Then he returned to the family home, determined to explain his fathers death. On the whole, the American public reacted to the Frank Olson story in much the same way that they responded, 50 years later, to the news that Barney was being used to torture Iraqi detainees. 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. 46.24 Thank goodness. 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. By March of 1953, he was certainly consulting for the Agency and being paid for these professional services.Inasmuch as he was billing the government on a biweekly basis, it seems apparent that this was ongoing work with at least some of it related to development of Project MKULTRA. 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. 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. 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. Thomas, whose books include a 1988 study of the CIAs forays into mind-control. The Soviet Memorial for the Victims of the Second World War. What this means for me is that a national security homicide is not only a possibility, but really it is a necessity, when you have a certain number of ingredients together. This was the breakthrough the agency had been awaiting for three years; now it had access to all the LSD money could buy. Government officials had been impressed by the confessions of Hungarys late Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty during his trial in 1949CIA specialists were convinced he had been brainwashed with drugsand with the apparent brainwashing of American prisoners of war in North Korea. Everyone considered him to be a sympathetic family friend. He was intensely patriotic and served on the Committee for National Morale. 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. Or, to use the words of CIA terminology that we would later discover, he was dropped.. At the time, the Americans feared Hitler might attack the allied troops with a virus or bacteria. AP All-Big Ten: Stroud, Campbell, Harbaugh take top honors. Eric Olson, an intelligent, educated, introspective man, could have done many things with his life; what he in fact did was work tirelessly against a national security state that, all the while, grew into an utterly unaccountable behemoth. Family Statement on the Murder of Frank Olson, That day in July 1975 we sat at this table and read a, In the years after the case was settled we had had time to grapple more carefully with the confusing stack of, documents we had received from William Colby, elliptical, incoherent, and contradictory, We now know that this story begins long before the meeting at, In these documents the overall context for Frank Olsons death is related not to the infamous MK-ULTRA program for mind and behavior control, as is generally assumed. Once, Eric Olson says, he was, too. itself. He had entered a world of covert operations, espionage, mind control, drugs, and even death. Olson had thrown himself through the closed shade and closed window, falling 170 feet to his death on the sidewalk below. According to his colleagues he had always been a popular, extroverted person and his professional, scientific work was considered to be outstanding. Global advisory council: David Rubenstein (founding chair; also: trustee Harvard Corporation; trustee Johns Hopkins University; trustee University of Chicago; trustee Duke University 2005-2012, vice chair 2012-2013, chair 2017-2020)). Feldman tottered in, pulled a small footballshaped clear plastic ampule out of his pocket and plunked it on the table. What was so sensitive to the CIA that it would kill one of its own? Some victims are asphyxiated, which results from cutting off oxygen to the brain. 39.37 39:03 Voice of Eric Olson: Eric spent a weekend at Normans house in Connecticut. To tell that story, I ask the readers indulgence in my turning the clock back a few years. Huge drafted a fifteen-page memorandum in support of their position. Recent experience strongly suggests, moreover, that such top-secret work fosters ever more lurid schemes. The scientific studies following the autopsy can take weeks to months. The distance from the sidewalk to the windowsill of Room 1018A was about 173 feet as determined by triangulation made by Geologist George Stephens and myself from actual measurements we made onsite. (SeeNew York TimesIndex, ibid.). He has never made a public statement. Barred from pursuing the case in civil court, he turned to the criminal justice system. What remains striking in Simpsons account is the placement of the Olson suicide story in such close spatial proximity to the accounts of terminal experiments and assassinations in Europe. Such ambivalence characterized virtually the entire elite clique of East Coast professionals to which he belonged. I remember Sargent telling me that he spoke several times in 1953 with Frank Olson at Sargents consulting rooms in Harley Street, London. In the wrong hands, 100 million doses would be enough to sabotage a whole nations mental equilibrium. 40.42 The sleep they might have induced in him could have been his last. In Mount Olivet Cemetery, which dates its first interment to 1854, lay hundreds of soldiers from both sides of the Civil War, as well as veterans from the past centurys world wars. Soon, MKULTRA was testing all conceivable drugs on every kind of victim, including prison inmates, mental patients, foreigners, the terminally ill, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities. 33.07 Voice of Ira (Ike) Feldman/Former CIA agent: 34.52 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University: 36.05 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University: 36.49 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University: 37.24 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson: 38:16 Voice of Arthur Vidich/Brother-in-law of Frank Olson: 42.19 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson, 43.10 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson. Saracco and Bibb flew to meet him in California, but he would only talk in the presence of an attorney, which resulted in his stone walling all the questions asked. What little else they knew came from a small article in their local paper: Army Bacteriologist Dies in Plunge from NY Hotel. In order to assure his family of Civil Service benefits, the CIA had his death officially recorded as a classified illness.. On the contrary Lyman Kirkpatrick would report on December 1, 1953 that in a conversation with Dr. Willis Gibbons, a higher-up in the C.I.A., Gibbons indicated that, Olson had a history of mental disturbances. His source for this knowledge was not revealed. His preservation is best explained by Ambassador Porter who reported to the Secretary of State that the body fortunately was found well-preserved, the coffin having been filled with alcohol but which had evaporated. Of course, like Frank Olson, the linen winding sheet in which both he and John Paul Jones had been wrapped was added protection against post-mortem decay. On Nov. 28, 1953, Olson allegedly dove through a closed and shaded 10th-floor hotel window in the middle of the night. The body of Dr. Frank Olson has been exhumed and is undergoing an autopsy. HEROES OF THE R.A.F. Now, California history professor Kathryn Olmstead says she has found documents written by Cheney and Rumsfeld which show how far the White House went to conceal information about Olsons death. 2. On July 11, 1975, the Olson family held a press conference expressing their outrage and anguish, called for a full accounting of the incident, and filed a wrongful death suit against the United States Government. Despite its many inconsistencies, the CIA account of what happened during the early morning hours of November 28, 1953 would become the official story of Frank Olsons death: It was an unfortunate suicide triggered by a small dose of Lycergic Acid Diethylamide LSD secretly administered to Olson in a mind-control experiment gone awry. It could not be learned from the diaries whether Anslinger knew that one of his top narcotics agents also was working for the CIA, in fact, was tape-recording and observing men to whom prostitutes gave drugs after picking them up in bars. Meachums column becomes even more informative when combined with the two long articles by Scott Shane on Detricks Special Operations Division and on the Olson case that ran in the Baltimore Sun three days earlier, on August 1. He personally handled contracts with outside institutions, approving every payment, no matter how small. He did not appear to be the least bit troubled by the moral ambiguities of intelligence work. Eric Olson, a Maryland clinical psychologist, began to spend every spare moment trying to get at the true story of what had happened to his father. Happily the extraction process had hit no snags. 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. 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. Officials of the biological defense program at Fort Detrick, where Vollum 1B is still used to test vaccines, do not know of any connection to the accidental human infections, said Caree Vander Linden, spokeswoman for the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. In 1955, White moved the safe house to San Francisco, and he took over as regional head of tha Bueau of Narcotics. But it seems the CIA has already found a solution. Dave Dickenson, Tim Hauck, Kroy Biermann, Trumaine Johnson, Dante Olson. Operation ARTICHOKE was a CIA program that preceded MK-ULTRA. 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. Revised, updated, and expanded. Sirhan Sirhan, convicted as the assassin of Robert F Kennedy, showed unmistakable symptoms of hypnosis. 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. Dr. Gibson then explained that based on this limited information he could not arrange for an admission immediately, but that the patient could be brought in for an examination and that then a recommendation (which might be either an admission or a referral) could be made. 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. The lower frontal portion of the head, from the eyes to the throat, can withstand enormous blows without fatal consequences. 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