Gottlieb was the ultimate dirty trickster, having personally participated in attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. He played this role for 20 years, until his forced resignation and a two-year disappearance in Australia after CIA scandals began breaking out in 1973. He must have put a curve on what he said, for the woman gave a low intimate laugh. By then Sargent had learned that Frank Olson was acting deputy head of SO (Special Operations). And on the Monday morning Frank did, indeed, tender his resignation, but his colleagues persuaded him to seek psychological counselling in New York. [68]. Marks was told that ORDs files contained 130 boxes of documents relating to behavioral research. One, By 1996 our suspicions had reached an intolerable threshold. Bonnie K Olson Age 66. Suspected double agents were the most common targets for execution. Hairs from a number of bodily locations on Dr. Olson, some fitted with a root structure, were also submitted to Dr. Caplan. Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations. Then it came to me. Lots of writers asked me to tell my story. He had obviously jumped out of the window, just another suicide in a city where the plunge from skyscraper to pavement was a shocking but not unusual event. If you work on a top government secret, a city secret, a state secret, and it spills out to people who should not know, there is only one way to do it: kill him.. 50.26 Shock would be my first feeling, Willard said on hearing the evidence described in this article. That was an apartment from which I moved years ago. GODLESS ICON Yet he seemed to be feeling better. They were worried they might dump it in the water supply and drive everybody wacky. By the 1960s, Alice had developed a drinking problem that eventually led to the loss of her job as a teacher and a drunk driving arrest on Christmas Eve. BED OF NAILS Frank Olsons moral crisis culminated in his decision to quit his job during the weekend following the drugging, a fact which, again, is not mentioned in the Colby documents. In 1953, White rented a house at 81 Bedford St. in New York Citys Greenwich Village under the name of Morgan Hall, the same one he used serveral years later to set up the Telegraph Hill apartment at 225 Chestnut St. in San Francisco. The Security Branch agents quickly closed the NYPD investigation. [I do not know whether Dr. Gibson is able to be specific as to whether names were given, either of the caller or the friend. At the same, the Agency had begun to rely increasingly on Mulholland for his advice and expertise. Reprinted June 12, 1999 inDagens Nyheter, largest newspaper in Sweden. The message was cryptic, but it characterized Frank Olson as having no inhibitions.. Olson, Lashbrook and possibly Gottlieb were also members of the CIA group at Detrick. (Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling,Vol. {As I mentioned this I was aware for a moment of the almost Proustian expanse of time that has been devoted to solving my fathers murder.] How can I go back and face my family?. 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. What Colby did not tell them -- did not reveal until he published his memoirs just three years later -- was that Frank Olson had not been a civilian employee of the Department of the Army. While these myriad investigations were occurring around me, I was not quiescent. was in fact experimenting with ''expendables'' in Germany, and if Olson knew about it, Eric reasoned, then it would not be enough to hospitalize him, discredit him with lies about his mental condition and allow him to slip back into civilian life. One of these was Richard Helms, then special assistant for clandestine operations to CIA director Walter Bedell Smith. A habitual stutterer, Gottlieb exhibited the same zeal for self-improvement and personal reinvention in every other aspect of his life. He had written and lectured about Robert-Houdins 1856 mission on behalf of Napoleon III to help quell the Mirabout-led uprising in Algeria. Spin Magazine,March 1994. When I asked for his experiential evidence that such a thing had happened in some reported case or cases involving an exhumation many years after the fact, the answer was one that no true scientist would tender. Seven months later, in May 1949, the Special Operations Division quietly opened at Fort Detrick. 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. Vice President Single Family, Multifamily. I never signed any goddamn secrecy agreement.. The result is that the issue of the vast territory that falls between the poles of these extreme cases, what we might call plain old everyday national security terminations, has been effectively omitted from the discourse of Cold War history (except of course in Stalins Russia where the end justified the means.) From the perspective of analyses like that of Michel Foucault one might ask not only about the occasional necessity for such acts, but also about the role such terminations would have played in disciplining a democratic population for fighting a Cold War in which covert operations and plausible deniability were the key weapons. 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. Dr. Gibson remembers being concerned for the caller, who had apparently witnessed the horrifying death of a friend. The accompanying toxicological report only assayed the presence of methyl and ethyl alcohol in the liver, with negative results, and included no drug scan of any kind. To me he was a Captain. The most candid discussion I have seen of this general problem with reference to the values of a democracy (though murder of a fellow citizen is not mentioned) occurs between two CIA officers in William Buckleys novelSpytime: Esterhazy was solemn in his reflection. He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment. His search for answers would ultimately span the course of three decades, becoming a personal obsession that would drain his finances, upend his relationships, and derail his once promising career as a Harvard-trained psychologist. He was accompanied by his boss, Vincent Ruwet and a stranger who was introduced to her as Dr. Robert Lashbrook. Several days later, he jumped from a tenth-floor window of his room and died as a result. (Actually, Room 1018A was on the 13th floor. When George Kennan, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, made some inexplicably undiplomatic remarks at a press conference and was declaredpersona non grataby the Kremlin, American intelligence officials wondered if he had been hypnotized or drugged. When last-minute plans were being made on the afternoon of November 27, 1953 to hospitalize Frank Olson a call was placed to a young admitting psychiatrist in Maryland named Robert Gibson. Dr. Gibson said he cannot remember all the words that were used in the explanation, but that was what was told to him had formed an image in his mind of what the situation had been, and this image he remembers very clearly. The purpose of this paper, Mulholland wrote in the introduction, is to instruct the reader so he may learn to perform a variety of acts secretly and indetectably. 19.15 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager: LSD never did find a disease to cure. They should not have contained any MKULTRA material. He had written on a piece of white paper the initials G. Eric Olson. He woke up, confused, and headed in the dark towards the bathroom. Now, after the Sept. 11 attacks, the anthrax mailings and a steady stream of government warnings on terrorism, the fears of the 1950s have returned and the experiments of Fort Detricks covert bioweapons makers suddenly resonate in a new era. 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. Expert: Zach Olsen Title: How to Make Data-Driven Decisions for Ecommerce Marketing. He had either fallen or jumped, but young Eric could not understand the full importance of what that meant. With these preliminaries accomplished by October 1993, I proceeded to assemble a team of qualified and eminent specialists in the multiple scientific disciplines that would be put to the task in this investigation. Starrs concluded that the forensic evidence was rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.. Eventually you would come to San Francisco. I just dont give interviews on that subject, said Andrew M. Cowan Jr., 74, the divisions last chief, who is retired and living near Seattle. Conversations and correspondence with Eric Olson. By night, he is a builder, tinkering away for the joy of seeing his creations come alive. 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. Given these connections among LSD, hypnosis schizophrenia, psychiatry, magic, and mystery, could mere chance explain the fact that the Lashbrook-Gottlieb team had somehow contacted Dr. Gibson? 14.50 Sirhan Sirhan, convicted as the assassin of Robert F Kennedy, showed unmistakable symptoms of hypnosis. by this time -- but she did know that whenever his lab tested chemical or biological compounds on monkeys and the monkeys died, her husband would bring a testy silence home. So most of the facts were retained only in the memories of men who did not want to talk. The bones lay in pieces in boxes under lock and key in my office at GW, and the soft flesh was placed in a vault in storage at York College. Among the few matters on which we can only speculate is the likelihood that the traditional view (at least since 1976) of Dr. Olsons exiting the window glass, shade and all is scientifically and realistically plausible. H. as Morgan Hall, Whites undercover name. Foiled and frustrated I made a quick but courteous departure and in my abstracted frame of mind took a taxi back to Grand Central Station. Contact:We would love to hear from you. Was a decision then taken to make certain that Olson never talked by destroying his memory with drugs and, when this failed, by murdering him and making it look like a suicide? The Rockefeller report added a footnote: ''There are indications in the few remaining agency records that this individual may have had a history of emotional instability.''. Very, very close, every day of the week for two and a half years. There was no guarantee Feldman would talk. As Pastore placed his pass-key into the door, the police drew their guns as a precautionary measure. 11.21 Voice of Professor Kurt Blome: Untertitel // Subtitles Intelligence reports had the Soviets on the fast track and the Americans playing catch up. Yet even before this new angle could be explored more thoroughly the Olson family was visited by yet another tragedyone that was indirectly instrumental in bringing me into this steamy John Carre-like brew. There was the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin. In 25 years of research into controlling human behavior, the agency had found little of value to its operations. These tests fed massive quantities of convulsant and psychedelic drugs to foreign prisoners in an attempt to make them talk, according to CIA records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by author John Marks. Owsley acid became world famous for its high quality. When you think about it, 12, and alone. As we were discussing the scenario in New York I mentioned the very strange business involving Franks visit to a magician, Dr. Mullholland. But Dr. Isbells report for the first quarter of 1954 noted that clinical studies at his center were also concerned with intoxication with diethylamide of lysergic acid. In his quarterly report to the CIA, he claimed new insights, including an evaluation of whether the drugs effects varied according to race, age, and social and economic status: We have now studied the subjective changes induced by LSD-25 in more than 50 former narcotic addicts. 8.43 Voice of Eric Olson: Saracco and Bibb did manage to meet with Ruwet in Frederick, Maryland, as reported by H.P. Far from ending with Olson's death, the LSD experiments continued for two decades. Murray expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support., Leary had taken LSD for the first time at Harvard in 1959, where, traveling in Abramsons orbit, he had attended Fremont-Smiths Macy Foundation conferences on the drug. While he continued his performance schedule, he cleared his calendar of other commitments. Never one to shrink from the call of duty, White first tried the drug on himself. Fort Detricks Special Operations Division was the top-secret Chemical Corps branch that was Olsons assigned place of work at the time of his death. I provided the background on the case to each person and all of them responded with alacrity to my invitation, even after hearing the many complexities and, possibly imponderables that lurked on the horizon. He now realized he had been nave to expect justice from the same government that had committed the crime in question. By 1938, he had written a book on the subject,Beware Familiar Spirits,which traced the history of modern spiritualism and described its techniques. As I sat in Eric Olsons house and listened to his story I remembered that I had heard Sidney Gottliebs name mentioned before, in some other faraway context. The death of Frank Olson on November 28, 1953 was a murder, not a suicide. The CIA man immediately began to tell lies. Dr. Fritz Hoffmann, a chemist from former Nazi Germany, had been hired a few years earlier to spur the search for new behavior-modifying substances. He did speak up any time he wanted to. He received a telephone call from a family friend on the morning of June 11th 1975: Have you seen the Washington Post? When we all die off, thats it, he said. Tests were made under both clinical and nonclinical conditions on both witting and unwitting subjects.. She knew he had not been sleeping well, she knew he wasnt really at peace. Were where we want to be we know what happened. Immediately after the death a call was placed from Frank Olsons hotel room. Those factors would have an impact on his speed in exiting the room. Ruwet would spent long-daytime hours with Mrs Olson. According to Gottlieb,this would involve the application of techniques and principles employed by magicians, mind readers etc, to communicate information, and the development of new techniques. He must have put a curve on what he said, for the woman gave a low intimate laugh. As America entered the 1950s, the world around John Mulholland was changing. And stayed on, right on through to 1953.. There were pictures of the teenage Eric and his younger brother Nils standing by their bikes. During the six and a half weeks of our journey we were propelled by a powerful and simple idea, which boiled down to the notion just keep peddling. We knew that Route 40, the old National Pike just a few hundred yards from here at the end of the lane, went all the way to the West Coast. The laugh was an attractive and alarming trait, because sometimes he would laugh about things that weren't funny at all. If you talk to Saracco and Bibb in the Italian restaurant in lower Manhattan where they hang out after-hours, you get the impression that they don't think there's a case to send to a grand jury. While Alice's memory was of Frank being in the grip of an ethical dilemma, Ruwet told C.I.A. ''In that moment when I learned that my father had gone out a window and died,'' Eric later wrote, ''it was as if the plug were pulled from some central basin of my mind and a vital portion of my consciousness drained out.'' (He can be said to have dismissed Olsons death during hearings in 1977 as one of the risks of running such experiments.). Recruited by the US Army from graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in 1943, Frank Olson was one of the pioneering scientists in Americas biological warfare program. The film juxtaposes footage of an American pilot making these claims with footage in which this same serviceman subsequently recants his germ warfare confession. The question as to which of these statements is the product of indoctrination is thereby starkly posed, with the implication that the notion of brainwashing was, among other things, a powerful tool for psychological discrediting. The news that the men delivered was that Erics father was dead. Reportedly he himself had thrown away his papers, his identification badge and his wallet while walking around the city the previous day. Two decades passed. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. (Demesneis the etymological origin of domain, that is, the lands belonging to the Lordfor which he pays no rent.) 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. TRAUMA (with Max MorganWitts) 3.58 Elmore Leonard,BE COOL. I have been traveling an unconscionable amount. This was said for the blond woman as much as for me. At the funeral in 1953, the coffin was shut because the family had been told that the body was broken up and that there were extensive cuts and lacerations to the face caused by the fall through the glass. However, I now had another conflicting view of the last moments in the life of Frank Olson. Weve been cycling across the United States and weve wanted to see Harolds Club the whole time. [66], At some point, John Mulhollands personal files were also apparently vetted to remove any connection between him and the Agency. Dr Sargant remarked that he was just like any other CIA spy, using our secret airfields to come and go. Says Eric: I knew that my father couldnt have jumped out through that closed hotel window even if he wanted to., That same year Eric, Nils and Alice paid a visit to Sidney Gottlieb at his secluded farmhouse in Rappahannock County, Virginia. 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