Attempts are being made at present to set up projects with collaborating organizations on the effect of LSD-25 on brain metabolism, on the metabolic activities of nerves and on enzyme reactions.. Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine, Eric N. Olson Mentorship Award established by International Society for Heart Research, Edwin G. Conklin Medal in Developmental Biology, Libin Prize for Excellence in Cardiovascular Research, Heritage Foundation, Canada, Dallas Historical Society Award for Excellence in Medicine, The Eugene Braunwald Mentorship Award, American Heart Association, March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology, Research Achievement Award, International Society for Heart Research, Fondation Lefoulon-Delalande Grand Prize for Science, Editorial Board, EMBO Molecular Medicine (2008), Editorial Board, Developmental Cell (2005), Editorial Board, Molecular and Cellular Biology (1993). Why people are visiting the . CIA documents have confirmed that a week earlier Olson had been surreptitiously drugged with LSD at a high-level CIA meeting. He greeted the Olsons warily. [19]. Ive ruined my life, he says in one interview. Budiansky, Stephen, Erica E. Goode, and Ted Gest. And to Franks son Eric, who takes part in this conversation? My real memories of my father are not very many or very clear, because the trauma of his death really darkened a lot of these memories. But the condition of the body meant that precise identification was impossiblemaking the area a conspiracy blackspot. They now claimed that their earlier statements had been made under the duress of psychological manipulation and torture. I was simply told that Your father has had an accident, and that he has died. The only detail that I was then given was that he had fallen or jumped out of a window. Editorial Director: Gert Monheim But he also borrowed money from friends and family, maxed out half a dozen credit cards, and began to sink into debt. In the late 1940s Frank Olson joined the CIA where he specialized in the field of information retrieval. This was the ARTICHOKE program, which we already knew was the operational context in which Frank Olson was working. In 1994 nobody had a clear idea of what that big something might be. I find an unholy desire to tell you about the worst fiasco we ever had, which is why this letter has to be UltraBAP [Burn After Perusal]. As a freshman, Eric Olson ('77, Ph.D. '81, DSc '03) planned to follow his chemist-father into a career as a research scientist when he hit an obstacle that forced a profound reckoning. Their skepticism is understandable. The Rockefeller commission report on domestic CIA activities said it did not know how many Americans were given behavior influencing drugs by the CIA, declaring that all persons directly involved in the early phases of the program were either out of the country and not available for interview or were deceased.. The following summer, the Agency asked the magician to undertake another assignment. This developed during the time I used him in various documentary programmes for the BBC. This is no longer a happy, feelgood story, Eric said, and I dont like it better than anyone else does. He decided that Frank Olson could pose a security risk if he continued to speak and behave as he did. It was the centre of covert biological warfare and as such the record of its activities are deeply buried. Its best left that although the truth may make you free, something less than the whole truth, in some situations, is necessary in order to keep the fire lit., (William F. Buckley,Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton(New York: Harcourt, 2000). Eric Olson is responsible for protecting and evaluating innovations in high tech arising from research at the University of Minnesota as well as partnering with Technology Licensing Officers to facilitate commercialization of these innovations. After recounting this story Dr. Gibson and I discussed a number of questions that naturally arise. Over the years, he amassed one of the worlds finest collections of magic books and memorabilia. The Bergmann Model 1934 is particularly good in this way. He recalled his mother telling him that Frank Olson had been concerned that the United States was using biological weapons in Korea. The evidence on the body says that the agency may have lied. 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. And Ted Kaczynski would participate. He was laying there looking at me, trying to speak to me, very earnest agents, men now in their 70's and 80's, are about to come forward unless they are released from their confidentiality agreements with the agency. A third bioweapons veteran, William C. Patrick III, confirms two of the cases but says he is not sure about the third., Anthrax gets stronger as it goes through a human host, said Walter, now retired in Florida. The autopsy and its sequelae which were to intervene between the exhumation and the reburial were not featured in my approaches to the legal authorities in Maryland. The memo remained under wraps and officially off the books for decades until the Frank Olson case erupted again, in 1975. He was a conflicted man living in conflicted times who died leaving conflicting leads. N was Anthrax, X was botulism and so forth. (4.53). The attempt on Hitlers life failed because the conspiracy did not give this matter proper attention. There wasnt room enough for a running start, and the window sill was high and blocked by a radiator. Outside intervention was clearly advisable, not only for Frank Olsons sake, but for the sake of Camp Detrick and the biological warfare program, and in particular for the overall security of the SO Division. He rushed out to find a middle-aged man lying semi-conscious on the ground. Not the Rockefeller Commission, not the CIA, not the White House. The propaganda value of this system may be very high. A failed exercise in brainwashing? This culture of secrecy had also contaminated the family from within. But in college and graduate school, he grew skeptical. And when his pet bird died, it hurt, he wrote. Lashbrook, giving the impression of being befuddled, said he had been sleeping when he awoke to the sound of crashing glass. National security homicide and secret state assassination are not terms with which we are familiar in this country. In the meantime, Sidney Gottlieb had already reported up the chain of command. They slipped him LSD? Published inNight and Daymagazine, the Sunday supplement toThe London Mailon Aug 23, 1998. I went back and I saw White, and he says to me, What do you think of Sidney? I said, I think hes a fuckin nut. White says,Well, he may be a nut, but this is the program. By PHILIP SHENON As the numbers of people using LSD multiplied, so did sensationalized accounts of its effects. Yesterday, Eric Olson thanked people who have long listened to his story and helped him work through the details: the filmmaker who made a German documentary on the subject, the mechanic who has kept his Volvo running, the friend who catered lunch. But at some point he had remembered that a group of government guys had been in his place, and that Olson had been one of them. He agreed to pay Mulholland $3,000 for his efforts, and was greatly pleased with his discovery of the magician. My old Harvard mentor Henry Murray (who assessed Hitlers personality for the OSS) used to tell me, Chance, love, and logic. Olsons son Eric is convinced his father was murdered by agents of the American government because he wanted to leave the CIA. But in a second test on the agent, in which the ARTICHOKE technique of using straight medication was employed, the agency obtained highly successful results during a two-hour and-15-minute interrogation which included a remarkable regression. During this regression, the subject evidently relived certain events in his life, some dating back 15 years, while totally accepting the case officer and interpreter as an old, trusted and beloved personal friend whom the subject had known in years past in Georgia, USSR. The report goes on to say that total amnesia was apparently achieved for the second test. The information will be collected principally from the previous studies made by Mr. Mulholland in connection with various problems he has considered. New York Post,Sept. 21, 1997, By Scott Shane 1, 1967). Are their accusations accurate? The directions were forthcoming and very accommodating, even to the point of a uniformed officers volunteering to show me the way even to the extent of carrying the box with the skull for me. War room:In the years of projects BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the planners met in what was known as the war room. Frank Olson, a chemist and joint employee of the CIA and Army Chemical Corps, had worked his entire professional life at Fort Detrick. The story of Frank Olsons death, illuminated for a moment with the anonymous news from the Rockefeller Report, seemed to return to inky darkness. While Mulhollands work for the CIA may have ended, the Agency continued its interest in the connection between the techniques of conjuring and espionage. Perhaps not through assassinations, and perhaps not even intentionally, MK-ULTRA definitely altered a generation. The basic program, called BLUEBIRD,and soon renamed ARTICHOKE (the code names have no known significance), was the creation of a small group of young, gung-ho CIA operators, former members of the OSS, whom time rose to key positions in the, agency. Army tests showed he had an unusual facility for language, so he was enrolled in a special school in Germany where he learned fluent Russian, By the end of the war, Feldman was a lieutenant colonel with a background in Military Intelligence. One way, therefore, for the Agency to deal with its troubled member at Fort Detrick would be to have him forget all he knew about Special Operations, to clear out his mind by this supposed new technique of brainwashing. Then he could safely be allowed to retire from the service and return with his family to his home town in Wisconsin. Weve been sweating across the desert., We ended up staying for a week at Harolds Club. By late Friday night he was dead. I went through each and every document page by page. At age 13 Mulholland began taking magic lessons from John William Sargent at $5 an hour. The CIA was on to acid long before the flower children. Another unanswered question is raised by the small scrap of paper that Robert Lashbrook had in his wallet the night Frank Olson died. What Mulholland was teaching CIA operatives to do was surreptitiously administer mind-altering chemicals, biological agents, dangerous drugs, and lethal poisons in order to disorient, discredit, injure, and even kill people. I told Dr. Gibson that I had re-read the transcript of the conversation he had had with Jim Starrs almost exactly five years earlier, on Dec 21, 1994. Documents uncovered by the authors reveal that within 48 hours of Blauers death, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi, the Chemical Corps contract officer for Project Pelican, traveled to the New York State Psychiatric Institute on Jan. 10 and met with Hoch. Now the way was opened for the use of LSD in interrogations. 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. At the point of impact, the skull was split from right to left across the top of the skull allowing it to be manipulated as if it were hinged. In Stockholm, he worked to develop the psychotherapeutic technique he had begun at Harvard: the collage method, a process that involved clipping pictures and pasting them into photomontages. ), In the weeks following the Post story, no one from the government bothered to contact the Olsons. His chemical division laboratory stored a vast array of poison pills and potions. Instead, he worked for the CIA, running the Special Operations Division at Detrick, which Olson says was the governments most secret biological weapons laboratory, working with materials such as anthrax. A week or so later, Eric, Lisa, Nils and two lawyers met the C.I.A. Among MKULTRA papers that later came to light, Lee and Shlain write, were, CIA documents describing experiments in sensory deprivation, sleep teaching, ESP, subliminal projection, electronic brain stimulation, and many other methods that might have applications for behavior modification. 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. 27.38 The message was cryptic, but it characterized Frank Olson as having no inhibitions.. Gottlieb referred to the result in these cases as reversible chemical lobotomysuggesting that the effects wear off. Why do you want to write about White? The most likely source revealing such a happening was Olsons head. In both cases one reached the goal by small continuous increments of motion along a single strand. Suddenly, information so long denied the Olson family began to dribble in. However, the simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. Actually it was not at all clear exactly what it was that the President and the CIA Director were apologizing for. A few thoughts on the many questions this raises: The idea of placing one thing near another and then asserting (explicitly or implicitly) that the one has nothing to do with the other of course suggests Freuds comments about negation, where, due to the fact that the unconscious cannot represent a negative relationship, denial always implies affirmation. It then becomes clear that the real target of mind control was not Frank Olson. Throughout this undeclared conflict he continued to serve, albeit quietly, Americas defense efforts. That any evidence of John Mulhollands involvement with the CIA still exists is remarkable in itself although it would take decades for it to come to light. But what about the social manifestation of this mechanism in the form of learning to ignore that which (perhaps despite its strangeness) has been made to appear normal or usual? Moreover, Mulhollands work on the manual was at a critical point. Lashbrook identified himself only as a consultant chemist for the Defense Department and inexplicably told the officers that he saw no reason to go down to the street to check on his colleague. Pictures taken in Frankfurt and Heidelberg will later turn up among Olsons slides. But were the confessions the truth? Others interviewed on the program disputed the likelihood of suicide from a closed window with the shade drawn, and in fact Olson has spoken calmly to his wife on the telephone a few hours before. My father was a writer and magician, Dr. Gibson said. He and CIA officer Robert Lashbrook decided to spend the night at the Statler and head south the next morning. Late the next day, according to the C.I.A. If Olson was a threat because of what he knew, and knowledge can be passed on, then the CIA would have to spy on all those who had been close to him in case he had told them the truth about MK-ULTRA? There are rent bills for cabins at state parks a favorite site for secret meetings. (Ten years later, Hollywood luminaries such as Cary Grant and James Coburn would regularly ingest doses of 200 micrograms under the supervision of a handful of Los Angeles psychiatrists who briefly dabbled in LSD therapy.) Robert Lashbrook, Ph.D. who was with Olson on that fateful night, recounted his version of the events leading up to and occurring at the tragic moment many times: Lashbrook and Olson were together in Room 1018A on the 10th floor, actually the 13th when the first three unnumbered floors are counted, when Dr. Olson suddenly went out the rooms only window. Even today, however, neither Murrays friends, his widow, nor even some historians believe this. Thats why Im here. 12.45 Book Information : Title : Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance Rating : You mentioned that you would let me see Rosens letters., Yes, he said. Was it from overwork and worry caused by the burdens of heading up the whole Division? He says were all stuck in 1953, in a sense, because the events of that year have a continual and overwhelming impact on our lives. The original cost was $3,000.00, of which $1,500.00 is remaining as of now. Yes they tried to take care of our father, my brother and sister and I always thought. Elvis first visited a recording studio, and Bill Haleys Rock Around The Clock gave the world rock and roll, and subsequently the teenager. At the time, Alice Wicks Olson, Franks widow, said she was satisfied with the settlement and that her family was ready to move on with their lives. 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. Ruwet phoned Alice on Tuesday morning to tell her that he and a colleague were taking her husband to New York for treatment because they were concerned that Frank might become violent with you. According to Eric, this statement completely shocked my mother, because she had seen no indications of anything remotely like violent tendencies. Eric now believes that Ruwet was lying, in an effort to frighten Alice and thereby preempt the possibility that she might object in any way to their plans. Later that day, Alice drove with her husband to Washington, D.C., where he was to catch a flight to New York with Ruwet and Lashbrook. THE TERMS of the $750,000 government settlement for Olsons death prevented his family from pursuing the matter in the civil courts. Given the circumstances they outlined, the outcome for either of them could be severe. Now Im gonna give you another assignment. The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. Their ultimate purpose, they said, was to imprint what had happened to their father in ''American memory.''. The next day, Olson went straight to Ruwet's office and said he wanted to resign. Two decades after the bizarre tragedy, Olsons eldest son, Eric, would begin to dispute the official account. Colleagues were astonished to spot Olson chatting with the pacifists who protested outside Detricks gates. University researchers would soon discover that, like Dr. Faustus, the legendary Renaissance magician who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power, they had signed a contract before reading the fine print. If the cold war should ever turn hot, deadly bacteria might be used as weapons. He considered himself a terribly loyal and patriotic person. The President promised the Olsons full disclosure, and the CIA provided the family, and America, with a flurry of details, each more unexpected than the last. While the U.S. sub-machine guns fire the most lethal cartridges, the higher cyclic rate of some foreigh weapons enable the gunner to cover a target quicker with acceptable pattern density. Here was a top government scientist, engaged in some of the most secret projects at the height of the Cold War. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method. But Eric, the eldest, couldnt settle down. 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. He had written on a piece of white paper the initials G. The document, written in January 1954, details a conversation Lashbrook had with a high-ranking Pentagon official who telephoned the CIA to inquire if the agency had heard that the Chemical Corps was being sued because of an incident involving the use of chemical compounds at the New York Psychiatric Institute, which is affiliated with Columbia University. The memo states: A Dr. Paul Hoch was the Institutes principal investigator. Nor did he ever mention LSD or the CIA. Fremont-Smith and Abramson were the links between the universities and MKULTRA. According to a 1975 CIA document, the U.S. Military attach in Switzerland had miscalculated by a factor of one million in his CIA reports because he did not know the difference between a milligram (1 /1,000 of a gram) and a kilogram (1,000 grams). The offensive bioweapons program was launched during World War II and ended by President Richard M. Nixon in 1969. This made it easy to peddle the ludicrous fairy tale cover story in 1975, a story that in hindsight resembles The Emperors New Clothes.. By his own account, Gottlieb served Cointreau to seven of the men without telling them he had laced it with LSD, ostensibly to study the drugs effects. He recommended that Olson be denied further access to Porton Down, the British chemical-weapons research establishment. 22.28 Subsequently Dr Gottlieb and Frank Olson visited London and, according to Dr Sargent, he accompanied them to Porton Down, Britains main research centre for biological/chemical research. Saracco, an ambitious, aggressive lawyer with no fear about taking on the American establishment, says that the men he wants named in the indictments will include some of Americas most respected CIA veterans and, if the grand jury agrees to his request to widen his investigations, former officers of the British Secret Intelligence and Security Services as well. 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