A request for a re-review of these files is still pending. The body that had floated to the surface of the murky lake had at last been reinserted into the network of shady, disavowed operations that led to the murder. Another mystery that seemed to be part of Olsons November death involved the trip that he had taken overseas during the prior summer. Yet curiously, the CIA has always claimed that its attempts to create real-life incarnations of Richard Condons unfortunate protagonist Raymond Shawthe hypnotically programmed assassin of, The ultimate goal of mind control would have been to produce a Manchurian Candidate assassin, an agent who didnt know he (or she) was an agentbrainwashed and programmed to carry out that most sensitive of missions. If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism. According to Lashbrook, he and Olson were unable to get a departing flight until the weekend, so they settled for Thanksgiving dinner at a Horn & Hardart Automat, then checked into room 1018A of the Statler Hotel. If anybody with bad intentions got hold of the things we had, it would be disastrous., By Thomas OTooole University researchers would soon discover that, like Dr. Faustus, the legendary Renaissance magician who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power, they had signed a contract before reading the fine print. Eric was woken up by his mother and taken down the hall, still wearing his pyjamas, towards the living room the same room where the two of us now sat, on the same sofas. In many ways, he had helped make magic intellectually respectable. 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. Used here with permission of the authors. She knew he had not been sleeping well, she knew he wasnt really at peace. Then in 1975 the Rockefeller Commission, set up by President Ford to examine the extent of the CIAs illegal domestic operations, revealed that an unnamed army scientist had died after CIA experts, experimenting with mind-bending drugs, had secretly slipped him a dose of potent LSD. This worsening coincided with considerable publicity in the press about the return to the United States of twenty-five airmen who had made confessions of using biological warfare in Korea. The shade had also been pulled down. What is Olsons new assignment? Alice Olson covered the whole subject of Frank's death with a silence that was both baffling and intimidating. Another unanswered question is raised by the small scrap of paper that Robert Lashbrook had in his wallet the night Frank Olson died. Not the man from the CIA who was in room 1018A with Olson when the 43-year-old biochemist and father of three crashed through a closed, shuttered window and tumbled to the cold sidewalk below. But terminal ARTICHOKE experiments werent the only matters weighing heavily on Olsons conscience during the summer of 1953. Published by Carol Pubishing Group A call from someone was definitely received by Dr. Gibson, and certainly a call from someone in the Agency to someone at Chestnut Lodge would have to have been made. The event was chronicled in a lengthy article published in the. His death was so dark and so unmentionable. Control of muscle formation by the fusogenic micropeptide myomixer. After 20 minutes, Olson developed mild symptoms of disorientation. 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. Each and every document had to be carefully scrutinized and then crosschecked against all of the other released papers. This reads as follows: 7. The body of Dr. Frank Olson has been exhumed and is undergoing an autopsy. Ike, he says, youve been doing one hell of a job as an undercover man. Talk about shutting off curiosity!!! 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. Outside the White House, after their 17-minute meeting with President Ford, Alice Olson gave a statement to the press. I wish to express my appreciation to the many loyal readers, and above all to the contributors who made my editorship such a rewarding endeavor. So was it in fact murder? As the coffin was lowered into the ground, the CIA men might have felt an odd sense of relief. Olson, Eric. The CIA was on to acid long before the flower children. In that spirit, we will try here to convey the path we followed that led, finally, to a very different story of how, and why, Frank Olson died. Or Department of Defense? Certainly if the real story to which we were being led was correct, then the government would have been forced into a very awkward position when the Olson family suddenly attached a name to the anonymous story of an Army scientist that the Rockefeller Commission had divulged. Among the mourners at the ceremony were two CIA men: Robert Lashbrook the man from room 1018A and his boss, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, architect of the CIAs MK-ULTRA program and the spy agencys mastermind of bizarre assassination techniques employing lethal biological agents ranging from anthrax to shellfish toxin. The major difficulty is placing the first burst exactly on the target, as most machine gunners are trained to spot their fire on target by observation of strike. The following year, an obscure Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffmann, working for the Sandoz pharmaceutical company, accidentally imbibed a concoction he had created while looking for a circulation stimulant. My mother, acting on the ill-considered advice of a close family friend, allowed a hastily recommended English physician to sign my father into the Priory psychiatric hospital near London. The explanation turned out to be that a member of the Scientology Church had gotten a short term job in Dr. Gibsons organization just prior to this affair and had had access to office files. MIRACLE OF SURGERY On the other hand, a medical report prepared by the Army 18 years after Boyles death states that live anthrax bacteria could not be (and never was) cultivated from blood, sputum, nose and throat, or skin at any time during the illness, not from tissue and fluids taken at autopsy. . A deeply moral and religious man, Frank Olson had been grappling with an ethical dilemma related to his work. While in Europe, according to his son, Eric, Frank Olson also learned that the Americans were deploying Anthrax against enemy troops in Korea. By the time the ambulance arrived, Olson was dead. According to Cournoyer, through his work at Camp Detrick, Frank Olson had acquired direct knowledge of illegal biowarfare experiments conducted by U.S. armed forces and the CIA on Korean soldiers and civilians. Sargant saw Frank Olson after his brief visit to Norway and West Germany, including Berlin, in the summer of 1953. I want to travel to Long Island to interview a former narcotics agent who worked undercover for the CIA dosing people with LSD. My parole officer would have ordered a urine test on the spot. We tested this stuff they call the Sextender, Feldman went on. The next day, Lashbrook and Ruwet took Olson to the home of John Mulholland, a professional magician whom the TSS had hired to write a manual adapting the magicians art to covert activities. Gottlieb had tasked Mulholland with developing sleight-of-hand techniques that CIA agents could use to slip drugs into drinks. Will be to arrive where we started 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. They mailed letters to Ruwet and Colby. The North Korean Government has said it is not holding any Americans. According to the invitation, it was a conference for sports journalists. Are you a gangster? they asked. Since the date set by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion fell only four weeks after his arrival in Moscow, the CIA had a strong motive for preventing his travel to Havana. They practiced germ attacks in airports and on the New York subway, tracking air currents and calculating the potential death toll. With only an hour between the time Lashbrook was slated to meet with Mulholland and Frank Olsons next appointment with Dr. Abramson, it might have been simply out of convenience that Lashbrook suggested that Olson and Col. Ruwet accompany him on this visit. Ideally, only one person will be involved. Norman and his family celebrate together with Alice and Frank Olson and their children. While waiting in the outer office agent Walter P. T. was nevertheless able to overhear the conversation of the two men, which he records in his report. 7.58 I gained confirmation for some of Pastores remembrances from another former Hotel Statler employee, employed, upon my meeting with him, at the relocated Penn Bar.He was on duty at the hotel the night of Olsons death. Perhaps Lashbrook, Gottlieb, and or Agency the security officers who were called in subsequently checked their own assassination manual and discovered that the best alibi of choice is one in which it is claimed that the assassination/witness saw nothing. The man whom the CIA documents credit with inspiring the program is Dr. L. Wilson Greene of the Army Chemical Corps, who had long urged the United States to embark upon psychochemical warfare. By morning, he was still in an agitated state. Olson had been given LSD without being told, and 10 days later jumped to his death from the 10th floor of a New York City hotel. Earlier in 1943-1944, Olson, assigned to Division D at the Chemical Corps Edgewood Arsenal, and Abramson worked closely together on a prototype project involving simulated exercises aimed at biological-contamination of the New York City water supply. That is only reasonably explainable as having occurred by reason of his being shall we say silenced, being rendered unable to defend himself, so that he could be tossed out of the window.. Barred from pursuing the case in civil court, he turned to the criminal justice system. All hands agreed that () among the returning POWs He left a computer running in his home, a glass of wine on the table, and the lights and radio on. Its doubtful there is one. Not only had the elite government scientist whose death was in questionnotdied in the manner officially described, his body did not bear the injuries stated in his autopsy report. This call was received the day before a second call on the day of Olsons death informing Gibson that Dr. Olson would not be coming. Nevertheless, a deal was struck. More searching and additional questing lay before me. Far from ending with Olson's death, the LSD experiments continued for two decades. Have you heard of The Shadow novels? Dr. Abramson makes clear in the Colby documents that he wanted to be kept out of it. This is merely the first of a whole series of security problems that would have arisen. MK-ULTRA poisoned foreign and domestic enemies with LSD to induce mental breakdown and/ or suicide. The caller was the same man with whom Gibson has spoken the day before. During the ten years of MKULTRAs existence, the agencys inspector general reported after its termination in 1963, the program experimented with electro-shock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials.. One of the things Mulholland may have been helping them do was to create a cover story for whatthey were doing in New York in the first place, notes Eric Olson. The only way to be sure is to demand that federal officials open the files on biological and chemical experiments, just as they did on radiation experiments. An effective alternative to this would be for you to come..on May, 13, 14, or 15 to discuss the current status of the work. In the first instance our attention was drawn to Olsons face and neck. Compounding the familys sense of shock was the seeming improbability of the tragedy. The 1975 Senate investigation revealed that the SO Division supplied biological materials for several planned CIA attacks, none of which were successful. 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. The woman who sold us the crayons said, What are you guys doing?, We said, Were going to make a sign, HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! Eric Olson, In giving the six unwitting Harvard seniors LSD that spring of 1954, Dr. Hyde was motivated by the highest ideals. They said he had been so badly mutilated in the fall that it wouldnt be right for the family to see him. A Gottlieb memo in 1953 stated that MK-ULTRA Subproject 6 is designed to develop a reliable source of lysergic acid derivatives within the U.S., as opposed to our present complete depen upon [DELETED I sources, and in addition, it aims to extend the isolation and testing program of the hypnoti c nat- products from the Rivea species of plants obtained from [DELETED].. Their first sons were born within a few days of each other in 1944. The Eighty Greatest Conspiracies of All Time: Historys Biggest Mysteries, Coverups, and Cabals. Join Facebook to connect with Eric Olson Harvard and others you may know. That kind of an attitude of loyalty was one way of expressing your Americanism.. John Mulholland died at age 71 on February 25, 1970 after a long illness in University Hospital, New York. That was part of the occupational hazard of the job. The former director, whom the government declines to identify, also claimed, however, that he didnt recall any executions of double agents actually occurring during his tenure there. In Ruwet and Lashbrooks version of events, the three flew back to Washington later that morning. I cant imagine what would happen if you ever tangled with him. The study of prostitutes for clandestine use. The Agency conducted 149 separate projects involving drug testing, behavior modification, and secret administration of mind-altering chemicals at 80 US and Canadian universities, hospitals, research foundations, and prisons. His first order of business was to visit room 1018A at the Statler Hotel (by that time, renamed the Pennsylvania Hotel). I am fully cognizant of the dread scourge of non-involvement that causes many people to play the clam when information is sought. As the scientist responsible for biological warfare experiments, Frank Olson was among the most important holders of confidential information during the Cold War. In Olsons case, it took the government until 1975 to admit to the LSD experiment. I have checked the weather for the 27th and 28th, and found that in fact, contarary to what was claimed, the weather was good for flying.]. William A. Boyles, a 46-year-old microbiologist, inhaled anthrax spores on the job in 1951 and died a few days later. We drifted back down to the swimming pool, and an hour passed, and then Eric joined us. Among the tasks of the dirty tricks department in Building 1412 are brainwashing, drugs and torture, as well as murder by means of poisons and bacteria. He is of a mind that his father had expressed distress over experiments he was conducting and the possible use of the results. Through Thomas, Eric learned that during a trip to London in the summer of 1953 his father had apparently confided in William Sargant, a consultant psychiatrist who advised British intelligence on brainwashing techniques. It seemed remarkable to me that the organizational gap in the intelligence world between the light side (psychic supermen) and the dark side (covert assassinations) has been so narrow. In fact, as we have seen, Murray was indeed a Cold War warriornot, perhaps, as prominent a player as some, but a player nonetheless. After six months, in March 1953, Olson reverted back to his former position at his own request. 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). 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