#frank olson

Frank Olson | Don Morrison | Pines History | The Eagle

"Bad Trip" Illustration by Haruo Miyauchi accompanying “The CIA’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” by Tad Szulc, Psychology Today, November 1977 "Artist's portrayal of the suicide of biochemist Frank Olson, who jumped from a New York hotel room at 2:30 A.M. on November 28, 1953, nine days after the CIA gave him LSD. Foreground, Dr. Robert Lashbrook, the CIA scientist who brought Olson to New York to seek treatment."

Wormwood (2017)

In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky. In Europe and East Asia, [Sidney] Gottlieb's victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. One of those centers, built in the basement of a former villa in the German town of Kronberg, might have been the first secret CIA prison. While CIA scientists and their former Nazi comrades sat before a stone fireplace discussing the techniques of mind control, prisoners in basement cells were being prepared as subjects in brutal and sometimes fatal experiments. These were the most gruesome experiments the U.S. government ever conducted on human beings. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. In another, captured North Koreans were given depressant drugs, then dosed with potent stimulants and exposed to intense heat and electroshock while they were in the weakened state of transition. These experiments destroyed many minds and caused an unknown number of deaths. Many of the potions, pills and aerosols administered to victims were created at [Fort] Detrick. One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York.

WORMWOOD

A R T I C H O K E

"In the years of projects BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the planners met in what was known as the war room. The program was the creation of gung-ho young operatives who later rose to top positions, among them Richard Helms (lower right), who became CIA director."