He assigned the case to Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb, seasoned prosecutors on the cold cases unit. Two decades after the bizarre tragedy, Olsons eldest son, Eric, would begin to dispute the official account. This memo sets out the information provided by both Dr William Sargant, consultant psychiatrist, and William Buckley, former Station Chief of the CIA in Beirut, Lebanon. He set about finding remedies including electroshock (60,000 ECTs in a single year), lobotomies and other forms of psychosurgery, sensory deprivation and mind-altering drugsall used on patients who had little or no say in their treatment. Olson had moved three times in high school and was struggling in biology, an essential course for his major. But he did not explain what he meant any further. Ill have to tell my wife. He doesnt remember which finger it was, he said, but he does remember that his wife, Evelyn, could see him only through a glass barrier designed to keep any dangerous microbes contained during treatment, At 77, Kreh, who lives in Cockeysville, lives the full life of a fishing celebrity, writing magazine articles, taking VIPs on fly-fishing expeditions and endorsing products. He was turning, no doubt about it, Cournoyer says. This was one of Gottliebs MK-ULTRA subprojects and it was concerned with toxic delirium, uremic coma and cerebral toxicity from poisoning. Cancer and diabetic patients were given chemical compounds in order to study the eff ect on mental function of large doses of the compound. The document, which has heavy deletions, does not specifically mention LSD as the drug in these tests, but a former CIA official familiar with this particular program said privately that it couldnt have been anything else.. Mans gonna commit suicide. Oh I met him, Dr. Gibson said. Before long, I had half a dozen girls working for me. When Eric finished, the central image of his collage was a grainy picture of a man falling head first out of a window. During the ensuing uproar, the scientist was identified as Frank Olson. . One of the drinks has been spiked. We want you to test these mind-bending drugs. I said, Why the hell do you want to test mind-bending drugs? He said, Have you ever heard of, Dick Russell, author of a recent book on the Kennedy assassination titled, One of the CIAs mob contacts long suspected of involvement in John Kennedys assassination was the Las Vegas, 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. When returning American POWs reported this the first use of bacterial weapons by the United States in war authorities in Washington dismissed their claims as products of brainwashing. I must ask about this.] He said I could only publish what he had said after his death. Gloria gets the horrors Janet sky high, White dutifully recorded in his diary. Ideally, only one person will be involved. The Birth of BLUEBIRD How and when Mulholland came in first contact with the CIA remains unknown. Without knowing something more about them, especially about the shadowy figure of Robert Lashbrook, it would be difficult to determine with greater certainty how Frank Olson met his death. (Copies of this memorandum are available.) Professor in Philosophy . 39:03 Voice of Eric Olson: Some, locked in boxes and then given LSD, went temporarily insane. The agency wanted a drug, as LSD historians Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain put it, that would blow minds and make people crazy.. Buckley described both men as expert in hiding or destroying evidence. But the top-secret program had also involved other interrogation methods, including torture and attempts to induce amnesia in blown agents who knew too much. Five days after the Oval Office session, the Olson family met with CIA Director William Colby at the spy agencys headquarters in Langley, Virginia. 40.27 Clearly, in its post-mortem investigation, the CIA had attempted to conceal the fact that Olson was one of its own. There his wellbeing was again restored, and in September they once more went back to London, where my father almost immediately suffered a relapse. It is understood that no manipulation will be suggested which requires (actions) not normally used, nor any necessitating long practice. He revealed his intentions to Gottlieb and the other MK-ULTRA men present. Not tall, but big. And then I preceded to ask him about the germ warfare confessions, this was alleged to be by the American government, these confessions made by the American servicemen were immediately discredited by the U.S. government under the idea that these were manipulated and produced only by the effect of brainwashing. 7.22 Voice of Arthur Vidich/Brother-in-law of Frank Olson Eleven months later, the CIA claimed another victim. They wanted to know the wherewithal of those details. Colonel Edwards reported that the men had assembled at a twostory log cabin in the Deer Creek Lake area of Fort Detrick. He wrote all of those, more than three hundred Shadow novels in all. All of the material supplied to John Marks in 1977 as well as all of the material released to the Olson family by the CIA in 1975 was reviewed in light of this new evidence. But Frank Olson had a bad trip, perhaps giving rise to the legend that if you take LSD you believe you can fly and you end up falling out of windows. It was Dulles who moved the CIAs headquarters from central Washington DC to suburban Langley, Virginia (now renamed The George Bush Center For Intelligence) because he wanted to create a thoughtful, out-of-town campus milieu. Condons book was fiction; the Helms plan was not. His son, Eric, says his father told his wife that he intended to quit his job. They should not have contained any MKULTRA material. 48.30 Only two or three Agency officers at any time were cleared for access to Fort Detrick activities. Furthermore, the leaders of Americas intelligence community were the kind of men Mulholland could easily like and admire. The first lesson I learned during what has been a quarter of a century of writing about secret intelligence is that deception and disinformation are its stock-in-trade, along with subversion, corruption, blackmail and sometimes assassination. Firearms are often used in assassination, often very ineffectively. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995; paperback 1996). The CIA leadership feared a mind control gap.. Horror would be the wrong word. A brilliant biochemist, Gottlieb was a remarkable, albeit eccentric, man. But the diaries and personal papers of the Central Intelligence Agency operative who ran safe houses in San Francisco and New York in which drug-addicted prostitutes gave LSD and other drugs to unsuspecting visitors tell a different story. We could never prove it was murder, says Saracco. It took us seven weeks, and we had unbelievable adventures all the way., We camped out. Sometimes, in these 8mm films, you catch a glimpse of Franks travelling companions, three men, wearing long dark coats and trilby hats, sitting in Parisian pavement cafs, watching the girls go by. Dont go there.. Even if they were all released, their sheer bulk is sufficient to fend off even the most dedicatedor obsessedinvestigator. At one point, the two officers speculated to each other that the case might be a simple homicide with homosexual overtones and noted this in their written report. Sometime in 1952, the agency began testing LSD on individuals, presumably CIA volunteers. A third-rate novelist couldnt have ordered up a more obvious literary trope: The cat was indeed out of the bag. He received his medical degree from University of Minnesota Medical School and. In 1994 nobody had a clear idea of what that big something might be. After explaining my interest in removing Frank Olson from one cemetery and his reburial in another cemetery, beside his wife, I was directed to the local district attorney for Frederick County. They immediately began to run down leads, and were surprised to learn that the C.I.A. The government feared that highly classified information was at stake and that a court might grant full discovery, including information on the nature of Olsons work. Olson received his Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida, MBA from the Stetson University, and a BBA in marketing from University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. But, Eric wondered, what sort of secrets might his father have known? He reported that for every 1,000 persons taking LSD under medical supervision, there were 0.8 psychotic reactions lasting more than a day, and no attempted or com suicides. Copyright 2022 Eric Olson, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. financing to experiment with LSD, and his sole exercise of therapeutic attention was to prescribe Nembutal and bourbon to help Olson sleep. An allergist and immunologist practicing medicine in New York City, he had no formal training let alone a degree in psychiatry nor did he hold himself out to be an expert in the field. But he fell out the window the night before they could get him to a hospital.. One, By 1996 our suspicions had reached an intolerable threshold. Sound: Jan Schmiedt Fremont-Smith and Abramson were the links between the universities and MKULTRA. And five days after that (July 28) we were having lunch with CIA Director William Colby in the Directors 7th floor office at Langley, receiving an apology from the CIA, along with what we were told was the complete CIA file on our fathers death. Lashbrook and Olson flew back to New York that same day for further consultations with Abramson. Thats where Vollum 1B came from, said Patrick, of Frederick, who eventually headed Detricks product development division. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. Was it for keeping the allegedly psychotic Frank Olson in a hotel rather than a hospital? In both these proposed sections the tricks would differ considerably from those which have been described. A week or so later, Eric, Lisa, Nils and two lawyers met the C.I.A. 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. Pouring over the documents in which many lines and names were blacked out, the Olsons believed that significant information about their fathers death was still missing. It is illustratrated below. Eric had decided for the purposes of clarity to tell the story primarily through the narrative of his weekend with Norman Cournoyer. And he is down on the street.. Robert Lashbrook must have been a hard-boiled type, nerves of steel. Unable to obtain air transportation for a return trip on Friday night, Lashbrook and Olson made plane reservations for Saturday morning and checked into room 1018A in the Statler Hotel. The idea occurred to Gottlieb after his field agents reported difficulties in handling LSD without detection. He has created a resource which will be of lasting value to students, scholars, journalists, and the general public for years to come. Prophetically enough, before they could make contact with him, Berlin fell in a hotel room and died from head injuries. Elliot didnt mean that at all. But that was not all. Due to the fact that your letter was addressed to (a former address), it was delayed in reaching me. VOICES IN THE SILENCE 15.21 Earlier in 1975, spurred by the LSD revelations of the Rockefeller Commission, Morgenthaus office had briefly considered doing so but for reasons reportedly tied to the Olson familys settlement decided not to pursue the case. It enabled the C.I.A. Related stories: In the years after World War II the United States was busy learning what it could from the two powers it had just defeatedinformation it would then employ in its new battle against the Soviet Union. White retired from the bureau in 1965 and became the fire marshal at Stinson Beach, a resort area in Marin County, north of San Francisco. 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. This example is so good it could be used in literary theory as a case of unconscious reflexivity: inadvertently performing the very thing one is explaining. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. 2. 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. 5.49 DESIRE AND DENIAL I have given the subjects we discussed considerable thought, Mulholland wrote. And Ted Kaczynski would participate. Frank Olson has become a security risk. But it also generated alarm. He always said he never felt a goddamn thing. 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. The next morning, he returned to Ruwet's office and insisted that his resignation be accepted. I understand the stipulations. 's director, William Colby, at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. His suspicions aroused, Pastore spoke to the hotels phone operator, asking if any calls had come from room 1018A. The serpents were in the details. It made no sense. 1636: New York University (NYU) ' Feldman told Eric that Frank Olson had been murdered. She recalled one call. Contusions are ruptures of small subcutaneous blood vessels. For myself, I am solidly skeptical of anyone in Dr. Olsons allegedly distraught state of mind, or even someone of sound mind and memory, clearing a 31-inch high window opening obscured by a drawn shade, all in the darkness of a hotel room at night without having his line of travel so obstructed as to cause the venture to misfire. from Korea () the hard core group and those who had been successfully indoctrinated were excellent subjects for Artichoke work.. Pogue Distinguished Chair in Research on Cardiac Birth Defects; With the necessary consent of Eric Olson, I secured a copy which revealed its author to be Dr. Dominick Di Maio later to become the New York City medical examiner. He and Lifton wrote a paper that spoke of the way sudden, violent loss left people imprinted with death anxiety and long-term psychic numbing. The government has long denied the charge of murder. His brother, Nils, who was only 5 in 1953, consciously chose dentistry, the alternate career his father had considered. Drug experiments. Less than two weeks later (July 23) we were sitting in the Oval Office receiving an official apology from Gerald Ford. Were sorry for that.. 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. 32.58 Feldman stared at me for a long time. After the death of Dr. A. M. Wilson in April of 1930, he took over editorship ofThe Sphinx. Early in July, after months of negotiation, the two government departments gave in and agreed that the grand jury should hear Saraccos team examine Lashbrook at Venture County Courthouse during the week beginning 24 August. Erics new story is not only no longer fun, it is also exasperatingly intricate. He is from USA. Available documents indicate that a Detrick-CIA interrogation program called Artichoke with which my father was involved had debriefed these POWs prior to their recantations. He advised they are now using other channels., Other recently discovered documents concerning Blauers death reveal a more complete portrait of the specifics surrounding the experiments at the Psychiatric Institute. Thank you for the notification that my project has been approved. Had I once again passed through the looking glass? Drugs The C.I.A. Frank Rudolph Olson died on November 28, 1953, when he fell from the 13th floor of Manhattan's Hotel Statler. Cournoyers assertions resonated strongly with Eric. Indeed, its not unreasonable to speculate that the CIA-sponsored research with LSD during the 1950s in private institutions and hospitals contributed in some modest way to the drug culture-by turning many people on to the drug. Frederick News-Post [8]. (Psychology Today,poster 5.). Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. Eigelsbach, Robert Lashbrook, and Dr. [Abramson].. The name of the project is Operation Dustbin. The American military hopes to evaluate and exploit the findings German researchers made during the war. While these myriad investigations were occurring around me, I was not quiescent. As he put it, he had been taken in by the reports he received that this death was an uncomplicated out-and-out suicide. Such a third person could have been positioned to enter from the room next door through a door from that room to room 1018A. I am exceedingly skeptical of the view that Frank Olson went through that window on his own, Starrs said at the end of his investigation. He became one of the guinea pigs, but his reaction to the LSD spelled disaster for him. Such experimentation was at the heart of the MKULTRA project. One account passed down by a former staff member was that Vollum 1B was produced by passage of the Vollum strain through rabbits, she said. Otherwise, he said, she might not be safe with him under the same roof. 's director, Allen Dulles, to keep in touch with her. I do not think again from what I heard, that he was drugged because he was a security agent. In a nuclear age, Eisenhower could not risk telling the Russians or the Chinese that were willing to go to all-out war to get our prisoners back, Mr. Santoli said. By a great biographical irony, I had already come to know Henry Murray quite well at Harvard in the early 1970s, before I knew anything about the role of the CIAor the alleged role of LSDin my fathers death. We knew that Dr. Olson had been a pipe smoker, which could be reflected in his teeth, that he might have taken some falls from horseback riding, and that hed been discharged from the army for an ulcer. After six months, in March 1953, Olson reverted back to his former position at his own request. (Later, when the Eli Lilly Company of Indianapolis perfected a process to synthesize LSD, agency officials insisted on a similar agreement.) In Ruwet and Lashbrooks version of events, the three flew back to Washington later that morning. Suspected double agents were the most common targets for execution. Rumsfeld and Cheney, heads of the White House chiefs of staff, at the time recommended to President Gerald Ford that he apologize to the family in the name of the government, and to support retribution. 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. Yet I did find people who would talk, though there were major frustrations in the doing. High page and low page SEO c. PPC and product listing ads d. On page and paid search SEO. He made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew., Again he gazed stonily at me. He wrote that on Thursday evening, it was decided to experiment with the drug LSD, and for the members present to administer the drug to themselves to ascertain the effect a clandestine application would have on a meeting or conference. The report asserted that Gottlieb stated a very small dose of LSD was placed in a bottle of Cointreau, and that afterward the group was boisterous and laughing, and they could not continue the meeting or engage in sensible conversation.. Eric Olson. Blauer was being treated at the Institute for depression related to a broken marriage, but the injection was not part of his treatment. Portions of this article were taken from the forthcoming book,A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIAs Cold War Experimentsby H.P. 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