It has to do with a top secret project to use chemicals, drugs and torture on human beings in order to break their will and make them submissive. Eric was born here, but he never liked Frederick and he never liked this house. One of the virulent agents deployed was none other than airborne anthrax, the elder Olsons area of expertise. On the Sunday night Alice tried to calm him down by taking him to the cinema in Frederick to see whatever was on, which turned out to be a new film called Martin Luther. 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. But if the medical report is accurate, it appears to rule out the possibility that the weapons strain included bacteria collected during or after Boyles illness. The real story is not one in which anyone will take pleasure. (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.) I remember Sargent telling me that he spoke several times in 1953 with Frank Olson at Sargents consulting rooms in Harley Street, London. They gave his widow and children a government pension, and Gottlieb got away with a slap on the wrist. A photograph in People magazine in July 1975 shows each of them in the living room in Frederick, unsmiling and not looking at one another. And Frank failed the test. Only one problem seemed to slow down Gottliebs ambitious drug experiments: the agency couldnt get enough LSD. The CIA had already begun crafting this counter. He recalled his mother telling him that Frank Olson had been concerned that the United States was using biological weapons in Korea. The phenomenon that Langer is seeking to account for here is the seemingly paradoxical fact that one cant avoid something unless one first recognizes it: one cant resist seeing something unless one has first seen it. A new term had entered the lexicon: brainwashing.At show trials in Eastern Europe, dazed defendants had admitted to crimes they hadnt committed. Chair of the behavioral Sciences Department there, Dr. Levisky is a quiet and unassuming scientist with a lively interest in historical cemeteries in the York county arena. Our next port of call for identification purposes lay in the teeth. Lashbrook dictated the specifics of Olsons alleged psychiatric symptoms while Abramson took notes. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly-cased location. The CIA never reveals the identity of its assets. Often the professor himself doesnt know the originating source of research monies he receives. At least one person committed suicide after becoming an unwitting subject of a CIA LSD test, crashing through a highstory plate-glass window in a New York hotel as his Agency guardian watched. Repeated requests to the BBI under the Freedom of Information Act asking for details of the work that Boigle would have been doing in the US have met with refusal on the grounds of national security. So you can imagine the amount of work they did on these people., 43.10 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson Room C14, 45 Victoria Street Full contact details . In lost assassination, the assassin must be a fanatic of some sort. He says he has no reason to believe that the CIA would murder Frank Olson. I said, Julia thanks for respecting my wishes about not calling Norman. She said, Eric, Im a reporter. ' [33], The Agency continued to enlarge the scope of John Mulhollands work. And it put forth techniques that could be used by teams of men working in tandem. One of these was Richard Helms, then special assistant for clandestine operations to CIA director Walter Bedell Smith. 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. Their main advantage is their universal availability. Nor is there any mention at the National Archives, which reclassified Fort Detricks old biowarfare records after the Bush administration ordered agencies to withhold anything that might aid terrorists. Now, its hard to be sure, Dix, because I only acquired this at several removes, but Gottlieb seems to have had a honey of a theory, worked out in collaboration with Mrs. Montague and her theories. It had already been going on for three years. A most uncommon request, but one to which I acceded. I cannot be positive that they never found a technique to control people, Marks writes, despite my definite bias in favor of the idea that the human spirit defeated the manipulators.. But if Eric Olson could convince the authorities that his fathers death was a criminal matter, then he might eventually get at the truth. And Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, gave a talk to his Princeton alumni group in which he said Mind warfare is the great battlefield of the Cold War, and we have to do whatever it takes to win this.. He was choking. Twenty-two years earlier, in the early morning of November 28, 1953, our father died in what we were told was an accident. For those twenty-two years between 1953 and 1975 we knew nothing about how he died or why. Documents reveal that Frank never saw a psychiatrist in New York. The search for the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death of Dr. Frank Olson begins in 1945, with the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. However the introduction of the drug had a definite effect on the entire group. The meeting with the president lasted 17 minutes. Finally when one my fathers colleagues within the past year only told me that my father had come to understand that Korea was the key thing and that they were using biological warfare methods in Korea. But Eric, the eldest, couldnt settle down. Such plans must be modified frequently to meet changes in the tactical situation. Then CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all records of these experiments in the midst of Watergate and congressional investigations that threatened to bring to light the agencys practices in this field. The two became good friends. White said in the letter to Powelson he was interested enough to try the drugs himself. 3. When Eric asked him why, Gottlieb explained that his ecological sensitivity had made him aware of the dangers of paper overflow. Helms founded the MK-ULTRA program and justified its notably unethical aspects with the rationale, We are not Boy Scouts.. The attempt on Hitlers life failed because the conspiracy did not give this matter proper attention. Who the fuck are you?. At the time of his death my fathers colleagues at Detrick were informed that Frank Olson had been an unwitting participant in a drug experiment, and that this caused the psychological reaction that led to his taking his own life ten days later. He spends his days hounding journalists, the Manhattan D.A., anyone who will listen, with a steady stream of calls and e-mail messages from an office just feet away from the same living room, the same chair, the very spot where he was told by Ruwet that his father had ''fallen or jumped.'' He told the police that he worked for the Defense Department and he didnt know why Olson had jumped from the window, but he did know that Olson suffered from ulcers and might have been suffering from job-related stress. There was the peculiar memo in Olsons personnel file at Detrick, which indicated that the CIA did indeed see him as a potential security risk. The acid-tripping intersection between the CIA and the counterculture is one of the areas where the on-the-record facts about MK-ULTRA meld into the foggy region of conspiracy theory. Remembered by his colleagues for his forcefulness as well as for his marked stuttering while excited, Gottlieb came closest to the image of the sinister scientist in the whole strange cast of agency characters. LSD is a solid. We know that the horizontal divider on this double-hung window was five feet ten inches from the floor of Room 1018A. covert operations] in 1959, he was very interested in MKULTRA, said Gottlieb. The central character in the documentary is Olson's son Eric who spent most of his life researching his father's untimely passing. But the real problem was that the Colby documents seemed to be pointing to a story that they were not tellinga story quite at odds with the spin that had already been placed on the story by the initial account in the Rockefeller Commission Report. On April 13, 1953 Allen Dulles approved the project. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. Unlike the rifle and machine gun, this is a short range weapon and since it fires pistol ammunition, much less powerful. This quality of self-reflexivity largely derives from the devices of distanciation or alienation [The] means of representation are foregrounded. This foregrounding of devices, however, is not so much designed to produce a sense of aesthetic play [as] to offer the audience a place from which it can develop its own criticism of and judgment upon the actions represented. He said Norm, you would be stunned by the techniques that they used., They made people talk! The original estimated completion date was May 1, 1954. He also believed that, from his own meetings with Frank Olson, there was a very real possibility that your father could become a whistle-blower if he believed that what was happening was wrong. Dr. Gibson greeted me at the door together with his two large brown dogs. In truth, CIA spooks and scientists alike were tripping their brains out. (Terminal interrogations and biological weapons in the Korean War). Starrs was even more puzzled to discover that Olsons body lacked any lacerations on the face and neck. But it also generated alarm. 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? But when Owsleys factory in Berkeley, California, was raided in February 1965, the case was thrown out of court since California law did not specifically regulate LSD. ''Once and for all'' meant returning to the hotel and checking into Room 1018A. Cournoyer got right to the point: Yes, your father worked for the CIA. No doubt, Isbells prisoners and addicts were volunteers, but the documents do not tell us anything about what they were told before the experiments and whether they were given psychiatric examinations. During the Vietnam War, William P. Walter, who supervised anthrax production at Fort Detrick and worked with the SO Division on projects, asked British intelligence agents for blueprints of the office occupied by North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Mr. Olson's areas of emphasis are in civil business and business litigation, probate litigation, commercial transactions and complex real estate transactions. Olson was told that he had swallowed LSD about 20 minutes after drinking some Cointreau. (He can be said to have dismissed Olsons death during hearings in 1977 as one of the risks of running such experiments.). Thus, in the trial it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons and any settlement of judgment reached thereafter could be perceived as money paid to cover-up the activities of the CIA. In turn, he provides them with information about the Nazi biological weapons program. If the C.I.A. The proposed CIA work on drugs and mind manipulation was to remain one of the Agencys deepest secrets. The caller was the same man with whom Gibson has spoken the day before. It was a foggy November weekend, as she described it, and they sat here, holding hands and staring out of this big window into the fog, and he described having made something he referred to as a terrible mistake.. In one, someone from the room said, Hes gone, and the voice at the other end of the line said, Thats too bad.. Its best left that although the truth may make you free, something less than the whole truth, in some situations, is necessary in order to keep the fire lit., (William F. Buckley,Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton(New York: Harcourt, 2000). The next morning Dr. Gibson arrived about 8:00 a.m. It is here used to describe the planned killing of a person who is not under the legal jurisdiction of the killer, who is not physically in the hands of the killer, who has been selected by a resistance organization for death, and whose death provides positive advantages to that organization. Lashbrook reported to the police who were investigating Olsons death that he, Olson, worked for the Defense Department, and that Olson had been calm that evening, washing out his socks in the sink before going to bed. Drugs On Nov. 28, 1953, Olson allegedly dove through a closed and shaded 10th-floor hotel window in the middle of the night. Starrs, the pathologist, found none of the facial cuts the original autopsy described, but he did find a contusion to the head that he thought was caused by a blow struck before the fall. Projects at the Special Operations Division involved or related to the following activities: Assassinations materials research (e.g. As it turned out my knock at his door went unanswered. Due to the fact that your letter was addressed to (a former address), it was delayed in reaching me. and John Kelly. Whites credentials were impeccable: A former crime reporter on the West Coast before he joined the narcotics bureau, White had soon become one of the top international undercover agents under Harry Anslinger, the grandfather of Americas war on drugs. And so Erics mother sighed and she began. To judge my credibility in accepting this claim I begin with: PERSONAL BACKGROUND: Heavily censored documents I have already received under the Freedom of Information Act confirm that my father was under intense surveillance by the FBI and the CIA in 1960 and 1961, because he was planning to visit China and Cuba, in violation of US passport restrictions. Walter said he assumes the initials in the log sheets were shortened by someone who knew the source of the new sub-strain of anthrax never went by his formal name. 130, 12, p. 1827-1850 24 p. Research output : Contribution to journal Review article peer-review Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats 100% He wanted to understand what the farthest reach could be. I met Dr. Gibson at his home north of Baltimore just after 2:00 p.m. on a rainy Monday afternoon, Dec 20, 1999. In the early 50s, after a stint in Korea working for the CIA under Army auspices, Feldman decided hed had enough of military life. The victims name was not disclosed, but the description of the incident was too similar to the circumstances of Frank Olsons death for Eric to ignore. This was the breakthrough the agency had been awaiting for three years; now it had access to all the LSD money could buy. At Edgewood and Fort Holabird, Maryland (where I was stationed as a young second lieutenant in intelligence in 1957-58) at least one thousand soldiers were given up to twenty doses of LSD. 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. For months, the largest investigation in the history of American criminal justice has been underway. Lashbrook had been sharing the hotel room with Olson and was asleep in a bed next to him when, he said, he was awoken by the sound of breaking glass and realised that Olson had crashed through the window. The only organizational exit is a horizontal one. As information on MK-ULTRA entered the public domain, people who had known White only in his official FBN capacity were stunned to learn of his undercover role as Morgan Hall. [51], While the CIA was now admitting that Frank Olsons death was a suicide brought on by the after-effects of CIA-administered LSD, Eric Olson was never fully convinced. The CIA knows it. (p. 161). In intelligence circles there were rumours of a Soviet plot to place brain-washed zombies in the White House and other citadels of Western power. Little Gidding, (1943)Four Quartets. Get it?, In its disinformation wars the CIA did not hesitate to use whatever arrows it had in its quiver, including the claim of brainwashing, in the service of what it called psychological discrediting., What my fathers colleague was telling me was that this discrediting technique had been used to neutralize the germ warfare confessions.. Even a highly trained Judo expert will hesitate to risk killing by hand unless he has absolutely no alternative. Cournoyer believed so. I was, however, able to add it without necessitating extension of the number of weeks requested for the writing. When this information is added to the story, and when one obtains some idea of what sorts of projects were being pursued at the SO Division, then the overall picture of the death of Frank Olson changes entirely. Absolute reliability can nearly always be achieved at a distance of one hundred yards. Dr Foltz is an eminent toxicologist well versed in the use of gas chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry to assay the presence of LSD in bodily tissues. In 1955, White moved the safe house to San Francisco, and he took over as regional head of tha Bueau of Narcotics. The plan of action included his seeing a psychiatrist. 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