- Published in Night and Day magazine, the Sunday
supplement to The London Mail on Aug 23, 1998. Reprinted June 12, 1999
in Dagens Nyheter, largest newspaper in Sweden. http://www.fran
kolsonproject.org/Articles/LondonMail.html
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-
- 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.
-
- 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."
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