From what I could determine from many background sources, there was certainly substantial controversy over whether Frank Olsons death was an accident, a suicide or, more ominously, a homicide. 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. Or something in the sight. Deadly effective though it may be, biological warfare has drawbacks. These cunts all thought I was a racketeer, Feldman explained. Well, Gottlieb is like that except hes cosmic in scope, interested in everything. Eric stared down at a face he had last seen 41 years before. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, the CIA men might have felt an odd sense of relief. It looked like a family holiday, except the family werent with him. What percentage of clicks do PPC ads get? It was a family that had, in effect, been terrorized. Another parallel exists. The Cold War was at its height. And they had to have it too. The President assured us that the White House would support our efforts to obtain justice. It would begin a lifelong love of conjuring. And one of the phone numbers that Lashbrook carried that fateful night was for George White, the man in charge of the program, whose alias was Morgan Hall. Its tough on everyone when they die.. Hanging, obstruction of airways with some object, smothering, or strangulation can cause asphyxia and each has specific manifestations. But unlike the army experiments, the subjects of these tests, which took place in an apartment disguised as a brothel, would not be informed. Its hard to accept that your father didnt die because of suicide, nor did he die because of negligence after a drug experiment, he died because they killed him. In 1978 another CIA officer, John Paisley, also vaanished there in another boating accident. As our understanding of Frank Olsons work grew, our attention was again drawn back to the Colby documents, and we became aware of another gaping hole in the story we had been given. The authors wrote that the drugs early use was among small groups of intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast universities. View the profiles of people named Eric Olson Harvard. And then lure them into revealing secrets. You speak all these languages. 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. No, he said, the old cottage is still there. Experiments. U.S. News & World Report. Then Dr. Gibsons wife appeared. According to the file, Olson had suffered a chemically-induced psychotic flashback a week after he had been slipped the dose of LSD. Nor was this agency the only covert intelligence bureaucracy sponsoring Cold War studies. Eric had decided for the purposes of clarity to tell the story primarily through the narrative of his weekend with Norman Cournoyer. Starrs listened to Eric Olson talk yesterday about putting his fathers death in the past. No, Feldman replied with a wave of his cigar, Im a goddamn CIA agent.. I think people say these things in the hope theyll have sleep-filled nights again, Starrs said. 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. And then Erics mother became hysterical. This individual, the article stated, had not been made aware he had been given LSD until twenty minutes after it had been administered. It had been part of a larger C.I.A. In 1997, after the C.I.A. The answer given by the caller was that Dr. Olson was not currently in treatment and was not under the care of a doctor. Sargent told me his recommendation was acted upon by his superiors. I always wanted to be a gangster, Feldman told me. We spied on high government officials like Barry Goldwater and Bobby Kennedy; we had all of those activities advertised in the marketplace. The police had little reason to see any connection between paper and the incident. Dr. Frank Olson worked in this area. He says, This is my bag of dirty tricks. He had all kinds of crap in that bag. Interestingly, the belief that ones psyche is being invaded by radio transmissions or electrical implants is considered a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. Consequently, we knew those results would likely be a long time coming. In June of that year I met Dr. Eric Olson in New York, and we were both struck by the similarities between the cases of our respective fathers. First the death was not a suicide. 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. They were spic-and-span. He has an impressive military record, graduating as a Navy SEAL in 1974 before working his way up to becoming the first SEAL to ever be appointed Admiral, and the first naval officer to head USSOCOM. In addition his signed statement to the C.I.A. In fact, it might be argued that, PR-wise, a CIA employee dying in a bungled CIA drug experiment is somewhat less scandalous than an innocent Army civilian as fallguy. Fifty years after the fact, conventional history records Dr. Frank Olsons death as perhaps the most infamous repercussion of MK-ULTRA, the CIAs illegal quest to modify an individuals behavior by covert means using hypnosis, electroshock treatment and psychotropic drugs such as LSD. Tens of thousands of documents were released. I didnt want to leave it, one CIA agent said of his first LSD trip I felt I would be going back to a place where I wouldnt be able to hold on to this kind of beauty.. I recommend that you join a support group for children whose parents have committed suicide.. Just like every year. His death was so dark and so unmentionable. Olson was also taken to see John Mulholland, a New York magician on the C.I.A. Even more remarkable than what he did not find was what Starrs did find: A large bruise over Olsons left eye, which suggested to Starrs that the victim had been smashed on the head before plunging through the window. Jones also sold White a portable toilet for observation post.. Sexual encounters and the study of prostitutes for clandestine use. Perhaps we will never know what really happened to Frank Olson, but the important thing was that Eric had achieved closure. We try to assassinate people and we get there too late. Scientists thought both were harmless, though later research found that SM could cause illness or death in people with weakened immune systems. If desired, I am prepared to start work on this project immediately. 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. 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! I checked you out. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly-cased location. At the same, the Agency had begun to rely increasingly on Mulholland for his advice and expertise. 15.30 Meanwhile, the US army was conducting extensive experiments with a new miracle drug: LSD. MIRACLE OF SURGERY Apparently the cover story was changed later on Saturday morning, after the call to Gibson had been made. Those above ground investigations would include securing interviews, with people with knowledge of the incident. The point is'' -- and here his eyes go flat and cold and relentless -- what happened in the damned room. Should the verb disappeared be taken to mean jumped? The C.I.A.s activities were disguised in projects bearing innocuous names that concealed their actual purpose. Like the documents released to John Marks in 1977, these files were heavily though inconsistently redacted. Sometimes lacerations result, which is a tearing injury from impact and has ragged or abraded edges, often with bruising. 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. One question is why Lashbrook (or Abramson if that was who the caller was) would have called to arrange hospitalization, possibly to begin as early as that same night, if the intention was to kill the patient. That path involved information retrieval, an intelligence euphemism for interrogation techniques pioneered under the ARTICHOKE project. Eric turned the corner to see the family doctor sitting there. 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. Curiously, Whites widow donated his papers to the Electronics Museum at Foothill Junior College, a two-year school set amidst the rolling Los Altes hills 40 miles south of San Francisco. 2001H.P. They were a wonderful, much-loved couple with a young son, Jonathan. These were not formal patient/doctor consultations but rather Sargent trying to establish what Frank Olson had seen and done in Europe. Arrangements were made for Frank Olsons immediate admission to the hospital. The. But, by 1965, about 2,000 studies of the drug had been published: Conservative estimates suggest that over 30,000 psychiatric patients and several thousand normal volunteers had been given LSD during this period. (The Shakespearean parallels werent lost on the scholarly Eric; think Hamlet, he liked to say, but on the order of years, not months.) Eventually, Eric would uncover tantalizing evidence suggesting that his father, far from being the victim of a drug experiment gone awry, may have been murdered as the proverbial man who knew too much. If so, it would appear that Maryland waters are particularly unkind to retired members of the CIA. 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. Eric Olson. He, alone among the interrogators, had a scientific knowledge of how to administer drugs and chemicals. MK-ULTRA? Norman lives in a large white bungalow in an upmarket suburban street. The cops said what happened he said: I dont know, I just heard a crash of glass and I then I see, that Frank Olson is out of the window. Instead, the son says, his father was killed by the CIA because officials there feared he would divulge classified information concerning the United States use of biological weapons in Korea. Mulholland devoted his energies to the project and by November his first draft was complete. It was a joy to know them. Maybe some mysterious Harold junior would come along and kindly explain everything. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Suicide was certainly the finding at the inquestDr Frank Olson, a United States Army scientist, for reasons no one could fathom, had taken his own life. These drugs could be administered surreptitiously with food or drink, and given the bleakness of his existence, they might even offer a brief period of relief and pleasure, thereby creating a whole new category of longingand new leverage for his interrogators.. I am resuming work today. Enclosed was a signed receipt for the check and a notation that Gottliebs missive had taken longer than expected to reach him. Local residents remember him once turning in four kids for smoking pot, and in another incident, spraying a preacher and his congregation with water at a beach picnic. But at the time, fearing correctly that the Soviet Union had an even larger bioweapons program, Army scientists were driven to come up with more and more lethal disease strains.. They planned and acted to keep the country out of war by their stealth and cunning two qualities Mulholland long admired. Yes, he had said, I need your assistance so much that I will forgo my true innings. His knuckles, huge as carbuncles, fretted his wheel chair forward and back.. In safe assassinations, the assassin needs the usual qualities of a clandestine agent. Clearly, in its post-mortem investigation, the CIA had attempted to conceal the fact that Olson was one of its own. Even the manuscript itself would have to be written in a manner that protected the Agency should it fall into the wrong hands. He told Alice he wanted to quit his job and become a dentist. Of course, only a genius can when in concert with another genius like Hugh Montague. 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. Once, in the summer of 1975, the American government didnt hesitate to see to it that the truth was not made known. 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