quietly dropped the case (the New York D.A.s office has declined to comment, citing grand jury secrecy). He was director of Shepherd Pratt Hospital for twenty years, where a building there bears his name. On July 21, 1975, Alice, Eric, Nils, Lisa and Lisa's husband, Greg Hayward, were invited to the White House. government.'' Only then did he realize that Dr. Olson had catapulted through the rooms closed window, apparently bent on suicide. In 1949, Frank Olson had helped to set up the Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, where written records were forbidden and only a trusted few were allowed to know about the more sensitive projects. Educational Programs. On March 31, 1995, attorney Huge sent Morgenthau a 12-page memorandum that methodically argued why an investigation should be opened. Operation Realism, a top-secret project run by George White, involved giving citizens in bars and restaurants LSD without their knowledge. No, said Eric. I discussed this matter with Dr. Batterman, our teams bioengineer, and he left me with the distinct understanding that if this part of Dr. Olsons frontal bone had come into direct contact with an object at ground level at any speed above eleven miles per hour the frontal bone would have suffered a fracture, and the skin would have been lacerated. Olson went back to New York on November 28 and checked into the Statler Hotel. The overseer for all us Mensa types is Hugh Montague, the old OSS legend, and hes an odd one, as remote as Mt. Tad Szulc is a Washington-based writer on national security matters. ..I think the overall purpose is clear: they were exploring whether and to what extent they might distract my father (certainly the essence of the magicians art) for the purpose of taking his eye off the ball, making him forget, creating amnesia. This interest grew to an obsession after the Stalin show trials with the robotic, apparently artificially-induced confessions made by the accused. His arthritis had become very severe, but ulcers and other stomach problems prevented him from taking even aspirin to relieve it. 10-14. Online Marketplace Sales Leader: Extensive experience in online sales strategy, product development, optimization of content for user experience, SEO, and advertising, and off-site inventory . Piecing together the facts has been hard enough for Eric, the facts being buried in classified documents, or declassified documents covered with thick black lines made with marker pens, or worse Sidney Gottlieb admitted to Eric during one meeting that he had, on his retirement, destroyed the MK-ULTRA files. This call was received the day before a second call on the day of Olsons death informing Gibson that Dr. Olson would not be coming. Mulholland devoted his energies to the project and by November his first draft was complete. He killed himself nine days later by jumping out the window of New Yorks Starlet Hotel at 2:30 A.M. on Saturday, November 28. He told his wife, I made a terrible mistake and Ill tell you what it was when the children have gone to bed.. In any case, soon, Olson was experiencing disorientation. In fact, Eric told me, tomorrow would be the first time anyone had ever publicly charged the CIA with murdering an American citizen. Does it really threaten the fundamental nature of America?. Every day wed see these billboards, HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! He did confirm night manager Armond Pastores statement that Olson was still breathing as he lay on the sidewalk. Army tests showed he had an unusual facility for language, so he was enrolled in a special school in Germany where he learned fluent Russian, By the end of the war, Feldman was a lieutenant colonel with a background in Military Intelligence. Did the CIA, in collusion with the British intelligence service, orchestrate his subjection to mind depatterning? Actually Manchuria conjoins exactly the two disparate ideas biological weapons and mind control that initially seem such unlikely bedfellows in the Frank Olson story. 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. Reach out to us for more information on getting involved with our research. The caller said that his friend would not be coming. THAMES NUMBER ONE Not much was revealed not even the name of the victim. James Starrs interviewed Dr. Gibson in 1994, and in 1999 I finally decided I should meet him too. Stephen Saracco, Eric wrote, I know that you have reason to believe (no that is too weak a way of putting it; to know is more like it) that my father was murdered. (The Shakespearean parallels werent lost on the scholarly Eric; think Hamlet, he liked to say, but on the order of years, not months.) Eventually, Eric would uncover tantalizing evidence suggesting that his father, far from being the victim of a drug experiment gone awry, may have been murdered as the proverbial man who knew too much. But his first reaction was not to run downstairs or call the police or the hotel operator. He can offer no explanation for the suicide. Maybe its because Eric had spent so much of his adult life failing to be offered the kindness of strangers, failing to benefit from anything approaching an American dream, but now Frank Olson was out there, lying on a slab in a pathologists lab, and perhaps things were about to turn around for Eric. They practiced germ attacks in airports and on the New York subway, tracking air currents and calculating the potential death toll. Mercury News reporter Frederick Tulksy said: In 1993, Eric Olson arranged for his fathers body to be unearthed and examined by James Starrs, a forensic scientist. Whatever happened in Mulhollands office that November afternoon, it did not curtail his work with the Central Intelligence Agency. verging on paranoia? This phenomenon is a familiar one in psychoanalytic experience. 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: two circumstances affect our analysis of the Justice Department position. Retired New York City Patrolman Joseph Guastafeste (meaning a good feast, as he told me while preening himself, but the correct translation would be wasted or ruined feast) took a different tack and talked a blue streak, but his uncommunicativeness on Dr. Olsons death was just as indefatigable as that of Colonel Ruwet. He said I could only publish what he had said after his death. engaged in sinister and clandestine research activities of a biochemical nature. Was it broken? Although ethical standards for such experiments were considerably murkier then than they are now, the CIA launched its LSD research on unwitting subjects even though the U.S. was a party to an international understanding that, in effect, banned such activities. He owned a farm in Frederick Maryland, to which I would journey with my family on many occasions. The reason for this was the feeling that any questions by the Internal Revenue people concerning funds paid by CD/TSS would be prompted by questions on deductions made. During this time, according to Frank Barron, he had supervised experiments on the subjective effects of psycho-active drugs, injecting adrenaline . While evaluations indicated some operational value in the tests, it was noted that scientific controls were ab-in addition to the basic ethical problem.. . The source that I have was the New York City Police Department, the Bureau of Narcotics Agents and the CIA Agents themselves. As America entered the 1950s, the world around John Mulholland was changing. First, however, Gottlieb had to test the compatibility of LSD to his purpose. (pp. As Ive tried to tell you it conceptually rests on the idea that there are two vectors in this story and they only intersect in one place.. This can be done with the point of a knife or a light blow of an axe or hatchet. It spread to undergraduate students, then to other campuses. He was 9 years old. Fritz was interested in that area as well.. In the spring of 2000 Eric Olson, Frank Olsons son, called me in my office at the University of Virginia. Ironically, Erics retreat to a neutral and very quiet country only sharpened his resolve to exorcise the old family ghosts. When it was mentioned that the call related to the death of Dr. Olson, she was unwilling to discuss the matter of Dr. Abramsons treatment of Dr. Olsons or his experiments with LSD or her knowledge or involvement in it. When we all die off, thats it, he said. All 16,000 pages were, in the CIAs own words, heavily sanitized.Few documents had escaped redacting. Lashbrook refused it. Here was a pathologist who wanted a smoking gun, not a skull with a massively blood-stained frontal bone, to induce him to declare the manner of death a homicide. But the question of motive remained a mystery. He had his fathers mummified body exhumed. Elliot didnt mean that at all. His report of his dental comparisons was thorough and constituted additional strong support for the remains being those of Frank Olson, even though it lacked the element of surprise that his dental expertise revealed from the exhumed teeth of Jesse Woodson James. Detective James Ward initially referred to the case as a possible homocide in his report. The whole history of a lot of things would be different. Ruwet and Lashbrook claimed to have found Olson sitting in the Statler lobby early the next morning. The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing program may still suffer from the residual effects.*. These entries fit in with a 1963 internal report by then-CIA Inspector General Lyman B. Kirkpatrick about the MK-ULTRA project. The event was chronicled in a lengthy article published in theNew Yorker. tacitly acknowledged that it had committed a sin against the order that holds citizens in allegiance to their government. Eric Olson. ''He was trying to mumble something, but I couldn't make it out. But it seems the CIA has already found a solution. 10.55 . This, he told Eric, is quite probably what got your father murdered.. In 1955, the CIA concluded that tests in a controlled environment-at the agency and in hospitals and prisons-were no longer sufficient, and, to make sense, they had to be conducted in normal social situations., All along, Gottlieb had been trying to persuade his CIA superiors that experiments on unwitting subjects were necessary. Lashbrook said that Olson had jumped through the window shade and the window glass. They spent Thursday night at a Long Island hotel not far from Abramsons Long Island clinic. For fifty years the United States has continued to deny that this country has used biological weapons in combat. We were problem-solving.. When the casket was opened in 1994 Frank Olsons upper body was not disfigured as the New York Medical Examiners Report had claimed in 1953. It was made immediately after Frank Olson went out of the window. Frank told Norman that they didnt mind if people came out of this or not. Dr. Gibsons father the author of The Shadow! Drugs By then Sargent had learned that Frank Olson was acting deputy head of SO (Special Operations). The commission report said that all the drug program records were ordered destroyed in 1973, including a total of 152 separate files.. We know that the horizontal divider on this double-hung window was five feet ten inches from the floor of Room 1018A. Through Thomas, Eric learned that during a trip to London in the summer of 1953 his father had apparently confided in William Sargant, a consultant psychiatrist who advised British intelligence on brainwashing techniques. It noted that while definite results have been achieved in producing confusion among subjects treated with minute quantities, these items have not yet shown usefulness for interrogation purposes.. Two decades after the bizarre tragedy, Olsons eldest son, Eric, would begin to dispute the official account. Using the findings of Blome and other Nazi scientists, the Americans experimented with artificial diseases capable of destroying crops. Today five decades after it was written the tricks and approaches set forth in this manual are still classified top secret.. One of them was a former CIA pimp named Ira Ike Feldman. She said, How could you do such a harebrained scientific experiment? 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. One of the CIAs mob contacts long suspected of involvement in John Kennedys assassination was the Las Vegascapo mafiosoJohn Roselli. The death of Diane Linkletter, daughter of celebrity Art Linkletter, reportedly occurred while she was in the grip of LSD and not during a flashbackalthough it is difficult to say which is which in the case of an LSD habitu. Copyright 2003. by Alston Chase. In some Frederick circles, youll hear disapproving murmurs about Erics obsession contrasted with the success of his younger brother, Nils, a dentist. The experiment appears to have been conducted with Olsons consent and took place on Thursday, 19th November 1953. First stop: London. I regret everything. He is interrogated by military intelligence. [15]Mulholland letter to subscribers ofThe Sphinx, June 29, 1953,op. I have seen corpses in much worse condition with a lesser time period in between burial and exhumation. And Ted Kaczynski would participate. The letter was from The Diplomat Motor Hotel, in Ocean City, Maryland. Are their accusations accurate? While still in captivity in Manchuria some of the captured American pilots made statements that became known as germ warfare confessions. In these statements the pilots said they had dropped biological weapons on North Korea. Dick Cheney was a White House assistant. And there is much ado about dogs, including supplies for a Buster Project. One plan for the dart guns was to knock out guard dogs so U.S. agents could sneak into foreign facilities. For that matter to the contrary. Frank Olson pulled no punches at any time. Lincoln said, Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness? Sound: Jan Schmiedt But in the days that followed the press conference it became clear that every journalist had decided to report the story in much the same way. Although the men who were investigated had claimed that Frank Olson was in a suicidal frame of mind, they had roomed him on a high floor. ''Eric is crazy, Eric is obsessed,'' he says, mimicking his accusers. However on his initiative in telephoning me at my office, a later meeting was scheduled at which he demanded the right to question me for one hour in return for my interviewing him for an equal period of time. Consequently, we knew those results would likely be a long time coming. After my book was published, I continued to meet with Dr Sargent. Refine Your Search Results All Filters 1 Eric Rodney Olson, 56 Resides in Las Vegas, NV Lived In Dundee IL, Ypsilanti MI, Chula Vista CA, San Diego CA Past Addresses: Homes, Rental Properties, businesses, apartments, condos and/or other real estate associated with Todd Jaspers in Lakewood, CO. 5185 County 9 Blvd. THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE AND YOU An internal memo the following week refers to Olsons suicide in quotation marks, as if the memos author was aware that it had not been a suicide. The assassination range of the sub-machine gun is point blank. He and Alice spent much of that weekend sitting on the couch, holding hands, quietly looking out the window at the obscuring mist. My foremost interest was to locate the whereabouts of persons present at the Hotel Statler on the night Frank Olson had died. 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