Olson Family

Murray, the Zelig

From:
Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist
(CHAPTER 18)
Copyright © 2003

by Alston Chase.
Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Note:
Henry Murray, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, played a key role in CIA psychological experimentation going back to his involvement with the OSS during World War II, as this chapter explains.

By a great biographical irony, I had already come to know Henry Murray quite well at Harvard in the early 1970’s, before I knew anything about the role of the CIA—or the alleged role of LSD—in my father’s death. My own critical response to Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test was one of the factors that led to my work on the collage method.
— Eric Olson

In giving the six unwitting Harvard seniors LSD that spring of 1954, Dr. Hyde was motivated by the highest ideals. He and his colleagues believed that by studying the effects of this drug on the brain, they might find a cure for mental illness. But the CIA was paying his bills, and it had a different agenda in mind. The agency wanted a drug, as LSD historians Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain put it, that would “blow minds and make people crazy.”

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. And the fine print contained an ethical trap: Saving the world required the sacrifice—of others. In the name of the highest ideals, some would commit the lowest of crimes. Others, while not quite doing evil, simply lost their ethical direction. For both, this journey from high to low was such a gradual descent that many did not notice.

And among these fellow travelers would be Professor Murray
himself.

***

The agency’s interest began with its precursor, the OSS, in 1942, when General Donovan, anxious to perfect interrogation techniques for captured spies, established a “truth drug” committee of prominent psychologists, including Dr. Winfred Overholser, superintendent of St. Elizabethís hospital in Washington, D.C., and Dr. Edward Strecker, president of the American Psychiatric Association. The committee began testing a wide variety of chemicals on test subjects, from peyote and marijuana to “goofball” concoctions of sedatives and stimulants.

The following year, an obscure Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffmann, working for the Sandoz pharmaceutical company, accidentally imbibed a concoction he had created while looking for a circulation stimulant. The chemical was D-lysergic acid diethylamide, better known today as LSD. Without warning, Hoffmann found himself experiencing what was the world’s first acid trip. Coincidentally, at the same time, across the Rhine River in Germany, Nazi doctors were testing another hallucinogenic drug, mescaline, on inmates at the Dachau concentration camp.

The discovery of the Nazis’ Dachau notes after the war by U.S. Navy investigators triggered intense interest in mescaline in American intelligence circles. But it also generated alarm. The field of psychoactive drugs, it seemed, was yet another defense-related area in which the Nazis had been ahead of the Allies. To snatch up these Nazi experts in the dark sciences before the Soviets got them, the Pentagon launched ‘Operation Paperclip,’ a highly secret program to bring some of these German scientists into America. As most had been Nazis, their entry into the United States was prohibited by law. So Paperclip officials smuggled them in, forging, deleting, and doctoring documents to erase evidence of their Nazi past.

Some Paperclip scientists, such as the famous rocket specialist and Nazi Party member Werner von Braun, went to work in the U.S. space program. Others were chemical warfare specialists, experts on everything from sterilization to mass extermination. Among these were members of the former team of doctors already wanted by the U.S. Army war crimes unit for having conducted the ghoulish “high-altitude” (oxygen and pressure deprivation) experiments on Dachau inmates that killed at least seventy. These men would carry on similar research for the U.S. Air Force. Still other Paperclip scientists were sent to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, where they were put on the CIA payroll and began testing Nazi nerve and mustard gases on unwitting American GIs, seriously injuring several.

Soon, the very same Nazis who had helped to develop nerve gas and “Zyklon B”—tthe gas used to exterminate Jews at Auschwitzówere helping to perfect America’s own “Psychochemical Warfare” program, testing everything from alcohol to LSD on unsuspecting American soldiers. At Edgewood and Fort Holabird, Maryland (where I was stationed as a young second lieutenant in intelligence in 1957-58) at least one thousand soldiers were given up to twenty doses of LSD. Some, locked in boxes and then given LSD, went temporarily insane. Others had epileptic seizures.

In 1949, a Viennese chemist named Otto Kauders gave a lecture on LSD at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, claiming that this newly discovered drug artificially and temporarily induced psychosis. This claim would later be found false — acid trips are not at all like psychosis — but Kaudersís account impressed the hospital staff. If LSD reproduced the symptoms of psychosis, they reasoned, this proved that the disease had a chemical base. So studying LSD’s effects might lead them to drugs for treating mental illness.

Shortly after Kaudersís talk, one hospital staffer, Max Rinkel, ordered a supply of LSD from Sandoz and then persuaded his colleague Robert Hyde to test it on himself. Hyde’s ensuing trip—the first by an American—fired his enthusiasm for further experimentation. Research on one hundred subjects began at Harvard’s Boston Psychopathic under Hyde’s direction in 1950
.
Meanwhile, the CIA was in hot pursuit of the elusive truth drug. After the Soviets’ 1949 show trial of the Hungarian prelate Cardinal JÛzsef Mindszenty, this pursuit turned into a race. At the trial, the cardinal confessed to crimes he clearly didn’t commit, and acted as though he were sleepwalking. Other Soviet show trials demonstrated the same apparent “brainwashing” of prisoners. Later, it would be learned that the Soviets didn’t use drugs at all to accomplish this. Their major weapon was psychology and sleep deprivation. But at the time, the CIA suspected the Soviets had some super-mind-control drug. And they had to have it too.

In 1949, according to John Marks, who first broke the story of CIA experimentation with LSD, the agency’s head of Scientific Intelligence went to Western Europe to learn more about Soviet techniques and to supervise experiments of his own, in order, this official explained, to “apply special methods of interrogation for the purpose of evaluation of Russian practices.” By the spring of 1950, the agency established a special program under its security division named “Operation Bluebird” to test behavior-control methods, and started recruiting university scholars to work for the program. Bluebird scientists began experimenting on North Korean prisoners of war and others. They tried “ice-pick lobotomies,” electroshock, and other “neural-surgical techniques,” as well as a host of drugs including cocaine, heroin, and even something called a “stupid bush,” whose effects remain classified to this day.

To pursue these shadowy endeavors, the government enlisted the elite of the American psychological establishment, either as conduits, consultants, or researchers. According to a later agency review, these helpers included at least ninety-three universities and other governmental or nonprofit organizations, including Harvard, Cornell, the University of Minnesota, the Stanford University School of Medicine, the Lexington, Kentucky, Narcotics Farm, several prisons and penitentiaries, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Institutes of Health.

Project Bluebird was renamed “Project Artichoke” in 1951, and in that same year the CIA discovered LSD. When the Korean War drew to a close the following spring, the CIA’s interest in the drug became an obsession.

As American prisoners of the Chinese were repatriated, authorities discovered to their horror that 70 percent had either made confessions of “guilt” for participating in the war or had signed petitions calling for an end to the U.S. war effort in Asia. Fifteen percent collaborated fully with the Chinese, and only 5 percent refused to cooperate with them at all. Clearly, the Chinese had found new and formidable brainwashing techniques that could transform American servicemen into “Manchurian candidates” programmed to do Communist bidding. America faced a brainwash gap!

Pushing the panic button, in April 1953 the CIA replaced Project Artichoke with a more ambitious effort called MKULTRA, under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, a brilliant chemist with a degree from CalTech. Gottlieb was the ultimate dirty trickster, having personally participated in attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. And he immediately put his talents to work, this time against Americans.

Once MKULTRA was established, say Lee and Shlain, “almost overnight a whole new market for grants in LSD research sprang into existence as money started pouring through CIA-linked conduits.” Among these conduits was the Josiah J. Macy Foundation, whose director was an ex-OSS officer named Frank Fremont-Smith. And among the beneficiaries of this covert funding would be Harold Abramson, an acquaintance of Gregory Bateson’s, who was an allergist at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital and a CIA consultant to Edgewood Arsenal’s Paperclip scientists. Another was Hydeís group at Boston Psychopathic.

The aim, Gottlieb explained, was “to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behavior by covert means.” LSD, he hoped, would turn out to be the Swiss Army knife of mind control—an all-purpose drug that could ruin a man’s marriage, change his sexual behavior, make him lie or tell the truth, destroy his memory or help him recover it, induce him to betray his country or program him to obey orders or disobey them.

Soon, MKULTRA was testing all conceivable drugs on every kind of victim, including prison inmates, mental patients, foreigners, the terminally ill, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities. Altogether, it conducted tests at fifteen penal and mental institutions, concealing its role by using the U.S. Navy, the Public Health Service, and the National Institute of Mental Health as funding conduits. During the ten years of MKULTRA’s existence, the agency’s 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.”

Its brainwashing research also took the CIA to Canada, where the agency hired an eminently prestigious psychologist, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, president of the Canadian, American, and World Psychiatric associations and head of the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University (which had been founded with money from the Rockefeller Foundation). Cameron’s studies centered on what he called “depatterning” and what one CIA operative described as the “creation of a vegetable.” This entailed giving unwitting test subjects bevies of drugs that caused them to sleep for several weeks, virtually straight, with only brief waking intervals. This was followed by up to sixty-five days of powerful electroshock “therapy,” where each jolt was twenty to forty times more intense than standard electroshock treatment. After this program, some were given LSD and put in sensory deprivation boxes for another sixty-five days.

* * *

By the late 1950s, the CIA and LSD had become virtually inseparable. The advent of LSD, Timothy Leary would declare later, “was no accident. It was all planned and scripted by the Central Intelligence.”

Indeed, it was. As Lee and Shlain explain:

Nearly every drug that appeared on the black market during the 1960s — marijuana, cocaine, heroin, PCP, amyl nitrite, mushrooms, DMT, barbiturates, laughing gas, speed and many others — had previously been scrutinized, tested, and in some cases refined by CIA and army scientists. But of all the techniques explored by the Agency in its multimillion-dollar twenty-five-year quest to conquer the human mind, none received as much attention or was embraced with such enthusiasm as LSD-25. For a time CIA personnel were completely infatuated with the hallucinogen. Those who first tested LSD in the early 1950s were convinced that it would revolutionize the cloak-and-dagger trade.

To push its drugs, the CIA sought help from the university elite. In 1969, John Marks reports,

the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs published a fascinating little study designed to curb illegal LSD use. The authors wrote that the drug’s “early use was among small groups of intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast universities. It spread to undergraduate students, then to other campuses. Most often, users have been introduced to the drug by persons of high status. Teachers have influenced students; upperclassmen have influenced lower classmen.” Calling this a “trickle-down phenomenon,” the authors seem to have correctly analyzed how LSD got around the country. They left out only one vital element, which they had no way of knowing: That somebody had to influence the teachers and that up there at the top of the LSD distribution system could be found the men of MKULTRA.

Fremont-Smith and Abramson were the links between the universities and MKULTRA.

Fremont-Smith organized the conferences that spread the word about LSD to the academic hinterlands. Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead’s former husband, his first LSD. In 1959 Bateson, in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet friend of his named Allen Ginsberg to take the drug at a research program located off the Stanford campus.

And Murray was part of this drug-testing pyramid. During this time, according to Frank Barron, he had supervised experiments “on the subjective effects of psycho-active drugs, injecting adrenaline . . . into naive subjects to study changes in their subjectivity.” And in 1960, even as the “Multiform Assessments” on Kaczynski and his classmates were underway, Murray had, according to Leary, given his blessing to the latter’s testing psilocybin, an hallucinogen derived from mushrooms, on undergraduates.

In his autobiography, Flashbacks, Leary, who would dedicate the rest of his life to “turning on and tuning out,” described Murray as “the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation. 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 Abramson’s orbit, he had attended Fremont-Smithís Macy Foundation conferences on the drug. And Murray, write Lee and Shlain, “took a keen interest in Leary’s work. He volunteered for a psilocybin session, becoming one of the first of many faculty and graduate students to sample the mushroom pill under Learyís guidance.”

By that time, Gregory Bateson was working at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California. While he was introducing Allen Ginsberg to the drug, a colleague began testing it on Stanford undergraduates. One of these students was Ken Kesey, who would later write One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and was soon to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe as a “Merry Prankster” and LSD missionary in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Meanwhile, Murray, already addicted to amphetamines, continued to flirt with hallucinogens. At Leary’s suggestion, according to a former colleague, he took psilocybin again, this time with Aldous Huxley and Ginsberg. He introduced Morgan to LSD. And in 1961 he spoke at the International Congress of Applied Psychology in Copenhagen, which, thanks to Leary and Huxley’s presence, turned into a virtual psychoactive circus. His talk there, wrote Forrest Robinson, featured “a highly literary rendering of a psilocybin ‘trip’ that he took with Timothy Leary a year earlier. . . . ‘The newspapers described it as the report of a drug-induced vision,’ he wrote [Lewis] Mumford, with obvious delight.”

Not all scientists worked for the CIA. And many did so unwittingly. Nor was this agency the only covert intelligence bureaucracy sponsoring Cold War studies. The U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and other defense agencies financed their own experiments as well, often duplicating each otherís efforts, sometimes at the same institutions. (The Harvard Medical School, for example, conducted LSD research on unwitting subjects for the Department of the Army in 1952-54, even as Hyde continued with similar work at Boston Psychopathic for the CIA.)

And although LSD may have been the most sensational subject, Lee and Shlain make clear that it was far from the only field in which the government was prime mover. Cold War research ran the gamut, from investigations of sleep deprivation to perfecting anthrax delivery systems. It co-opted nearly an entire generation of scholars in the physical, social, and health sciences. This work was so various, so widespread, and so secret that even today it is impossible to grasp its full dimensions.
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. One project was designed to turn people into programmed assassins who would kill on automatic command. Another document mentioned “hypnotically-induced anxieties” and “induced pain as a form of physical and psychological control.” There were repeated references to exotic drugs and biological agents that caused “headache clusters,” uncontrollable twitching or drooling, or a lobotomy-like stupor. Deadly chemicals were concocted for the sole purpose of inducing a heart attack or cancer without leaving a clue as to the actual source of the disease. CIA specialists also studied the effects of magnetic fields, ultrasonic vibration, and other forms of radiant energy on the brain. As one CIA doctor put it, “We lived in a never-never land of ‘eyes only’ memos and unceasing experimentation.”

As university professors and hospital researchers pursued their devil’s bargain with the intelligence community, victims accumulated.

On January 8, 1953, Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player, reportedly died from a massive overdose of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The drug, say the investigative journalists H. P. Albarelli, Jr., and John Kelly, was administered “as part of a top-secret Army-funded experimental program . . . code named Project Pelican, in which Blauer was used as a guinea pig.” The supervisor of the project was Dr. Paul H. Hoch, director of experimental psychiatry and, according to Albarelli and Kelly, an associate of Harold Abramson’s.

Project Pelican, write Albarelli and Kelly, was part of a larger cooperative venture between the CIA and the army’s Chemical Corps Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, called MK-NAOMI — reputedly named after Abramsonís assistant, Naomi Busner. The project’s purpose, according to CIA documents, was to develop biological weapons that could be used on “individuals for the purposes of affecting human behavior with the objectives ranging from very temporary minor disablement to more serious and longer incapacitation to death.” At the behest of the Chemical Corps, the New York medical examiner conducted no autopsy of Blauer, kept the army’s name out of its report, and described the death as an accidental overdose.

Eleven months later, the CIA claimed another victim. On November 28, 1953, a Fort Detrick biochemist fell — or was pushedófrom a thirteenth-floor window of New York’s Statler Hotel on Seventh Avenue, falling 170 feet to the sidewalk. He was still alive and trying to talk when the night manager, Armond Pastore, reached him, but died a few minutes later.

Frank Olson, a chemist and joint employee of the CIA and Army Chemical Corps, had worked his entire professional life at Fort Detrick. 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. In 1949 and 1950, he worked briefly on “Operation Harness,” a joint US-British effort to spray virulent organisms — so-called BW antipersonnel agents — around the Caribbean, decimating untold thousands of plants and animals. At the time of his death, Olson was developing a new, portable, and more lethal form of anthrax that could be put into a small spray can.

By 1953, Olson was acting chief of Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, which, according to a Michael Ignatieff article in the New York Times Magazine, had become “the center for the development of drugs for use in brainwashing and interrogation.” But he was becoming increasingly disillusioned.

The turning point came during the summer of 1953. Olson had traveled to England and Germany to observe the use of mind-control drugs on collaborators and German SS prisoners considered “expendable.” Some died. While in Europe, according to his son, Eric, Frank Olson also learned that the Americans were deploying Anthrax against enemy troops in Korea. When returning American POWs reported this — the first use of bacterial weapons by the United States in war — authorities in Washington dismissed their claims as products of brainwashing. Returning to America shaken, Olson resolved to quit.

On November 19, Gottlieb met with six MKULTRA personnel, including Olson, at Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland. The CIA would claim twenty-two years later that during the retreat, on Gottlieb’s order, his deputy, Robert Lashbrook, spiked the after-dinner Cointreau with LSD. Olson and all but two of the others (one a teetotaler, the other abstaining because of a headcold) drank it. In fact, Eric Olson believes that only his father’s drink was spiked, and that the substance he imbibed was probably not LSD but something stronger. In any case, soon, Olson was experiencing disorientation.

When he came home, his wife, Alice, found him withdrawn, saying repeatedly that he “had made a terrible mistake.” The next day he told his supervisor, Vincent Ruwet, that he wanted to resign from the agency. But officials couldn’t afford to let him leave. He knew too much. Once outside, he could be an acute embarrassment. So Ruwet and Lashbrook took Olson to New York, supposedly to see a psychiatrist. In fact, they brought him to Harold Abramson, who prescribed nembutal and bourbon.

According to the CIA, Ruwet and Lashbrook had earlier taken Olson to see John Mulholland, a magician hired by the CIA to advise on “the delivery of various materials to unwitting subjects” — i.e., on how to spike drinks with drugs or poisons. Olson was suspicious of Mulholland and asked Ruwet, “Whatís behind this? Give me the lowdown. What are they trying to do with me? . . . Just let me disappear.”

That evening, Olson wandered the streets of New York, discarding his wallet and identification cards before returning to the Statler. And the next day, the CIA claims its experts decided Olson must be institutionalized. Yet he seemed to be feeling better. After he and Lashbrook ate a dreary Thanksgiving meal at a Horn & Hardart restaurant, the two men returned to their room at the Statler, which they shared, and Olson called Alice to say he “looked forward to seeing her the next day.”

Around 2:00 a.m. the next morning, Pastore found Olson on the sidewalk. Olson tried to tell Pastore something, but his words were too faint and garbled to be understood. He died before the ambulance arrived. Immediately afterward, Pastore asked the hotel operator if she’d overheard any calls from Room 1081A. Yes, she said, two. In one, someone from the room said, “He’s gone,” and the voice at the other end of the line said, “That’s too bad.”

The CIA hushed up Olson’s death. The medical examiner made no mention of the CIA, did not do an autopsy, and ruled the death a suicide due to depression. The family didn’t believe this story, as Olson had never seemed depressed until after the retreat at Deep Creek Lodge. Yet it would not be until 1975 that they would learn some of the circumstances of his death, and even then not apparently the whole story.

At the request of Frank Olson’s son, Eric, an autopsy was performed in 1994, revealing that Olson had apparently been struck on the left side of the temple and knocked unconscious before going through the window. In 1998, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office reclassified Olson’s death “cause unknown.”

* * *

With Olson’s death, the culture of despair had come full circle. Having experienced what Ellen Herman called “a collapse of faith in the rational appeal and workability of democratic ideology and behavior,” the generation of scholars that emerged from World War II had sought to perfect the tools of social control by which the elite would save democracy. Following the rubrics of positivism, they believed that good and evil are fictions. People aren’t bad, merely sick. By curing them, psychologists can prevent war. All problems can be fixed by the alchemy of the mind sciences.

But a world in which morality has no meaning is one in which eventually everything is permitted. The same narrow focus on value-free science that led Nazi concentration camp doctors to commit atrocities encouraged many of these well-meaning scholars to cross ethical lines. By following a path of moral agnosticism, they reached a dead end. Rather than saving democracy, they created tools for coercion, and many people were hurt.

Murray was a product of these times, a man whose career and ideas embodied the development of his discipline and its role in American culture. Like other leading psychologists of his generation, he was a beneficiary of the Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts to promote psychology in public policy. He was intensely patriotic and served on the Committee for National Morale. He flourished during World War II and he was a star in the OSS.

After the war, Murray’s contributions to personality theory, including the TAT, personnel assessment, and techniques for analyzing foreign leaders and countries, became virtual Cold War institutions. Throughout this undeclared conflict he continued to serve, albeit quietly, America’s defense efforts. And among the services he performed would be the experiments on Kaczynski and his cohort.

Even today, however, neither Murray’s friends, his widow, nor even some historians believe this. Murray, they argue, was a world federalist who, in Herman’s words, was “transformed into a militant pacifist and peace activist after the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Their skepticism is understandable. It is rare when even spouses know of these connections. The CIA never reveals the identity of its “assets.” Often the professor himself doesn’t know the originating source of research monies he receives. And Murray made much of his supposed transformation into ‘peace activist’ following Hiroshima.

Nevertheless, they are mistaken. Hiroshima did not convert Murray to world federalism. Even in 1943, during the same period when he was seeking combat duty in Europe, he wrote in his analysis of Hitler that “there is a great need now rather than later, for some form of World Federation” (Murray’s italics).

Rather, like so many “nervous liberals” of his generation, Murray was both hawk and dove. He resembled his contemporary, Cord Meyer, the war hero and onetime president of United World Federalists, who eventually became a top officer in the CIA. Such ambivalence characterized virtually the entire elite clique of East Coast professionals to which he belonged. Theirs was a world in which everyone knew each other, and many worked for the CIA. Murray was so surrounded by agency people he couldn’t have moved without bumping into one.

In fact, as we have seen, Murray was indeed a Cold War warrior—not, perhaps, as prominent a player as some, but a player nonetheless. He received steady funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which had served as cover for his trip with Cantril to the Soviet Union for the CIA in 1958, and from the National Institute of Mental Health, also known to be a covert funding conduit. He apparently worked for HumRRo. He served as an adviser on army-sponsored steroid experiments. He helped found Harvard’s Social Relations Department, which had been generously funded by covert intelligence agencies. He served the U.S. Army Surgeon General’s Clinical Psychology Advisory Board and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene with the CIA’s propagator of LSD, Frank Fremont-Smith. Along with Fremont-Smith, Abramson, and Leary, he occupied a spot on the agency’s LSD pyramid.

And in 1959, Murray would cap off a long and distinguished career with the last of a series of studies inspired by his OSS assessments and originally undertaken for the U.S. Navy Department. And Ted Kaczynski would participate.

Finding the cabin at Deep Creek Lake

Eric Olson
Deep Creek Lake, Maryland

“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
…
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
…
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)”

— T.S. Eliot
“Little Gidding,” (1943) Four Quartets

Friday, May 8, 1998

I drove west from Frederick on Route 70 in a pouring rain, and continued in slightly better weather on Route 68 through Cumberland, a dilapidated town I hadn’t seen in 37 years, since Nils and I collapsed in exhaustion there on the first day of our bicycle trip to California in the summer of 1961. I kept thinking “Harolds Club or Bust.” Just west of Frostberg I turned south on Route 219.

When I reached the town of “Accident” Maryland I figured I must be getting close. (That town was named for two nineteenth century survey parties who happened—accidentally—to meet up there.) Sure enough, the Deep Creek Bridge, a key landmark for finding the old cabin, was just a few miles beyond.

I stopped at a restaurant a half mile or so from the bridge, and asked where I would find the “Bailey Cabin.” Nobody knew. But then came the suggestion that perhaps I meant the “Railey Cabin.” I had gotten the name from the old typewritten 1953 “Deep Creek Rendezvous” invitation. I checked the name more closely and discovered that the “B” was in fact an “R.” I was crushed to hear someone say “The old Railey cabin was torn down ten years ago,” but I revived fast when the next sentence came. “Go over and meet Mr. Railey, He’s next door drinking at the bar.”

Jim Railey is a small man in his late 70’s who still operates what appears to be a substantial a real estate business. I found him sitting at the bar nursing a Coca Cola. I explained why I was there, and Railey immediately knew the story. “No,” he said, “the old cottage is still there. It’s been added onto quite a bit, but it’s still there. The Stone Tavern that used to stand by the bridge is gone. But the cottage those guys from the CIA used—that’s still there.”

Railey had had only a dim memory of the guys from Washington who had rented the cottage forty-five years earlier. He and his father and brother had laid out the foundation for the place in the early 1940’s, and had finished building it in 1946 when the two brothers got home from the war.

Railey couldn’t say just when he had figured out that the guy who had gone out the window in New York was one of the men who had stayed in his cottage a few days earlier. 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. The cottage itself was only a quarter of mile from where we were sitting and Railey told me how to find it.

The mythical Deep Creek cabin: why had it taken me forty five years to go looking for it? And why had I had to wait until another investigator implied that maybe the place hadn’t been used for the experiment at all? By comparison it had only taken 31 years to find room 1018A in what had been the Statler Hotel. Then another 10 years to exhume the body. Finally I found myself driving toward the place where something had happened on a chilly November night 45 years ago, something that had set a bizarre chain of events in motion.

The stone house is just above the lake at the end of a small dirt road. It is built on a steep slope, and appears considerably larger from the lake side than from the approach. Nobody was home, so I spent half an hour looking in the windows, taking pictures, trying to imagine what might have occurred there those many years ago. I could see a big stone fireplace in the living room of a wing of the house that hadn’t been there in 1953. Just outside was a broad terrace with old lawn chairs facing the lake, and a set of wooden stairs going down 50 feet to the water. The old part of the house was all there was in ’53. In agreement with the 1953 invitation, Railey said the the cottage had had four only bedrooms, each with a double bed. It must have been tight, I thought, when the CIA group of four and the SOD group of five occupied it.

Saturday, May 9, 1998
Point View Inn

I spent the night at the Point View Inn next to the bar where I had met Jim Railey. I was eating breakfast in the dining room overlooking the lake when Railey appeared again with pictures of the Stone Tavern and some of the smaller cottages. He hadn’t found a picture of the old Railey cabin as it looked in 1953, but as we sat drinking coffee he called his brother on his cell phone and Bud Railey promised to send me one.

As we talked about the old cabin Railey looked sad. Meeting me must have been strange for him, but I imagined there was more. It seemed as if, irrationally, a part of Jim Railey believed that what had happened in his cottage, and what it had led to, had been in some way his fault. This bizarre story has the power to make a lot of different people feel that way. I thought for example of Armand Pastore, who is Jim Railey’s contemporary and is clearly pained when he remembers the aspects he witnessed. The only people who seem to be immune to feelings like that are the ones who were actually involved in making it happen.

—Eric Olson

“Why Our Town is Called ‘Accident’?

About the year, 1751, a grant of land was given to Mr. George Deakins by King George II, of England, in payment of a debt. According to the terms, Mr. Deakins was to receive 600 acres of land anywhere in Western Maryland he chose. Mr. Deakins sent out two corps of engineers, each without knowledge of the other grroup, to survey the best land in this section that contained 600 acres.

After the survey, the Engineers returned with their maps of the plots they had surveyed. To their surprise, they discovered that they had surveyed a tract of land starting at the same tall oak tree and returning to the starting point. Mr. Deakins chose this plot of ground and had it patented ‘The Accident Tract’ — Hence, the name of the town.”

History from the back of the business card for:
Accident Garage, Main Street
Accident, Maryland

Allen Fratz, owner

1. Wormwood

Errol Morris’s Wormwood is a groundbreaking hybrid of non-fictional and fictional storytelling modes—although no matter how you classify it, it’s the year’s towering cinematic achievement. The filmmaker’s second release of the year (after the charming The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography) recounts the tangled saga of Frank Olson, a government biochemist whose mysterious 1953 death out a New York City hotel room window was first deemed a suicide, then the byproduct of a CIA mind-control program, and then something more sinister still. With Olson’s sleuthing son Eric as his guide, Morris immerses himself in this thorny true-crime case, using dramatized sequences—starring a phenomenal Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, Tim Blake Nelson, and Bob Balaban—for his 1953-set sequences, and documentary interviews and material for the rest. Wormwood is assembled as a hallucinatory, psychologically penetrating collage and plays like a pulse-pounding thriller, a damning indictment of institutional malfeasance, and a chilling portrait of both self-destructive obsession and the elusiveness of truth. Simultaneously released as both a 241-minute theatrical movie and a six-part Netflix mini-series, it’s a masterpiece that breathes new life into the documentary form, and further confirms Morris’ peerless greatness. Consequently, it’s our pick for the best film of 2017. Available to stream on Netflix.

PAUL ROBESON JR.
The Paul Robeson Files

The Nation
December 20, 1999

The PBS American Masters documentary on Paul Robeson titled “Here I Stand” surveys the life and work of this great American artist, scholar, and activist. The documentary also examines the question of Robeson’ 1961 suicide attempt.

In the morning of March 27, 196 1, Paul Robeson was found in the bathroom of his Moscow hotel suite after having slashed his wrists with a razor blade following a wild party that had raged there the preceding night. His blood loss was not yet severe, and he recovered rapidly. 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?

Heavily censored documents I have already received under the Freedom of Information Act confirm that my father was under intense surveillance by the FBI and the CIA in 1960 and 1961, because he was planning to visit China and Cuba, in violation of US passport restrictions. The FBI files also reveal a suspicious concern over my father’s health, beginning in 1955.

A meeting I had in 1998 adds further grounds for suspicion. In June of that year I met Dr. Eric Olson in New York, and we were both struck by the similarities between the cases of our respective fathers. On November 28, 1953, Olson’s father, Dr. Frank Olson, a scientist working with the CIA’s top-secret MK-ULTRA “mind control” program, allegedly “jumped” through the glass of a thirteenth-floor hotel window and fell to his death. CIA documents have confirmed that a week earlier Olson had been surreptitiously drugged with LSD at a high-level CIA meeting. It is expected that a New York grand jury will soon reveal whether it believes Olson was murdered by the CIA because of his qualms about the work he was doing. MK-ULTRA poisoned foreign and domestic “enemies” with LSD to induce mental breakdown and/ or suicide. Olson’s drugging suggested a CIA motive similar to the possible one in my father’s case—concern about the target’s planned course of action.

In this context, the fact that Richard Helms was CIA chief of operations at the time of my father’s 1961 “suicide attempt” has sinister implications. Helms was also responsible for the MK-ULTRA program. In 1967 a former CIA agent to whom I promised anonymity told me in a private conversation that my father was the subject of high-level concern and that Helms and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles discussed him in a meeting in 1955.

The events leading to my father’s “suicide attempt” began when, alarmed by intense surveillance in London, he departed abruptly for Moscow alone. His intention was to visit Havana at Fidel Castro’s personal invitation and return home to join the civil rights movement. Since the date set by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion fell only four weeks after his arrival in Moscow, the CIA had a strong motive for preventing his travel to Havana.

My father manifested no depressive symptoms at the time, and when my mother and I spoke to him in the hospital soon after his “suicide” attempt, he was lucid and able to recount his experience clearly. The party in his suite had been imposed on him under false pretenses, by people he knew but without the knowledge of his official hosts. By the time he realized this, his suite had been invaded by a variety of anti-Soviet people whose behavior had become so raucous that he locked himself in his bedroom. His description of that setting, I later came to learn, matched the conditions prescribed by the CIA for drugging an unsuspecting victim, and the physical psychological symptoms he experienced matched those of an LSD trip.

My Russian being fluent, I confirmed my father’s story by interviewing his official hosts, his doctors, the organizers of the party, several attendees and a top Soviet official. However, I could not determine whether my father’s blood tests had shown any trace of drugs, whether an official investigation was in progress or why his hosts were unaware of the party. The Soviet official confirmed that known “anti-Soviet people” had attended the party.

By the time I returned to New York in early June, my father appeared to me to be fully recovered. However, when my parents returned to London several weeks later, my father became anxious, and he and my mother returned to Moscow. There his wellbeing was again restored, and in September they once more went back to London, where my father almost immediately suffered a relapse. My mother, acting on the ill-considered advice of a close family friend, allowed a hastily recommended English physician to sign my father into the Priory psychiatric hospital near London.

My father’s records from the Priory, which I obtained only recently, raise the suspicion that he may have been subjected to the CIA’s MK-ULTRA “mind depatterning” technique, which combined massive electroconvulsive therapy with drug therapy. On the day of his admission, my mother was pressured into consenting to ECT, and the treatment began just thirty-six hours later. In May 1963 1 learned that my father had received fifty four ECT treatments, and I arranged his transfer to a clinic in East Berlin.

Certain key CIA documents that have been withheld, in whole or in part, would probably shed additional light on these events. Among the questions to be answered are:

Why was Robeson’s health such a concern to the government, and why is the FBI’s information on it still being withheld?
Was the CIA implicated in my father’s 1961 “suicide attempt”?
Did the CIA, in collusion with the British intelligence service, orchestrate his subjection to “mind depatterning”?

The idea that thirty-eight years after the original events occurred, the release of these documents could endanger national security should be rejected. On the contrary, the release of the information will improve national security by helping to protect the American people from criminal abuse by the intelligence agencies that are supposed to defend them.

In reburial, Olsons hope to lay saga of father to rest
Family has disputed government claims he committed suicide in ’53; Ceremony planned for today

By Stephanie Desmon
Baltimore Sun Staff
Originally published August 9, 2002

FREDERICK — It was here in the Olson family back yard in 1975 that the world first learned the name of a man who, the story went, had been unwittingly drugged with LSD by the Central Intelligence Agency 22 years earlier and then jumped to his death from a 10th-floor hotel room.

The Olsons – among them Eric, the oldest child – called a news conference. Reporters from throughout the country came to the house that Frank Olson had built and gathered around the picnic table to listen.

Reporters heard that family patriarch Frank Olson, ostensibly an Army scientist, had committed suicide in 1953. But that explanation left the family – Eric Olson in particular – with many questions about Frank Olson’s life and death.

Eight years ago, questions unanswered, Frank Olson’s body was exhumed from the Frederick cemetery where it had lain for more than 40 years. Forensic experts are hesitant to assert anything with complete certainty, but they said the death was not a suicide.
Today, Eric Olson and his family will try to put their questions, theories and suspicions to rest as they rebury what is left of Frank Olson in the cemetery plot he shared with his wife. 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.

“I feel satisfied,” said Olson, a Harvard-educated clinical psychologist. “We’re where we want to be – we know what happened.”
What Olson says he knows is this: His father was not a civilian scientist at nearby Fort Detrick, as the family had been told. Instead, he worked for the CIA, running the Special Operations Division at Detrick, which Olson says was the government’s “most secret biological weapons laboratory,” working with materials such as anthrax.

He says the evidence he has gathered over the years shows that Frank Olson didn’t suffer a nervous breakdown, as the family initially was told, and didn’t commit suicide because he had had a negative drug experience, as they learned in the 1970s. Instead, the son says, his father was killed by the CIA because officials there feared he would divulge classified information concerning the United States’ use of biological weapons in Korea.

“It didn’t happen,” CIA spokesman Paul F. Novack said yesterday. “We categorically deny that.”

Two weeks after that news conference in 1975, the Olson family was invited to the White House for a formal apology from President Gerald R. Ford. “Actually, it was not at all clear exactly what it was that the president and the CIA director were apologizing for,” Olson recalled yesterday. After the family agreed not to sue the CIA, it was awarded a $750,000 settlement. They had been told theirs was a case they could not win.

Now the family has learned that the Ford administration was keeping information from the family, concerned that family members would ask questions about the scientist’s work that the government was unprepared to answer. Among those who advocated keeping quiet were Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the vice president and defense secretary, the Olsons learned from memos and other papers received last year from the Gerald R. Ford Library.

“Most of it is documented now,” said Philadelphia lawyer David Rudovsky, who was a roommate of Eric Olson’s in the 1970s and has assisted him with the case over the years. “It’s more than just some crazy paranoid speculation.”

“It’s not an easy theory to wrap your mind around,” concedes Nils Olson, 53, Eric Olson’s brother.

Little is left of the body the Olsons exhumed in 1994. When the casket was opened that day – it had been closed during the funeral years before because the family had been told Frank Olson’s body was too disfigured from his fall – Eric Olson recognized his father. His face was largely intact, lacking the cuts that would have resulted if he had broken through a plate-glass window to jump.

Something else they say they have learned: Information about the murder of Frank Olson, as the family calls it, is included in the assassination curriculum of the Israeli Mossad – Israel’s intelligence agency – because it is considered a successful instance of disguising a murder as a suicide.

When Frank Olson is buried again today, only bones will be returned to the ground – the tissue has been removed for study. The bones have been sitting for years in a locked file cabinet in the George Washington University office of James E. Starrs, the professor of law and forensic sciences who determined that the death was not a suicide.

Yesterday’s news conference lasted nearly two hours as members of Eric Olson’s family, including his brother, son and nieces, read through a statement, more than 20 pages long, before answering questions. Eric Olson lives in his childhood home, the place he lived when he was 9 years old and learned of his father’s death.

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.

Starrs listened to Eric Olson talk yesterday about putting his father’s death in the past. Starrs is not sure that Olson will be able to do so.
“I think people say these things in the hope they’ll have sleep-filled nights again,” Starrs said.

“What I really respect about Eric is the purity of his pursuit,” brother Nils Olson, a dentist who lives in Frederick, said afterward. “It hasn’t been to pursue a fixed agenda. It’s really been the pursuit of truth.” Nils Olson sometimes worried that they might learn something ugly about their father – for example, that he had been a traitor to his government. Eric, though, was undeterred, whatever the outcome.

“Eric has given over a large bulk of his life to this,” Nils Olson said. “To be able to now invest energy back into his professional career – hopefully, it’s not too late; he is in his late 50s. He is extremely bright, and he has a lot to offer the field of psychology.

“I believe he can put it to rest.”

Unpublished letter to the editor, The New Yorker, in response to Louis Menand’s “Brainwashed: Where the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ came from.”

September 12, 2003
To the editor, The New Yorker

In his essay “Brainwashed: Where the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ came from” Louis Menand suggests that the charge made by brainwashed American pilots that the US had engaged in germ warfare during the Korean War was “untrue but widely believed in many countries.” Menand implies that this controversial issue is far more settled than is in fact the case.

A new documentary film, “Code Name Artichoke” (produced this year by German public television and widely shown internationally and in the US on WorldLink TV) on the death of my father, Dr. Frank Olson, revisits this question and presents new evidence.

In the year before his death in 1953 my father, a biochemist, was acting chief of the Special Operations Division (essentially an off-campus CIA BW lab) at the Army’s center for biological warfare at Camp Detrick, Maryland. This position put him on the boundary between biological warfare and interrogation research, precisely the strange boundary zone evoked in the term “germ warfare confessions.” The conventional wisdom alleges that in November 1953 he threw himself out of a 13th floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) after having himself been drugged with LSD by the CIA in a mind control experiment. This version of events comprises the core chapter of John Marks’ 1979 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. (Times Books)

“Code Name Artichoke” shows that my father became convinced that the US was using biological weapons in Korea, at least on an experimental basis. 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.

Sincerely,
Eric Olson, PhD

Family Statement on the Murder of Frank Olson

August 8, 2002
Frederick, Maryland

Eric Olson, PhD – Stephan Kimbel Olson – Nils Olson, DDS – Lauren Olson – Kristin Olson

We welcome you and thank you for coming.

Forty-one years ago—on June 26, 1961—Nils (then twelve years old) and Eric (then sixteen) set out on our bicycles from this house and began cycling to California.

A bit like Lewis and Clark, we had very little idea what we would encounter during our trip West. 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. Our motto was “Harolds Club or Bust.” All you had to do was just keep going and follow the road. Eventually you would come to San Francisco.

Eight years earlier our father had died—vanished really—and it has taken all the years since then to figure out what happened to him. Our search for the truth about what happened to our father has been a lot like that bike trip to California. All one had to do was to keep following the thread represented by his disappearance. Eventually one would come to the answer.

In both cases one reached the goal by small continuous increments of motion along a single strand. Nevertheless, the final destination did not look anything like the place from which one started out. Little by little one entered unknown terrain. But the destination, whether it was San Francisco or the truth about what happened to Frank Olson, was still on the same map. Incredible as it sometimes seemed, in both cases, the place one finally got to was still part of America.

Today we want want to try to give you some idea of what this journey has been like, and tell you something about the unfamiliar American territory we have discovered.

Our purpose in inviting you here today is to explain why—49 years after his death, 27 years after the government claimed to have told us the truth about his death, and 8 years after we had his body exhumed and a forensic investigation performed—we are going to rebury our father’s remains tomorrow.

The reason we have waited so long to do this is that we wanted to be certain that when we reburied our father’s remains we would not be reburying the truth at the same time.

The gist of what we want to say can be compressed into three headlines:

1. The death of Frank Olson on November 28, 1953 was a murder, not a suicide.

2. This is not an LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in 1975. This is a biological warfare story. Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a “bad trip.” He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program called “ARTICHOKE” in the early 1950’s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.

3. The truth concerning the death of Frank Olson was concealed from the Olson family as well as from the public in 1953. In 1975 a cover story regarding Frank Olson’s death was disseminated. At the same time a renewed coverup of the truth concerning this story was being carried out at the highest levels of government, including the White House. The new coverup involved the participation of persons serving in the current Administration.

We will make available materials to amplify all these points, and provide copies of a definitive new one-hour documentary film on the Frank Olson case called “Code Name ARTICHOKE” that will air on public TV in Germany (the ARD network) next week, on Monday, August 12.

I. “Return to the beginning”

Now, to back up and approach all this a bit more slowly:

There is a passage in “The Four Quartets” where the poet T.S. Eliot writes:

… the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

This is a moment like that, a moment when the circle closes. A moment of returning—this time with knowledge—to the beginning.

Twenty-seven years ago, on July 10, 1975, our family sat at this same picnic table in this same backyard, to hold a press conference. At that time the family consisted of our mother Alice, then 59 years old, Eric, 30, our sister Lisa, 29, and Nils, 26.

Today Eric is 57. Nils is 53. Eric’s son Stephan is 12. Nils’ daughter Lauren is 19. His daughter Kristin is 17. Lisa died in an airplane crash in 1978. Our mother passed away in 1993.

That day in July 1975 we sat at this table and read a family statement. This was how it looked that day.(“Backyard press conference,” poster 3).

A month earlier, on June 11, 1975, an article had appeared on the front page of the Washington Post. The article contained stunning news about our father, but it did not mention his name. The purpose of our press conference in 1975 was to say that the unidentified man referred to in that article was Frank Olson.

Twenty-two years earlier, in the early morning of November 28, 1953, our father died in what we were told was an “accident.” For those twenty-two years between 1953 and 1975 we knew nothing about how he died or why. In 1953 we had been told only that he had had “an accident” in a New York hotel room and had “fallen or jumped” out the window.

Then followed 22 years of inky darkness.

II. “Suicide Revealed”

Ours was a family that tried its best to be normal in the 1950’s way. But in fact this was a family haunted by fear, shame, uncertainty, and insecurity. It was a family that had, in effect, been terrorized. Two decades passed.

Then on June 11, 1975, out of nowhere, like a message in a bottle suddenly washed ashore by distant storms (in this instance the storms were Vietnam and Watergate), came a cryptic bit of news.

Under the headline “Suicide Revealed” on the front page of the Washington Post we read the following paragraphs:

A civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test, then jumped 10 floors to his death less than a week later, according to the Rockefeller commission report released yesterday.

The man was given the drug while attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on a test project that involved the administration of mind-bending drugs to unsuspecting Americans and the testing of new listening devices by eavesdropping on citizens who were unaware they were being overheard.

“This individual was not made aware he had been given LSD until about 20 minutes after it had been administered,” the commission said. “He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment. Several days later, he jumped from a tenth-floor window of his room and died as a result.”

The CIA’s general counsel ruled that the death resulted from “circumstances arising out of an experiment undertaken in the course of his official duties for the United States government.” His family, thus, was eligible for death benefits. And two CIA employees were “reprimanded” by the director.

The man identified as an “army scientist” turned out to be Frank Olson. But nobody bothered to notify our family that this story was being released. Not the Rockefeller Commission, not the CIA, not the White House.

It was as if a long-lost MIA had at last been found and identified, but his family were not notified.

This horrendous omission turns out to be a key to the whole story. It indicates that the “truth” was being suppressed even as it was coming to light. In fact the headline “Suicide Revealed” was triply ironic. First the death was not a suicide. Second it was not “revealed”: the name was not given. Third, we would later learn that the subject of the experiment was not an “Army scientist.”

We recognized our father in this story only by the fit of the details: the man was a “scientist,” the year was “1953,” the fall was from a “tenth floor window.”

A month later (July 10) we held a press conference, right here, to provide the name—“Frank Olson”—that the story had lacked up to then.

At that point the government wasted no time in getting in touch.

Less than two weeks later (July 23) we were sitting in the Oval Office receiving an official apology from Gerald Ford. And five days after that (July 28) we were having lunch with CIA Director William Colby in the Director’s 7th floor office at Langley, receiving an apology from the CIA, along with what we were told was the complete CIA file on our father’s death.

The contrast between the failure of the government to notify us when the anonymous story about our father was being released, and the scurrying around at the highest levels to apologize to us once we identified ourselves, could not have been more stark.

This was another sign that something was still amiss. Ask yourself when you last remember an American President calling a family to the Oval Office to receive an apology for the unintended effects of a United States government policy.

Actually it was not at all clear exactly what it was that the President and the CIA Director were apologizing for.

Was it for the reckless CIA LSD drugging at Deep Creek Lake?

Was it for the nonchalant medical treatment by the non-psychiatrist to whom Frank Olson was subsequently taken?

Was it for keeping the allegedly psychotic Frank Olson in a hotel rather than a hospital?

Was it for the fact that his CIA escort was asleep in the next bed when Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window?

Was it for not telling the truth to his family in 1953?

Or was it for not notifying the Olson family when this story was finally emerging twenty-two years later, in 1975?

The President assured us that the White House would support our efforts to obtain justice. Almost immediately we were advised by White House attorneys that a law suit would be risky, as the law was not on our side. Accordingly the government attorneys strongly recommended that we pursue a settlement via a Private Bill in Congress, which they said the White House would support.

In 1976 our family received a financial settlement from Congress for far less than the White House, CIA Director George Bush, the Justice Department, the Labor Department, and the Treasury Department had recommended. A single Congressman had decided to oppose the settlement, so it was enacted in drastically reduced form.

Having already received the document package from the CIA, the matter was now officially over. We signed an agreement saying that all our claims against the United States government in the death of Frank Olson were settled.

By that time the name “Frank Olson” had started to achieve the almost mythical status it subsequently acquired. “Frank Olson” became a symbol for the effects of careless human experimentation in general and reckless CIA behavior in particular. (“Psychology Today,” poster 5.)

The “fell or jumped” scenario at the window never really made sense. But nobody in the 1970’s spent much time thinking about how our father actually died. In fact the 1970’s version of the Frank Olson story was a story that everyone could love.

Journalists could pride themselves on having reported a story of horrendous governmental wrong-doing that now had a human face. Congressional investigators and legislators could pride themselves on their dutiful governmental housecleaning in the aftermath of Watergate. The White House could pride themselves on having acted responsibly when the truth came to light. The public could revel in wild stories of government-sponsored drug experiments. And the CIA itself could relax, knowing that behind the popular notion of buffoon-like behaviour of out-of-control-agents the real story had not even been touched.

Everyone seemed to get high on the Frank Olson story. In the midst of all this hubbub what nobody seemed to notice was that the story of Frank Olson’s death hadn’t changed at all.

In 1953 the story was that Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window due to job-related stress. The Olson children grew up saying that our father died of a “fatal nervous breakdown.”

In 1975 the story was still that Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window. Only now the reason was that he had been drugged with LSD by the CIA eight days earlier.

In both cases the claim was that nobody saw anything even though a CIA official allegedly acting as an escort and protector was sleeping in the next bed when Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window of a very small room.

Nobody saw anything in 1953. In the 1975 version nobody saw anything either (the only new element was the unwitting administration of LSD), and nobody notified the Olson family that a new story was coming out. In 1953 the Olson family was assured by the government within three days of Frank Olson’s death that the family would receive government employee’s compensation. In 1975 after the family press conference the Olson family was immediately assured by the President that the government would provide more restitution.

Despite the apparent narrative shift, the continuity in the structure of the story over two decades could scarcely have been more complete.

The story didn’t make any sense in 1953, and it didn’t make any more sense in 1975. But the sensational notion of LSD administered by the CIA served wonderfully to conceal this gap.

Frank Olson didn’t jump out the window (even in physical terms that would have been virtually impossible), and he certainly didn’t fall out. He was pushed out. Or, to use the words of CIA terminology that we would later discover, he was “dropped.”

But if there was foul play in the death of Frank Olson what was the motive? Why would the government murder an “Army scientist” who had been unwittingly drugged with LSD?

At that point the gap concerning what happened at the window turned into a chasm concerning the motive for the whole affair.

The story of Frank Olson’s death, illuminated for a moment with the anonymous news from the Rockefeller Report, seemed to return to inky darkness.

III. A story no one could love

Over the 27 years that have elapsed since 1975 light has been cast on all this from many directions, and the real story of Frank Olson’s death has gradually taken shape.

The real story is not merely a story that no one could love. The real story is a story that no one wanted to know. This made it easy to peddle the ludicrous fairy tale cover story in 1975, a story that in hindsight resembles “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

The real story is not a simple or short one, and we will not be able to tell all of it in detail in this statement. Instead we will fast forward to key the key moments that have, piece by piece, eviscerated the 1975 story and left a very different one in its place. The real story is not one in which anyone will take pleasure. Uncovering this story has been a decades-long agony for us as well.

The real story is like a murder mystery in which the tale begins with a body that floats to the surface of a murky lake. The mystery of the death can’t be solved until that body is reinserted into the sprawling network of crime, corruption, and power that motivated the murder.

In Eric’s quest for truth two quotes have been key:

One came from CBS correspondent Anthony Mason in 1994: “Eric,” Mason said, “you are going to get to the bottom of this, but it is going to be a false bottom.”

That is no longer the situation, but getting to a solid bottom has required a very long descent.

The second quote comes from Tommy Worsley, the genius Volvo mechanic who kept Eric’s car running during the long years of digging. Tommy said:

“Eric, you need to tell this story, because it will help a lot of people connect a lot of other dots in other stories that have nothing to do with this one.”

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. We want to emphasize at the outset, however, that our purpose was never to prove that Frank Olson was murdered. Our purpose was to find out what had happened, and to arrive at a story—whatever that story might be—that made sense. In the course of a long search not a single shred of evidence has corroborated the government’s story, which, it is important to remember, was never really a story at all. The Emperor was naked from the start.

Problems with the conventional story
(The Colby documents)

In the years after the case was settled we had had time to grapple more carefully with the confusing stack of documents we had received from William Colby. The more we tried to absorb these documents the more they seemed to dissolve in ambiguity in front of our eyes. The story told by the government simply did not hold up to scrutiny.

Already in 1976 the New York Times had observed that the Colby documents were “elliptical, incoherent, and contradictory.” The Times wrote that:

Taken as a whole, the file is a jumble of deletions, conflicting statements, unintelligible passages and such unexplained terms as the “Artichoke Committee” and “Project Bluebird” that tend to confuse more than enlighten.

But the real problem was that the Colby documents seemed to be pointing to a story that they were not telling—a story quite at odds with the spin that had already been placed on the story by the initial account in the Rockefeller Commission Report.

For example, one of the reports submitted by the doctor (an allergist, as it turned out) to whom our father was taken in New York, states that “an experiment had been done to trap” Frank Olson.

We now know that this story begins long before the meeting at Deep Creek Lake November 1953 where the CIA conducted what it later called a “drug experiment.” It begins with concerns about Frank Olson’s commitment to CIA programs, especially after he witnessed terminal interrogations in Germany in the summer of 1953. The aim of the drugging at Deep Creek was apparently to assess the extent of Frank Olson’s disaffection and alienation, given the depth of his ethical qualms.

The CIA official (Sidney Gottlieb) who was reprimanded by the Agency for the drugging of Frank Olson was also personally involved in CIA attempts to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and other national leaders.

In another place the Colby documents refer to something called “the Schwab activity” at Frank Olson’s division at Detrick as being arguably “un-American.” The documents imply that issues pertaining to this activity were somehow involved in Frank Olson’s death.

In these documents the overall context for Frank Olson’s death is related not to the infamous MK-ULTRA program for mind and behavior control, as is generally assumed. The Colby documents locate Olson’s death in the context of a CIA operation called ARTICHOKE. However most of the passages pertaining to ARTICHOKE in the documents provided to the Olson family have been carefully deleted.

Operation ARTICHOKE was a CIA program that preceded MK-ULTRA. ARTICHOKE involved the development of special, extreme methods of interrogation. Officials responsible for the ARTICHOKE program were very concerned with the problem of disposing of “blown agents” and with the task of finding a way to produce amnesia in operatives who had seen too much and could no longer be relied upon.

The Colby documents state, as does William Colby in his 1978 autobiography, that Frank Olson was not an “Army scientist,” but, rather, a “CIA employee,” a “CIA officer.”

The key witness changes his story
(What Dr. Lashbrook told Dr. Gibson)

One of the most confusing aspects of the story of what happened to Frank Olson is the inconsistency in the accounts given by the key witness, CIA employee Dr. Robert Lashbrook, who was allegedly asleep in next bed in the same small hotel room at the time Frank Olson went out the window (“Psychology Today,” poster 5).

In the immediate aftermath of Olson’s death in 1953 Lashbrook told Alice Olson that he had seen her husband plunge through the hotel window. But later Lashbrook said that he had been awakened from sleep by the sound of crashing glass, and only upon noticing that the bed next to his was empty did he realize that his roommate had gone out the window. In 1995 we were contacted by Dr. Robert Gibson.

In 1953 Dr. Gibson was the admitting psychiatrist at the hospital near Washington to which Frank Olson was allegedly to have been taken after returning from New York City. Subsequently Dr. Gibson went on to a distinguished career in psychiatry, becoming President of the American Psychiatric Association, and Director of Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Baltimore.

Dr. Gibson reported to us the statement that had been made to him by the CIA official who contacted him on the morning of Frank Olson’s death—a statement identical to one Robert Lashbrook made to Alice Olson, but in direct contradiction to the story told in the Colby documents.

In the early morning of November 28, the CIA official who had shared the hotel room with Frank Olson did not tell Dr. Gibson that he was awakened by the sound of crashing glass when his roommate went through the window. Instead, Dr. Gibson was told that Frank Olson’s CIA escort had awakened to see Olson standing in the middle of the room. The witness had tried to speak to Olson, and had then watched as Olson plunged through the window on a dead run.

This account appears to have been the first draft of a cover story that was subsequently revised to the form in which it was eventually disseminated. In that version of the story nobody saw anything.

But if nobody saw nuthin, somebody did hear something. Immediately after the death a call was placed from Frank Olson’s hotel room. The call was overheard by the hotel switchboard operator and reported immediately to the night manager (Armand Pastore). The call consisted of only two sentences. According to the operator the person in the room had said:

“Well he’s gone.”

The person on the other end replied:

“That’s too bad.”

Then they both hung up.

In various versions of Lashbrook’s accounts of what occurred in room 1018A the window was either open or else it was closed; the blind was either drawn and pushed through the window when Frank Olson plunged through the window or else it snapped up and spun around the spindle when it was hit; and Lashbrook either did nor did not see what happened.

Digging up the body
(Exhumation and forensic investigation)

The doubts raised by the incoherent Colby documents, and by the many other anomalies in the story, led us to have Frank Olson’s body exhumed and a forensic investigation performed. This we did in 1994.

After his death the Olson family was told that Frank Olson’s body was too disfigured to be seen. For this reason at the funeral in 1953 Frank Olson’s casket was closed. The Olson family never saw his body after he left for New York four days earlier. This contributed to a feeling that Frank Olson had not so much died as disappeared.

When the casket was opened in 1994 Frank Olson’s upper body was not disfigured as the New York Medical Examiner’s Report had claimed in 1953. In fact Frank Olson was recognizable after forty-one years in the grave.

The forensic investigation in 1994 confirmed the family’s worst suspicions. In fact the results of this investigation led the principal forensic investigator, who is with us today, to conclude that the overwhelming probability was that Frank Olson’s death was not a suicide but a homicide.

In November of 1994 Professor Starrs and his team presented the initial findings of their forensic investigation at a press conference. “When you pull on the Frank Olson case,” Professor Starrs said then, “you get the feeling that something very big is pulling back.”

In 1994 nobody had a clear idea of what that big something might be.

The question of motive
(Why would the government murder Frank Olson?)

As indications accumulated that Frank Olson had been murdered the question of motive became more pressing. Why would the government murder an “Army scientist” simply because he had been used as an unwitting guinea pig in a drug experiment? Once again, as we went down the path suggested by these questions we discovered that all the assumptions on which they were based were incorrect.

First, as indicated earlier, we discovered that Frank Olson was not simply an “Army scientist.” He was a “CIA officer” associated with projects so heavily guarded that the term “top secret” gives only scant indication of their sensitivity. Actually they are better described as State Secrets.

Special Operations Division at Detrick

In 1952 Frank Olson was acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick; at the time of his death in 1953 he was SOD’s director of planning and evaluations. The Special Operations Divison at Detrick was the government’s most secret biological weapons laboratory. In fact the SO Division was only physically located at Detrick. In essence the SO Division was an off-campus CIA biological warfare laboratory, doing work on bacteriological agents for use in covert operations.

The Rockefeller Commission’s account of the suicide of an “Army scientist” not only neglected to add the man’s name and his CIA affiliation; it omitted any reference to his high position in the country’s most secret biological weapons laboratory.

When this information is added to the story, and when one obtains some idea of what sorts of projects were being pursued at the SO Division, then the overall picture of the death of Frank Olson changes entirely. (“Dangerous intersection,” poster 6.)

Projects at the Special Operations Division involved or related to the following activities:

• Assassinations materials research (e.g. the materials used in the CIA’s attempts to assassination Lumumba in the Congo and Castro in Cuba)

• Biological warfare materials for use in covert operations

• Biological warfare experiments in populated areas

• Terminal interrogations

• Collaboration with former Nazi scientists

• LSD mind-control research

• U.S. employment of biological weapons in the Korean War.

Security issues

As our understanding of Frank Olson’s 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. Considering the ultra-secrecy and strategic importance of the work in which Frank Olson was engaged at the time of his death it is nothing less than astounding that among the documents we had been given by the CIA in 1975, which we were told was the complete file, there is no mention at all of any security issues.

Even within the parameters of the CIA’s own story this could not have been true. Here was a top government scientist, engaged in some of the most secret projects at the height of the Cold War. According to the CIA’s account, this scientist had now been used as an unwitting guinea pig in an LSD experiment. He reacts badly to the drug, becomes unstable, and is taken to New York for treatment. But he is not taken to a hospital, or even a safe house. He is kept in a hotel. Two days before his death he allegedly leaves his room in the middle of the night, wanders the streets alone, throws away wallet, including all of his money and his identification.

At no point do the documents describing this weird scenario mention a security problem.

But if the Colby documents fail to discuss security issues, other internal documents that we obtained do mention this issue. One document, found in Frank Olson’s personnel file at Detrick, specifically mentions “fear of a security violation” after Olson’s trip to Europe in the summer of 1953, just four months before his death.

The New York District Attorney

From every direction the story of Frank Olson’s death seemed only to become more dark as we were able to fill in more of the background and context. First, the CIA documents proved unconvincing. Second, the forensic investigation added fuel to the fires of our suspicions. And third, the motive for murder turned out to be far more substantial than we had dared to imagine.

By 1996 our suspicions had reached an intolerable threshold. We decided to turn for assistance to the only governmental institution that might be able to help us. Because the death occurred in New York we presented a memorandum to the New York District Attorney’s Office outlining the many reasons for believing that the death of Frank Olson was a murder. We asked the DA’s office to reopen the case. (Copies of this memorandum are available.) This memorandum proved persuasive. In 1996 the New York District Attorney opened a homicide investigation into the death of Frank Olson.

A “perfect murder”

One of the outcomes of the The New York District Attorney’s investigation has been confirmation of an allegation that had earlier seemed too extreme to be taken seriously. The New York DA was informed that for many years the murder of Frank Olson was taught as a case of “perfect murder” at the assassination training unit of the Israeli Mossad outside Tel Aviv. The Frank Olson case was included in the Mossad’s assassination curriculum due to the success with which a murder had been disguised as a suicide.

The New York District Attorney was in fact able to locate a source in Israel with close ties to Israeli intelligence which was able to confirm this allegation. In 2000 this source traveled to the United States to speak with the Assistant District Attorney assigned to the case, and also to Eric Olson. Eric was told directly by the New York DA’s source that the case of Frank Olson’s death has been taught in Israel as a case of “perfect murder.”

An alternative story of the death of Frank Olson
(Terminal interrogations and biological weapons in the Korean War)

Gradually a completely new story of the death of Frank Olson was emerging, one that bore very little resemblance to the one that had long-since become the conventional wisdom on this issue. But the question of motive remained a mystery. Eventually that piece of the puzzle appeared as well.

A little over a year ago we were contacted by one of our father’s oldest friends and closest colleagues at Detrick. Together with a small group of other scientists this colleague (Norman Cournoyer) and Frank Olson had designed the protective clothing for the invasion of Normandy during World War II.

Cournoyer told us that a crucial element had been omitted from published accounts of the Olson case. That element was the Korean War.

Cournoyer added three crucial elements to the story:

1. In the late 1940’s 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.

2. In the course of this work in information retrieval Frank Olson made numerous trips to Europe, during which he observed interrogations of persons (Soviet prisoners, former Nazis, and others) which involved the combined application of electro-shock, drugs, and torture. These interrogations sometimes led to the deaths of the subjects being interrogated.

3. Through the “information retrieval” work Frank Olson learned that in fact—despite vehement denials by the American government—the United States was using biological weapons, including anthrax, in the Korean War.

This information from Cournoyer fit well with what we already knew and with what we would soon learn. In documents from the Gerald Ford Library we were about to discover the extreme concern in the 1975 White House that “highly classified national security information” was at stake in the death of Frank Olson.

This information also fits closely with what Alice Olson had repeatedly said about her husband’s state of mind in the period prior to his death. Alice Olson had always insisted that Frank had been very worried that the United States may have been employing biological weapons in Korea. But she did not know whether her husband knew the truth about this or not, or even whether he would have been in a position to know.

This information also fits the fact that in the summer of 1953, after returning from a trip to Europe, Frank Olson underwent a moral crisis concerning his work. This moral crisis was noticed by his wife, by his close friends, as well as by relatives. This crisis occurred, it is important to emphasize, several months prior to the LSD drugging at Deep Creek Lake.

Frank Olson’s 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. Frank Olson went to work on a Monday morning and resigned from his job. By late Friday night he was dead.

For fifty years the United States has continued to deny that this country has used biological weapons in combat. As chief of the government’s most secret biological lab in the early 1950’s Frank Olson’s position concerning these allegations could not have been discredited.

An interview with Cournoyer elaborating these points appears in the new German documentary film, “Code Name ARTICHOKE.”

Technique of a concealed murder
(The CIA assassination manual)

The story of Frank Olson’s death now held two of the three elements that are required to be present to postulate a murder: motive, means, and opportunity. The days in the New York hotel room, away from family and community, had certainly offered an opportunity for the crime. What we had discovered about the scale of national security secrets to which Frank Olson had access, combined with Frank’s growing moral doubts, held a plausible motive. However, we were still unable to conceptualize a means for the execution of the crime. That too was about to change.

In 1997 we obtained a copy of the CIA’s 1953 assassination manual and were stunned to discover its pertinence to the questions that haunted us. The scenario presented in that manual dovetails not only with what we had learned from the forensic investigation, but also with what we had been told regarding the teaching of the Frank Olson case by the Mossad’s assassination training unit in Israel.

The CIA’s own assassination manual contains precise instructions for the technique of disguising a murder as a suicide or an accident through perpetrating what the manual calls a “contrived accident.”

The sort of “contrived accident” that the manual recommends for the purpose of disguising a murder as a suicide is a fall from a high window or roof onto a hard surface.

As with the original Washington Post story that had led us in 1975 to recognize our father—even though he was not named—the fit between what the manual says about this technique and what is known about Frank Olson’s death is stunningly precise. This fit led the principal forensic investigator who had exhumed our father’s body to say that the assassination manual “fits the death of Frank Olson like the fingers of a glove.” (“CIA assassination manual found,” poster 7.)

The assistant district attorney handling the homicide investigation in New York put it even more strongly. After reading the assassination manual the Assistant District Attorney said,

The assassination manual reads like a script for the murder of Frank Olson.… The only question is which came first, the manual or the murder. Was the manual based on the murder or was the murder carried out according to the manual? (“Saracco reads the manual,” poster 8.)

Here are some passages from the CIA’s 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. Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made…

TECHNIQUES

The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject.

Techniques may be considered as follows:

1. Manual

It is possible to kill a man with bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well…

2. Accidents

For secret assassination, either simple [where the subject is unaware of the danger he is in] or chase [where the subject is aware of the danger but unguarded], the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.

The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve… If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.

If the subject’s personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used [2 words excised] to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.

3. Drugs

In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method.

5. Blunt weapons

Blows should be directed to the temple, the area just below and behind the ear, and the lower, rear portion of the skull.

It was on Frank Olson’s temple, above his left eye, that the forensic team discovered a suspicious hematoma which they concluded must have come from a blow to Frank Olson’s head before he went out the window. The forensic team discovered this hematoma, and concluded it must have come from a blow to the head in the room, a full three years before we found the CIA’s assassination manual. (“CIA assassination manual found,” poster 7.)

In the end it was impossible not to read the CIA’s assassination manual as anything but a blueprint for the murder of Frank Olson. Indeed the principal forensic investigator who had exhumed the body viewed it in exactly that way. Hard as it was to imagine that the government would murder an American citizen and then disguise that murder, first as a suicide and then as a reaction to an LSD overdose, we now felt compelled by the overwhelming weight of the evidence to accept this scenario as the only plausible account of this whole complex affair.

Clinching the story
(Documents from the 1975 Ford White House)

A long and grueling journey toward understanding seemed to be coming to an end. We now were able to clearly formulate a motive, a means, and an opportunity for the murder of Frank Olson, and to provide an account of the death that was more convincing than anything we had been told by the government. The glaring gap that still remained pertained not to what had happened in 1953 but to what had happened in 1975.

Certainly if the real story to which we were being led was correct, then the government would have been forced into a very awkward position when the Olson family suddenly attached a name to the anonymous story of an “Army scientist” that the Rockefeller Commission had divulged. This would explain why the goverment had reacted so quickly to our press conference in July of 1975, immediately inviting us to meet the President in the Oval Office of the White House to receive an official apology.

But was the truth that was buried in the death of Frank Olson so big that even the President would be enlisted to maintain the secret? 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. But now, having reached what we were now convinced was the truth about the murder, how could we ever learn the truth about the renewal of the coverup in 1975?

That gap in our understanding—which seemed even wider than the one that had once surrounded the death itself—was about to be closed in the most astounding way.

In 2001 we obtained documents from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan pertaining to the handling of our case by the Ford White House in 1975. These documents include intra-office memoranda by senior White House staff members and attorneys. Copies of these documents are available. (“The White House reacts,” poster 9.)

These documents show that the White House was extremely alarmed that the Olson family had recognized the unnamed “Army scientist” as Frank Olson, and was concerned that the family was demanding the truth concerning Olson’s death. Already on July 11, 1975—just one day after our press conference—the White House was outlining a strategy to handle our case, a strategy that would ensure that we did not request pertinent information regarding what had actually happened to Frank Olson.

In 1975 the White House advised us that they were concerned that if we went to court we might lose and not obtain what the White House regarded as appropriate compensation.

But the memoranda we obtained show that the real concern at the White House was that if we went to court we it might become necessary to disclose “highly classified information.” The memos show that the government would refuse to disclose such information. This would mean that the government would have no defense at all against claims for information that the Olson family might legitimately make.

The invitation to our family to meet with President Gerald Ford was part of this strategy. Unbeknownst to us, the intent of the White House in having the family meet personally with the President was to ensure that the Olson family pursue a course that would enable the government to maintain secrecy even as it was being alleged that the full story concerning this incident was being released.

Despite the government’s claim to have released all information pertinent to the death of Frank Olson, we still have not received the information that the White House was so concerned to keep secret.

The 1975 White House documents include the following comments:

First, a passage from a September 1975 memorandum by White House attorney Roderick Hills addressed to Richard Cheney:

The Defense to the Olson Claim. …

two circumstances affect our analysis of the Justice Department position.

(i) The bizarre circumstances of his death could well cause a court of law to determine as a matter of public policy that he did not die in the course of his official duties.

(ii) Dr. Olson’s job is so sensitive that it is highly unlikely that we would submit relevance to the court on the issue of his duties.

The latter circumstance may mean as a practical matter we would have no defense against the Olson law suit. In this connection, you should know that the CIA and the Counsel’s office both strongly recommend that the evidence concerning his employment not be released in a civil trial.

In short, there is a significant possibility that a court would either (a) grant full discovery to the Olsons’ attorneys to learn of Dr. Olson’s job responsibilities; or (b) rule that as a matter of public policy, a man who commits suicide as a result of a drug criminally given him cannot as a matter of law be determined to have died “in the course of his official duties.”

If there is a trial, it is apparent that the Olsons’ lawyer will seek to explore all of the circumstances of Dr. Olson’s employment as well as those concerning his death. It is not at all clear that we can keep such evidence from becoming relevant even if the government waives the defense of the Federal Employees Compensation Act. Thus, in the trial it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons and any settlement of judgment reached thereafter could be perceived as money paid to cover-up the activities of the CIA.

These comments are from the same White House attorney, Roderick Hills, who was simultaneously advising us that we should not go to court because the law was not on our side.

Obviously it was not possible for the Olson family in 1975 to assess the government’s story of what Hills refers to here as Frank Olson’s “bizarre death” as long as the family was being misinformed as to the job Olson was doing—a job that Hills describes as so “sensitive” that the government would refuse to describe it.

The same concerns are evident in a memo that was written by White House Deputy Staff Director Dick Cheney to his boss Donald Rumsfeld on July 11, 1975, the day after our family press conference. In this memo Cheney refers to concerns about:

…the possibility that it might become necessary to disclose highly classified national security information in connection with any court suit, or legislative hearings on a private bill intended to provide additional compensation to the family.

Again, these comments have to be placed in the context of assurances given to us personally by the President of the United States that we would be provided with all relevant information concerning the death of our father.

IV. What’s it all about?

What do we learn, finally, from the harrowing story of the death of Frank Olson and its half-century concealment?

In the years after World War II the United States was busy learning what it could from the two powers it had just defeated—information it would then employ in its new battle against the Soviet Union. This occurred on both of World War II’s major fronts, and Detrick was involved in both.

Detrick scientists made a secret deal to obtain the results of Japanese biological warfare research that had entailed some of the most ghastly human experiements of the century. One of those scientists lived just across the highway from where we are sitting today, about a quarter of a mile from here. And Detrick scientists were also involved in collaboration with former Nazi scientists to obtain the results of experiments that had been performed in the death camps.

A Cold War context in which unethical research was being absorbed and sponsored was bound to see extreme forms of discipline and sanction applied to those who raised ethical questions or who might be likely to do so. In the wake of the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940’s the United States could not afford to be exposed as a sponsor of the sort of research it had prosecuted the Nazis for undertaking. Lacking a Siberia to which the reluctant could be sent, extreme security measures in the US took a more complex form.

We are familiar with the health risks to which workers in plutonium plants were subjected during the Cold War. And we are familiar with the risks taken with the lives of persons who were subjects of unwitting government experiments of various kinds. We are familiar with the stories of those whose lives were ruined when they became victims of unjustified accusations during the McCarthy witch hunts. The discrediting of Manhattan Project director Robert Oppenheimer, which began just two weeks before Frank Olson was killed, illustrates the jeopardy into which highly-regarded scientists who dared to criticize American weapons development in the early 1950’s were placed.

These are all phenomena that have become part of the record of Cold War history, a dark side of this nation’s history during that painful era. But even in this company the true story of Frank Olson opens a new chapter. “National security homicide” and “secret state assassination” are not terms with which we are familiar in this country. There are no other terms for Frank Olson’s “bizarre death,” and for the elaborate disinformational edifice that has been erected to obscure it.

V. Conclusion: An MIA with a name

With the information concerning biological weapons in the Korean War on the one hand and the information about the White House coverup in 1975 on the other, the story of the death of Frank Olson finally hit bottom. Frank Olson did not die as a consequence of a drug experiment gone awry. He died because of security concerns regarding disavowed programs of terminal interrogation and the use of biological weapons in Korea. This secret was so immense that even twenty-two years later the White House had been enlisted to maintain it.

The body that had floated to the surface of the murky lake had at last been reinserted into the network of shady, disavowed operations that led to the murder. Amazingly, the solution to the mystery had pertained to the most obvious fact of all concerning Frank Olson, but one that was conspicuously missing from the accounts in 1975: Frank Olson was a founding member and in the year prior to his death he was chief of the country’s most secret biological warfare laboratory.

For just under half a century the death of Frank Olson has been a weighty burden for the Olson family. But this is far more than a family story, which is why for many years it has been avidly followed by many people in this country and others.

At the end of this story one’s mind is inevitably drawn back to that Washington Post article which, under the ironic headline “Suicide Revealed,” reported the anonymous suicide of an “Army scientist.” Clearly the intent was that Frank Olson was an MIA who should remain forever nameless.

Frank Olson does have a name. Finally, forty-nine years after his death, he also has a story. We therefore feel ready to rebury the physical remains of our father, our grandfather.

A STUDY OF ASSASSINATION

DEFINITION
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, who were assigned to carry out political and other murders, usually at the cost of their lives.

It is here used to describe the planned killing of a person who is not under the legal jurisdiction of the killer, who is not physically in the hands of the killer, who has been selected by a resistance organization for death, and whose death provides positive advantages to that organization.

EMPLOYMENT
Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations. It should be assumed that it will never be ordered or authorized by any U.S. Headquarters, though the latter may in rare instances agree to its execution by members of an associated foreign service. This reticence is partly due to the necessity of committing communications to paper. No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made, but usually the act will be properly covered by normal news services, whose output is available to all concerned.

JUSTIFICATION
Murder is not morally justifiable. Self-defense may be argued if the victim has knowledge which may destroy the resistance organization if divulged. Assassination of persons responsible for atrocities or reprisals may be regarded as just punishment. Killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary.

But assassination can seldom be employed with a clear conscience. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.

CLASSIFICATIONS
The techniques employed will vary according to whether the subject is unaware of his danger, aware but unguarded, or guarded. They will also be affected by whether or not the assassin is to be killed with the subject. 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 assassin must not fall into enemy hands.
A further type division is caused by the need to conceal the fact that the subject was actually the victim of assassination, rather than an accident or natural causes. If such concealment is desirable the operation will be called “secret”; if concealment is immaterial, the act will be called open”; while if the assassination requires publicity to be effective it will be termed “terroristic.”

Following these definitions, the assassination of Julius Caesar was safe, simple, and terroristic, while that of Huey Long was lost, guarded and open. Obviously, successful secret assassinations are not recorded as assassination at all. [Illeg] of Thailand and Augustus Caesar may have been the victims of safe, guarded and secret assassination. Chase assassinations usually involve clandestine agents or members of criminal organizations.

THE ASSASSIN
In safe assassinations, the assassin needs the usual qualities of a clandestine agent. He should be determined, courageous, intelligent, resourceful, and physically active. If special equipment is to be used, such as firearms or drugs, it is clear that he must have outstanding skill with such equipment.

Except in terroristic assassinations, it is desirable that the assassin be transient in the area. He should have an absolute minimum of contact with the rest of the organization and his instructions should be given orally by one person only. His safe evacuation after the act is absolutely essential, but here again contact should be as limited as possible. It is preferable that the person issuing instructions also conduct any withdrawal or covering action which may be necessary.

In lost assassination, the assassin must be a fanatic of some sort. Politics, religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives. Since a fanatic is unstable psychologically, he must be handled with extreme care. He must not know the identities of the other members of the organization, for although it is intended that he die in the act, something may go wrong. Will the Assassin of Trotsky has never revealed any significant information, it was unsound to depend on this when the act was planned.

PLANNING
When the decision to assassinate has been reached, the tactics of the operation must be planned, based upon an estimate of the situation similar to that used in military operations. The preliminary estimate will reveal gaps in information and possible indicate a need for special equipment which must be procured or constructed. When all necessary data has been collected, an effective tactical plan can be prepared. All planning must be mental; no papers should ever contain evidence of the operation.
In resistance situations, assassination may be used as a counter-reprisal. Since this requires advertising to be effective, the resistance organization must be in a position to warn high officials publicly that their lives will be the price of reprisal action against innocent people. Such a threat is of no value unless it can be carried out, so it may be necessary to plan the assassination of various responsible officers of the oppressive regime and hold such plans in readiness to be used only if provoked by excessive brutality. Such plans must be modified frequently to meet changes in the tactical situation.

TECHNIQUES
The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject. A human being may be killed in many ways but sureness is often overlooked by those who may be emotionally unstrung by the seriousness of this act they intend to commit. The specific technique employed will depend upon a large number of variables, but should be constant in one point: Death must be absolutely certain. The attempt on Hitler’s life failed because the conspiracy did not give this matter proper attention.

Techniques may be considered as follows:

1. Manual
It is possible to kill a man with bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well. Even a highly trained Judo expert will hesitate to risk killing by hand unless he has absolutely no alternative. However, the simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice. A length of rope or wire or a belt will do if the assassin is strong and agile. All such improvised weapons have the important advantage of availability and apparent innocence. The obviously lethal machine gun failed to kill Trotsky where an item of sporting goods succeeded.

In all safe cases where the assassin may be subject to search, either before or after the act, specialized weapons should not be used. Even in the lost case, the assassin may accidentally be searched before the act and should not carry an incriminating device if any sort of lethal weapon can be improvised at or near the site. If the assassin normally carries weapons because of the nature of his job, it may still be desirable to improvise and implement at the scene to avoid disclosure of his identity.

2. Accidents
For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.

The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly-cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.

Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. It will be more reliable if the assassin can arrange to attempt rescue, as he can thus be sure of the subject’s death and at the same time establish a workable alibi.

If the subject’s personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used [2 words excised] to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.

Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.
Automobile accidents are a less satisfactory means of assassination. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. If the subject’s car is tampered with, reliability is very low. The subject may be stunned or drugged and then place in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation.

Arson can cause accidental death if the subject is drugged and left in a burning building. Reliability is not satisfactory unless the building is isolated and highly combustible.

3. Drugs
In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If no, two grains will suffice.

If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.

Specific poisons, such as arsenic or strychnine, are effective but their possession or procurement is incriminating, and accurate dosage is problematical. Poison was used unsuccessfully in the assassination or Rasputin and Kolohan, though the latter case is more accurately described as a murder.

4. Edge weapons
Any locally obtained edge device may be successfully employed. A certain minimum of anatomical knowledge is needed for reliability.
Puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. The heart is protected by the rib cage and is not always easy to locate.

Abdominal wounds were once nearly always mortal, but modern medical treatment has made this no longer true.

Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region. This can be done with the point of a knife or a light blow of an axe or hatchet.

Another reliable method is the severing of both jugular and carotid blood vessels on both sides of the windpipe.

If the subject has been rendered unconscious by other wounds or drugs, either of the above methods can be used to insure death.

5. Blunt weapons
As with edge weapons, blunt weapons require some anatomical knowledge for effective use. Their main advantage is their universal availability. A hammer may be picked up almost anywhere in the world. Baseball and [illeg] bats are very widely distributed. Even a rock or a heavy stick will do, and nothing resembling a weapon need be procured, carried or subsequently disposed of.

Blows should be directed to the temple, the area just below and behind the ear, and the lower, rear portion of the skull. Of course, if the blow is very heavy, any portion of the upper skull will do. The lower frontal portion of the head, from the eyes to the throat, can withstand enormous blows without fatal consequences.

6. Firearms
Firearms are often used in assassination, often very ineffectively. The assassin usually has insufficient technical knowledge of the limitations of weapons, and expects more range, accuracy and killing power than can be provided with reliability. Since certainty of death is the major requirement, firearms should be used which can provide destructive power at least 100% in excess of that thought to be necessary, and ranges should be half that considered practical for the weapon.

Firearms have other drawbacks. Their possession is often incriminating. They may be difficult to obtain. They require a degree of experience from the user. They [illeg] is consistently over-rated.

However, there are many cases in which firearms are probably more efficient than any other means. These cases usually involve distance betweeen the assassin and the subject, or comparative physical weakness of the assassin, as with a woman.

(a) The precision rifle.
In guarded assassination, a good hunting or target rifle should always be considered as a possibility. Absolute reliability can nearly always be achieved at a distance of one hundred yards. In ideal circumastances, the range may be extended to 250 yards. The rifle shold be a wll made bolt or falling block action type, handling a powerful long-range cartirdge. The .300 F.A.B. Magnum is probably the best cartridge readily available. other excellent calibers are .375 M.[illeg]. Magnum, .270 Winchester, .30 – 106 p.s., 8 x 60 MM Magnum, 9.3 X 62 KK and others of this type. These are preferable to ordinary military calibers, since ammunition available for them is usually of the expanding bullet type, whereas most ammunition for military refles is full jacketed and hence not sufficiently lethal. Military ammunition should not be altered by filing or drilling bullets, as this will adversely affect accuracy.

The rifle may be of the “bull gun” variety, with extra heavy barrel and set triggers, but in any case should be able to group in one inch at one hundred yards, but 2 1/2″ groups are adequate. The sight shold be telescopic, not only for accuracy, but because such a sight is much better in dim light or near darkness. As long as the bare outline of the target is discernable, a telescope sight will work, even if the rifle and shooter are in total darkness.

An expanding, hunting bullet of such calibers as described above will produce extravagant laceration and shock at short or mid-range. if a man is struck just once in the body cavity, his death is almost entirely certain.

Public figures or guarded officials may be killed withgreat reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion. The propaganda value of this system may be very high.

(b) The machine gun.
Machine guns may be used in most cases where the precision rifle is applicable. Usually this will require the subversion of a unit of an official guard at a ceremony, though a skillful and determined team might conceivably dispose of a loyal gun crow without commotion and take over the gun at the critical time.

The area fire capacity of the machine gun should not be used to search out a concealed subject. This was tried with predictable lack of success on Trotsky. The automatic feature of the machine gun should rather be used to increase reliability by placing a 5 second burst on the subject. Even with full jacket ammunition, this will be absolute lethal is the burst pattern is no larger than a man. This can be accomplished at about 150 yards. In ideal circumstances, a properly padded and targeted machine gun can do it at 850 yards. The major difficulty is placing the first burst exactly on the target, as most machine gunners are trained to spot their fire on target by observation of strike. This will not do in assassination as the subject will not wait.

(c) The Submachine Gun.
This weapon, known as the “machine-pistol” by the Russians and Germans and “machine-carbide” by the British, is occasionally useful in assassination. Unlike the rifle and machine gun, this is a short range weapon and since it fires pistol ammunition, much less powerful. To be reliable, it should deliver at least 5 rounds into the subject’s chest, though the .45 caliber U.S. weaponshave a much larger margin of killing efficiency than the 9 mm European arms.

The assassination range of the sub-machine gun is point blank. While accurate single rounds can be delivered by sub-machine gunners at 50 yards or more, this is not certain enough for assassination. Under ordinary circumstances, the 5MG shold be used as a fully automatic weapon. In the hands of a capable gunner, a high cyclic rate is a distinct advantage, as speed of execution is most desirable, particularly in the case of multiple subjects.

The sub-machine gun is especially adapted to indoor work when more than one subject is to be assassinated. An effective technique has been devised for the use of a pair of sub-machine gunners, by which a room contailning as many as a dozen subjectgs can be “purifico” in about twenty seconds with little or no risk to the gunners. It is illustratrated below.

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. The Bergmann Model 1934 is particularly good in this way. The Danish Madman? SMG has a moderately good cyclic rate and is admirably compact and concealable. The Russian SHG’s have a good cyclic rate, but are handicapped by a small, light protective which requires more kits for equivalent killing effect.

New Evidence in Army Scientist’s Death

48-year-old case has links to CIA’s secret experimentation program

By H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly
Originally published by

WorldNet Daily, Friday, July 6, 2001
© 2001 H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly

Editor’s note: In 1998, WorldNetDaily first reported on the CIA’s secret behavior-modification program MK-ULTRA, which included experimentation with LSD on unsuspecting subjects. Authors H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly’s upcoming book deals with the mysterious death of one of those subject, Dr. Frank Olson. In this report, Albarelli and Kelly disclose new evidence they have uncovered in this case. By H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly

To view this article in on the WorldNet site go to WorldNet Daily and enter “Olson and CIA” in the WND search box at left side of the page. Links are also provided to three additional, previously published WorldNet articles pertaining to the Frank Olson case.

“I would turn our gaze from the past,” pronounced CIA Director George Tenet recently before Congress. “It is dangerous, frankly, to have to keep looking over our shoulders.” Whether Tenet had the unsolved death of Dr. Frank Olson in mind is not known, but there is little doubt that it is on his mind today.

Informed sources revealed this week that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is reviewing dramatic new evidence in the Olson case. The evidence is said to involve the Jan. 8, 1953, death of Harold Blauer and its subsequent elaborate cover-up.

Blauer, a widely respected tennis professional, died nine months before Olson after being injected with a massive dose of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Blauer was being treated at the Institute for depression related to a broken marriage, but the injection was not part of his treatment. It was administered only as part of a top-secret Army-funded experimental program. The program, codenamed Project Pelican, was overseen by Dr. Paul H. Hoch, director of experimental psychiatry at the Institute, who worked in secret collaboration with the Army Chemical Corps chief of clinical research, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi.

Born in Hungary and schooled in psychiatry in Germany, Hoch came to the U.S. in 1933 on a visitor’s visa and soon legally immigrated with the assistance of then-attorney and future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. (At the time of Frank Olson’s death, Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster, was head of the CIA.) Before joining the Institute’s staff, Hoch headed the Manhattan State Hospital Shock Therapy Unit and worked as chief medical officer for war neuroses for the U.S. Public Health Service.

Hoch, along with associates Dr. Harold A. Abramson and Dr. Max Rinkel, was among an elite group of five private researchers and six U.S. Army physicians who began quietly conducting LSD experiments in the U.S. in 1949.

Rinkel, the man responsible for first transporting LSD into this country, supplied the drug to Hoch and Abramson in that same year. Rinkel, who fled Nazi Germany before the war to work at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, had known both Abramson and Hoch when all three studied together at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany. According to 1998 interviews with former-CIA official Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, it was Rinkel’s close associate, Dr. H.E. Himwich, along with the Army’s Dr. L. Wilson Greene, who first drew the CIA’s attention to the “wonders of LSD.”

When he died in 1965, Hoch was eulogized by two of his closest friends, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, who would soon be exposed as administrator of some of the most horrendous CIA-funded experiments on record, and New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller.

For nearly five years, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s cold-case unit has been conducting an unprecedented criminal investigation into the mysterious death of Fort Detrick biochemist Frank Olson. On Nov. 28, 1953, Olson allegedly dove through a closed and shaded 10th-floor hotel window in the middle of the night.

He plummeted 170 feet to his death on the sidewalk below. Uniformed policemen, summoned to the hotel by night manager Armondo Diaz Pastore, discovered CIA official Robert V. Lashbrook calmly sitting in the room he shared with Olson. 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. Lashbrook also told police that Olson had journeyed to Manhattan to be treated by Abramson for “depression related to an ulcer.”

Two detectives from the 14th Precinct dispatched to the Statler Hotel were suspicious about what they observed. At first, they suspected they had a “homosexual affair” gone bad on their hands. Detective James Ward initially referred to the case as a possible “homocide” in his report. Ward and his partner, detective Robert Mullee, took Lashbrook to the precinct house for interrogation. Within less than two hours, Lashbrook was set loose and the case was closed out as “D.O.A. Suicide.” The final police report makes no mention whatsoever of the CIA or any drugs, nor does the report on Olson’s death filed by the New York City Medical Examiners Office.

After his release from questioning at the 14th Precinct station, Lashbrook went to the Medical Examiners office to officially identify Olson’s body. There he was briefly interviewed by a stenographer before returning to spend another day at the Statler Hotel.

The Olson death remained a suicide stemming from depression for 22 years. Then in June 1975, a blue-ribbon commission chaired by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller submitted a report on CIA domestic crimes to President Gerald Ford. In it, under a section headed “The Testing of Behavior-Influencing Drugs on Unsuspecting Subjects Within the United States,” the suicide of an unnamed man who jumped from a New York hotel after being given LSD “without his knowledge while he was attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on the drug project” was briefly mentioned.

The Olson family threatened to sue the government, were granted an Oval Office audience with President Ford, served a stately luncheon by then-DCI William Colby at the CIA’s Langley, Va., complex, and were generally placated with a pile of heavily redacted documents pertaining to Olson’s “suicide” and by a 1976 congressionally approved settlement in the amount of $750,000. At the time, Alice Wicks Olson, Frank’s widow, said she “was satisfied with the settlement” and that her family was ready to move on with their lives. After decades of doubts and confusion, it appeared that the strange story had finally found a fitting conclusion.

But then in 1994, Frank Olson’s only survivors, sons Eric and Nils, convinced noted forensic sleuth James E. Starrs of George Washington University, Washington, D.C., to disinter their father’s corpse and scientifically scrutinize the remains for any signs of suspected foul play.

Working with a team of 15 forensic experts, Starrs quickly discovered a number of peculiarities in the New York Medical Examiner’s 1953 report written by then-Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Dominick DiMaio.

Starrs noted, “That report was brief and to the point, but it was a report of what was only an external examination of the remains.” Starrs was troubled that “the accompanying toxicological report only assayed the presence of methyl and ethyl alcohol, including no drugs of any kind.” This despite that Olson had allegedly been dosed with LSD and given “nembutal” shortly before his death.

Starrs was even more puzzled to discover that Olson’s body lacked any lacerations on the face and neck. Said Starrs, “This finding stood in contradistinction to that of Dr. DiMaio in his report of his external examination of Dr. Olson’s remains in 1953.” Continued Starrs, “It is a matter of some consternation how Dr. DiMaio could have reported the existence of multiple lacerations on the face and neck of Frank Olson when in truth, there were none.”

In addition to these discrepancies in the medical examiner’s report, Starrs discovered a “highly suspicious” hematoma over Olson’s left eye that he concluded was “singular evidence of the possibility that Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head prior to exiting the window.” There was no mention of this hematoma in the 1953 medical examiner’s report.

Armed with Starrs’ startling findings, the Olson brothers retained high-powered Washington, D.C., attorney Harry Huge of Powell, Goldstein, Frazer, & Murphy, to convince Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to open a murder investigation. Earlier in 1975, spurred by the LSD revelations of the Rockefeller Commission, Morgenthau’s office had briefly considered doing so but for reasons reportedly tied to the Olson family’s settlement decided not to pursue the case. At the same time, DiMaio told reporters that he had been told nothing in 1953 about Olson being given LSD or having been brought to New York to see a physician.

DiMaio said that Robert Lashbrook, when questioned by the medical examiner’s stenographer, Max Katzman, failed to say anything about Olson having taken LSD or that he was under psychiatric treatment. DiMaio also said that while it “was routine for his office to review the police report in such cases,” the report on Olson’s death had “not been forwarded.”

Pertinent to note here is that the police report, dated Nov. 30, 1953, clearly states that Olson was being examined by Abramson for “a mental ailment” and that Abramson “had advised” that Olson “enter a sanitarium as he was suffering from severe psychosis and illusions.”

On March 31, 1995, attorney Huge sent Morgenthau a 12-page memorandum that methodically argued why an investigation should be opened. Within weeks, Morgenthau agreed with Huge’s findings and assigned the reopened case to his newly created cold-case unit headed by seasoned prosecutors Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb.

According to informed sources, newly emerging evidence in the Olson case revolves around Harold Blauer’s death and a number of previously unrevealed links between the CIA, Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, or SOD, Olson’s place of work and the New York City Medical Examiners Office.

Cold case prosecutors Saracco and Bibb have learned that, contrary to long-standing reports, both the CIA and SOD had a direct interest in the experiments conducted at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Sources say that Saracco and Bibb have obtained “incontrovertible evidence” that reveals that CIA officials Lashbrook and Gottlieb, as well as officials from the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office, directly participated in the cover-up of Blauer’s death. Gottlieb was the CIA branch chief that ordered “the experiment” with LSD that allegedly resulted in Olson’s suicide. In 1986, Lashbrook denied that he had any knowledge about Blauer’s death.

But a top-secret CIA memorandum obtained by the authors reveals that Lashbrook knew far more than he claimed. 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 Institute’s principal investigator. He was carrying out experiments involving the injection of Mescalin [sic] derivatives into patients. In this particular case the patient died. Relatives of the deceased have brought the action.”

The document goes on to detail that Lashbrook “had been advised of these facts by Dr. Marrazzi, civilian employee of the Medical Laboratory,” and that both Lashbrook and Gottlieb advised the inquiring Pentagon officer that Marrazzi “was keeping [CIA] informed of their various activities along these lines.” The document continues, “Chemical Corps’ contract is for approximately $1,000,000 dollars. We took a $65,000 financial interest in this place of research around 23 February 1953, after the referenced incident occurred.”

The memorandum goes on to explain that following Lashbrook’s telephone conversation, Gottlieb contacted the Pentagon officer the next day “and advised him we did not want the Agency’s name mentioned in connection with the case since we were in no way involved.” The officer, according to the memo, “assured” Gottlieb that the Agency “will not be mentioned and that he would keep us informed.” The last several sentences of the memo read: “Further information supplied by [officer] was that the lawyer [for the Blauer family] was a military man and had been advised the case involved military connections. The lawyer stated he would give the case no publicity. And finally, the reason for [officer’s] contacting the Agency in the first place was to see if we could help them in any way to hush the thing up. He advised they are now using other channels.”

Other recently discovered documents concerning Blauer’s death reveal a more complete portrait of the specifics surrounding the experiments at the Psychiatric Institute. A 1975 CIA document written by Technical Services Inspector General, Donald F. Chamberlain, reads: “The Army Inspector General informed me that the Army’s Special Operations Division, Fort Detrick (the unit that Frank Olson was in) had a contract for two years with the Psychiatric Institute (1952-53) to test various mescaline-related and other drugs [including LSD] that the Army was interested in. Blauer died 2-1/2 hours after an injection of an apparent overdose of 450 milligrams of EA 1298 [mescaline-related drug].”

That it was Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division that initiated the secret contracts with the New York State Psychiatric Institute is significant because the division was established with CIA assistance for the exclusive purposes of devising biological weapons that, according to CIA documents, could be targeted “at individuals for the purposes of affecting human behavior with the objectives ranging from very temporary minor disablement to more serious and longer incapacitation to death.” These purposes seriously call into question the motivations behind the “experiment” on Blauer.

Nearly a year before Blauer’s death, beginning in 1952, the relationship between the CIA and Fort Detrick’s SOD was formalized through a written agreement. It was officially referred to as Project MK/NAOMI, an adjunct to the larger CIA behavior modification program that within months became known as MK-ULTRA. According to former CIA officials, Project MK/NAOMI was named after Abramson’s assistant, Naomi Busner. Abramson, from 1951 through to at least the late 1960s, served as a high-level researcher for the CIA and Army. Earlier in 1943-1944, Olson, assigned to Division D at the Chemical Corps’ Edgewood Arsenal, and Abramson worked closely together on a prototype project involving simulated exercises aimed at biological-contamination of the New York City water supply.

Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division was the top-secret Chemical Corps branch that was Olson’s assigned place of work at the time of his death. Contrary to conventional press accounts, CIA-employee Olson was not a simple research scientist with SOD but was a high-ranking division administrator holding the titles assistant division chief and director of plans and assessments. Prior to that, according to military and CIA records, he served as the division’s director of planning and intelligence activities and as director of the SO division itself for about 12 months.

Documents uncovered by the authors reveal that within 48 hours of Blauer’s 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. According to several documents, Marrazzi instructed Hoch to do everything possible to conceal the Army’s involvement in Blauer’s death. Additionally, documents reveal: “Marrazzi indicated in his trip report that while he was in New York he prevailed on one of the New York City Medical Examiners with whom he was well acquainted to place all the records (regarding Blauer) in a confidential file in the medical examiners office. Thus the Medical Examiner was informed that Blauer’s death was connected with secret Army experiments, but he was also told that this information was not to be disclosed.” This was the same office of the New York City Medical Examiner that months later received the body of Frank Olson.

Contacted at his home, retired medical examiner DiMaio said, “I don’t recall the incident involving Harold Blauer.” On Frank Olson’s death, he said, “It was a long time ago. They [the police] told me he was on LSD and had been acting aberrant and erratic for a while. There was no reason to do an autopsy.”

CIA spokesman Tom Crispwell declined to comment on any of the new evidence being examined by the District Attorney’s Office.
He said, “CIA activities related to the MK-ULTRA program were thoroughly investigated in 1975 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research. The CIA cooperated with each investigation.”

Olson family attorney Harry Huge said, “We are monitoring these developments closely and are very encouraged that we may now have the means to pursue things further. For obvious reasons, this is an extremely difficult case. The district attorney’s prosecutors have diligently logged hundreds of hours working on it, and we’re anxious about additional findings that may be forthcoming.”

Portions of this article were taken from the forthcoming book, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Cold War Experimentsby H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John F. Kelly.

Related stories:
Meet Sidney Gottlieb – CIA dirty trickster
Terry Lenzner’s CIA connection
Cold War legend dies at 80

To view these articles on the WorldNet site go to WorldNet Daily and enter “Olson and CIA” in the WND search box at left side of the page. Links are also provided to three additional

THE OLSON FILE
A secret that could destroy the CIA

by Kevin Dowling and Phillip Knightley

Dr. Frank Olson’s life was a mystery, full of dubious experiments for the CIA, and unexplained trips to Porton Down. His death, in 1953, was stranger still. Was it suicide? A failed exercise in brainwashing? Or murder? And what did he know that made his death so convenient? Next week, a grand jury may finally hear the truth about the Cold War’s darkest Secret.

Published in Night and Daymagazine, the Sunday supplement to The London Mail on Aug 23, 1998.

Reprinted June 12, 1999 in Dagens Nyheter, largest newspaper in Sweden. Used here with permission of the authors.

In the early hours of 28 November 1953, Armand Pastore, the night manager of the Statler Hotel, New York, was startled to hear a crash of breaking glass and then a sickening thump on the pavement outside his hotel. He rushed out to find a middle-aged man lying semi-conscious on the ground.

Pastore looked up to see light shining from a shattered window of a room on the hotel‚s thirteenth floor. He knelt down alongside the man, cradled his head in his arms and leaned closer as the man made an effort to speak, then died. 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.

Suicide was certainly the finding at the inquest—Dr Frank Olson, a United States Army scientist, for reasons no one could fathom, had taken his own life. And that was what the record showed for the next twenty-two years.

Then in 1975 the Rockefeller Commission, set up by President Ford to examine the extent of the CIA‚s illegal domestic operations, revealed that an unnamed army scientist had died after CIA experts, experimenting with mind-bending drugs, had secretly slipped him a dose of potent LSD. During the ensuing uproar, the scientist was identified as Frank Olson.

The US government moved immediately to show how sorry it was for what had happened. Congress passed a private humanitarian relief bill which authorised a payment of $750,000 to the widow, Mrs Olson, and her three children. Mrs Olson and her son Eric were invited to the White House where President Ford publicly apologised to them. And the then CIA director, William Colby, held a lunch for Mrs Olson and Eric in his office at the CIA, apologised and gave them the CIA file on the case.

According to the file, Olson had suffered a “chemically-induced psychotic flashback” a week after he had been slipped the dose of LSD. So a CIA doctor, Richard Lashbrook, had been deputed to look after Olson until he was normal again. Lashbrook had been sharing the hotel room with Olson and was asleep in a bed next to him when, he said, he was awoken by the sound of breaking glass and realised that Olson had crashed through the window.

Eric, who is now 54,was never very convinced by this version of events but kept quiet so as not to distress his mother. Then when she died in 1994 he decided to test the official story of his father’s death. Experts told him that in order to achieve the momentum needed to vault over a central heating radiator under the window, burst through the closed blinds and smash through the hotel’s heavy glass panes, Olson would have had to struck the window travelling at more than 30km per hour. A trained athlete takes about fifty metres to accelerate to that speed. But the hotel room was only 5.5 metres long.

Next there was Dr. Lashbrook‚s strange behaviour when the hotel manager Pastore arrived in the room to tell him that his colleague was dead on the pavement below. Lashbrook went to the telephone, rang a number and simply said, “Olson’s gone”. Then he hung up and retired to the bathroom where he sat on the lavatory with his head in his hands.

Eric Olson, a Maryland clinical psychologist, began to spend every spare moment trying to get at the true story of what had happened to his father. Today he is convinced he is on the brink of doing so. But the story is so strange, so reminiscent of the TV series “The X-Files,” that despite compelling evidence, it is uncertain that anyone will believe it.

THE TERMS of the $750,000 government settlement for Olson‚s death prevented his family from pursuing the matter in the civil courts. But if Eric Olson could convince the authorities that his father’s death was a criminal matter, then he might eventually get at the truth. Four years ago he had his first breakthrough when he won a court order to exhume his father’s body.

“When he was buried the coffin had been sealed. They said he had been so badly mutilated in the fall that it wouldn’t be right for the family to see him. But when we opened the casket a lifetime later, I knew Daddy at once. He had been embalmed and his face was unmarked and untroubled. He hadn‚t been hurt the way they said he had.”

A new autopsy confirmed Eric Olson’s impression and entirely contradicted the findings of the first inquest. Carried out by a team led by James Starrs, Professor of Law and Forensic Science at The National Law Centre, George Washington University, it could find no sign of the cuts and abrasions that the first autopsy said had been caused by crashing through the window glass.

On the other hand, there was a haematoma, unrecorded at the first post mortem examination, on the left hand side of Olson’s skull. This had been caused by a heavy blow, James Starrs decided, probably from a hammer, before the fall from the window. Starrs and his team concluded that the evidence from their examination was “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”

Although the team did not say so—because it could be only supposition—someone had struck Olson on the head with a hammer, smashed open the window, probably with the same hammer, and had then thrown Olson out. But the new autopsy findings were certainly enough for a New York public prosecutor, Stephen Saracco, to win the right for a grand jury to begin hearing the evidence he had uncovered. If the jury, too, found the evidence of murder compelling, then Saracco requested that it should hand down indictments for murder and conspiracy to murder.

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 America’s 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.

Already there are indications that the international intelligence community is running scared. The CIA and the Department of Justice have resisted Saracco ‘s attempts to subpoena Dr. Lashbrook, who now lives in California, to question him, among other things, about Olson’s last hours, the telephone call that Lashbrook made immediately after Olson’s death and the work that Lashbrook and Olson had been engaged in together.

Early in July, after months of negotiation, the two government departments gave in and agreed that the grand jury should hear Saracco’s team examine Lashbrook at Venture County Courthouse during the week beginning 24 August. Saracco has already offered Lashbrook immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony. He was too late, however, to do the same for William Colby, the CIA chief who apologised for Olson’s death.

On 27 April 1996, after Saracco won the right to a grand jury hearing, Colby who realised that he would be forced to give evidence, vanished from his country retreat about forty miles south of Washington. It looked as if he had left in a hurry: the lights and the radio were still on, his computer was still running, and a half finished glass of wine was on the table. The next day his empty canoe was found swamped on a sand bar. Five days later divers found a body identified as Colby’s. He had apparently been the victim of a boating accident.

If so, it would appear that Maryland waters are particularly unkind to retired members of the CIA. In 1978 another CIA officer, John Paisley, also vaanished there in another boating accident. A week after Paisley‚s abandoned boat was located, a body with a gunshot wound to the head was found. But the condition of the body meant that precise identification was impossible—making the area a conspiracy blackspot.

Suppose the grand jury does in the end find that the evidence that Olson was murdered and that the perpetrators were other CIA officers, there will still remain a major barrier to an eventual conviction–what was the motive? What was so sensitive to the CIA that it would kill one of its own? To find an answer we have to go back to the fifties when the two great ideologies of the 20th century, communism and capitalism, were locked in a battle to the death and no act no matter how morally shocking was ruled out in the struggle for victory.

THE NUCLEAR stand-off of the Cold War had sent both sides back to their drawing boards. If it were impossible to employ nuclear weapons without assuring mutual total destruction, what other weapons could the boffins come up with—given virtually unlimited funds and no moral restraints—that would win any future war? Two possibilities attracted attention. The first was bacteriological warfare.

Bacteriological warfare is remarkably cheap; it has been described as “the poor man‚s nuclear bomb.” A deadly virus sufficient to wipe out every living person over an area of one square mile would cost only about $50. In the 1950s both sides in the Cold War set up research establishments to develop biological weapons, methods of delivering them, and methods of protecting against them. Dr. Frank Olson worked in this area.

Trained as a biochemist, he had been employed since 1943 in the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was associated with a CIA secret research unit known at the time as MK-ULTRA, and came to Britain frequently between 1950-53 to work at the British Microbiological Research Establishment (MRE) at Porton Down. Olson was part of a team which was developing aerosol delivery systems for biological weapons that included staphylococcus enterotoxin, Venezuelan equine encephalo- myelitis, and anthrax. Olson seems to have concentrated on counter- biological warfare, trying to find vaccines and special clothing that would protect against attack.

Deadly effective though it may be, biological warfare has drawbacks. There is always the risk that it may get out of control and attack not only the enemy but those who decided to employ it in the first place. Like nuclear warfare, biological warfare could wipe out civilisation as we know it. So Olson and some of his colleagues became intrigued by another type of weapon altogether, one which attacked not the body but the mind.

Those scientists in the Western intelligence community who supported the idea of developing brain-washing programmes had two gurus—Dr Douglas Ewan Cameron, a Glasgow-born psychiatrist, and Dr. Sydney “The Gimp” Gottlieb, the CIA‚s top expert on brainwashing. Cameron won his post-graduate diploma in psychiatric medicine at the University of London before joining the staff at John Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, in 1926. He became convinced that the mentally ill posed a grave threat to Anglo-American civilisation and should be forcibly sterilised.

During the Second World War he was a member of the Military Mobilization Committee of the American Psychiatric Association and was appalled to learn that of the fifteen million men inducted into the US armed forces, two million had to be rejected on neuropsychiatric grounds, a proportion far higher than in any other nation. He set about finding remedies including electroshock (60,000 ECTs in a single year), lobotomies and other forms of psychosurgery, sensory deprivation and mind-altering drugs–all used on patients who had little or no say in their treatment. Conscientious objectors, many of them Quakers, were defined by Cameron as mentally-ill and sometimes forced to accept treatment.

When the end of the war revealed that the Nazis had been carrying out similar experiments—23 German doctors were convicted at Nuremberg—the Western intelligence community suddenly became very interested in Cameron’s work. This interest grew to an obsession after the Stalin show trials with the robotic, apparently artificially-induced confessions made by the accused. Then the behaviour of American POWs held in Chinese camps during the Korean War and their subsequent denunciation of the American way of life, futher convinced the CIA that the communists were already well advanced in mind control techniques. In intelligence circles there were rumours of a Soviet plot to place brain-washed zombies in the White House and other citadels of Western power.

The American response was MK-ULTRA. Its director, Dr. Gottleib, sought help from his Scottish hero, Cameron, and set him up with cover organisations to distance the CIA from some of the more abbhorent aspects of MK-ULTRA‚s work. So Cameron founded the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, ran a proprietary company called Psychological Assessment Associates, and contributed papers to learned journals on “Psychic Driving”, “The Restructuring of the Personality” and “Suggestion and Extra-Sensory Perception.”

The short term goals were to counter any communist plot to insert brain-washed assassins into the West. However, according to authors Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett, biographers of Nelson Rockefeller—one-time chairman of a committee overseeing the MK-ULTRA operation—the scientists also wanted to find drugs or techniques by which “a man could be surreptitiously drugged through the medium of an alcoholic cocktail at a social party . . . and the subject induced to perform the act of attempted assassination of an official in a government in which he was well-established socially and politically.”

A far-fetched ides, perhaps, but one whose currency was not limited to the CIA. A few years later, the surreptitious administration of a mind-altering drug in a drink at a party was suggested as a possible solution to a strange double death in Sidney, Australia. On the morning of January 1, 1963, Dr. Gilbert Bogel, and his lover, Mrs. Margaret Chandler, were found dead on a river bank after a riotous party given by staff of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Bogle, a brilliant scientist, had told friends that he was about to go to the US to work on scientific research of great military importance. The deaths were never solved, but Sydney detectives became convinced that Bogle and his colleagues had been experimenting with LSD and the effect it produced on their thought-processes—the invitation to the New Year’s party required each guest to bring a painting done under the influenced of the drug—and their either by accident or by design someone had slipped the couple what turned out to be an overdose.

Repeated requests to the BBI under the Freedom of Information Act asking for details of the work that Boigle would have been doing in the US have met with refusal on the grounds of national security. But the speculation is irresistible that it might have involved experiments in mind control similar to those that Olson had worked on.

The long-term aim of these experiments with mind-altering drugs is thought by those who have studied the MK-ULTRA programme to have been to ensure the dominance of Anglo-American civilisation in the “war of all against all—the key to evolutionary success.” Brain-washing would be used not only to defeat the enemy but to ensure compliance and loyalty of one’s own population.

Where did Dr. Olson fit into all this? A Harley Street psychiatrist, Dr. William Sargant, now dead, was sent by the British goverment in the early 1950s to evaluate MK-ULTRA. On his return he told a colleague and friend, former BBC television producer, Gordon Thomas, that what Cameron and Gottlieb were up to was as bad as anything going on in the Soviet gulags.

Thomas, whose books include a 1988 study of the CIA’s forays into mind-control, Journey into Madness: Medical Torture and the Mind Controllers, says “Sargant told me that he had urged the British government to distance this country from it. He said it was blacker than black.” According to Thomas, Sargant told him that Frank Olson had come to Britain between 1950-53 to work on attachment at Porton Down and had also made frequent visits to “an intelligence facility” in Sussex. This is confirmed by entries in the special passport that Olson used.

The stamps on the passport, which declare that the bearer was on “official business for the Department of the Army” indicate a pattern of travel that took Olson between various British military airfields, France, Occupied Germany, Scandanavia and the United States between May 1950 and August 1953. Prosecuting attorney Saracco believes that something happened on one of these trips that holds the key to Olson’s death. Since the matter is still before a grand jury Saracco cannot talk about it but Gordon Thomas has his own idea of what it was. “The CIA was using German SS prisoners and Norwegian Quislings [collaborators] taken from jails and detention centres as guinea pigs to test Cameron’s theories about mind control. The agency preferred to conduct such clinical trials outside the United States because sometimes they were terminal—the human guinea pig ended up dead. Olson was accustomed to seeing lethal experiments done on animals but when human beings were used in this way it was too much for him. I believe that he wanted out.”

Mike Miniccino, an American businessman and historical researcher who has spent 25 years studying the MK-ULTRA programme and developing a database on its activities says that if Olson expressed doubts about MK-ULTRA and its work then he would have done so to William Sargant, the Harley Street psychiatrist, who had evaluated MK-ULTRA‚s work and who had been a close colleague of Olson’s.

And although—as we already know—Sargant wanted the British government to distance itself from the CIA’s work with MK-ULTRA, Miniccino says he nevertheless was committed to the principle of mind control and became the link between the British Secret Intelligence Service and MK-ULTRA. Miniccino adds, “So if Frank Olson expressed serious doubts about the MK-ULTRA project to Sargant, then he signed his own death warrant.”

What Miniccino is implying and what public prosecutor Saracco wants to prove is that the MK-ULTRA mind control project—with its clinical trials on unsuspecting human beings—was 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.

Is this, then, what happened? Did Olson tell the British psychiatrist/SIS agent Sargant that he wanted out of the mind-control project, and that his conscience might compel him to reveal publicly what the intelligence services had been doing? Did Sargant then pass this on to SIS, who in turn told the CIA? 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?

Apart from the evidence set out earlier, there is another compelling fact that supports this theory. Until Mrs Olson died in 1993, a regular visitor at her house was Olson’s former boss in Special Operations, Vincent Ruwet. Ruwet would spent long-daytime hours with Mrs Olson. The two would drink together at her house (Mrs. Olson became an alcoholic) while Ruwet listened to the problems she faced in bringing up her three fatherless children. Everyone considered him to be a sympathetic family friend. But newly-discovered documents reveal that Vincent Ruwet had been assigned by the CIA to “keep track of the wife.”. 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? THE CIA has always maintained as a matter of historical record that it has never murdered an American citizen on American soil. If, as a result of Eric Olson’s persistence in trying to uncover what really happened to his father, and the investigating skills of public prosecutor Saracco, this turns out to be a lie, it could well be the beginning of the end of the agency.

Eric Olson says, “The Cold War is over and there are now ongoing national debates about the future of the CIA and about unethical medical testing on humans. My father’s case covers both. The use of hallucinogens, hypnosis, electroshock and other procedures in an attempt to control the way people behave was the CIA‚s equivalent of the Manhattan [atom bomb] Project. MK-ULTRA was secret, shocking and incredibly dangerous. They couldn‚t afford to take the risk of letting my father continue to be involved or, considering all he knew, allowing him to quit. So he was terminated instead. My father’s murder crossed a line in the sand which the U.S. government has always publicly respected. The guilty ones will not be allowed to get away with it.” Or as Fox Mulder would say, “The truth is out there.”

Code Name: Artichoke
The CIA’s Secret Experiments on Humans

A film by Egmont R. Koch and Michael Wech

Camera: Sven Kiesche
Sound: Jan Schmiedt
Editing: Arno Schumann
Archive Research: John H. Colhoun
English version: Mark Rossman
Editorial Director: Gert Monheim
Production: Egmont R. Koch Filmproduktion
Bremen, Germany
Premier, ARD, WDR August 12, 2002

0.02
(distorted voice, like a radio newscast)

Frederick/Maryland. More than 40 years after his death, the body of former CIA scientist Dr. Frank Olson has been exhumed. Olson’s son Eric is convinced his father was murdered by agents of the American government because he wanted to leave the CIA. Dr. Frank Olson was an expert for anthrax and other biological weapons and had top security clearance. Forensic pathologists at George Washington University performed an autopsy and concluded that Olson probably was the victim of a violent crime.

00.50 Voice of Eric Olson
“I was strongly identifying with him, I loved him. And I am sure that’s why in the end I came to take on this task trying to figure out what had become of him.”

Title: “Code Name: Artichoke.”

1.36
It has been eight years since the exhumation. Eric Olson is still searching for the reasons behind his father’s death in November of 1953. Eric was nine years old at the time. It’s a quest he inherited as the oldest of three children. To solve the mystery of their father’s death.

2.01 Voice of Eric Olson
“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. His death was so dark and so unmentionable. After he died, it was a subject one couldn’t really go near.”

2.25
Eric Olson has returned to live in the house his father built for the family in Frederick in 1950. Back then, Olson senior was one of the biochemists responsible for the biological weapons center the U.S. army ran nearby. The anthrax letters that killed five and caused illness to several others have haunted Eric ever since. Could there be a connection between his father’s death five decades ago and the acts of terror taking place today? (3.00)

3.15
The deadly disease that frightened America after the terrorist attacks on September 11th seems to have come from the same US Army Laboratory in Frederick where Olson had worked: Fort Detrick.

3.31
The biological weapons lab was founded in 1943. At the time, the Americans feared Hitler might attack the allied troops with a virus or bacteria. They quickly produced gas masks and anthrax weapons, in order to be able to strike back in kind.

3.58
Dr. Frank Olson, an army captain and one of the first scientists at Fort Detrick, worked together with Norman Cournoyer. The two became good friends. Their first sons were born within a few days of each other in 1944.

4.18 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“We worked about five months in this thing called aerosols to see if we could test gas masks and impregnated clothing to see how good they were. And then one day he was transferred to working on hot agents. He said: ‘Norm, how about working for me in the hot stuff?’ That’s how we always referred to it. N was Anthrax, X was botulism and so forth.” (4.53)

4.55
Christmas 1947. The war is finally over. Norman and his family celebrate together with Alice and Frank Olson and their children.

5.07 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“Were we close? Yes! Very, very close, every day of the week for two and a half years. You are going to expect us to be close.”

5.17
Among the things his father left behind, Eric Olson found some home movies and slides. At first he didn’t pay them much attention. But today, he sees that material from a different point of view. Might it contain any indication of the secret anthrax research his father was doing after the war?

5.35
Frank Olson made a hobby of home movies. These scenes reveal nothing of his secret task involving deadly weapons. They show the perfect world of a young father, captured with the latest 8-mm camera to hit the market.

5.49
Frank Olson also used photography. He brought home a lot of slides from his many travels. His photographs also primarily show private moments.

6.02
Frank with his wife Alice and son Eric in 1945. Both in 1947 with son Eric and daughter Lisa. Christmas 1949 in a tuxedo. Alice had given birth to their third child, Nils, in the meantime.

6.19 Voice of Eric Olson:
“The whole subject of the relationship between a wife and a husband who is doing top secret, classified work is a subject one could discuss at some length. The wife develops uncanny kind of intuitions, about all the things that are not being said and she knows the limits of what she can ask. 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.

When he would come home for lunch and have a certain kind of expression, she would immediately know that this meant that this morning all the monkeys had died, which meant that the experiment had been a success.”

7.06
Arthur Vidich is Frank Olson’s brother-in-law. Their families regularly spent their summer vacation together. Vidich remembers Frank Olson as an American patriot, who was enthusiastic about working for the Army’s biological weapons program.

7.22 Voice of Arthur Vidich/Brother-in-law of Frank Olson
“He was a person who believed in what he was doing, who felt the work that he was doing at the Center in Frederick was important for the United States. He considered himself a terribly loyal and patriotic person. That kind of an attitude of loyalty was one way of expressing your Americanism.”

7.58
Dr. Frank Olson had worked for the US Army’s biological weapons laboratory for exactly ten years when he died in New York in the wee hours of November 28, 1953. He spent the night at the Hotel Pennsylvania, along with a CIA agent who was there to guard him. That night, Frank Olson plunged to his death from his room on the hotel’s thirteenth floor. Through a closed window, it was said.

8.31
“Army Bacteriologist Dies In Plunge From New York Hotel”.

Nils, the youngest of Olson’s three children, scribbled on the clipping with a crayon.

8.43 Voice of Eric Olson:
“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. I remember quite clearly just being quite stupefied by this.

As a nine-year-old I was old enough to have some idea of cause and effect. And I had no idea what does it mean to fall out of a window. How you fall out of a window in the middle of the night. What is that?”

9.20
Eric didn’t understand.

And for his mother, the subject of his father’s death became a taboo.

9.33
The search for the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death of Dr. Frank Olson begins in 1945, with the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. American troops discovered the corpses of hundreds of prisoners who had been murdered or starved to death. Many of the survivors told US doctors about cruel experiments the camp’s doctors carried out using disease germs and various drugs.

9.59
A few weeks later, at Kransberg Castle north of Frankfurt, the scientific elite of Nazi Germany is arrested and questioned by American officers. The name of the project is “Operation Dustbin.” The American military hopes to evaluate and exploit the findings German researchers made during the war. Among the prisoners at Kransberg Castle is rocket scientist Professor Hermann Oberth, who collects autographs from his colleagues.

10.33
Also at Kransberg Castle: Some of the leading scientific experts in Nazi Germany had been involved in biological warfare, testing the effects of deadly germs on human beings in Dachau and other concentration camps. One of them was Professor Kurt Blome. Blome was the Third Reich’s Deputy Surgeon General and the man behind German research into biological weapons.

10.55
Blome will be among those charged in the case against concentration camp doctors brought before the military tribunal in Nuremberg. He will face the death penalty.

11.07
In spite of the fact that there is enough evidence against him, Kurt Blome will be acquitted in Nuremberg. The Americans have other plans for him.

11.21 Voice of Professor Kurt Blome: Untertitel // Subtitles
1) I stated publicly and openly that I was a conscientious National Socialist…

2) and a follower of Adolf Hitler.

11.29 Voice of Norman Cournoyer
“We were interested in anyone who did work in biological warfare. Did they want to use that? The Nazis? Yes, absolutely! They wanted to use anything that killed people. Anything!”

11.48
The Americans save Kurt Blome, seen here on the left, from death by hanging. In turn, he provides them with information about the Nazi biological weapons program. One of the specialists interrogating Blome is Donald Falconer, a friend and colleague of Frank Olson. Falconer is responsible for developing anthrax bombs.

12.12
Today, more than 50 years later, Donald Falconer lives in a convalescent home not far from Frederick.

12.22
Eric Olson has visited Falconer several times, hoping his father’s old friend might one day confide a crucial secret in him. But Falconer refuses to say anything, feeling bound by his military oath, and doesn’t want to be interviewed.

12.45
In one of his father film’s, immediately following images of his grandfather, Eric discovers a sequence that seems to show secret crop-dusting flights that took place in 1947. Using the findings of Blome and other Nazi scientists, the Americans experimented with artificial diseases capable of destroying crops.

13.07
After this short clip, more family pictures of the children.

13.15
Meanwhile, in Fort Detrick, a massive arms program is taking place with bacteriological weapons, primarily anthrax spores, which have proven to be highly resistant and therefore suitable for biological warfare.

13.29
Anthrax was cultivated in this building, then placed in bombs. The Americans are concerned about the Soviets’ biological arsenal. If the cold war should ever turn hot, deadly bacteria might be used as weapons. The army demands ample weapons at the ready.

13.50
Frank Olson often uses the Air Force to test germ warfare in the field, for example on the Caribbean island of Antigua. These tests are carried out to monitor the spread of diseases under realistic conditions. Most of the tests Olson’s team carries out in the Caribbean and on the Alaskan tundra deal with relatively harmless bacteria, but some tests are conducted using actual pathogens – called “hot stuff.”

14.20 Voice of Norman Cournoyer:
“We did not use anthrax, we used bacillus globigii which is very similar a spore as Anthrax is. So to that extent we did do something that was not kosher. We picked it up all over. It was picked up months after it.”

14.50
It’s an easy-going life they lead, but they have a secret mission. In California, Olson and his team drive up the Pacific coast in a yellow convertible to prepare an experiment to take place over San Francisco Bay. Spores will be released in order to test the city’s vulnerability to an act of Russian sabotage. Frank Olson loves life and has little interest in following rules. His unconventional manner seems inconsistent with his job working for the army.

15.21
In October of 1949, Olson is suspected of disclosing government secrets. He is interrogated by military intelligence.

15.30
(visual texts) “Olson was mildly impatient with the questioning conducted during the course of this interview. This attitude is regarded as typical by persons at Detrick who are acquainted with him.”

“Olson is violently opposed to control of scientific research, either
military or otherwise, and opposes supervision of his work. He does not follow orders, and has had numerous altercations with MP’s (…)”

15.52 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“He was very, very open and not scared to say what he thought. For that matter to the contrary. He did not give a damn. Frank Olson pulled no punches at any time. And I don’t know. That’s what they were scared of, I am sure. He did speak up any time he wanted to. Was he gonna be caught on this? Could be. Could be.”

16.22
As the scientist responsible for biological warfare experiments, Frank Olson was among the most important holders of confidential information during the Cold War.

November 1953. Four years after he was suspected for disclosing secrets – an accusation that was never proved: During a trip to New York, Olson is accompanied by a CIA agent who watches him constantly, never leaving his side. Olson and the CIA agent take a room in the famous Hotel Pennsylvania. So, what are they doing in New York?

17.00
Armand Pastore is the manager of the hotel. He is on duty that night, when Frank Olson falls from the 13th floor, landing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.

17.12 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager:
“He was laying there looking at me, trying to speak to me, very earnest
look in his eyes, wide open …. but there was blood everywhere: blood from his nose, blood from his eyes, blood from his ears, there was a bone protruding from his left arm, sticking straight out. And I kept trying to speak to him, but we were not really communicating, because I could not understand anything he was saying, and then finally he died.”

17.48
Pastore notifies the police and accompanies them to the 13th floor. In the meantime, he has determined that Olson must have fallen to his death from 1018A, and that there was probably another person in the room at the time.

18.03 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager:
“’Wait a minute’, I said, ’it is possible that there is somebody in there’. Then they became alert and they pulled their guns out and said: ’You open the door and we’ll go in.’ I opened the door with my key and they rushed in. Here this guy was sitting in the commode with the hands on his knees, his hands up to his head. The cops said ’what happened’ he said: ’I don’t know, I just heard a crash of glass and I then I see, that Frank Olson is out of the window. And he is down on the street.’”

18.50
The CIA shadow testifies that he was fast asleep and didn’t hear Olson get out of bed. He can offer no explanation for the suicide. He has nothing else to say. He makes no statement regarding the reason the two were visiting New York. The case is closed quickly. No one is interested in the telephone call that was made from Olson’s room immediately following his death.

19.15 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager:
“The operator said, ’yes there was one call out of that room’. So I said ‘What was the conversation?’ She said the man in the room called this number out in Long Island and said ‘Well, he’s gone’ and the man on the other end said ’Well, that’s too bad’ and they both hung up.”

19.39
Was that the CIA agent reporting that he had solved the “Frank Olson problem” in the Hotel Pennsylvania?

19.50
Eric Olson in New York. For years now, he has been searching for witnesses who might know something about his father’s death, which he considers to be a murder perpetrated by the CIA. He wants to know the motive. Was the government afraid Frank Olson might reveal state secrets? The recent terror attacks involving anthrax were a shock to Eric.

20.28
Eric finds himself wondering about a lot of things. Was the anthrax terrorist one of our own? Is that the reason he hasn’t been caught? Because he knows something no one else should find out about? A secret his father knew, too?

20.44
In a suburb of New York, Eric Olson meets long-time CIA veteran Ike Feldman. In the fifties, he worked in drug enforcement. At least, that was the official version. Although Feldman never met Eric’s father personally, he discovered some information about the circumstances of his death.

21.07 Voice of Ira (“Ike”) Feldman/Former CIA agent:
“The source that I have was the New York City Police Department, the Bureau of Narcotics Agents and the CIA Agents themselves. They all say the same thing: that he was pushed out of the window and that he did not jump.

People who wanted him out of the way said he talked too much and he was telling people about the things he had done which is American secret. 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.”

21.46
In April of 1950, Dr. Frank Olson received a diplomatic passport, unusual for an army scientist. Did he have a new job? In the following years, he traveled often to Europe, including making several trips to Germany.

22.00 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“He was a member of the CIA. I only found this out after he told me about it. To me he was a Captain. That’s all I knew about it at first. It turned out that he was a CIA agent. And stayed on, right on through to 1953.”

22.28
Pictures taken in Frankfurt and Heidelberg will later turn up among Olson’s slides. These cities were home to the US Army’s most important facilities in Germany. There is also a picture of the top secret CIA headquarters in Germany, located in the building of IG Farben in the heart of Frankfurt.

22.56
What is Olson’s new assignment? He is now working in an area that has nothing to do with biological weapons. Here, in the German offices of the CIA, the biochemist is conducting important conversations with US intelligence officers.

23.17
Increasingly, he can be found in the company of other CIA agents, including a certain John McNulty. It has to do with a top secret project to use chemicals, drugs and torture on human beings in order to break their will and make them submissive. Brainwashing.

23.35
The code name for this operation: Artichoke.

23.43
(Visual text!)
“The (…) team would enjoy the opportunity of applying
“Artichoke” techniques to individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or plants and subjects having known reasons for deception.”

23.56
In Oberursel, in the Taunus hills north of Frankfurt, hidden in old half-timbered houses, the US Army led a quiet interrogation center: “Camp King”. It was primarily Soviet agents and defectors from East Germany who were kept here, people the CIA considered to be communist spies. Special teams, the so-called “rough boys”, interrogated the prisoners.

24.23
Former SS member Franz Gajdosch was hired just after the war by the Americans to tend the bar in the officers’ mess at Camp King. Sometime in the year of 1952, in the top secret interrogation center, Gajdosch runs across another German: Professor Kurt Blome.

24.42 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./ Former barkeeper at “Camp King”:
“For a long time, Blome was a doctor at Camp King, he also ran the clinic. He was a protégé of the Americans, and had been a concentration camp doctor. He conducted experiments.”

25.03
The American officers who lived the good life at Camp King aren’t disturbed about Blome’s past. Was the former concentration camp doctor expected to lend his experience for their own planned experiments on human beings? A CIA consultant began planning the Artichoke experiments as early as September of 1951.

25.24
(Visual text!)
“The conversations at Oberursel pointed up (…) signs
and symptoms of drugs that might be used (…) We should look into the use of amnesia-producing drugs.”

25.34 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./ Former barkeeper at “Camp King”:
“Of course their methods were not humane, they exerted a lot of pressure. There are ways of breaking people. At Camp King, they were notorious, the “rough boys” – anything somebody didn’t want to reveal, they would try to get it out of them.”

26.01
There are many indications that the cruel experiments involving human beings – “Operation Artichoke” – took place in this isolated CIA safe house near Camp King, at the edge of a town called Kronberg.

26.17
The former “Schuster Villa”, now called “Haus Waldhof”, was built shortly after the turn of the century as the summer residence of a Jewish banking family from Frankfurt. The Nazis confiscated it in 1934, and the Americans took it over after the war.

26.33 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./Former bartender at “Camp King”:
“The neighbors, the community didn’t know who it was, what this place was, because the military personnel going in and out of the house weren’t in uniform, they wore civilian clothing. The vehicles had no license tags, so the community wasn’t even aware it was an American facility.”

26.58
At “House Waldhof,” in June 1952, the CIA begins conducting brain-washing experiments, using various drugs, hypnosis, and probably torture. One of the top secret protocols documents a Russian agent being pumped full of medication.

27.19
The goal of the experiments is to manipulate the human mind in order to extract secrets from its subjects. And then to erase their memory, so they can’t remember what happened to them.

27.38
Dr. Frank Olson arrived in Frankfurt on June 12, 1952, from Hendon Military Airport near London. He left the Rhine-Main region three days later, on June 15.

27.53
On June 13, experiments are conducted with “Patient No. 2”, a suspected Soviet double-agent.

28.03 Voice of Norm Cournoyer
“He was troubled after he came back from Germany one time. He came back and told me and he said Norm, I tell you right now you and I never talked about this, but we were both grown-ups and this was rough. He said ‘Norm, you would be stunned by the techniques that they used.’

They made people talk! They brainwashed people! They used all kinds of drugs, they used all kinds of torture.”

28.32
The CIA’s unscrupulous experiments on human beings continued the Nazi drug experiments they learned of during the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.

28.43 Voice of Norman Cournoyer
“They were using Nazis, they were using prisoners, they were using Russians, and they didn’t care whether they got out of that or not.”

29.17
Meanwhile, the US army was conducting extensive experiments with a new miracle drug: LSD. Here, for example, a soldier was expected to assemble a rifle while under the influence of the hallucinogen.

29.35
The army’s LSD experiments took place on the campus of the Chemical Corps in Edgewood Arsenal. The scientists who worked in these laboratories in the early fifties, and who collaborated closely with Frank Olson, were looking for new hallucinogenic substances. They hoped to find a way to use the drugs on the battle ground.

30.04
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. Immediately after the war he courted the Americans, seeking to ensure a job in the United States.

30:21 Voice of Bennie E. Hackley/Chemical Corps US Army:
“There was an interest in the U.S. during that time in looking at mood-altering drugs from LSD to BZ and other possible mood-altering drugs. Fritz was interested in that area as well.”

30.50
After its experiments on soldiers, the army saw potential in using LSD and other drugs to sedate and “dope” enemy troops. In short order, it would be possible to conquer territory without a fight.

31.15
A short time later, the CIA begins conducting its own LSD experiments in the bohemian New York neighborhood of Greenwich Village, on Bedford Street. But unlike the army experiments, the subjects of these tests, which took place in an apartment disguised as a brothel, would not be informed. The CIA hired prostitutes to pour LSD into their customers’ drinks. And then lure them into revealing secrets.

31.41 Voice of Ira (“Ike”) Feldman/Former CIA agent
“My purpose was to see that we got guys up there we wanted to talk and through other people we got prostitutes to talk to these guys and each prostitutes would put something – which I found out later was LSD – into their drink and made them talk. Either they wanted to talk about narcotics, security or crime. This was all part of the CIA experiments. They called it ‘dirty tricks’”.

32.08
LSD, it was soon learned, was a much more effective way to loosen the tongue than alcohol was.

32.24
Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland, a three-hour drive from Washington. In an isolated vacation house at the edge of the lake, the CIA’s “dirty tricks” department converged here for a meeting with ten of its scientists in November 1953.

32.43
The meeting is about Artichoke. According to the invitation, it was a conference for sports journalists. But in reality, the participants, one of them Frank Olson, were to be placed under the influence of LSD.

32.58
One of the drinks has been spiked. Later, it will be said the CIA was conducting a kind of self test – but without the knowledge of the participants.

33.07 Voice of Ira (“Ike”) Feldman/Former CIA agent:
“I do not think again from what I heard, that he was drugged because he was a security agent. He was drugged because he talked too much.”

33.19
When Frank Olson was later briefed about the LSD experiment, he knew immediately what it meant: They had interrogated him with Artichoke techniques.

33.30 Voice of Eric Olson:
“Friday evening he came home and spent the weekend in this house with my mother, my brother and sister and me and during much of the weekend they sat on the sofa which was just over here. It was a foggy November weekend, as she described it, and they sat here, holding hands and staring out of this big window into the fog, and he described having made something he referred to as a terrible mistake.”

34.01
The CIA brings Olson, accompanied by an agent, to New York. In the hotel they are joined by a doctor working for the secret service, who administers medication. Frank Olson has become a security risk. But it seems the CIA has already found a solution.

34.24
Forty years later, at the Institute for Forensic Sciences at George Washington University. The body of Dr. Frank Olson has been exhumed and is undergoing an autopsy. Eric wants clarity, once and for all. And as it turns out, the results of the first autopsy in 1953 in New York were manipulated.

34.52 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University:
“The report from New York City, from the Medical Examiner’s office which I had before me was totally inaccurate in some very important respects. It talks about lacerations, cuts of the flesh that in all probability might have been caused by glass in the course of his fall.

There were no lacerations. They were not there, totally non-existent.

We also noticed immediately that he had a hemorrhage, which we call a hematoma, which is under the skull by the frontal bone. That is only reasonably explainable as having occurred by reason of his being shall we say silenced, being rendered unable to defend himself, so that he could be tossed out of the window.”

35.54
Starrs arranges to visit the Pennsylvania Hotel with Armand Pastore, the hotel manager who found Frank Olson that night. Afterwards, he makes his judgment:

36.05 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University:
“It is my view and a number of my team members, not all of them, that it was homicide.”

36.16
That would mean Frank Olson was first knocked out by a targeted blow and then thrown out of the open hotel window. 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. In this report, it says:

36.37
(Visual text!)
“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. (…) In some cases it will be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him.”

36.49 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University:
“What was spelled out in that ‘Assassination Manual’ was almost letter for letter what happened to Doctor Olson and it was a protocol, as we call it, for an assassination, which fit like the fingers in a glove.”

37.10
So was it in fact murder? But for what reason? Why did Olson speak of a “terrible mistake” he had made?

37.24 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“There is a piece missing and I am not sure that I am the one to give it to you. What happened was, that he just got involved in it in a way he was unhappy about it. But there was nothing he could do about it. He was CIA and they took it to the end.”

37.49
Summer 1953. Frank Olson and his father-in-law cut down a tree. Then the family goes to Tupper Lake on vacation. Just like every year. With Arthur Vidich, his wife and their children. Everything seems the same as always. But that appearance is deceiving. Frank is troubled by something. And he makes an attempt to confide in his brother-in-law Art.

38:16 Voice of Arthur Vidich/Brother-in-law of Frank Olson:
“I had never had a conversation with him about anything that might have involved moral values. What had startled me about it was that he had mentioned the Bible and that he was struggling with something. I knew that there was a problem that he was attempting to confront. But what that problem was, I did not know. I can visualize his face actually: It was drawn, in a way I had never seen it before.”

38.58
While the family enjoys summertime at the lake, Frank retreats into his own world.

39:03 Voice of Eric Olson:
“My mother also recalled that my father was short-tempered during that last summer. She knew that he had been going through some kind of crisis. She knew he had not been sleeping well, she knew he wasn’t really at peace. He had been agitated and worried about something and from time to time discussed leaving Detrick, leaving his job and retraining himself as a dentist. She had encouraged him to do this if that is what he wanted to do.”

39.37
In Asia, at that time, a bitter war was going on between allied US troops against the North Koreans and Chinese. It had already been going on for three years. It was the first, long-awaited and long-feared battle between the West and Communism. Could the Korean War have anything to do with Frank’s personal problems?

40.05
He still has an office here in Fort Detrick, in the US army’s center for biological weapons. At the same time, he is working for the CIA. Among the tasks of the dirty tricks department in Building 1412 are brainwashing, drugs and torture, as well as murder by means of poisons and bacteria.

40.27
On July 17, 1953, Olson celebrates his 43rd birthday with friends. A few days later, he leaves for the last trip he will ever take. He took his movie camera.

40.42
First stop: London. First objects filmed: Big Ben and a parade on the Mall.

40.52
Then on to Paris. Near the Eiffel Tower, his two CIA colleagues sit in a sidewalk café and watch pretty French girls go by, on the left is John McNulty.

41.07
“Paris, London, Stockholm”, Frank will later write on the packaging. His son Eric is seeing his father’s last film consciously for the first time.

41.18
Then, suddenly, a picture of the ruins of the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate. The Soviet Memorial for the Victims of the Second World War. So Frank Olson was also in Berlin early in August 1953.

41.38
In Zehlendorf he photographs the headquarters of the American army.
Is Frank Olson on a secret Artichoke mission? Several top-level communist agents were being interrogated in Berlin at the time. It was a time of intense political and military tension in the divided city, just weeks after the civilian uprising in the Soviet sector. At the army headquarters in Berlin, Olson apparently witnessed brutal interrogation methods.

42.19 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“After he came back from Germany the last time he sounded different. When he talked to me he said, I can probably tell you things, that I can’t tell other people, because they are still in top secret material. The people he saw in Germany went to the extreme. He said: ‘Norm, did you ever see a man die?’

I said ‘No.’

He said, ‘Well, I did.’

Yes, they did die. Some of the people they interrogated died. So you can imagine the amount of work they did on these people.”

43.10 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“He said, that he was going to leave. He told me that. He said, ‘I am getting out of that CIA. Period’.”

43.19
In Korea, it’s just a matter of days before the first American prisoners of war will be released. Some of them will face charges of high treason, because they accused their own country of conducting biological warfare.

43.31 Voice of US Air Force Pilot (Prisoner of War in North Korea):
“If my son asked me what I did, what I did in Korea, how can I tell him that I came over here and dropped germ bombs on people destroying, and bringing death and destruction. How can I go back and face my family?”

43.48
Are their accusations accurate? Or are they themselves the victims of communist brainwashing? One thing is for certain: Back home, in freedom, the soldiers making these confessions will be interrogated again, using drugs and torture – by their own people!

(Visual text!)
“All hands agreed that (…) among the returning POWs
from Korea (…) the ‘hard core’ group and those who had been successfully indoctrinated were excellent subjects for Artichoke work.”

44.19
The American soldiers who claimed to have committed biological warfare were apparently manipulated using Artichoke techniques. This is documented in CIA papers. And indeed, all discredited their confessions.

44.30 Voice of US Air Force-Pilot (after his return):
“I did sign a confession, relating to germ warfare. The statements contained in this confession were false they were obtained under duress from Chinese communists. When making these statements I deliberately attempted to put in much as was false and ridiculous that I could possibly get away with.”

44.57 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“I took an oath when I left the Army that I would not talk about that. I am sorry.”

45.05
The Korean War Memorial in Washington honors the Americans who died in that fight. Of those who returned, some were interrogated by the CIA using cruel methods, and forced to rescind their confessions. But were the confessions the truth? Did the Americans in fact use biological weapons in the Korean War? As a test? And was this the secret Frank Olson knew, and might disclose?

45.34 Voice of Eric Olson
“This fits with what my mother had always said: Korea really bothered your father.

Finally when one my father’s colleagues within the past year only told me that my father had come to understand that Korea was the key thing and that they were using biological warfare methods in Korea.

And then I preceded to ask him about the germ warfare confessions, this was alleged to be by the American government, these confessions made by the American servicemen were immediately discredited by the U.S. government under the idea that these were manipulated and produced only by the effect of brainwashing.

And at that point my father’s colleague looked at me as if to say ‘read-my-lips’: ‘it wasn’t all brainwashing’.”

46.24
Would this colleague, Norman Cournoyer, repeat this statement in front of the camera? He has never made a public statement. Neither about Frank Olson, nor about biological warfare in the Korean War. Will he, now in his 80s, pay last respects to his old friend Frank Olson? And to Frank’s son Eric, who takes part in this conversation?

46.46 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“I took an oath when I left the United States Army that I would never divulge that stuff.”

“You divulged it to me.”

“You cannot prove it, can you?”

“I can assert it. You told me.”

“Hearsay!”

“So you don’t want to say it?”

“No …. I don’t want to say it. But, there were people who had biological weapons and they used them. I won’t say anything more than that. They used them.”

47:24 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“Was there a reason for your Dad being killed by the CIA? Probably so.”

47.44
Around Frederick, Maryland, where Frank Olson lived while working for both the US Army’s secret biological warfare program and the CIA, the FBI is still looking for the anthrax terrorist.

For months, the largest investigation in the history of American criminal justice has been underway. Should the perpetrator be accused and the case come to court, the government in Washington might be forced to reveal what Eric Olson believes is top secret information about illegal research on biological weapons, about the use of anthrax in the Korean War – and about his father’s murder.

48.30
Eric wants to tell his friend Bruce about the latest evidence. Bruce has been at his side throughout his years of research. Once, in the summer of 1975, the American government didn’t hesitate to see to it that the truth was not made known.

48.43
The conspiracy originated at the top, in the White House, initiated by Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney. It had just been learned that the CIA allegedly drugged its employee Frank Olson with LSD before his supposed suicide.

Rumsfeld and Cheney, heads of the White House chiefs of staff, at the time recommended to President Gerald Ford that he apologize to the family in the name of the government, and to support retribution. In order to prevent worse things from happening. That’s the content of this White House memo:

49.21
“There (is…) the possibility that it might be necessary to disclose highly classified national security information in connection with any court suit or legislative hearings.”

49.38
Ten days later, Ford hosted the Olson family and apologized. This allowed him to remain silent about state secrets – and the true reasons for Frank Olson’s death.

49.52 Voice of Eric Olson
“What this means for me is that a national security homicide is not only a possibility, but really it is a necessity, when you have a certain number of ingredients together.

If you are doing top secret work that is immoral, arguably immoral, especially in the post-Nuremberg period, and arguably illegal, and at odds with the kind of high moral position you are trying to maintain in the world, then you have to have a mechanism of security which is going to include murder.”

50.26
The two politicians who collaborated in the conspiracy in 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney, are back in power. As vice president and secretary of defense of the government of the United States. The Frank Olson case, it seems, is far from being closed, even 50 years later. That, at least, is one thing of which Olson’s son is now certain.