Established by the CIA on April 2, 1951, Project BLUEBIRD Was supposed to invent techniques for what became known as special interrogations. By mid-year, however, BLUEBIRD had begun to spread its wings. Had he seen something so repugnant in the MKULTRA work that he couldnt be part of it? Using a high-speed oscillating saw, we open the skull and remove the calvarium (the top of the skull above the brow ridges) so we can lift out the brain to examine and weigh it and examine the intra-cranial walls of the skull. But the cottage those guys from the CIA usedthats still there.. 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.. VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED (with Max MorganWitts) This crisis occurred, it is important to emphasize, several months prior to the LSD drugging at Deep Creek Lake. Although it is the standard practice to keep the relatives out of the autopsy room I made an exception in this case due to my noticing the uncanny resemblance between Eric in life and his father in death. The scientist wrote that our own current work contains the strong suggestion that LSD-25 will produce mass hysteria (unaccountable laughter, anxiety, eth.). Another Gottlieb subproject under MK-ULTRA conducted experiments with LAE, a lysergic-acid derivative, for the purpose of inducing depersonalization and a schizophrenia-like condition in test subjects. One of them had received a substantial sum of money in the month of Olsons death for services rendered. So had Abramson. Or should we perhaps take the word disappeared in the meaning it has acquired in Latin America, where it is used as a past participle: i.e., the dissidents were disappeared? In his memoirs, Colby remembered the lunch as ''one of the most difficult assignments I have ever had.'' I never signed any goddamn secrecy agreement.. If his mother shared his doubts, Eric said, she never acted on them: My mothers mantra was: You are never going to know what happened in that hotel room. Its an injunction, a kind of threat, a taboo and a prediction.. Basically, he said, this is a story about a guy who had a simple moral code and a nave view of the world. 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. Most of his historical foot-notoriety, however, stems from his freelance work using prostitutes to lure unsuspecting johns to a CIA safehouse in San Francisco, where the unwitting pleasure-seekers would instead be dosed with MK-ULTRA acid. Dangers include injecting too much drug, so that an erection can last dangerously long and kill penile tissue. The potions are not administered orally, as they were by the CIA, because the drug must affect only the penis and not the rest of the body. Show more detail. An expert in germ warfare, during World War II he had designed clothing intended to protect Allied soldiers from possible German biological attacks during the Normandy invasion. So we decided to make a sign that said HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! 4.18 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson: 5.07 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson: 7.22 Voice of Arthur Vidich/Brother-in-law of Frank Olson, 11.21 Voice of Professor Kurt Blome: Untertitel // Subtitles, Olson is violently opposed to control of scientific research, either. (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. Twenty-five seconds after it was shot, the sheep just fell to the ground, said Baronian, 73. Now, it seemed to Eric Olson, that apology had been a cynical lie. His suspicions aroused, Pastore spoke to the hotels phone operator, asking if any calls had come from room 1018A. Most are proud of their work, pointing out that the Soviet biological program was much larger and also developed assassination tools. Unfazed by the suicide of their colleague, the CIAs acid enthusiasts were, in fact, more convinced of the value of their experiments. (In fact, Eric Olson would later discover that the doctors at Chestnut Lodge had no special security clearance, a fact that begs the question, Why did the CIA lie about this?) He had also co-wrote a 1939 magic-detective novel,The Girl in the Cage, with Cortland Fitzsimmons. View Eric Olson results in Rockford, IL including current phone number, address, relatives, background check report, and property record with Whitepages. The plane crashed, and everyone on board was killed.). I said, Whos smokin a pipe? Gittinger, one of those CIA nuts, was there with two of my girls. Twice each year, the MKNAOMI team from SOD held a working retreat where the Army scientists could plan and discuss future projects with their CIA counterparts. That manual clearly suggested disguising a murder as a suicide by dropping the subject from a high window or roof. In addition, we learned that the nature and thickness of the window glass, although altered at the time of our on-scene investigations, was identical to that of a window in an upstairs unit at the hotel. Though heavily redacted, the file fleshed out the narrative bones of the Washington Post story. 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. He might have jumped., Anyhow, said one of the men. He wielded a fat unlit cigar like a baton, pulled out a wad of bills that could have gagged a drug dealer, slipped a 20 to the waitress and told her to take good care of us. That evening and the following day stories about Frank Olson and his family dominated network news broadcasts and newspaper headlines. The cause of his disturbance is not made clear in the documents at hand, but it is said that he had begun to feel guilty about something. Here are some passages from the CIAs own manual on the technique of disguising a murder through engineering a contrived accident: Assassination is a term thought to be derived from Hashish, a drug similar to marijuana, said to have been used by Hasan-Dan-Sabah to induce motivation in his followers, Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations., No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. The effects of LSD-25 appear to be specific and are not related to any of the factors mentioned above. Since John Mulholland had died in 1970, there was no way for the Olsons to interview him about his possible involvement in this tragedy. These telling results left no further doubt that the remains we had autopsied were those of Dr. Frank Olson to the exclusion of anyone else. After his mother died in 1993, Eric and the family decided to move Frank Olsons remains from another cemetery so that he could be reburied beside his wife. Excuse me? said Eric. Dont let him in.. Eric had other reasons to believe that his father had been the victim of a CIA assassination. Contact Us Tim Carroll, APR According to the documents Colby had given the family, Olson spent an agonized night wandering the streets of New York, discarding his wallet and identification cards. Archive Research: John H. Colhoun Here was a pathologist who wanted a smoking gun, not a skull with a massively blood-stained frontal bone, to induce him to declare the manner of death a homicide. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/magazine/cia-what-did-the-cia-do-to-his-father.html. Yes, she said, two. In less than a year on the job as steward of MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb had already established a rather wild and arguably unscientific methodology that involved dosing unsuspecting CIA men at Langley with LSD and then watching them freak out. At some point during his investigation, Eric hooked up with the British journalist Gordon Thomas, who has written numerous books on intelligence matters. Poor little bastard just couldnt make it, a 1952 entry says. 24.42 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./ Former barkeeper at Camp King: [16]He soon found, however, that if it were to meet the CIAs expectations, his manual would have to be far more than a hypothetical extension of existing magic tricks, principles and methods to covert activities. But the conversation never got around to what the terrible mistake had been. Thats him! What CIA scientists eagerly sought at the outset was a drug that might neutralize the suspected Russian compounds and prevent agents from revealing information. LSD was not yet ready for testing in interrogations, but the agency did report some success in causing amnesia after interrogations, through a combination of hypnosis and sodium pentathol. This complex story is told in detail in the 2002 documentary film on the Frank Olson storyCode Name Artichokewhich has now been shown internationally in many countries and in the United States on Link-TV. Thats too bad, came the reply. As a researcher Olson himself used animals in experiments and perhaps witnessed the use of humans as well. From these encounters, Eric realized that he was up against a brotherhood of silence and that his father had once belonged to it. THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED (with Max MorganWitts) 46.24 But defensive findings had offensive implications. Now Im gonna give you another assignment. But Nils Olson, 55, says he admires his brothers tenacity and agrees with his conclusion. But while Mulholland prepared a detailed memo on what the manual would cover, theres no evidence in the CIA documents that he ever turned it in. He went home every Thanksgiving weekend, and because Frank Olson went out of the window during the Thanksgiving holiday of 1953, the family invariably ended up watching old home movies of Frank, and Eric inevitably said to his mother, Tell me the story again., During Thanksgiving weekend 1974, Erics mother replied, Ive told you this story a hundred times, a thousand times., Eric said, Just tell me it one more time.. Echoing todays fears, the report said the United States is particularly vulnerable to covert germ attack because enemy agents are present already in this country [and] there is no control exercised over the movements of people., Although it emphasized the threat to America, the report called for offensive capability. So far as I was concerned, clear thinking was nonexistent while under the influence of any of these drugs, he wrote. Certainly the virtuoso job of disinformational engineering that had been applied to the whole affair seemed to suggest that no resources would be spared to keep the truth secret. Others had epileptic seizures. But could the Frank Olson story have an even simpler, albeit darker, explanation? Dr. Gibson had met Mullholland! The invitation to our family to meet with President Gerald Ford was part of this strategy. I had thought all along of the possibility of the presence of a third person in room 1018A when Olson exited it. 17.12 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager: Its 1-Boyles.. It proposed strategies and tactics to fit the needs of female agents. Walter recalls an effort to package the spray device in a food can for smuggling into the Soviet Union and planting in a targets office or apartment. In what was undoubtedly a remarkable coincidence, the doctor who served as the admitting physician for was Dr. Robert W. Gibson the 25-year old son of Walter Gibson. Ruwet took Olson back to the Statler hotel. They were a wonderful, much-loved couple with a young son, Jonathan. I always wanted chickens, Feldman recalled, so I bought a chicken ranch. He said I could only publish what he had said after his death. The sill was high and there was a radiator right in front of it. This developed during the time I used him in various documentary programmes for the BBC. I believe that he wanted out.. Biological agents can really cover more territory than nuclear weapons, Walter said. Then he began to tell his wife that he had made terrible mistakes. Had Frank Olson said or done something that was as he himself feared a breach of security? For nearly five years, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthaus cold-case unit has been conducting an unprecedented criminal investigation into the mysterious death of Fort Detrick biochemist Frank Olson. But the condition of the body meant that precise identification was impossiblemaking the area a conspiracy blackspot. The total came to fifteen. This tragedy stayed with me as did my questioning the reason for the fate that had saved me. The family now came to the painful realization that Frank Olson might have been murdered. 13.07 Eight years ago, questions unanswered, Frank Olsons body was exhumed from the Frederick cemetery where it had lain for more than 40 years. Of course their methods were not humane, they exerted a lot of pressure. Eric would later wonder whether Houstons memo of understanding or another backroom agreement had played a role in the abortive investigation by the New York D.A.s office. If there is fluid in an organ, it gets drained for a sample, and then the stomach and intestines are opened to examine the contents. After further discussions with Abramson, it was agreed that Olson should be placed under regular psychiatric care at Chestnut Lodge, an institution closer to his home and which had CIA-cleared psychiatrists on its Rockville, Maryland, staff. At mid-centuryThe Sphinxstood as Americas oldest and most prestigious magic magazine. Sargant believed that Frank Olson could also have been given a cocktail of drugs that included more than LSD. Chapter Eleven of Simpsons book, Guerrillas for World War III, deals with the recruitment of former Nazis to carry out American-ordered assassinations in Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s. ''He was broken up something awful,'' Pastore told reporters many years later, flat on his back with his legs smashed and bent at a terrible angle. Non-drug factors such as set and settinga persons mental state going into the experience and the surroundings in which the drug is takencan make all the difference in reactions to a dose of LSD. Personal relationships faltered. cit. And why had I had to wait until another investigator implied that maybe the place hadnt been used for the experiment at all? had not turned over to my team Olsons fingerprints or dental records. himself. Armand Pastore is the manager of the hotel. The kit consisted of a lethal toxin possibly anthrax concealed in a tube of toothpaste. He has nothing else to say. By morning, he was still in an agitated state. The last ten years of his life, he lived in Stinson Beach, California, where, known as Colonel White, he went on the wagon for a few years and became chief of the volunteer fire department. It doesnt much matter where, because the place would not have been familiar or identifiable to him. In a photograph taken during the 1975 meeting, Alice Olson and her grown-up children Eric, 30; Nils, 27; and Lisa, 29 look at ease and, more to the point, relieved, as they stand with the president. He asked her if any calls had been made from Frank Olsons room. My letter to the New York City police departments pension division seeking to contact him was forwarded to him but I received no reply from him. All but two of the SOD team were served the LSD-laced liqueur. denied any knowledge of them, but one man appeared to be related to several assassination cases, and therefore no one was going to talk. From him I learned that the RIA tests had all given positive results for the presence of LSD in the tissues. Hiroshima did not convert Murray to world federalism. Mulholland devoted his energies to the project and by November his first draft was complete. 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