The Killing of Frank Olson
Long before Anne White endured her experiences, Sargant had become fascinated by the manipulative effects of voodooism. While voodoo achieved this through the lao, its deities, Sargant believed the same result could also be produced by hallucinogenic drugs. His drug of choice would be mescaline.
He had first flown to Washington to discuss using mescaline on patients as a mind-controlling drug in 1968.
By then he had established a close relationship with Sidney Gottlieb. This was due to the key role Sargant had played in alerting the CIA that one of its chief officers, Frank Olson, had been about to become a whistle-blower.
Shortly after 2:30 a.m. on November 28, 1953, Olson’s body was discovered, bloodied and broken, on the pavement of Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue, clothed only in underpants and a T-shirt.
The government asked the Olson family to believe he had hurled himself through a closed window on the 10th floor of the Statler Hotel while another CIA scientist, assigned to keep an eye on him, had slept in the next bed.*
The decision to terminate Frank Olson had been made by Gottlieb after Sargant had listened to Olson’s admissions in London in early November 1953 that he had taken part in lethal experiments on German nationals in post-war Europe.
Sargant, who had regarded Frank Olson as “steady as a rock” had told his colleagues in British intelligence that he feared Olson was about to go public. Shortly afterward, at a CIA safe house at Deep Creek Lodge in western Maryland, Olson had joined other CIA researchers—ironically, to discuss the use of drugs like mescaline for further experiments in Europe.
CIA operative George White had acted as one of the hosts for the gathering. At some point during the evening he reportedly slipped 70 micrograms of LSD into Olson’s drink. Olson quickly became “sullen and disturbed.” A CIA scientist, Richard Lashbrook, escorted him to New York “to take care of him"—words that Olson’s son, Eric, later used with grim irony. White was one of the hit men the agency used for what it called “wet jobs.”
In that 1968 visit Gottlieb did not want to talk about mescaline. His only concern was that Sargant would maintain his silence over the truth of why Olson had died. He had been killed by George White.
Sargant reassured Gottlieb that the CIA’s murder of Frank Olson was a secret safe with him. Armed with the agency’s latest work on hallucinogenic drugs in mind-control, Sargant returned to London.
In 1976, Olson’s family received $750,000 to settle their claims against the government. But Eric remained convinced his father had been murdered “on orders from the highest level.”
An indication of how high that level extended finally emerged in July 2002. A California history professor, Kathryn Olmstead, discovered documents in the Gerald R. Ford Library, written by Ford White House officials, connecting them to the effort to clean up the disaster that the CIA’s Black Sorcerer, Sidney Gottlieb, had created.
The papers show how far efforts went to conceal information about Olson’s death—and his role in preparing anthrax and other biological weapons for the agency. Part of Olson’s work in the 1950s had been done at Porton Down, Britain’s ultra-secret chemical and biological warfare center.
He had been brought there originally by William Sargant. It was at Porton Down, in the depths of the English countryside—not far from one of the mansions Sargant used to indulge his sexual fantasies—that Sargant and Olson explored the use of mind-bending drugs.
A Story of Terror
Until Olmstead’s revelations, efforts to keep Olson’s work secret had remained successful.
In 1975, a senior White House staffer acknowledged in one memo, “that the Olson lawyers will seek to explore all the circumstances of Dr. Olson’s employment, as well as those concerning his death. In any trial it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence of national security and any settlement or judgment reached thereafter could be perceived as money paid to cover the activities of the CIA.”
Another White House memo stated that “Dr. Olson’s job was so sensitive it is highly unlikely we would submit relevant evidence.”
Eric Olson told me: “The documents show the length to which the government tried to cover up the truth.”
It was only years later, long after she had left St. Thomas’s Hospital, that Anne White, the “zombie-like creature” that so shocked her own father, began to discover the truth about William Sargant. He was the psychiatrist who had appeared for the defense in the trial of Patty Hearst in 1976, when he had told the court that Patty was “an unwilling victim of brainwashing.”
His judgment could well fit the case of Anne White.
Her case notes disappeared from St. Thomas’s shortly after Sargant’s death. Her efforts to find them have failed. My own inquiries suggest they were taken by MI5 and shredded. Same with the records of Ewen Cameron’s work at the Allan Memorial Institute in America. After his death in early 2002, the files of Louis Jolyon West relating to his work with Cameron and Sargant also disappeared.
The story of Anne White, and all those like her, is ultimately a story of terror: of the familiar—a respected hospital—becoming a place of horror.
White believes that the best defense against unethical behavior is public disclosure and awareness. She believes the time has come for governments to reveal all that they know about still-secret research.
The further that is away from being revealed, the closer we are to allowing the successors to Sargant, West and Cameron to continue their work.
*JAMES STARRS, a law professor and forensic scientist at George Washington University, led a team of experts at the request of Frank Olson’s sons to determine the cause of death. After Olson’s body was exhumed in 1994, the team determined there were no traces of LSD and no evidence of facial lacerations, as had been reported in 1953. Instead, they found extensive skull fractures—far more than would have been possible from simply hitting the pavement. The most likely scenario, Starrs concluded, was that Olson had been smashed in the head with a hammer or similar blunt instrument, then his body was thrown through the window.
Gordon Thomas is the author of 53 books with total sales exceeding 45 million copies. Several were Main Selections for Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild Book, and the Reader’s Digest Book Club. He has received two Mark Twain Society Awards for Reporting Excellence and numerous other awards. Seven of his books are major motion pictures, including the five-time Academy Award-nominated “Voyage of the Damned.” His Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors became a major documentary which he wrote and narrated for Britain’s Channel Four. One recent book is Mindfield: The Untold Story Behind CIA Experiments with MK ULTRA and Germ Warfare. He lives in England with his wife, an interior designer. His four children work in the entertainment industry. |
||
|
Harm in the Name of Help
“Documenting Psychiatry: Harming in the Name of Health Care” includes insights from medical professionals in more than 20 countries. It scientifically disproves the most fundamental psychiatric diagnostic fallacy: that mental illness is the result of a “chemical imbalance in the brain.” The “chemical imbalance” theory is used to justify millions of prescriptions of mind-altering drugs. Included are articles covering the worldwide medical concern over children being labeled with fraudulent psychiatric disorders and drugged with cocaine-like stimulants, such as methylphenidate. Documents and statistics also establish the link between rising childhood/teen violence and the influx of psychiatric drugs in our education system. To obtain copies, contact the Citizens Commissions on Human Rights at 6616 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028. Telephone (323) 467-4242 or (800) 869-2247, or visit www.cchr.org or e-mail: humanrights@cchr.org |
||
