eric olson harvard
And then, in this home video, Eric was back at home, exhilarated, talking on the phone to Nils: I saw daddy today!. One minute he would be laboring some abstruse point in his Southern drawl, the next his face would be alight with a snaggle-toothed grin, and his body would be electrified by the joke he had just slipped by me, deadpan. Mulholland continued work on the operational guide throughout the spring and summer. Lashbrook went so far as to claim that Alice Olson had urged her husband to seek psychiatric help months before the LSD dosing a bald-faced lie, according to Alice. Investigations of suspicious events are justifiably reliant on an Occams razors approach in reaching their conclusions. Afterward, when he seemed to be suffering from serious side effects, the C.I.A. That possibility is not as fantastical as it might at first blush appear to be. When William Colby appeared before a Senate Committee in 1975 to explain the Agencys involvement in biological warfare he remarked that from the outset this activity was characterized by extreme compartmentation [sic] and a high degree of secrecy within CIA itself.. The scientific studies following the autopsy can take weeks to months. Actually Manchuria conjoins exactly the two disparate ideas biological weapons and mind control that initially seem such unlikely bedfellows in the Frank Olson story. I first encountered their behaviour while investigating many of the great spy scandals of the Cold War: the betrayal of Americas atomic bomb secrets by Klaus Fuchs and the compromising of Britains M15 and M16 by Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby. Arson can cause accidental death if the subject is drugged and left in a burning building. When he looked around the subject was gone. Despite the CIAs editing of the material, the documents provided a remarkably comprehensive account of John Mulhollands work for the CIA. Very, very close, every day of the week for two and a half years. The meeting was as awkward as the food was elegant. Erics mother had created from the same scant facts offered to Eric this scenario: Frank Olson was in New York. Their major weapon was psychology and sleep deprivation. The Olson family had never heard this name, and would not learn of Dr. Gibsons role until 1994. Professor of Biomedical Ethics,University of Virginia. He was intensely patriotic and served on the Committee for National Morale. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995; paperback 1996). Self-evidently LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) was at the very top of our list, but other drugs were on it as well. Is it possible, then, that in the early morning hours of Saturday, November 28, 1953, in Room 1018A of the Hotel Statler in New York City that Frank Olsons body and mind were so possessed by a dose of LSD that he was given that night which precipitated his exiting the 13th floor window to his death? Its more than just some crazy paranoid speculation. The pad, as White called the CIA safe house, resembled a playboys lair, circa 1955. But if someone is stricken with a sudden, fatal illness or an epidemic slashes across a crowded city there is no way of knowing whether anyone attacked, much less who. It was always referred to as the pad, never the apartment, and was modeled after Playboy magazine, 1955 . I thought for example of Armand Pastore, who is Jim Raileys contemporary and is clearly pained when he remembers the aspects he witnessed. But officials couldnt afford to let him leave. Elliot didnt mean that at all. My unflagging investigator, Gary Eldredge, located Guastafeste through drivers license and vehicle registrations as having homes both in New York and in Florida. But if nobody saw nuthin, somebody did hear something. The item for operational supplies is intended to provide for the purchase of supplies used to test or verify ideas. He took a number of courses at both Columbia University and at New Yorks City College, but did not attain a degree. A similar survey in 1969 by Dr. Nicholas Malleson of 4,303 British patients who had taken a total of more than 50,000 doses of LSD came to much the same conclusion. The scientist wrote that our own current work contains the strong suggestion that LSD-25 will produce mass hysteria (unaccountable laughter, anxiety, eth.). At the same time the actual skull from our exhumation was forwarded to Dr. McDowell. e.olson@sheffield.ac.uk. The Nazis confiscated it in 1934, and the Americans took it over after the war. Although Eric was convinced that his father had been the victim of a CIA assassination, the possible motive behind a murder had long remained the weak link in his theories. Condons book was fiction; the Helms plan was not. PLANNING A molecular biologist and a country musician might seem an odd pair, but Dr. Eric Olson and Willie Nelson share musical and scientific interests that have benefitted both fields. Actually they are better described as State Secrets. This interest grew to an obsession after the Stalin show trials with the robotic, apparently artificially-induced confessions made by the accused. Samples of hair are taken as well, and if the body has recently died, urine is removed from the bladder for drug testing. [ From reading Dr. Abramsons report it is not readily evident what the CIA wanted in particular to have in it.] The truth concerning the death of Frank Olson was concealed from the Olson family as well as from the public in 1953. Vast quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, could now be produced with reasonable ease in any sophisticated chemistry laboratory.At about the same time, a subculture of researchers began to experiment on themselves. In 1951, Allen Dulles, later appointed director of Central Intelligence, received a report from military sources that the Russians had bought 50 million doses of a new drug from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland. The CIA was able to secretly buy small amounts from Sandoz, but this was not considered sufficient. The agency wanted a drug, as LSD historians Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain put it, that would blow minds and make people crazy.. He was CIA and they took it to the end.. A glance atThe New York TimesIndex for 1953 (pg 573) under the heading Germ Warfare shows the large number of articles on the subject day after day, and charges about the use of biological warfare as a crime against humanity. (Exhumation and forensic investigation). On page 157 (hardback edition) Regis describes the Tuesday morning when, for the second time after the Deep Creek drugging, Olson arrived at work: Ruwet now decided that this was far more serious than hed realized at first. And no government panel would be publishing a report acknowledging that Frank Olson had been murdered. I had a strong reaction to the letter. His research focuses on the history of political thought in early-modern Europe and America, and on the implications of that history for debates in contemporary political theory. But Dr. Gibbons and the C.I.A. As we talked about the old cabin Railey looked sad. Why has it taken half a century to arrive at the truth about what happened to Frank Olson? They found that the poisons had come from the SO Division under a CIA-Army project code-named MKNAOMI. Then he fell like a rag doll to his side, coming to a full stop lying supine on the sidewalk. Dr. Gibson said he cannot remember all the words that were used in the explanation, but that was what was told to him had formed an image in his mind of what the situation had been, and this image he remembers very clearly. The case is closed quickly. The blow to the head creates a wave effect on the brain tissue, causing it to flow to the side of the skull opposite the injury site where hemorrhaging occurs when the moving brain tissue finds no outlet and crashes against the inner table of the skull. Among them is Army intelligence veteran Norman G. Cournoyer, 85, who worked with Olson at Detrick and became one of his closest friends. They were using Nazis, they were using prisoners, they were using Russians, and they didnt care whether they got out of that or not.. But what that problem was, I did not know. We talked about the standard account of his fathers death and he shared with me his theory, one that will be tested by the New York district attorney. Consequently he withdrew his resignation letter. The last ten years of his life, he lived in Stinson Beach, California, where, known as Colonel White, he went on the wagon for a few years and became chief of the volunteer fire department. All their friends fathers worked at the base. Outside the White House, after their 17-minute meeting with President Ford, Alice Olson gave a statement to the press. Were where we want to be we know what happened. Thats too bad, a man on the other end of the line had replied, before hanging up. CHAOS UNDER HEAVEN We joked about it., He said, Theyre trying to find out what kind of guy I am. The plan of action included his seeing a psychiatrist. This had been caused by a heavy blow, James Starrs decided, probably from a hammer, before the fall from the window. MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD SUBJECT: Project ARTICHOKE. After returning, Cournoyer recalls, Olson asked, Have you ever seen a man die?, He actually called it torture, Cournoyer recalls. Ruwet told him to calm down. The rest of the Armys offensive biological weapons program thought big: 500-pound anthrax bombs that could contaminate entire cities. Another visitor was John Gittinger, a CIA psychologist who testified last month before Senate investigative committees that he met with Morgan Hall on numerous occasions to interview prostitutes about their drug and sex habits. The agencys 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. Elizabeths hospital in Washington, D.C., and Dr. Edward Strecker, president of the American Psychiatric Association. How could Dr. Di Maio have reported the existence of multiple lacerations when, in truth and in fact, there were none? They later received $750,000 in compensation. Was he standing on a ledge and he jumped? asked Eric. The CIA would claim twenty-two years later that during the retreat, on Gottliebs order, his deputy, Robert Lashbrook, spiked the after-dinner Cointreau with LSD. The CIA report offers no more details about Olsons doings on that Friday. They will also be affected by whether or not the assassin is to be killed with the subject. Mysterious characters from Fort Bragg and the CIA came and went at the SO Division, leaving wish-lists and checking progress. Isnt this what Communism is all about anyway! But if so, what was the motive for such a nefarious deed? White apparently knew Abramson, because a Sept. 20, 1954, diary entry contained a reference to Gottlieb and Abramson. 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. The next day an official SOD car came to convey Frank Olson to New York. and John Kelly. In his initial version of the events, Lashbrook insisted that he had been asleep at the time, and that he awoke to the sound of crashing glass. Without warning, Hoffmann found himself experiencing what was the worlds first acid trip. Of course their methods were not humane, they exerted a lot of pressure. Magnum, .270 Winchester, .30 106 p.s., 8 x 60 MM Magnum, 9.3 X 62 KK and others of this type. Lashbrook went to the telephone, rang a number and simply said, Olsons gone. The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. From my view and that of the clear majority of my team members, with all the other investigative details, as well as what we found scientifically, Dr. Olsons death was not a suicide. (Sylvia Harvey, Research on one hundred subjects began at Harvards Boston Psychopathic under Hydes direction in 1950 A Citadel Press Book This unit was headed by Sidney Gottlieb, then a 34-year old Bronx native with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. The next step in our reconstruction efforts was to assay the size of the room, the location of the beds in the room, the height and dimensions of the window, and any obstructions that might have been in front of it. On Sunday night, they went to see a film about Martin Luther. When we all die off, thats it, he said. A half-hour later, Frank Olson boarded a flight to New York. And he knew how to keep a secret. For obvious reasons, this is an extremely difficult case. Chapter Eleven of Simpsons book, Guerrillas for World War III, deals with the recruitment of former Nazis to carry out American-ordered assassinations in Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In it, the scenario promoted for contrived accident murder precisely fit like the key that would unlock the door the mystery of Frank Olson is death so much so that the only question remaining was whether his murder was the paradigm for the manual or whether the manual offered the blueprint for his death. Aside from the offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in this field of covert chemical and biological warfare gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemies theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are. cover organization to engage in LSD experimentation, using it as an adjunct to psychotherapy on abnormal or mentally disturbed persons. Seven years after that, Joel E. Willard, 53, an electrician who worked in the hot areas where animals were dosed with deadly germs, died of the same inhalational form of the disease. Way back in 1967, a book titledWere We Controlled?, whose unknown author used the pseudonym Lincoln Lawrence, stated that both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were under mind control of some kind. The couple stopped for lunch at a coffee shop just outside the Capitol, but Olson wouldnt touch his coffee. On more than one occasion, White sent me to the airport to pick up John Roselli and bring him to the office, said Feldman. But you cant quite make out what it is.. According to his colleagues he had always been a popular, extroverted person and his professional, scientific work was considered to be outstanding. Pastore wasnt the only interested party to take note of the recent news headlines. His daughter Kristin is 17. My other awards include the Critics; and Jurys prizes at the Monte Carlo Film Festival, an Edgar Allen Poe Award and three citations from the Mark Twain Society for Reporting Excellence. 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eric olson harvard