may have been the realization that security at the hospital would indeed have posed unsolvable problems. But many were unwitting subjects, particularly drug addicts, prostitutes, mental patients, and prisoners people who were unlikely to complain and even less likely to be believed if they did. Through a closed window, it was said. He had apparently been the victim of a boating accident. It had just been learned that the CIA allegedly drugged its employee Frank Olson with LSD before his supposed suicide. Throw him out a window and make it look like he committed suicide., Raji said, Elliot like, are you stupid or something? Pushing the panic button, in April 1953 the CIA replaced Project Artichoke with a more ambitious effort called MKULTRA, under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, a brilliant chemist with a degree from CalTech. Starrs noted, That report was brief and to the point, but it was a report of what was only an external examination of the remains. Starrs was troubled that the accompanying toxicological report only assayed the presence of methyl and ethyl alcohol, including no drugs of any kind. This despite that Olson had allegedly been dosed with LSD and given nembutal shortly before his death. When you think about it, 12, and alone. I spent most of the. The question of motive And when his pet bird died, it hurt, he wrote. I wanted to see if there was a way to make it look like a natural occurrence. As Eric struggled to absorb the devastating news, Alice composed herself enough to tell her two other children, seven-year-old Lisa and five-year-old Nils, that their father would not be coming home. He told me that. 49.38 Did the CIA, in collusion with the British intelligence service, orchestrate his subjection to mind depatterning? Mr. Sejna, a former Czech defense official, had access to information about medical experiments carried out on American prisoners of war by Russian and Czech personnel in a hospital in North Korea during the war. The drug-testing program resumed in the Bay Area under the cryptonyrn Operation Mid-night Climax. My effort was not to hold on to the issue, but to put it behind me. Give me the lowdown. Carried out as a secret operation, Lifton points out, this work was deprived of exposure and critical evaluation by others. They now claimed that their earlier statements had been made under the duress of psychological manipulation and torture. Mulhollands task was to evaluate this and other claims of telepathy and clairvoyance. So he comes out and looks at our bikes and he says, What are you guys doing?, We said, Harold. He had even managed to slip away from them one night, a good indication that they were not really watching him. (3.00). And no government panel would be publishing a report acknowledging that Frank Olson had been murdered. By 1951, the Special Operations Division had won praise from a Pentagon committee for the the originality, imagination and aggressiveness it has displayed in devising means and mechanisms for the covert dissemination of bacteriological warfare agents.. Reporters from throughout the country came to the house that Frank Olson had built and gathered around the picnic table to listen. Ideally, only one person will be involved. Of course, if the blow is very heavy, any portion of the upper skull will do. But as covert LSD experiments proliferated, things down at CIA headquarters began to get out of hand. But assassination can seldom be employed with a clear conscience. To give the Olson family confidence that all available scientific and investigative means had been employed to bring the truth about Frank Olsons death under public and scientific scrutiny; 2. Considering the ultra-secrecy and strategic importance of the work in which Frank Olson was engaged at the time of his death it is nothing less than astounding that among the documents we had been given by the CIA in 1975, which we were told was the complete file, there is no mention at all of any security issues. However the introduction of the drug had a definite effect on the entire group. Even more puzzling were the reports numerous references with all details blacked out to the CIAs Project ARTICHOKE. The New York District Attorney was in fact able to locate a source in Israel with close ties to Israeli intelligence which was able to confirm this allegation. 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. I went through each and every document page by page. 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. BILL BUCKLEY, Station Chief of the CIA in Beirut (1983). He holds The Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Science and the Annie and Willie Nelson Professorship in Stem Cell Research. cit. (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.) It talks about lacerations, cuts of the flesh that in all probability might have been caused by glass in the course of his fall. If Abramsons reports in the Colby documents are to be believed, Abramson had had ample reason to have come to the conclusion early on that Olson required hospitalization. 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. 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? The Men Who Stare at Goats Before World War 11, few medical researchers seemed consciously concerned with ethical problems, says Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist who writes about bioethical problems. 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