11/28 The Ghost of Frank Olson
The Ghost of Frank Olson
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ghost : noun
1 : the seat of life or intelligence : soul <give up the ghost>
2 : a disembodied soul; especially : the soul of a dead person believed to be an inhabitant of the unseen world or to appear to the living in bodily likeness
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56 years ago, on November 28th 1953, Frank Olson, a US Army scientist, fell to his death from a New York City hotel window. Officially classified an accident, this was the first in a series of mysterious deaths of germ war scientists.
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Frank Olson was an anthrax aerosolization specialist who was based at the US Army’s germ war lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. At the time of his death he was part of Special Operations, a covert division with close links to the CIA which was run by Sidney Gottlieb, the brainchild of notorious clandestine projects like MKULTRA, Project Artichoke and MKNAOMI. Olson was involved in some of the most highly classified work of the Cold War – germ war, mind control and the development of extreme interrogation methods.
At the time of death his family had no idea of this secret work and were just told that he had fallen in some sort of accident. But more than a decade later, during that short-lived post-Watergate period in 1975, when the Rockefeller Commission looked into the murky world of the CIA, it was revealed that Frank Olson had been secretly given LSD which had caused him to jump. The story made headlines, his family was invited to the White House where President Ford offered the family a public apology, they later met with the CIA director and were eventually awarded a $750,000 settlement.
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But Olson’s son Eric believed there was more to the story and in 1994 had his father’s body exhumed and examined by the country’s leading forensic pathologist who determined that Olson had suffered a blow to the head before falling from the window. In other words he has been assassinated.
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It’s interesting to note that both Frank Olson and Anthrax Attacks suspect Bruce Ivins both worked at Fort Detrick and were both anthrax specialists. Even though Eric Olson believes the cases are very different, their deaths, half a century apart, are somber bookends to the deadly world of germ war research investigated in Anthrax War.
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In fact we also uncovered a connection between Frank Olson and David Kelly and secret human testing experiments at the British Government’s Porton Down lab. Olson had been a liaison between Proton and Fort Detrick and had witnessed experiments on volunteer servicemen there just months before his death. It is alleged that he was present during an experiment that killed a young serviceman volunteer.
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That death and scores of complaints by fellow human guinea-pigs prompted the launching of the largest-ever police investigation by the Wiltshire Police Department in 1999. Code named “Operation Antler” it looked into scores of deaths during decades of experiments conducted at Porton Down from the late 1930s up to 1989, a time when David Kelly was head of their Microbiology Department.
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An official notice from Porton Down calling for volunteers in experiments to test chemical and biological agents.
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After an exhaustive investigation by a team of twenty detectives that stretched over several years, the police recommended the prosecution of Porton Down scientists and senior MOD officials. But in July 2003, just days before David Kelly was found “dead in the woods” the Crown Prosecution Service quietly announced that they were dropping the case. The British press, who had made headlines of the story when the police first announced their investigation in 1999, ignored this latest twist and another dark chapter in germ war history was lost in the shadows.
Were Frank Olson, Bruce Ivins and David Kelly all scientists who wanted out? Had they reached a point in their work at which they could no longer continue in good conscience?
As Eric Olson so eloquently points out in his interview… it’s sort of like the mob… you can never quit the International Bio-Weapons Mafia.
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The Ghost of Frank Olson from Bob Coen and Eric Nadler’s “Dead Silence – Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail” (2009 Counterpoint Press).
