On November 28, 1953, US Army scientist Dr. Frank Olson crashed out of his room on the tenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York and crashed to his death. According to the results of the investigation, it was suicide. In his testimony, CIA colleague Richard Lashbrook, who was at the time with Olson, said that he had not been able to stop Olson.
Death cure
The official version remained the same for 23 years. Then, in 1975, the CIA's Rockefeller Commission of Inquiry uncovered Operation Artichoke, a top-secret drug and interrogation research program that involved both Olson and LSD in one way or another. Olson was not a victim of his own reckless experiment: LSD was poured on him a few days before his death. The doctor developed an addiction to psychotic episodes and was sent to New York for treatment for the psychological effects of LSD.
President Ford invited the Olson family to the White House to apologize, while CIA Director William Colby explained details of his death at lunch and later declassified many CIA documents related to the matter. Congress also hastily wrote a check for $ 750,000 for the victim's family. But The New York Times called Colby's documents "vague, inconsistent and inconsistent," and said they contained "exemptions, conflicting statements and incoherent passages." Correlated with previous secrecy surrounding the role of drugs in Olson's death, this swift remorse by the government smelled like an even bigger conspiracy.
Son continues to investigate
After the death of his mother in 1993, Frank's son Eric, who was not satisfied with the official explanations, began his investigation into the circumstances of his father's death. According to experts, Frank Olson had to run at a speed of 20 miles per hour in order to jump over a radiator and smash his body through the strong sheet glass of windows and shutters, and Eric obtained permission to exhume his father's body. Scientists from the University of George Washington found no record of cuts or injuries, or traces of LSD in the documents left after the initial autopsy more than four decades ago. But after exhumation, they found a previously unspecified wound on the skull, the nature of which is comparable to the possible multiple blows from behind, inflicted before the fall.
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The news sparked the interest of the New York City District Attorney, and Assistant District Attorney Steve Sarakko was assigned to re-investigate Olson's death with an attempted murder theory. Key witnesses called to court from the US and UK intelligence services were to be interviewed, including Lashbrook, Colby and Sidney Gottlieb. (Colby, however, disappeared from his suburban home in Maryland on April 27, shortly after receiving the subpoena. Eight days later, his body was found facedown in the river by the police, and the verdict was "accidental death." The investigation also revealed that the Frank Olson case was taught as a "perfect murder" in the Israeli Mossad mercenary training unit, as an example of a successful murder being passed off as suicide.
It turned out that Lashbrook, who was watching Olson, called someone shortly after the fall, saying only: "Olson is dead." Eric also uncovered CIA documents pertaining to the "killing" of people and drew several parallels with his father's death. But five years later, after countless interviews and analysis of hundreds of CIA tapes, the case was still open. “We will never be able to prove it was murder,” Sarakko says, even though he and Eric continue to believe that this was the case.
From Korea with anthrax
According to the German documentary and book Code Artichoke: Secret CIA Experiments on Man, Olson worked on Operation Artichoke, associated with the MK-ULTRA program, which conducts research into the use of LSD in torture and interrogation. During the Korean War, Olson was transferred to Fort Derrick, where the US was developing ways to use biological weapons such as anthrax against Koreans and Chinese. Also here, former Korean military personnel captured and brainwashed were interrogated using LSD in the form of a crude experiment with mixed results, to say the least.
Olson also visited a bio-research center in the UK and witnessed brutal interrogations based on techniques borrowed from the Nazis. When he returned to the United States in the summer of 1953, he told colleagues that he was disgusted with such work, and informed his boss, brainwashing expert Sidney Gottlieb (head of technical services), that he was going to resign from his post. According to the American political magazine Counterpunch, Gottlieb was involved in inhuman drug experiments funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Gottlieb allegedly drugged Olson's drink in mid-November in Maryland and set the stage for his death-leap days later.
The revelations continue
Eric Olson believes his father was fed up with the ever-increasing psychotic drugs he was paid to work on in the military. As he told The New York Times in 2001, the US biological weapons program - and the use of such weapons in North Korea - may have been a major reason for his father's decision to leave the CIA, and ultimately his death. … Eric also pointed to the simultaneous pursuit of Robert Oppenheimer, a scientist working on the Manhattan Project.
Fun fact: Both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield were young lions from the short-lived administration of President Ford at the time when Operation Artichoke came to light. Documents unearthed by UC professor Catherine Olmsted link their names to the decision not to authorize any new investigation into Olson's death. A White House memorandum of July 11, 1975 states that such an investigation could "lead to the need to disclose high-level information relevant to national security," such as information related to biological weapons programs.
In September 2001, The New York Times reported that the US government was investigating violations of the 1972 Biological Weapons Prohibition Agreement. When the newspaper released evidence that the US military was secretly developing bacteriological bombs, interest in the investigation faded away behind other events on the day of publication, September 11, 2001.
Yuri MEDVEDEV. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" No. 10 2009