In 1996 Eric asked Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morganthau to open a new investigation. When George Kennan, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, made some inexplicably undiplomatic remarks at a press conference and was declaredpersona non grataby the Kremlin, American intelligence officials wondered if he had been hypnotized or drugged. The hearing Tuesday of the subcommittee will include potentially explosive testimony from a Czech defector, Jan Sejna, who now works for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency. The cause of his disturbance is not made clear in the documents at hand, but it is said that he had begun to feel guilty about something. The two politicians who collaborated in the conspiracy in 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney, are back in power. Sleight of hand:When its field agents reported problems in handling LSD for secret tests, the CIA hired a New York magician, John Mulholland, for advice on how to I . Was there a reason for your Dad being killed by the CIA? According to Ruwet, Abramson prescribed the use of sedatives and a high-ball to relieve Olsons mental distress. Or, to use the words of CIA terminology that we would later discover, he was dropped.. Its not an easy theory to wrap your mind around, concedes Nils Olson, 53, Eric Olsons brother. But if nobody saw nuthin, somebody did hear something. Eric was woken up by his mother and taken down the hall, still wearing his pyjamas, towards the living room the same room where the two of us now sat, on the same sofas. It did not spontaneously appear among the youth of the Western world as a gift from the God of Gettin High. U.S. employment of biological weapons in the Korean War. All hands agreed that () among the returning POWs 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. Yet curiously, the CIA has always claimed that its attempts to create real-life incarnations of Richard Condons unfortunate protagonist Raymond Shawthe hypnotically programmed assassin of, The ultimate goal of mind control would have been to produce a Manchurian Candidate assassin, an agent who didnt know he (or she) was an agentbrainwashed and programmed to carry out that most sensitive of missions. ''Everyone was in a plot to 'get' him,'' he told Lashbrook. Eleven months later, the CIA claimed another victim. Fort Detricks engineers delivered five devices including the dart gun collectively known as the Big Five. But records of what Special Forces did with the weapons remain classified, said Fort Bragg archivist Cynthia Hayden. Manual Kenneth E. Willard, Joel Willards son, said the same. Ive read them through twice, and about all I can do is summarize the impression that they leave on my mind. It was Frederick itself. He pointed out that Olson had witnessed harsh interrogations of former Nazis and Soviet spies, and that sometimes these persons had died as a result of those procedures. Yet he freely admitted that his role in Midnight Climax was to supply whores. 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. This was the terrible mistake he had made. He had become part of the MKULTRA team and the Agency was already employing his knowledge and skills in a wide range of ways. However, according to authors Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett, biographers of Nelson Rockefellerone-time chairman of a committee overseeing the MK-ULTRA operationthe 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 . 28.32 When asked by the officers who this JM was, Lashbrook indicated he preferred not to identify him because of security reasons and the matter was pressed no further by the detectives.[48]. Ruwet and Lashbrook claimed to have found Olson sitting in the Statler lobby early the next morning. How differently the above account reads if one keeps in mind the following facts: (1) Frank Olson was not an army employee; according to the CIAs own file (the one that Helms accidentally missed and therefore did not destroy, and also according to William Colbys autobiography) Olson was not an army employee; he was, in fact, a CIA employee; (2) the Special Operations Division for which Olson worked was closely allied with the CIA, and with the CIAs efforts to develop methods for special interrogation; (3) the CIA officer in charge of the experiment in which Olson was drugged (Sidney Gottlieb) was the same man who developed the exotic poisons for use in the attempted assassinations of Castro and Lumumba; (4) Gottlieb has testified that the poison for use in the attempted assassination of Lumumba came from the laboratory (Detrick) in which Frank Olson worked; (5) Frank Olson had made a trip to Europe and specifically to Germany on Special Operations business in the summer of 1953 before he was killed in November of that year. The first was bacteriological warfare. Suspected double agents were the most common targets for execution. Much of his income for the previous year had come from the CIA for work that he knew was to be kept absolutely secreteven from other branches of the United States Government. Before a priest and an ambulance arrived, Olson died in Pastores arms. The caller said he had known his friend was dead because the window was on a high floor of the hotel.. The meeting quickly devolved into laughter and random psychedelic incoherence, and by various accounts several of the men grew uneasy. It was learned that an agent who had gone to New York immediately after Olsons death had listened to a conversation between Lashbrook and Abramson that clearly concerned their conspiring to devise a report to the effect that Olsons mental state had been deteriorating. And while the CIAs Security and Medical offices maintained a long list of other doctors, including psychiatrists, with such top secret approval, Abramsons work and interest placed him well inside the Technical Services Staffs family. Gottlieb was determined that his secret activities remained secret even within the wider reaches of the CIA. Mulholland immediately set about the task of researching and writing the manual. Accident, Maryland. That the CIA had much to hide became dramatically evident during the summer of 2001, when Eric obtained documents from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. To gain a measure of certainty on this matter, we would have to experiment with a number of five-foot-ten inch bodies (or simulations of them in the form of mannequins) hurtling through a window of the dimensions and the location of the one in Room 1018A. The very same day that Allen Dulles approved Project MKULTRA, Sidney Gottlieb went to see John Mulholland. In 1994, an Associated Press reporter discovered the typewritten memo, which quoted an earlier, hand-written note forwarded to Detrick in 1975 by a person described only as retired Army and retired DAC (Army shorthand for Department of the Army Civilian). It would begin a lifelong love of conjuring. Biologicals better than nuclear because it doesnt destroy the buildings.. It was on the sidewalk in front of the Penn Bar, adjacent to the place where he had found Dr. Olsons body. We are familiar with the health risks to which workers in plutonium plants were subjected during the Cold War. Eric is second from the right. The betrayal was deeply personal. But in college and graduate school, he grew skeptical. 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. What was so sensitive to the CIA that it would kill one of its own? Supplies of the powerful hallucinogen were not even available on the U.S. market, and little was known about its effects on personality and behavior (see box, page 101). It looked like a family holiday, except the family werent with him. Lives in: Mesa AZ. This is clearly the implication of the film documentaryMind Control Murderproduced by Principal Films and presented as part of Arts & Entertainment NetworksInvestigativeReportsseries in September of 1999. It was always referred to as the pad, never the apartment, and was modeled after Playboy magazine, 1955 . The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject. The ultimate goal of mind control would have been to produce a Manchurian Candidate assassin, an agent who didnt know he (or she) was an agentbrainwashed and programmed to carry out that most sensitive of missions. If his mother shared his doubts, Eric said, she never acted on them: My mothers mantra was: You are never going to know what happened in that hotel room. Its an injunction, a kind of threat, a taboo and a prediction.. These drugs could be administered surreptitiously with food or drink, and given the bleakness of his existence, they might even offer a brief period of relief and pleasure, thereby creating a whole new category of longingand new leverage for his interrogators.. There are ways of breaking people. Albarelli Jr. and John Kellys upcoming book deals with the mysterious death of one of those subject, Dr. Frank Olson. But officials couldnt afford to let him leave. In any case, soon, Olson was experiencing disorientation. PONTIFF (with Max MorganWitts) As Eric would later explain, So great was the shock experience by the family that we did not grieve our loss at all; it was as if nothing had happened. But as they often do, calm surfaces belied turbulent undercurrents. Recently declassified documents reveal that Artichoke was all about inventing insane, brutal, violent, frequently fatal new ways of interrogating people. Charles Baronian, a retired Army weapons official, recalls a demonstration at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Our rate and the Russian rate was the same about 7 kilograms of dry anthrax a week.. Summer 1953. I can do no other. Before the end of the war, a painful stomach ulcer had forced Olson to seek a medical discharge from the Army. She had been drinking on the quiet since the 1960s, and had begun locking herself in the bathroom and coming out mean and confused. Eric Nelson is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Government at Harvard University. 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