This was how it looked that day. Did the Americans in fact use biological weapons in the Korean War? Lashbrook had also given Lt-Col Ruwet the impression that Olson was coming to New York to see a psychiatrist. Now I understand why, when I asked Eric what he had learned from his 25-year ordeal, he told me that no one should ever dig up his father's body. Upon the door being opened by Pastore the room, its window broken, appeared to be empty, aswim in cold air. Was the anthrax terrorist one of our own? Eric remembers that his mother was uncomfortable about the work her husband was doing. It doesnt much matter where, because the place would not have been familiar or identifiable to him. Eliot Alice Olson had always insisted that Frank had been very worried that the United States may have been employing biological weapons in Korea. In Korea, its just a matter of days before the first American prisoners of war will be released. He took us up in a helicopter around Reno, put us up in a fancy hotel. People could carry a brown bag with light bulbs in it and nobody would be suspicious, Pannier said. White and CIA director Allen Dulles were there. investigators that in Mulholland's presence, Olson became highly agitated. Disciplinary action was recommended against Gottlieb and Lashbrook, but the agency's director, Allen Dulles, delivered only a mild reprimand. Two decades after the bizarre tragedy, Olsons eldest son, Eric, would begin to dispute the official account. We are looking for dynamic and motivated researchers to join our team. Yes they tried to take care of our father, my brother and sister and I always thought. At the first level there are the reports of the New York city policeman who came to the scene after a call from the Statler Hotel around 4 a.m. on 28th November as well as comments by two New York city detectives. 5. 28.03 Voice of Norm Cournoyer 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. Germ dispensers could be concealed in many objects, such as the exhaust system on a 1953 Mercury. However, U.S. intelligence and military operations with the same purpose had been ongoing at least since World War 11 and likely chugged ahead for many years after MK- publicly stated conclusion. The agencys interest began with its precursor, the OSS, in 1942, when General Donovan, anxious to perfect interrogation techniques for captured spies, established a truth drug committee of prominent psychologists, including Dr. Winfred Overholser, superintendent of St. Elizabeths hospital in Washington, D.C., and Dr. Edward Strecker, president of the American Psychiatric Association. He was laughing about it. By some accounts, Olson might also have met a magician by the name of John Mulholland, who may have tried to use hypnosis on him. As he continued to assemble his postmortem collage, Eric also encountered signs and symbols of a less fantastical nature. Eric Olson is on Facebook. 14.50 Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were discovered by the media in 1962, and the craze was on. look in his eyes, wide open . Write this down. 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. His reaction to the glare of the rising suns blinding me like an interrogation lamp causing me to seek to move to another chair out of the suns bright light had C.I.A. Olson and all but two of the others (one a teetotaler, the other abstaining because of a headcold) drank it. All Rights Reserved. Another Gottlieb subproject under MK-ULTRA conducted experiments with LAE, a lysergic-acid derivative, for the purpose of inducing depersonalization and a schizophrenia-like condition in test subjects. September 12, 2003 The Skeletons decimated our ranks; the High Holies, if not excised, will cut us right out of the map. In 1955, White moved the safe house to San Francisco, and he took over as regional head of tha Bueau of Narcotics. At first he didnt pay them much attention. Its a quest he inherited as the oldest of three children. They took every necessary step to prevent Frank Olsons death from being connected with the CIA in any way. He did not call Lt-Col Ruwet, the chief of the Special Operations Division, right away. 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. Eric had been playing around with his father's camera and making photomontages since childhood. The sight of his fathers shrunken corpse might prove disturbing. Former SS member Franz Gajdosch was hired just after the war by the Americans to tend the bar in the officers mess at Camp King. Had he found out something he was not supposed to know? Increasingly, he can be found in the company of other CIA agents, including a certain John McNulty. A check with Ruwet confirmed it. 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. A third question is why in 1994, when he was informed of Dr. Gibsons version of these events, Lashbrook would have responded by saying, Dr. Looking up, Pastore could see a blind pushed through an empty window frame high up in the Statler. We understand youre back in the States, he says.I want you to come in to the Bureau of Narcotics. This was 54 to 55, White was District Supervisor [of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics] in San Francisco. Dr. Frank Olson arrived in Frankfurt on June 12, 1952, from Hendon Military Airport near London. 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 body of Dr. Frank Olson has been exhumed and is undergoing an autopsy. Thats why Im here. Among those who advocated keeping quiet were Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the vice president and defense secretary, the Olsons learned from memos and other papers received last year from the Gerald R. Ford Library. 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. The Rockefeller Commissions account of the suicide of an Army scientist not only neglected to add the mans name and his CIA affiliation; it omitted any reference to his high position in the countrys most secret biological weapons laboratory. had taken an allegedly psychotic man to a hotel room situated on a high floor rather than to a safe house or hospital. THAMES NUMBER ONE First objects filmed: Big Ben and a parade on the Mall. More recently his colleagues at the laboratory included DR. SID GOTTLEIB, who was chief of the Technical Services Division, and ROBERT V. LASHBROOK, Ph.D, who joined the organization only in 1952. Fort Detrick in Maryland, where Frank Olson worked experimenting with viral strains (such as the deadly microbes Sidney Gottlieb personally carried to Africa in an aborted attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba), was recently the locale of a near disaster involving an outbreak of a newly emerged virus. While still in captivity in Manchuria some of the captured American pilots made statements that became known as germ warfare confessions. In these statements the pilots said they had dropped biological weapons on North Korea. If Frank Olsons death was indeed the unintended result of an MK-ULTRA experiment as the report concluded then why all the cryptic references in the document to ARTICHOKE? He has further seriously studied the psychology of deception and has instructed graduate students, 3. Now living by himself in the family home his father built, he surrounded himself with stacks of documents and bits of evidence accumulated in his decades-long pursuit of justice. Congress passed a private humanitarian relief bill which authorised a payment of $750,000 to the widow, Mrs Olson, and her three children. They [the police] told me he was on LSD and had been acting aberrant and erratic for a while. Steward Alsop noted they were called the Ivy Leaguers, the Socialites, the Establishmentarians.He himself coined an alternative epithet: the Bold Easterners.The CIA, he said, was positively riddled with Old Grotonians.[6]. Some of the people they interrogated died. Never one to shrink from the call of duty, White first tried the drug on himself. It was long after the Olson children had grown up and Alice had recovered from alcoholism that the ghost of the father returned. Because of the resemblance between an LSD trip and psychosis, much of the early research was focused on mental illness. Enhancer is the focus of his Transcription factor research. At the time of your husbands death, I was the assistant night manager at the Hotel Statler in New York and was at his side almost immediately after his fall. Late the next day, according to the C.I.A. Mulholland is a self employed magician whose normal income is derived from payment by various individuals and organizations for individual performances. Here, then, is the CIAs own admission of failure. In one of his father films, immediately following images of his grandfather, Eric discovers a sequence that seems to show secret crop-dusting flights that took place in 1947. It is now clear that, tinder controlled conditions, LSD is a relatively harmless drug. Mulholland had taken over the publication with Volume 29 Number 3 in May of 1930. It would revolutionize both the obtaining and the delivery of secret information. The activities at Deep Creek, it suggests, were designed to find out what Olson knew, what he had done, and what he was likely to do. Clearly, the Chinese had found new and formidable brainwashing techniques that could transform American servicemen into Manchurian candidates programmed to do Communist bidding. I have seen corpses in much worse condition with a lesser time period in between burial and exhumation. A moment of returningthis time with knowledgeto the beginning. What are they trying to do with me? He does not follow orders, and has had numerous altercations with MPs (), 15.52 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson: This version of events comprises the core chapter of John Marks 1979 book. 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. Despite Lashbrooks pathetic attempts to deflect blame by trumping up a bogus psychiatric history for Olson, CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick officially (but secretly) concluded that Olsons suicide had been triggered by the LSD dosing. Over the left eye, underneath unbroken skin, was a fist-sized hematoma embedded in the sub-galeal sheath. But the cottage those guys from the CIA usedthats still there.. And he has a clubfoot, but loves all the same to square dance. In either case it seems obvious that if hospitalization had been arranged, as is claimed in the Colby documents and as the family was informed after the death in 1953, then someone must have called the hospital to inform them of the new situation. Theres something out there, he said, pointing at the window overlooking the lawn. 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. Yet in the aftermath of that ill-fated Thanksgiving weekend in 1953, and for a numbing 22 years afterward, the Olson family had been given no explanation at all for Frank Olsons mysterious death. Susanne Langer. ''It just hit you,'' he says. Studying muscle development and disease. We called it `LK thats what wed put on the log sheets for each run, Walter said. Furthermore, he noted, Certain portions of subproject 4 require experimental verification by Mr. Mulholland. He was trying to mumble something, Pastore later told reporters, but I couldnt make it out. In an exclusive interview, Ike Feldman, one of the operations kingpins, talks to Richard Stratton about deadly viruses, spy hookers, and bad trips. I regret everything. Dr. Gibson then went into his office to take the call. But there was nothing he could do about it. However, I could not determine whether my fathers blood tests had shown any trace of drugs, whether an official investigation was in progress or why his hosts were unaware of the party. We categorically deny that.. 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. Reporting on Frank Olsons death in the Colby Papers proceeds on three levels. I prevailed on them not to do so for the sake of Alice, their mother, and for the solace they would take in knowing the investigation was not ended, only interrupted by the reburial. Was it for the nonchalant medical treatment by the non-psychiatrist to whom Frank Olson was subsequently taken? At the urging of Eric and Harry Huge I took a train to New York City accompanied by Olsons boxed skull. On the day of our last interview, over lunch at a restaurant in Little Italy, Feldman told me the CIA had contacted him and asked him why he was talking to me. Lt. Col. Vincent Ruwet, his father's boss at the Army research establishment at Fort Detrick, told Eric something bad had happened. Are they also CIA? The meeting with the president lasted 17 minutes. This strategy has been remarkably effective. Under the headlineSuicide Revealed on the front page of theWashington Postwe read the following paragraphs: 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. I realized then that my professional ivory-tower had not equipped me for the C.I.A.s world of feints, flaws and foibles. 10.55 22.28 managers offered emoluments to universities soliciting their involvements. The documents, obtained from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and other Government depositories by a Congressional committee, show that the Pentagon knew in December 1953 that more than 900 American troops were alive at the end of the war but were never released by the North Koreans. The Olson family and I were linked in a friendly, social relationship through Greg Hayward, a student of mine at George Washington Universitys law school. His subsequent handwritten travel voucher for the December 3 journey only lists meeting with a contact.[56]Perhaps the Lashbrook visit was scheduled for the two men to discuss this activity. 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. was losing interest. According to an agency memo, the CIA feared KGB agents might employ psychedelics to produce anxiety or terror in medically unsophisticated subjects unable to distinguish drug-induced psychosis from actual insanity. In an effort to school enlightened operatives for that eventuality, Dulles and Gottlieb instructed high-ranking agency personnel, including Gottliebs entire staff at TSS, to take LSD themselves and administer it to their colleagues. Frank is troubled by something. Today, more than 50 years later, Donald Falconer lives in a convalescent home not far from Frederick. As sections 2,3,4, and 5 were written solely for use by men working alone the manual needs two further sections. 3.15 Then on June 11, 1975, out of nowhere, like a message in a bottle suddenly washed ashore by distant storms (in this instance the storms were Vietnam and Watergate), came a cryptic bit of news. Piecing these facts together, Eric Olson thought that Lashbrooks account was implausible. 40.52 Eight years earlier our father had diedvanished reallyand it has taken all the years since then to figure out what happened to him. In this connection, you should know that the CIA and the Counsels office both strongly recommend that the evidence concerning his employment not be released in a civil trial. Yet Jack Frost thought that if Olson had been hit with a blunt force object in the room, he would expect to find some indication on the skulls surface. The committee began testing a wide variety of chemicals on test subjects, from peyote and marijuana to goofball concoctions of sedatives and stimulants. His stipulations made me make haste to sit in his presence, the presence, as it appeared, of a most curious man with a puzzling mind. He has nothing else to say. Then Eric recalled that the family had never been told any of the details, that they had been callously deceived, and that they wanted to know why a cover-up had been in place all these years. We are familiar with the health risks to which workers in plutonium plants were subjected during the Cold War. I explained I was a writer researching George White. It takes me a while after I leave Eric to grasp one salient fact that may make resolution difficult. The sub-machine gun is especially adapted to indoor work when more than one subject is to be assassinated. In November of 1994 Professor Starrs and his team presented the initial findings of their forensic investigation at a press conference. The ominous nature of such mind-control research was exposed to public view in the Hollywood movie The Manchurian Candidate, starring the late Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey. They were of Norman and Frank Olson, arm in arm, somewhere in the middle of Fort Detrick, circa 1953. In 1970, Eric enrolled at Harvard. Another visitor was John Gittinger, a CIA psychologist who testified last month before Senate investigative committees that he met with Morgan Hall on numerous occasions to interview prostitutes about their drug and sex habits. And they had to have it too. After a silent dinner, he told his wife he had made a terrible mistake at the retreat. The connections between MK-mind-control experiments, the proliferation of the drug culture, Mob/CIA assassination plots, and the emergence of new, lethal viruses go on and on. He decided the time had come to close the case and to rebury his father. At no point do the documents describing this weird scenario mention a security problem. Yet before we could go further with these examinations, we must needs establish the identification of the remains as that of Frank Olson. The CIAs unscrupulous experiments on human beings continued the Nazi drug experiments they learned of during the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. 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. 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