Carbon monoxide poisoning can also be a cause of death. With increasing frequency, someone inside the Agency would want an explanation for something they had seen or heard and Mulholland was asked to explain it. When Olson returned home, Alice found her husband to be uncharacteristically withdrawn. 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. Dr. Gibson explained that the affair was still vivid in his memory because he grieved over the fact that he had dissuaded Dr. Lashbrook from journeying with Dr. Olson to the hospital on the night of the first phone call. Dr Sargents own conclusion was that Frank Olson had undergone a marked personality change; many of Olsons symptoms soul searching, seeking reassurance etc. On June 11, 1975, The Washington Post revealed that a commission led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had discovered that ''a civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test'' and ''developed serious side effects.'' The old training group PQ 31 is doing all right for itself, even if PQ has to stand for peculiarwhich is what I can say about my work now. 41.38 Seeing Martin Luther on the Sunday night had made him all the more determined to quit his job. He went though a moral crisis, but he was in too deep and they couldnt let him out., We continued watching the home video. Professor & Chair Endowed Title Annie and Willie Nelson Professorship in Stem Cell Research; Pogue Distinguished Chair in Research on Cardiac Birth Defects; The Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Science Department Molecular Biology Graduate Programs Genetics, Development and Disease Education Undergraduate These days, Feldman takes offense at how his work has been charqcterized by former cops who knew him. He had remained close to Erics father after the war, when Olson had been recruited into the CIA. And two CIA employees were reprimanded by the director. THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED (with Max MorganWitts) What a brilliant cover story, he thought. For days afterward, Olson was withdrawn. And in 1961 he spoke at the International Congress of Applied Psychology in Copenhagen, which, thanks to Leary and Huxleys presence, turned into a virtual psychoactive circus. The goal, according to a declassified White House memo, was to avert a lawsuit in which it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons.. Does all this rest on the word of one man, your fathers friend?. But at the time, the CIA suspected the Soviets had some super-mind-control drug. Frank Olson has become a security risk. Anything!. Elliot didnt mean that at all. 41.18 The Agency has never admitted this, but an Italian judge deciding in 1979 whether to try Stark for armed banditry in relation to Starks many contacts with terrorists (among other things, Stark accurately predicted the assassination of Aldo Moro) released the drug dealer after finding an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs that Stark had worked for the CIA from 1960 onward.. President Ford invited Alice Olson and her son, Eric, to the White House where he personally apologized on behalf of the government. Youd shut off curiosity. (paperback edition, p. 212), The interesting thing, the amazing thing really about this quote is that it occurs on the very same page (p. 212) wherejust eight lines earlierThomas tells the story of the death of Frank Olson, who, Thomas says, worked with Gottlieb, also experimented with LSD and fell to his death from the window of a New York hotel in 1953.. Erics request, even entreaty, was entitled to and received my immediate and careful attention. Eric recalled family descriptions of Olsons state of mind upon returning from the European junket. I have given the subjects we discussed considerable thought, Mulholland wrote. Yesterday, from the same picnic table, Eric Olson, now 57, spoke again to reporters, this time saying he knows how his father was killed, and why enough answers to allow him to move on. What Olson says he knows is this: His father was not a civilian scientist at nearby Fort Detrick, as the family had been told. None of that having occurred, that possibility seemed to be excluded. All he would say was Im going to have to resign, Ive made a terrible mistake.. In piecing out the puzzle of the reasons for Dr. Olsons death, the state of his mental health prior to and at the time of his surreptitiously being given LSD is of prime importance. And he immediately put his talents to work, this time against Americans. Regarding this hematoma, however, we must address another matter. Later a second irony occurred to me. And for his mother, the subject of his fathers death became a taboo. The cause of death was confirmed by an autopsy finding of bacteria resembling anthrax in the brain. But on the day Eric put his father to rest for the second time, the son seemed to have found his footing again. His life had been dedicated to magic and the keeping of secrets. In short order, it would be possible to conquer territory without a fight. Well, Gottlieb is like that except hes cosmic in scope, interested in everything. Then there were several contradictory statements made by Abramson in the report. The blow to the head creates a wave effect on the brain tissue, causing it to flow to the side of the skull opposite the injury site where hemorrhaging occurs when the moving brain tissue finds no outlet and crashes against the inner table of the skull. Why Mulholland decided to do this is a matter of some conjecture. Olson had thrown himself through the closed shade and closed window, falling 170 feet to his death on the sidewalk below. Now in his 70s, Feldman still looks and talks like Edward G. Robinson playing gangster Johnny Rocco inKey Largo. government.'' Click a location below to find Eric more easily. Then he insisted he had no clue as to why Olson jumped, but added, irrelevantly, that the dead man had suffered from ulcers. Police initially suspected a homicide with homosexual overtones, but they dropped the matter after Ruwet and Abramson backed Lashbrooks account and hinted at classified government connections. He made his debut as a performer when he was 15. (Exhumation and forensic investigation). Just hours after the arrangement was made to take Frank to Chestnut Lodge the following day he had a phone call with my mother in which he said he would be home that same following day. I can visualize his face actually: It was drawn, in a way I had never seen it before.. LSD inspires one to tell the truth. However, both the raucous party and his suicide attempt remain unexplained, and for the past twenty years the US government has withheld documents that I believe hold the answer to the question: Was this a drug induced suicide attempt? Then he laughs, and the look on his face is wild, bitter and full of pain. In 1951, Allen Dulles, later appointed director of Central Intelligence, received a report from military sources that the Russians had bought 50 million doses of a new drug from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland. White used to send me to the air-port to pick up Sidney and this other wacko, John Gittinger, the psychologist. In the war on terror, America again appears tempted to use extreme measures. By the time the priest and the ambulance came, the stranger on the sidewalk was dead. From the perspective at which we have arrived here, however, one can suspect that a decision to kill Olson would have to have been accompanied by a decision to arrange a spurious hospitalization for him. He makes no statement regarding the reason the two were visiting New York. Just a few months before the murder took place, the CIA had this Study of Assassination prepared, a how-to book for agents, on how to kill people without leaving any clues. Brainwashing is commonplace among cults, but not with the multimillion-dollar resources of the United States governments military and intelligence operations? Eric D. Olson is dual-qualified as a United States (California) attorney and Solicitor of England and Wales and has a complex international litigation, arbitration, and strategic counseling practice. The Agency has deflected the question of national security homicides in a double maneuver. By the time I returned to New York in early June, my father appeared to me to be fully recovered. Military ammunition should not be altered by filing or drilling bullets, as this will adversely affect accuracy. Query: was the chair bugged or was my Robert Redford movie viewers idea of the C.I.A. (Gibson went on to a very distinguished career in medicine: he became director of Shepherd-Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, and President of the American Psychiatric Association.) When the end of the war revealed that the Nazis had been carrying out similar experiments23 German doctors were convicted at Nurembergthe Western intelligence community suddenly became very interested in Camerons work. We want you to work as an under cover agent in San Francisco.. He was a great friend of the Bushes, once the Bush family lawyer, a pipe-smoking patriarch who believed that the CIA should be like an ivy league university, taking inspiration not only from agents, but also from scientists, academics, and whoever else might come up with something new. Assassination of persons responsible for atrocities or reprisals may be regarded as just punishment. The solids, gases and liquids were not harmless substances. Here I stand, I can do no other. The moral of Martin Luther is that the individual cannot hide behind the institution. His Harvard research was about how to help people recover from trauma. Olson and several others spent a sleepless night under the effects of the drug. Experiments. U.S. News & World Report. And for quite a long time, possibly ever since my father began working at Detrick, the whole business about the monkey dying was a very delicate matter for him. denied any knowledge of them, but one man appeared to be related to several assassination cases, and therefore no one was going to talk. In the renderings of collage is disclosed that which social ideology tends to pass over. Eric Olson Director at Ontosphere LLC Frederick, Maryland, United States168 connections Join to connect Ontosphere LLC Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Websites Websites. These interrogations sometimes led to the deaths of the subjects being interrogated. Project Bluebird was renamed Project Artichoke in 1951, and in that same year the CIA discovered LSD. On my instruction, Dr. Goldberger forwarded selected bodily tissue samples to Dr. Rodger Foltz at Northwest Toxicology in Salt Lake City, Utah. What Miniccino is implying and what public prosecutor Saracco wants to prove is that the MK-ULTRA mind control projectwith its clinical trials on unsuspecting human beingswas such a sensitive issue with the western intelligence community that it would go to any lengths to prevent an insider like Olson, from blowing the whistle. But the speculation is irresistible that it might have involved experiments in mind control similar to those that Olson had worked on. His intention was to visit Havana at Fidel Castros personal invitation and return home to join the civil rights movement. For this reason, a detailed record book is kept of his income, with a separate page for each performance or source of income., While acknowledgement of the magician receiving payments from the Agency was not felt to be a breach of security in itself, the CIA believed that it was absolutely imperative that the nature of Mulhollands work be kept from IRS scrutiny. As it happens, that phrase is inscribed in the entry hall of the C.I.A. When other-people who ingested the drug reported similar effects, the chemical became something of a pharmaceutical curiosity: a mysterious drug searching for something to cure. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. Lt. Col. Ruwet reassured Olson that he had done nothing wrong at the retreat, and persuaded his employee to stay on. [14]It was a source of great joy for him. 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. A habitual stutterer, Gottlieb exhibited the same zeal for self-improvement and personal reinvention in every other aspect of his life. Although not applying to calendar year 1953, other characteristic sources of income are from publishers of books, etc., and from individuals to whom he has given instructions in magic. The LSD cover-up had involved Frank Olsons colleagues, particularly his boss, the late Col. Vincent Ruwet who had consoled Eric with the gift of a darkroom set and a jigsaw after his fathers death. But a world in which morality has no meaning is one in which eventually everything is permitted. It was the story of Luthers crisis of conscience over the corruption of the Catholic Church in the 16th Century, when its theologians claimed it was impossible for the Church to do any wrong, because they defined the moral code. But the D.A.s attempts to question Sidney Gottlieb who was to become a central target of the investigation hit a terminal snag in 1999 when the ailing Gottlieb died, taking whatever secrets he still guarded to his grave. However, I cannot now work on this project every week and would hesitate to promise completion prior to the first of May, 1954.[20], Mulholland estimated that it would cost $1800 to finish the project. On September 12, 2001, Harry Huge suddenly bowed out. 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. Hereafter, assassinations in which the subject is unaware will be termed simple; those where the subject is aware but unguarded will be termed chase; those where the victim is guarded will be termed guarded., If the assassin is to die with the subject, the act will be called lost. If the assassin is to escape, the adjective will be safe. It should be noted that no compromises should exist here. The meeting was as awkward as the food was elegant. [1]Mulholland letter to subscribers ofThe Sphinx, June 29, 1953, George Daily Collection, [2]Memorandum for Director, Central Intelligence,Two Extremely Sensitive Research Programs, Central Intelligence Agency, April 3, 1953, authors files, [4]Memorandum for Deputy Director (Administration), Project MKULTRA Extremely Sensitive Research and Development Program,Central Intelligence Agency, April 13, 1953, authors files, [5]Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, US Official Poisoner Dies,CounterPunch, Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity, March 1999, [6]Stewart Alsop,The Center: The Anatomy of Power in Washington, London, Hodder & Stroughton, 1978, [7]John Northern Hilliard,Greater Magic, Kaufman and Greenburg, 1994, page 1095, [8]Mulholland invoice, Central Intelligence Agency, MKULTRA document 4-30, April 13, 1953, authors files, [9]Mulholland letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Central Intelligence Agency, MKULTRA document 4-29, April 20, 1953, authors files, [10]Memorandum for the Record,Project MKULTRA, Subproject 4, Central Intelligence Agency, MKULTRA document 4-28, May 4, 1953, authors files, [12]Letter to John Mulholland, Central Intelligence Agency, MKULTRA document 4-28, May 5, 1953, authors files, [13]Mulholland letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Central Intelligence Agency, MKULTRA document 4-2, May 11, 1953, authors files, [14]James B. 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