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escargot1 Joined: 24 Aug 2001 Total posts: 17709 Location: Farkham Hall Age: 3 Gender: Female |
 Posted: 14-09-2004 16:09 Post subject: Frank Olson |
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I came across a Guardian Saturday Review supplement from April 7th 2001, featuring a big spread on Frank Olson by Michael Ignatieff.
It's very interesting. In fact, I think I saved it to reread as I'd seen a TV prog about the mysteries surrounding Olson's life, work and death.
If anyone'd like this, pm me and it's yours. |
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19943 Location: Mongo Age: 42 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 14-09-2004 16:17 Post subject: |
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Can you not OCR it and drop the text in here? Its what I do with any interesting Guide articles.
And urmmmmmmm April 2001? Did you find it while cleaning out one of your many sheds? |
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19943 Location: Mongo Age: 42 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 14-09-2004 16:20 Post subject: |
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Or better read it here:
| Quote: | Who killed Frank Olson?
Fifty years ago, Eric Olson's father was found dying on a New York sidewalk. The official verdict was suicide; but the more Eric probed, the less the facts seemed to fit. Michael Ignatieff on a tale of LSD, the CIA and a cover-up that went to the top
Saturday April 7, 2001
The Guardian
For a quarter of a century, a close friend of mine, a Harvard classmate, has believed that the Central Intelligence Agency murdered his father, a United States government scientist. Believing this means, in my friend's words, "leaving the known universe", the one in which it is innocently accepted that an agency of the American government would never do such a thing. My friend has left this known universe, even raising his father's body from the grave where it had lain for 40 years to test the story the CIA told him about the causes of his death. The evidence on the body says that the agency may have lied. But knowing this has not healed my friend. When I ask him what he has learned from his ordeal, he says: "Never dig up your father." Then he laughs, and the look on his face is wild, bitter and full of pain.
On November 28 1953, at around 2am, Armand Pastore, night manager at the Statler hotel opposite Penn station in New York, rushed out of the front door on Seventh Avenue to find a middle-aged man lying on the sidewalk in his undershirt and shorts. He was flat on his back, his legs smashed and bent at a terrible angle. "He was broken up something awful," Pastore told reporters years later. Looking up, Pastore could see a blind pushed through an empty window frame high up in the Statler. The man had fallen from the 10th floor - apparently after crashing through a closed window - but he was alive. "He was trying to mumble something, but I couldn't make it out. It was all garbled, and I was trying to get his name." By the time the priest and the ambulance came, the stranger on the sidewalk was dead.
When Pastore went up to the stranger's room - 1018A - with the police, they found a man called Robert Lashbrook sitting on the toilet with his head in his hands. Down at reception, Pastore asked the hotel telephone operator whether she had overheard any calls from 1018A. Two, she said. In one, a voice had said: "He's gone." The voice on the other end replied: "That's too bad." Lashbrook admitted making two calls, but has denied saying anything of the sort.
The trees over the family house in Frederick, Maryland, were still in darkness when Eric Olson was woken by his mother, Alice. His younger sister, Lisa, and brother, Nils, slept undisturbed. Lt Col Vincent Ruwet, his father's boss at the army research establishment at Fort Detrick, told Eric something bad had happened. "Fallen or jumped" and "accident" were the words he heard as he looked across the room at his mother, frozen and empty-eyed. "In that moment when I learned that my father had gone out a window and died," Eric later wrote, "it was as if the plug were pulled from some central basin of my mind and a vital portion of my consciousness drained out." He was nine years old.
When I first met Eric in 1974, we were both working on doctorates at Harvard: mine in history, his in clinical psychology. What I liked about him was his maniacal cackle. One minute he would be labouring some abstruse point in his southern drawl, the next his face would be alight with a snaggle-toothed grin, electrified by the joke he had just slipped by me, deadpan. The laugh was an attractive and alarming trait, because sometimes he would laugh about things that weren't funny at all.
His Harvard research was about how to help people recover from trauma. With the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, he had been to West Virginia to interview survivors of a disaster in which 125 people had been killed when a dam burst and a wall of black water containing coal waste swept down Buffalo Creek. He and Lifton wrote a paper that spoke of the way sudden, violent loss left people imprinted with death anxiety and long-term psychic numbing.
I remember Eric talking in his Cambridge apartment about a technique he had been using to help the people of Buffalo Creek. It was called the "collage method", and it involved getting survivors to paste together pictures, using anything they felt like clipping out of newspapers and magazines. Eric said that for people whose lives were in pieces anyway, collage was mysteriously satisfying. They would work for hours in silence, he said, moving about the floor, sticking things down, and sometimes when they had finished, they would contemplate what they had done and start to cry.
After 75 years of psychoanalysis - the talking cure - here was a therapy that didn't start from words but from images. It seemed to unfurl the winding processes of a person's unconscious and lay them out on paper. Eric had been playing with his father's camera and making photomontages since childhood. But he didn't stumble on the power of collage until he was in his 20s. One night, he and a girlfriend got down on their knees in her apartment and began cutting pictures out of magazines and gluing them down. When Eric finished, the central image of his collage was a grainy picture of a man falling headfirst out of a window.
On June 11 1975, the Washington Post revealed that a commission led by Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller had discovered that, "a civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test", and, "developed serious side effects". After being sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment, the employee jumped from a hotel window and died. The report added a footnote: "There are indications in the few remaining agency records that this individual may have had a history of emotional instability."
Back in Frederick, Lisa Olson confronted Vincent Ruwet. He had regularly visited Alice, shared a drink with her, become a friend of the children. Ruwet stalled at first but eventually confirmed that the man in the story was Frank and that he had known the details in the Post story all along.
If Ruwet had known all along, then the family had lived for 22 years in a community of lies: families of government scientists who had kept the truth away from a family dying from the lack of it. This culture of secrecy had also contaminated the family from within. Alice covered the subject of Frank's death with a silence that was both baffling and intimidating. Her mantra, whenever Eric asked about it, was: "You are never going to know what happened in that room."
The silence took its toll. By the 60s, Alice Olson was routinely drinking on the quiet, locking herself in the bathroom and then coming out mean and confused. Once, when Eric returned from a year in India, he walked right past her in the airport. The drinking had left her so wasted that he didn't recognise her. All the time, Ruwet had been keeping her company. It later turned out that he had received orders from the CIA's director, Allen Dulles, to keep in touch with her.
Thanks to the Post's revelations, the summer of 1975 was the family's "Copernican Revolution". They gave the exclusive on their personal story to Seymour Hersh of the New York Times, and when he arrived at their home, his first words were: "This must be the most uncurious family in the United States. I can't believe you fell for that story for 22 years." Later, at a news conference in the backyard at Frederick, the family announced that they were going to sue the government for wrongful death. Their purpose, they said, was to imprint what had happened to their father in "American memory".
The news conference had immediate results. On July 21 1975, Alice, Eric, Nils, Lisa and her husband Greg were invited to the White House. In the Oval Office, according to newspaper accounts, President Gerald Ford expressed "the sympathy of the American people and apologised on behalf of the US government". There is a photograph of Alice shaking the president's hand. Her face is glowing. Even so, catharsis was brief. The meeting lasted 17 minutes.
A week or so later, Eric, Lisa, Nils and two lawyers met the CIA's director, William Colby, at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In his memoirs, Colby remembered the lunch as "one of the most difficult assignments I have ever had". At the end of the lunch, Colby handed the family an inch-thick sheaf of declassified documents relating to Frank Olson's death. What Colby did not tell them - did not reveal until he published his memoirs just three years later - was that Frank Olson had not been a civilian employee of the Department of the Army. He had been a CIA employee working at Fort Detrick.
The Colby documents were photocopies of the agency's own in-house investigation of Olson's death, full of unexplained terms such as the "Artichoke" and "Bluebird" projects. These turned out to be the precursors of what became known as MK-ULTRA, a CIA project, beginning in the Korean war, to explore the use of drugs such as LSD as truth serums, as well as botulism and anthrax, for use in covert assassination.
The documents claimed that, during a meeting between the CIA and Fort Detrick scientists at Deep Creek Lodge in Maryland in November 1953, Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA slipped LSD into Olson's Cointreau. After 20 minutes, Olson developed mild symptoms of disorientation. He was then told the drink had been spiked. The next day, Olson returned home early and spent the weekend in a mood that Alice remembered as withdrawn, but not remotely psychotic. He kept saying he had made a terrible mistake, but she couldn't get him to say what it was.
On Sunday night, they went to see a film about Martin Luther. It followed the young Luther to the moment of spiritual crisis - "Here I stand, I can do no other" - when he decided to take on the might of the Catholic church. The next day, Olson went straight to Ruwet's office and said he wanted to resign. Ruwet told him to calm down. The next morning, he returned to Ruwet's office and insisted his resignation be accepted. While Alice's memory was of Frank being in the grip of an ethical dilemma, Ruwet told CIA investigators that Olson: "appeared to be greatly agitated and in his own words, 'all mixed up'."
Ruwet and Robert Lashbrook, a CIA liaison officer at Fort Detrick, took Olson to New York - ostensibly to seek psychiatric advice. But the doctor Olson saw, an allergist named Harold Abramson, was receiving CIA financing to experiment with LSD, and his sole exercise of therapeutic attention was to prescribe Nembutal and bourbon to help Olson sleep.
Olson was also taken to see John Mulholland, a New York magician on the CIA payroll, who may have tried to hypnotise him. Ruwet told CIA investigators that in Mulholland's presence, Olson became agitated. "What's behind this?" he kept asking his friend Ruwet. "Give me the lowdown. What are they trying to do with me? Are they checking me for security?" He told Lashbrook that everyone was in a plot to "get" him, and begged them to "just let me disappear".
According to the documents that Colby had given the family, Olson spent an agonised night wandering the streets of New York, discarding his wallet and identification cards. He said he was too ashamed to go home, so he and Lashbrook ate a cheerless Thanksgiving dinner at a Horn & Hardart automat in midtown.
Late the next day, according to the CIA story, it was decided that Olson needed to be institutionalised. Yet when Olson phoned Alice that night, he said that he felt "much better" and "looked forward to seeing her the next day". That night, in room 1018A, Olson was calm: he washed his socks and underwear and went to sleep. Four hours later, Armand Pastore found him lying on his back on Seventh Avenue.
The CIA's general counsel, called in immediately in 1953 to investigate Olson's death, noted that the official story - that LSD "triggered" the suicide - was "inconsistent" with the facts in the case. Disciplinary action was recommended against Gottlieb and Lashbrook, but the agency's director, Allen Dulles, delivered only a mild reprimand. Lashbrook left the agency, but Gottlieb remained in senior positions for 20 more years. He told the internal inquiry that Olson's death was "just one of the risks running with scientific experimentation". Far from ending with Olson's death, the LSD experiments continued for two decades.
The Colby documents left the family marooned, no longer believing that Frank's death was suicide but not knowing what to believe instead. In 1976, after negotiations in which they traded away their right to further civil or criminal proceedings against the government, the family received a total of 0,000, half a million less than recommended by the White House and even the CIA itself.
If this was "closure", it was of an especially cursed kind. Shortly after receiving her portion of the money, Eric's sister, together with her husband and their two-year-old son, Jonathan, set off by small plane from Frederick to the Adirondacks, where they were going to invest the money in a lumber mill. The plane crashed, and everyone on board was killed.
In the aftermath of Lisa's death, Eric took his portion of the money and went to Sweden to escape the accursed story. If distance was supposed to heal him, however, the cure didn't work. He "smouldered" in Stockholm and in 1984 returned to the States determined, he said, to find out the truth "once and for all".
"Once and for all" meant returning to the hotel and checking into room 1018A. He recalls this strange night as a revelation. "It just hit you," he says. The room was simply too small for his father to have gained the speed to take a running plunge through the window. The sill was too high and too wide - there was a radiator in front of it - for him to have dived through a closed window and a lowered blind in the dark.
Eric, Nils and Alice, now recovered from alcoholism, tracked down Sidney Gottlieb to his home in Culpeper, Virginia, where the retired spymaster was raising goats, eating yogurt and preaching the values of peace and environmentalism. He received them pleasantly but conceded nothing. "I was outclassed," Eric remembers. "This was a world-class intelligence." They also found Lashbrook, at his vine-covered stucco house in Ojai, California, where they watched him twitch in his seat as he told his version of what happened - that he was awakened by a crash, saw a broken window and an empty bed and concluded that Frank Olson had jumped to his death.
From these encounters, Eric realised that he was up against a brotherhood of silence and that his father had once belonged to it. It was, as one former Detrick employee called it, "a community of saints" dedicated to using the most fearful and secret science to defend the republic.
Olson's speciality, it turned out, had been the development of aerosols for the delivery of anthrax. With the discovery in the 1950s that the North Koreans were brainwashing US prisoners, the Special Operations Division at Detrick became the centre for the development of drugs for use in brainwashing and interrogation. LSD emerged as one of the interrogation drugs of choice. Alice never knew exactly what her husband was doing - he was, in fact, working for the CIA by this time - but she did know that whenever his lab conducted tests on monkeys and the monkeys died, her husband would bring a testy silence home.
One mystery - entry and exit stamps in Frank Olson's passport - indicating that he had been to Sweden, Germany and Britain in the summer of 1953 - seemed to offer a clue to his state of mind in the months before his death. Through Gordon Thomas, a British journalist and author of numerous books on intelligence matters, Eric learned that during a trip to London his father had apparently confided in William Sargant, a consultant psychiatrist who advised British intelligence on brainwashing techniques.
According to Thomas, who was a lifelong friend of Sargant's, Olson told Sargant that he had visited secret joint American-British testing and research installations near Frankfurt. Thomas's hypothesis is that the CIA was testing truth serums there - not on monkeys but on human subjects, "expendables": captured Russian agents and ex-Nazis. Thomas says that Olson confessed to Sargant that he had witnessed something terrible, possibly "a terminal experiment" on one or more of the expendables. Sargant heard Olson out and then reported to British intelligence that the young scientist's misgivings were making him a security risk. He recommended that Olson be denied further access to Porton Down, the chemical-weapons research establishment.
A document Eric later saw from his father's personnel file confirmed that doubts had been raised about Olson's security clearance before his death, possibly because of Sargant's warning. Alice, who knew nothing about the nature of his visit, did recall that when he returned from Europe that summer, Frank was unusually withdrawn.
Olson, a scientist by training, would have known that he was working for a government that had put Nazi scientists on trial at Nuremberg for immoral experiments on human beings. Now, in the late summer of 1953, his son believes, Olson faced up to the possibility that his own government was doing the same thing. If the CIA was in fact experimenting with "expendables" in Germany, and if Olson knew about it, Eric reasoned, then it would not be enough to hospitalise him, discredit him with lies about his mental condition and allow him to slip back into civilian life. It would be better to get rid of him altogether.
If Eric is right, slipping LSD into Olson's Cointreau was not an experiment that went wrong: it was designed to get him to talk while hallucinating. The trip to New York was not to contain his incipient psychosis. It was intended to assess what kind of risk he posed and then eliminate him if necessary. Housing a possibly deranged and desperate man in a hotel room high above Seventh Avenue was not a regrettable error of judgment. It was the prelude to murder. If Frank Olson had realised this, his son could now read his father's last words ("Just let me disappear") as a cry for help.
In 1997, after the CIA inadvertently declassified an assassination manual from late 1953, Eric Olson was able to read the following: "The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more on to a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. . . The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge." The manual went on to recommend a blow to the temple to stun the subject first: "In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him." Reading this passage, Eric realised that the word he had been looking for all his life was not "fallen" or "jumped" but "dropped". It was, he recalled, one of the few moments when, after nearly 50 years, he actually experienced his father's death, when the truth he had been seeking finally took hold of him.
In allowing the Olson family to receive the ultimate sacrament of American healing - a formal apology from the president in the Oval Office - the CIA tacitly acknowledged that it had committed a sin against the order that holds citizens in allegiance to their government. Now, it seemed to Eric, that apology had been a cynical lie. It enabled the CIA to hide, for ever, a perfect murder.
It is one thing to believe a truth as painful as this. It is another to prove it. In 1994, Eric had his father's casket raised from the ground. At the funeral in 1953, the coffin was shut because the family had been told that the body was broken up and that there were extensive lacerations to the face caused by the fall through the glass. In fact, the body had been embalmed, and it was in nearly perfect condition.
Eric stared down at a face he had last seen 41 years before. There were no lacerations consistent with damage by glass. On further examination, the forensic team, led by James Starrs of George Washington University, discovered a blow to Olson's temple, on the left side. It could not have occurred, the pathologists agreed, after he went out of the window because the velocity of his descent would have caused more extensive trauma. The conclusion that both Starrs and Eric drew was that someone had knocked Olson out, either while he slept or after a struggle, and then thrown him out of the window.
Since the autopsy, Eric has pursued leads to find out who actually carried out "the wet work" on his father. HP Albarelli, a writer-researcher with contacts among retired CIA agents in Florida, has found agents who say they know the identity of the men who went into room 1018A that night in November 1953, supposedly to tip Olson through the window. They were not CIA men, they say, but contract killers associated with the Trafficante mob family hired by the CIA. But none of the retired CIA agents, men now in their 70s and 80s, are about to come forward unless they are released from their confidentiality agreements with the agency.
In 1996, Olson approached Manhattan's district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, to see if his office would open a new investigation into the case. Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb of Morgenthau's "cold case" unit have deposed Lashbrook in Ojai; they have followed up a few of the hundreds of leads that Eric besieges them with almost daily. But the Manhattan DA, while probably agreeable to immunity for Albarelli's sources in Florida, has not pursued the confidentiality releases. If you talk to Saracco and Bibb in the Italian restaurant in lower Manhattan where they hang out after hours, you get the impression that they don't think there's a case to send to a grand jury. If you ask them why they don't go to Florida to talk to Albarelli's jealously guarded sources, they look at you as if to say, "How do you know these people exist?"
If there isn't enough for the Manhattan DA to take to a jury, Eric and his lawyer, Harry Huge, will have to bring a civil suit of their own, claiming that the CIA lied in 1976 when it secured the family's agreement to waive further legal proceedings. Eric says he knows the truth, but it is not the "smoking gun" kind of forensic truth that will force the agency to go to court and be put through the discovery process. And if you lack provable truth, you do not get justice. Without justice, there is no accountability, and without accountability there is no healing, no resolution.
Last autumn, after nearly 25 years, I went to see Eric in Frederick. The family home, a ranch house, is in a state of suspended animation - seemingly the same carpets, same couches, same dusty jar of Vaseline in the bathroom cabinet that were there the night Frank Olson died. Living there is worst at Thanksgiving, the time of his death.
Eric has taken a break from his work on the collage method, and the huge books of patients' collages now lie shut up in storage nearby. The house is full of drafts of books on collage, as well as books about his father's story that remain unfinished because the story itself lacks an ending. Eric lives on foundation grants, book advances and some help from his brother and others. He spends his days hounding journalists, the Manhattan DA, anyone who will listen, with a steady stream of calls and emails from an office just feet away from the same living room, the same chair, the very spot where he was told by Ruwet that his father had "fallen or jumped". That he is convinced that the word was neither "fallen" nor "jumped" but "dropped" does not heal. Indeed, his story makes you wonder about that noble phrase "The truth shall make you free." As it happens, that phrase is inscribed in the entry hall of the CIA's headquarters.
Eric knows that to charge the most secretive agency of American government with murder is to incur the suspicion that you have become deranged by anger, grief, paranoia, greed or a combination of all four. "Eric is crazy, Eric is obsessed," he says, mimicking his accusers. "Fine. I agree." A maniacal cackle. "But it's not the point. The point is" - and here his eyes go flat and cold and relentless - what happened in the damned room."
Just before I left, we went to the graves of his mother, sister and brother-in-law and their child, the place where he wants his father to be buried. When I asked him when the re-burial will happen, he paused to think. "When we know what to say," he said finally, looking down at the spare piece of grass beside his mother's grave. "When it is over. When we can do it right."
It takes me a while after I leave Eric to grasp a fact that may make resolution difficult. For seven years, his father's bones have lain in a filing cabinet in James Starrs's office. Only the bones - and not all of them - remain intact. To get at the truth of what happened to Olson, the pathologists had to rip the skin off his limbs and tear his body apart, macerate it and send it in chunks to various labs for analysis. In the search for truth, Eric had to tear his father's body limb from limb.
The fact is, it will never be possible to bury all of Frank Olson again. Now I understand why, when I asked Eric what he had learned from his 25-year ordeal, he told me that no one should ever dig up his father's body. Now I know why my friend's wild laugh is so full of pain.
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© Michael Ignatieff. Michael Ignatieff is the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's John F Kennedy School of Government. Eric Olson's website is at www.FrankOlsonProject.org |
http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,,469450,00.html |
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19943 Location: Mongo Age: 42 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 14-09-2004 16:23 Post subject: |
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See also these:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,313515,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,550122,00.html
| Quote: | Did he jump or was he pushed?
Jon Ronson
Saturday August 17, 2002
The Guardian
I am writing this from Frederick, Maryland. I've just been filming, for Channel 4, a press conference in which the son of a CIA officer who died in suspicious circumstances presented his evidence that vice-president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld were, in 1975, when part of the Gerald Ford administration, involved in a cover-up of the events surrounding his father's death. The press conference was due to have been two weeks ago, but when the son, Eric Olson, called the New York Times to invite them, they said, "Whoa! Do you really want to release such complex information to a bunch of journalists who'll probably screw it up? Let us do it properly instead."
I must try this ruse sometime. It worked on Olson. He postponed the press conference. The New York Times finally called him and said, "We missed Watergate because we thought it was just a small, unimportant break-in." What they seemed to mean was they believed his evidence but they couldn't decide if it was a huge, government-toppling White House cover-up of a murder, or a small, unimportant White House cover-up of a murder, the kind of stuff that doesn't mean much. So Olson rescheduled the press conference and I flew over yesterday.
On the plane, the captain told us security was as much our responsibility as theirs. "So introduce yourself to the person next to you," he said. "Say hi." I buried my head in the New York Times and read about Dave Pelzer, the bestselling author whose four books chronicle his abuse by his mother. She stabbed him in the heart with a knife, he wrote, and made him eat dog faeces with worms. Now the Times says he's making the whole thing up.
"Please!" Pelzer's brother, Stephen, told the paper. "I saw Mom cutting food when David grabbed her arm and got a small cut. There wasn't even any blood, yet he screamed, 'Mommy stabbed me!' David had to be the centre of attention. He was a spoilt brat."
This article made me very cross. I've often thought that, had Dave Pelzer's mother kept him locked in the cupboard under the stairs for just a few weeks longer, my own book, Them, would have been number two in the non-fiction bestsellers list last year, instead of number six.
The allegations don't seem to be damaging sales. Some fans have reported that they like Dave so much - he's been so great at healing himself - they don't mind if he invented it all. Perhaps if he did, he could make his fifth book a redemptive account of how he's forgiven himself - perhaps call it A Lying Bastard Called "It" - and he'd sell another million.
America seems full of people who claim they were victims of child abuse. In a few days, I will attend a conference for thousands of "survivors" who believe they were brainwashed and ritually abused by the CIA when they were children. My favourite is the hugely popular Cathy O'Brian, who says George Bush Snr dressed up in hunting gear, yelled, "Run for your life" and chased her with his rifle through the White House gardens.
Sometimes I think how awful it would be to be an actual victim of CIA abuse and have to struggle to be heard above the cacophony of fantasists. Eric Olson is that person. When he was nine, in 1953, he was woken in the night to be told, by two men he barely recognised, that his father had "jumped or fallen" from a hotel window in New York and that his death was a work-related accident. He's spent 50 years trying to find out what really happened. In 1975, the CIA told Olson they had spiked his father's drink with LSD to see how government scientists would respond to being unwittingly drugged. They said he had a bad trip and jumped a week later. Olson didn't believe this story, either, and had his father's body exhumed. A new autopsy pointed to murder. Then his father's friends began to speak out. They said Frank Olson was murdered because he was going to blow the whistle on the US army's use of anthrax in the Korean war. Declassified memos point to some kind of cover-up in the Ford White House. Now Olson feels ready to rebury his father.
This story is clearly less fun, and a lot more scary, than a CIA-LSD suicide, and it hasn't received nearly as much coverage. Few of the journalists who attended yesterday's press conference are following up the evidence Olson presented. Instead they've written about Olson's "healing process" and his "closure". The story is fun again. |
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,774950,00.html |
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| escargot1 Joined: 24 Aug 2001 Total posts: 17709 Location: Farkham Hall Age: 3 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 14-09-2004 16:56 Post subject: |
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Yup, I know it's available on t'internet, but some peeps like the hard copy stuff with the photos and dramatic artwork.  |
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| escargot1 Joined: 24 Aug 2001 Total posts: 17709 Location: Farkham Hall Age: 3 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 14-09-2004 17:07 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | And urmmmmmmm April 2001? Did you find it while cleaning out one of your many sheds? |
 Who told you that! |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17657 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 24-07-2013 13:47 Post subject: |
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Court documents at link.
| Quote: | Judge says family of bioweapons scientist can’t sue CIA over unsolved death
http://rt.com/usa/frank-olson-lsd-murder-476/
Image from Wikipedia.orgImage from Wikipedia.org
A federal judge in Washington, DC has dismissed a lawsuit that alleged the CIA murdered one of its own agents in 1953 and then attempted to pass it off as a suicide.
Sixty years after the death of bioweapons expert Dr. Frank Olson, United States District Judge James E. Boasberg ruled last week that the family of the former Central Intelligence Agency specialist can’t sue the US government.
The family of Dr. Olson filed a lawsuit against the CIA in late 2012 accusing the agency of a clandestine murder that had made it a hot topic of discussing more than half a century after the fact. But while Judge Boasberg agrees that many of the allegations put forth by the Olson family are likely true — even while admittingly coming off as unbelievable — he ruled that an earlier settlement agreed upon by the scientist’s children and the sheer tardiness of the late suit have left him unable to allow the case to continue.
“[T]he public record supports many of the allegations that follow, farfetched as they may sound,” Boasberg began his ruling. Pages later, however, he wrote, “Concluding that most of the allegations are both untimely and waived by a prior settlement agreement, and that any timely or preserved claims fall outside of the United States’ waiver of sovereign immunity, the Court will grant the Government’s Motion” to dismiss.
The agent’s two children, Eric and Nils Olson, have long insisted that their father was murdered by the CIA after expressing his interest in resigning from the spy agency. Ultimately he received his wish, but only after falling 13 floors from a New York City hotel after a meeting with a CIA doctor and a colleague who the Olson family say helped orchestrate his death.
According to the family’s attorney, Dr. OIson discussed leaving the CIA after being poisoned with LSD against his will as part of the MK ULTA behavioral engineering project, a top-secret CIA program that existed in part all the way through the 1970s.
Days after allegedly and unwillingly becoming a government guinea pig, Olson reportedly told a colleague he wanted to resign from the agency. That friend alerted Dr. Robert Lashbrook of the Chemical Division of the CIA’s Technical Support Staff, who in turn took Olson to New York in order to see a doctor. Then for a week in late 1953, the CIA shuffled Olson around the East Coast for various so-called psychiatric treatments before ultimately checking him into a Manhattan high-rise.
“The night of November 27, Lashbrook and Olson shared a room at the Statler Hotel in Manhattan,” Judge Boasberg recalled in his ruling. “Both had two martinis before bed. At 2:30 a.m. on November 28, Olson fell out of the window of his hotel room, tumbling thirteen stories to his death.”
Olson went on to cite a CIA manual made a short time after that included a “secret assassination” technique that could potentially cover-up such a death.
“For secret assassination . . . the contrived accident is the most effective technique” because “[w]hen successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated,” the report read.
“Specifically,” added Boasberg, “the manual counseled that ‘[t]he most efficient accident . . . is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface . . . [such as one from] unscreened windows.’ The manual also recommended that assassins use a blunt object to inflict ‘[b]lows . . . directed to the temple,’ but noted that ‘[c]are is required to insure [sic] that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.’ Finally, the manual suggested that ‘[i]f the subject’s personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used . . . to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.’”
Indeed, the exhumation of Olson’s body decades later revealed a blow to his head on par with what the CIA manual suggested, and the official cause of death was later changed from suicide to "unknown." But even though Boasberg declined to rightfully dismiss the family’s claims, he wrote that the delayed filing coupled with an early settlement left him unable to move the case anymore forward.
The family said their 1975 settlement with the US government shouldn’t be considered valid, though, since they “relied on the CIA’ assurances that all documents relevant to the circumstances surrounding the death had been turned over.” Eighteen years later, former CIA Director William Colby sent one of Olson’s sons a message indicating there was more to the story of his father’s death. Colby died shortly after, however, and the murder claim was not filed in court until nearly two decades later.
“If Plaintiffs’ theory were right, the statute of limitations would never definitively run. They could wait another decade, request additional information from the CIA, and then (deeming the response inadequate on account of negligent supervision) sue for every instance of “negligent supervision” since 1953,” wrote Boasberg. “The continuing-violation doctrine does not stretch so far.”
Coupled with the 1975 settlement that gave Eric and Nils Olson $187,500 each, Judge Boasberg ruled that the court must side with the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. |
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