Corey Ransom paper, part 3
It would take the
media coverage following the breaking of the Watergate scandal, to bring
a revelation about cause of Frank Olson’s mysterious illness. In
the early/middle 1970’s, temporary CIA chief and newcomer to the
intelligence community, James Schlesinger, had begun an internal investigation
which resulted in the creation of the infamous "family jewels"
list of agency misdeeds. New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh intercepted
leaks concerning this list and published a series of articles on domestic
spying, focusing negative attention on a government agency already in
the public’s doghouse. President Ford, reacting to public outrage,
commissioned an investigation lead by Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller
to delineate the truth about the alleged CIA activities from information
that was either “journalistic and therefore impressionistic, or official
and therefore suspect.” The commission was also designed to pave
the way for additional, deeper probing congressional hearings if Rockefeller’s
findings so warranted.
On June 11, 1975, the Washington Post ran a full spread on the numerous, declassified findings of Rockefeller’s Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States. Included in the Post’s coverage of the Rockefeller Report were two articles headlined “CIA Infiltrated 17 Area Groups, Gave Out LSD, Suicide Revealed.” One article reported the commission’s discovery of a civilian employee of the Department of the Army, who in the early fifties, "…had unwittingly taken LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test then jumped 10 floors to his death less than a week later." The article stated that the subject had been "…sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment" and several days later the suicide occurred.
The article revealed
that the CIA’s general counsel had determined the man’s death
to be directly related to a behavioral control experiment, and that two
CIA employee’s had been reprimanded as a result. It was reported
that the test was part of a larger program designed to study means of
controlling human behavior, and although many of the records had been
destroyed in 1973, the remaining evidence had been turned over to the
White House.
Mrs. Olson was reading
the paper that morning when she instantly realized the man described in
the Rockefeller report was her husband. She immediately contacted her
son Eric and her daughter Lisa who also agreed that their father was probably
the test victim reported in the Post. Lisa and her husband immediately
visited the now retired Vincent Ruwet seeking answers. He confirmed that
Frank had indeed been the subject of the reported test, but due to the
top-secret status of the program, Ruwet had been unable to divulge any
details.
The family immediately
hired Philadelphia attorney David Rudovsky to represent the family in
a lawsuit against the United States Government. Eric Olson, now 30 and
eldest of the Olson children, would spearhead the campaign to hold the
CIA "publicly accountable," since Mrs. Olson had just recently
begun treatment for cancer. In a statement written mostly by Eric and
read in turns by each family member at a press conference held on July
11, 1975, the Olsons expressed their outrage and anguish.
"We feel our
family has been violated by the CIA in two ways; first, Frank Olson was
experimented upon illegally and negligently. Second, the true nature of
his death was concealed for twenty-two years."
The statement continued,
"We are one family whose history has been fundamentally altered by
illegal CIA activity. In this we have something in common with those families
in Chile whose hopes for a better life were destroyed by CIA intervention…We
have something in common with those families in Cuba whose struggles for
a better life…have been made so much more difficult by CIA plots
and schemes. And we have something in common with those families whose
heroic efforts to be free of foreign interference have had to cope with
CIA subversion. We think it is crucial to point out the connections between
American treachery and immorality abroad and those same tendencies evident
at home…The CIA that participates in the assassination of foreign
leaders is the same CIA that infringes the rights of American citizens."
The response to the
Olsons’ press conference was immediate. The media attended in force
with major television and newspaper representation. The next day in New
York City, the medical examiner, Dominick J. Di Maio, announced that he
was reopening the Olson case in light of the "published reports of
the circumstances surrounding the plunge of Frank R Olson from the tenth
floor." Di Maio also cited conflicting accounts given by the man
staying with Olson that night, Robert Lashbrook, as contributing to renewed
suspicion.
Meanwhile, a free-lance
investigative reporter named John Marks, intrigued by the reporting of
Seymour Hersh, the Rockefeller Commission and the developments surrounding
the Olson family, issued a Freedom of Information request. Marks was particularly
interested in several "even more revealing sentences buried in the
Rockefeller text; ‘The drug program was part of a much larger CIA
program to study possible means for controlling human behavior. Other
studies explored the effects of radiation, electro-shock, psychology,
psychiatry, sociology, and harassment substances.’" His FOIA
request covered all documents which had been provided by the CIA to the
Rockefeller Commission concerning behavioral control programs. Marks was
no stranger to the CIA. He had previously co-authored a book, The CIA
and The Cult of Intelligence with Victor Marchetti. Marks’s 1974/75
FOIA inquires into the CIA’s mind control affairs would later bring
him to the forefront of the Frank Olson story.
Since the Olsons
had connected Frank to the Rockefeller suicide leak, a muddled picture
of what occurred in 1953 slowly developed. It was known that the CIA had
been secretly running a program to develop behavioral control drugs and
techniques at Fort Detrick. Frank Olson unwillingly became involved in
the project as a subject when he attended the SOD working retreat at Deep
Creek Lodge. During a round of after-dinner cocktails, two CIA men secretly
slipped LSD in the drinks of the SOD men. Twenty minutes later the CIA
men told the subjects that they had been administered LSD. Following the
secret administration of LSD, Frank Olson began exhibiting abnormal behavior,
which continued after Olson left Deep Creek and returned home. In the
following week after the working retreat, Olson had continued displaying
abnormal behavior. It had been decided by SOD and CIA men to take Olson
to see a secure psychiatrist, Dr Harold A. Abramson, in New York City.
Several nights after arriving in New York, Olson’s CIA escort apparently
awoke just in time to witness Olson plunge through the closed shade and
window “in a dead run.”
It appeared the LSD administered by the CIA scientists, had influenced Frank Olson’s abnormal behavior. The question became was why had the CIA been experimenting with LSD and why would they choose to test it on unwitting Army scientists?