13.15 However, he had been under contract to prepare a manual, Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception, that applied the magicians art to covert activities, such as slipping drugs into drinks. Eric Olson's income source is mostly from being a successful Actor. ), And although LSD may have been the most sensational subject, Lee and Shlain make clear that it was far from the only field in which the government was prime mover. Although he remained handicapped for life, he compensated by teaching himself to become a graceful square dancer. I have connections with local people as a dentist, and I see people on a daily basis who come in and read the local paper, and that affects me., Nils looked over at Eric, who was saying something to Julia, across the garden, but we couldnt hear what. The program noted that the New York City district attorneys office has reopened the 1953 case as a homicide investigation. The remarkable example of Evan Thomas failure to see what he himself placed in front of his own eyes on page 212 ofThe Very Best Menis not the only case where an author has blinked when faced with the Frank Olson story. He was pushed out. Born with two clubfeet, Gottlieb spent much of his life almost compulsively adapting himself to the external world. As Eric Olson surmised, In the wake of the Nuremburg trials in the late 1940s, the United States could not afford to be exposed as a sponsor of the sort of research it had prosecuted the Nazis for undertaking.. A sunny view of human nature, that. Firearms have other drawbacks. During all these close and careful scientific perambulations, my overriding concentration was with the goings-on in Olsons room that might have precipitated his fall from it. Passages in the documents they had received pertaining to a C.I.A. His resistance or, rather, the reaction to quiet his resistance by such third persons might have left its imprint on the skull of Dr. Olson. Two decades passed. What do you mean, fell or jumped?, We dont know if he fell, said one of the men. Dr Sargant was engaged by me as a consultant for a number of programmes. Things did not go well. During the war, one of Whites projects for the OSS was the quest for a truth drug, a serum that could be administered to prisoners of war or captured spies during interrogations. In a full autopsy, the external evaluation consists of examining old injuries, along with tattoos and scars. The prevailing mood was one fear, perhaps even paranoia. MAMBO The point is'' -- and here his eyes go flat and cold and relentless -- what happened in the damned room. In fact, as we have seen, Murray was indeed a Cold War warriornot, perhaps, as prominent a player as some, but a player nonetheless. Norman told Eric that the Artichoke story was true. See bio. Experiments. U.S. News & World Report. During this visit, Dr. Olson became highly suspicious and mixed up. When the family, in due course, met with Colby, who later reported that this had been among the most difficult assignments he had ever had, he offered them 150 pages of redacted documents that he claimed amounted to the entire file that was relevant to their concerns. He had been agitated and worried about something and from time to time discussed leaving Detrick, leaving his job and retraining himself as a dentist. Alice Olson roused her nine-year-old son, Eric, from bed and led him into the living room. But this was not some primer for amateur magicians to learn a few tricks. assassination plots on national leaders and was an enthusiastic supporter of mind control. In this report, Albarelli and Kelly disclose new evidence they have uncovered in this case. The same year, colleagues recall, Olson was influenced by a new book by a mentor. Among the other Big Five weapons: a 7.62 mm rifle cartridge packed with anthrax or botulinum toxin that would disperse in the air on impact; a time-delay bomblet that would release a cloud of bacteria when a train or truck convoy passed; and a pressurized can that sprayed an aerosol of germs. It was like a comedy routine, like the Marx Brothers Become Covert Assassins, and sometimes it seemed to Eric as if his family were the only people not laughing. I cant imagine what would happen if you ever tangled with him. Either they wanted to talk about narcotics, security or crime. 29.35 But with the postwar revelations of Nazi atrocities in the name of science, the need for formal ethical guidelines became painfully clear, The Nuremberg code was the most important document of this period. As America entered the 1950s, the world around John Mulholland was changing. 3.15 The Man Who Knew Too Much.Gentlemens Quarterly, January 2000. It is possible that after Boyles death, blood taken early in his illness was found to contain anthrax. Even a rock or a heavy stick will do, and nothing resembling a weapon need be procured, carried or subsequently disposed of. Facebook gives people the. That might well have happened, he said, if animal tests showed it to be more virulent than the existing weapons strain, the only means of checking potency at the time. One day in 1978, Greg came to my university office, his face glowing, and his smile evoking the best of news. While the family enjoys summertime at the lake, Frank retreats into his own world. Still other Paperclip scientists were sent to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, where they were put on the CIA payroll and began testing Nazi nerve and mustard gases on unwitting American GIs, seriously injuring several. BE COOL, Dell, 1999, p. 233). Friday evening he came home and spent the weekend in this house with my mother, my brother and sister and me and during much of the weekend they sat on the sofa which was just over here. It was his belief that the perpetrators were contract killers associated with a mob family and the C.I.A. In 2000 this source traveled to the United States to speak with the Assistant District Attorney assigned to the case, and also to Eric Olson. The sleep they might have induced in him could have been his last. His report of his dental comparisons was thorough and constituted additional strong support for the remains being those of Frank Olson, even though it lacked the element of surprise that his dental expertise revealed from the exhumed teeth of Jesse Woodson James. One item on the list suggested that someone look into Trip to Paris and Norway in 1953(?) Gottlieb later testified and Richard Helms confirmed that in ordering the destruction of the papers, Gottlieb was carrying out then-CIA Director Helms verbal orders. So I said What was the conversation? She said the man in the room called this number out in Long Island and said Well, hes gone and the man on the other end said Well, thats too bad and they both hung up.. After the war, Murrays contributions to personality theory, including the TAT, personnel assessment, and techniques for analyzing foreign leaders and countries, became virtual Cold War institutions. Yet the next day, he called his wife to assure her that he was better and expected to see her the following day. 's general counsel, called in immediately in 1953 to investigate Olson's death, noted that the official story -- that LSD ''triggered'' the suicide -- was ''completely inconsistent'' with the facts in the case. What are they trying to do with me? Bottom Line: University of Montana Montana linebacker Dante Olson was named NCAA Division II Defensive Player of the Year in 2019. . Yeah, said Norman. He explained it thus: One of the difficulties of determining explicitly the effect of the drug itself is that the subject and the observer are both conscious of the fact that an experiment is being performed. He decided the time had come to close the case and to rebury his father. From these encounters, Eric realized that he was up against a brotherhood of silence and that his father had once belonged to it. But, it seemed, the curse of the past wouldnt let go. Those four sentences stimulated the authors own Freedom of Information Act request calling for the Central Intelligence Agency to release of any information or records relating to Mulhollands work with the CIA, including any written agreements between him and the Agency, copies of the documents he produced, or other related materials. Later, it would be learned that the Soviets didnt use drugs at all to accomplish this. Adam Cray. After decades of doubts and confusion, it appeared that the strange story had finally found a fitting conclusion. Dr. Gibson informed me that he had been the psychiatrist on duty at the Chestnut Lodge hospital in Rockville, Maryland when Lashbrook, without identifying himself, had called from New York City just hours before Dr. Olson died. From him I learned that the RIA tests had all given positive results for the presence of LSD in the tissues. Olson went back to New York on November 28 and checked into the Statler Hotel. The practice of keeping little or no record of the activity was standard MKNAOMI procedure, a CIA investigator wrote. 3. Menu Log In Sign Up He traveled to Leopoldville (Kimshasa) with an Agency-developed bio-toxin in his diplomatic bag. That is exactly what would have transpired if he had been dropped rather than propelled through the window. Are you a gangster? they asked. For this reason the time estimates are difficult to make in advance and it is apparent at this time that the estimate was too short for the adequate preparation of this manual. Mulholland learned his lessons well. He was laying there looking at me, trying to speak to me, very earnest When the casket was opened in 1994 Frank Olsons upper body was not disfigured as the New York Medical Examiners Report had claimed in 1953. Upon my inquiring about the conversation between him and Dr. Lashbrook on the morning of Olsons death, I was stunned to hear yet another conflicting account from Lashbrook of the occurrence. A 1975 report by the CIAs inspectorgeneral summed it up: The program had explored avenues of control of human behavior involving such subjects as radiation, electroshock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials. The CIA even set up its own brothel to monitor the effects of the hallucinogen on prostitutes and their unsuspecting clients. The rest of the Armys offensive biological weapons program thought big: 500-pound anthrax bombs that could contaminate entire cities. If distance was supposed to heal him, however, the cure didn't work. The Cold War There was no explanation in these pages, for example, about why the C.I.A. The investigator had interviewed William Sargant, the English psychiatrist and consultant to British intelligence (and author of an early book on brainwashing). If at the end of three days of consultation with Abramson the patient killed himself (as the story was to be told) then it had to be as an unfortunate event happening before the hospitalization that had been arranged could be put into effect. From 1953 to 1975, as Alice Olson descended into alcoholism and fought back to sobriety, she and her children were told nothing about LSD. He was a member of the CIA. Eliot writes: This is a moment like that, a moment when the circle closes. However, there are many cases in which firearms are probably more efficient than any other means. , a professor of psychiatry at Yale and an expert on brainwashing, takes the view that the CIAs mind-control experiments were the product of a lurid imagination, leading to destructive processes in the name of science. Dr. Lifton, whom the CIA tried unsuccessfully to recruit in the early 1960s to work on the psychological breakdown of captured enemy guerrillas, said that all these events showed how our profession can be drawn into corruption. Quite aside from the moral issues, Lifton believes that the CIA research was not a serious professional effort, for it lacked the nccessary scientific standards. The discovery of the Nazis Dachau notes after the war by U.S. Navy investigators triggered intense interest in mescaline in American intelligence circles. But nobody bothered to notify our family that this story was being released. 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. He's a veteran of numerous campaigns, having led Marco Rubio's digital team during his 2016 campaign for president, served as digital director of Ed Gillespie's campaign for Virginia Governor in 2017 and US Senate in 2014, and advised on digital strategy for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign in 2016 . cover organization to engage in LSD experimentation, using it as an adjunct to psychotherapy on abnormal or mentally disturbed persons. Dr. Gibson said that normally an immediate hospitalization at Chestnut Lodge would have been impossible, due to the long waiting list which usually required a one year wait. But if nobody saw nuthin, somebody did hear something. American prisoners of war, paraded before the press by their North Korean captors, confessed in Zombie-like fashion that the US was using chemical and biological warfare against them. In the early morning of November 28, the CIA official who had shared the hotel room with Frank Olson did not tell Dr. Gibson that he was awakened by the sound of crashing glass when his roommate went through the window. We would use the injury and the information to make this determination. Soon a list of 37 physiological agents was drawn up for possible use in interrogations. That is, the patients of inexperienced LSD therapists were more likely to have bad trips. And for quite a long time, possibly ever since my father began working at Detrick, the whole business about the monkey dying was a very delicate matter for him. 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]. It did not spontaneously appear among the youth of the Western world as a gift from the God of Gettin High. The Special Operations Divison at Detrick was the governments most secret biological weapons laboratory. Two Canadian researchers, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, wrote a 1998 book arguing that such attacks occurred. Hed been in the house on the telephone. Before the end of the war, a painful stomach ulcer had forced Olson to seek a medical discharge from the Army. 5.35 In documents from the Gerald Ford Library we were about to discover the extreme concern in the 1975 White House that highly classified national security information was at stake in the death of Frank Olson. At the time, the spook scientists suspected that LSD had the potential to reprogram the human personality. On the morning of January 1, 1963, Dr. Gilbert Bogel, and his lover, Mrs. Margaret Chandler, were found dead on a river bank after a riotous party given by staff of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. She spent twenty years thinking her husband was an ordinary suicide, which is onerous for a family to believe since there are no ordinary suicides. And althoughas we already knowSargant wanted the British government to distance itself from the CIAs work with MK-ULTRA, Miniccino says he nevertheless was committed to the principle of mind control and became the link between the British Secret Intelligence Service and MK-ULTRA. Feldman told Eric that Frank Olson had been murdered. For that matter to the contrary. 31.41 Voice of Ira (Ike) Feldman/Former CIA agent Anyway, thats when they shut down the New York operation and moved it to San Francisco. The Olson affair was successfully covered up by the CIA for over 20 years. 19.15 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager: 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. Sidney Gottlieb retired from the CIA in 1973, receiving the Agencys Distinguished Intelligence Medal for his 22 years of service. That same year, Eric moved to Sweden, the birth country of his fathers parents, hoping to put some distance between himself and the family curse. It had not been noted in Dr. Di Maios first autopsy report. For twenty odd years, the Olson family remained in a state of perplexity about these events. But he was a great cop. Many others at Detrick were highly skeptical to say the least. Looking up 13 floors, Pastore saw a dangling blind flapping through an open window frame. Supplyingbackground facts in order that a complete novice in the subject can appreciate the underlying reasons for the procedures suggested. Just as importantly, the pathologist did not find the facial lacerations that had been recorded by the coroner in 1953 (though the skin was intact upon exhumation of the remains), though cuts would have been expected from a violent thrust through glass. The Division had three primary functions: assessing the vulnerability of American installations to biological attack; developing techniques for offensive use of biological weapons; and biological research for the CIA. The documents claimed that during a meeting between the C.I.A. Some of these people would become regulars with me in my future exhumations. It did not clear his mind; it worsened his anxieties and nine days later Frank Olson was dead, having jumped or been pushed through a window on the tenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City. But the sensational notion of LSD administered by the CIA served wonderfully to conceal this gap. [ From reading Dr. Abramsons report it is not readily evident what the CIA wanted in particular to have in it.] Dr. Gibson explained that Chestnut Lodge did not have security-cleared psychiatrists on its staff at that time, and that security would indeed have been a problem had psychotherapeutic treatment begun at Chestnut Lodge. Instead we will fast forward to key the key moments that have, piece by piece, eviscerated the 1975 story and left a very different one in its place. He was CIA and they took it to the end.. Walter, in Florida, agreed with Patricks diagnosis. 2022-02 to present | Product Manager (Infrastructure Team) Employment. (CIA assassination manual found, poster 7.). This Is the account he gave me of your fathers death which I now feel free to make public. We are familiar with the health risks to which workers in plutonium plants were subjected during the Cold War. It also suggested that the perpetrator then play the horrified witness, and that drugs be used for the subjects preparation. Yeah it is, said Nils. He reacts badly to the drug, becomes unstable, and is taken to New York for treatment. This CIA research included an MKULTRA subproject (code name MKNAOMI) in which SOD was to produce and maintain vicious mutant germ strains capable of killing or incapacitating would-be victims. It is understandable that he might fail to remember any executions; for admitting a role in such killings could well lead to arrest and prosecution for conspiracy to commit murder in Europe, if not in the United States itself.*. It seemed to unfurl the winding processes of a person's unconscious and lay them out flat on paper. Frank Olson also used photography. He died because of security concerns regarding disavowed programs of terminal interrogation and the use of biological weapons in Korea. The Agency examined both the active and the retired files of all the branches of the CIA considered likely to have had an association with the project, but never looked into the Budget and Fiscal Section retired records. And third, the motive for murder turned out to be far more substantial than we had dared to imagine. While he continued his performance schedule, he cleared his calendar of other commitments. He still has an office here in Fort Detrick, in the US armys center for biological weapons. He did confirm night manager Armond Pastores statement that Olson was still breathing as he lay on the sidewalk. When Olson died there were no papers to identify him. Repeated passes through a particular species usually increase the bacterias lethality toward that species, said David L. Huxsoll, who oversaw anthrax vaccine tests as commander of the Armys biodefense center in the 1980s. And we are familiar with the risks taken with the lives of persons who were subjects of unwitting government experiments of various kinds. 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. And to make an end is to make a beginning. 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.. Following a big opium smuggling bust in 1947, Jack Ruby was picked up and hauled in for interrogation, then later let off the hook by none other than White. Starrs is not sure that Olson will be able to do so. 28.32 In this context, the fact that Richard Helms was CIA chief of operations at the time of my fathers 1961 suicide attempt has sinister implications. In both cases the claim was that nobody saw anything even though a CIA official allegedly acting as an escort and protector was sleeping in the next bed when Frank Olson fell or jumped out the window of a very small room. 19.50 But why had Olson been taken to see Dr Abramson who was not a psychiatrist at all but a skin allergist? Of course, if the blow is very heavy, any portion of the upper skull will do. This notwithstanding,Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deceptionremains John Mulhollands most secret book of secrets. In fact, Sandoz had produced only about 40 grams of LSD in the ten years since its psychoactive features were first discovered by Albert Hofmann. An SOD driver met Olson and Ruwet at National Airport. The military offered little help, he added: The Army has no records on MKNAOMI or on the Special Operations Division.. They went directly to the publisher.. The probabilities, taken together, strongly and relentlessly suggest that it was a homicide. Eric would later uncover an official memorandum of understanding between the CIA and the Department of Justice essentially excusing the Agency from having to report crimes committed by its own personnel when doing so might compromise highly classified and complex covert operations.. Lying on the pavement, bloodied and broken, was Frank Olson. First they talked about security, and Abramson said to Lashbrook that he was worried about him. It was intended to assess what kind of risk he posed and then eliminate him if necessary. People could carry a brown bag with light bulbs in it and nobody would be suspicious, Pannier said. It was called the ''collage method,'' and it involved getting survivors to paste together pictures, using anything they felt like clipping out of newspapers and magazines. That element was the Korean War. Officially, the MK-ULTRA program ran from 1953 to 1964, at which time it was renamed MK-SEARCH and continued until 1973. I realized then that my professional ivory-tower had not equipped me for the C.I.A.s world of feints, flaws and foibles. 6.19 Voice of Eric Olson: Walter believes the original weapons strain of anthrax, a variety called Vollum after the British scientist who isolated it, was upgraded with bacteria collected from three Detrick workers who were accidentally infected. No report may be made. They mailed letters to Ruwet and Colby. He explained to me that he sometimes did work on Saturdays, so that it is plausible that he would have been at the hospital on Saturday November 28. if a man is struck just once in the body cavity, his death is almost entirely certain. In the spring of 2000 Eric Olson, Frank Olsons son, called me in my office at the University of Virginia. Aside from the offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in this field of covert chemical and biological warfare gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemies theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are. Eric gazed, smiling, at the screen. On the morning after the incident, he learned from his fathers government boss, Colonel Vincent Ruwet, that his father had died in a work-related accident that had occurred in a hotel. It would become Project MKULTRA, Subproject 4. Included would be explanations of(the skills) required and how quickly to master such skills. The moment was one to be savored by him and the Olson family. Frank is troubled by something. Author Robert Kaiser echoed that doctors conclusions in his book, James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King, also had a known fascination with hypnosis, and, more recently, British lawyer Fenton Bressler has assembled circumstantial evidence to support a theory that Mark David Chapman, slayer of John Lennon, was subject to CIA mind control. Hard as it was to imagine that the government would murder an American citizen and then disguise that murder, first as a suicide and then as a reaction to an LSD overdose, we now felt compelled by the overwhelming weight of the evidence to accept this scenario as the only plausible account of this whole complex affair. As he explained it to me, he was just a dumb cop.. Now after the passage of so many years since his fathers death, the political scene in Washington, D.C. had changed. Eric Olson says, "The Cold War is over and there are now ongoing national debates about the future of the CIA and about unethical medical testing on humans. The forensic team discovered this hematoma, and concluded it must have come from a blow to the head in the room, a full three years before we found the CIAs assassination manual. The anthrax letters that killed five and caused illness to several others have haunted Eric ever since. Instead, Dr. Gibson was told that Frank Olsons CIA escort had awakened to see Olson standing in the middle of the room. The kit consisted of a lethal toxin possibly anthrax concealed in a tube of toothpaste. It was then that White hired Feldman. 5.17 Yet when he returned from work the next day, he told Alice that his colleagues had reassured him. Although all outside contractors I were to be notified of Gibbons ban, the testing nonetheless went on. Later in the evening of that same Tuesday, Abramson visited Olsons hotel room and brought a bottle of bourbon and some Nembutal for Dr. Olson. But the darkest episode may well have been one in which John Mulholland found himself personally involved during the very first year of his MKULTRA work: the death of Dr. Frank Olson[44]. If Eric is right, slipping LSD into Olson's Cointreau was not an experiment that went wrong: it was designed to get him to talk while hallucinating. Although his family didnt know it, he had also been recruited by the CIA for a program code-named Artichoke, part of a decades-long hunt for drugs to make enemy prisoners spill their secrets. The AP story appears below, followed by my notes on that meeting. The solids, gases and liquids were not harmless substances. Japanese global apparel retailer UNIQLO introduces its UT Skater lineup through an exclusive Skater Event last February 22, 2023. In Kansas City the police picked us up, figuring we were runaways, and when they found out we werent they let us stay in their jail., Yeah, thats a kind of unbelievable mystery., (Erics mother Alice had died by 1994. My fathers case covers both. 1 man in the Federal Bureau fo Narcotics.