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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
New evidence in Army scientist's death
48-year-old case has links to CIA's secret experimentation program
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Editor's note: In 1998, WorldNetDaily first reported on the CIA's secret
behavior-modification program MK-ULTRA, which included experimentation with
LSD on unsuspecting subjects. Authors H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly's
upcoming book deals with the mysterious death of one of those subject, Dr.
Frank Olson. In this report, Albarelli and Kelly disclose new evidence they
have uncovered in this case.
By H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly
© 2001 H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly
I would turn our gaze from the past, pronounced CIA Director George Tenet
recently before Congress. It is dangerous, frankly, to have to keep looking
over our shoulders. Whether Tenet had the unsolved death of Dr. Frank Olson
in mind is not known, but there is little doubt that it is on his mind today.
Informed sources revealed this week that the Manhattan District Attorney's
Office is reviewing dramatic new evidence in the Olson case. The evidence is
said to involve the Jan. 8, 1953, death of Harold Blauer and its subsequent
elaborate cover-up.
Blauer, a widely respected tennis professional, died nine months before Olson
after being injected with a massive dose of a mescaline derivative at the New
York State Psychiatric Institute. Blauer was being treated at the Institute
for depression related to a broken marriage, but the injection was not part
of his treatment. It was administered only as part of a top-secret
Army-funded experimental program. The program, codenamed Project Pelican, was
overseen by Dr. Paul H. Hoch, director of experimental psychiatry at the
Institute, who worked in secret collaboration with the Army Chemical Corps
chief of clinical research, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi.
Born in Hungary and schooled in psychiatry in Germany, Hoch came to the U.S.
in 1933 on a visitor's visa and soon legally immigrated with the assistance
of then-attorney and future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. (At the
time of Frank Olson's death, Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster, was head
of the CIA.) Before joining the Institute's staff, Hoch headed the Manhattan
State Hospital Shock Therapy Unit and worked as chief medical officer for war
neuroses for the U.S. Public Health Service.
Hoch, along with associates Dr. Harold A. Abramson and Dr. Max Rinkel, was
among an elite group of five private researchers and six U.S. Army physicians
who began quietly conducting LSD experiments in the U.S. in 1949.
Rinkel, the man responsible for first transporting LSD into this country,
supplied the drug to Hoch and Abramson in that same year. Rinkel, who fled
Nazi Germany before the war to work at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, had
known both Abramson and Hoch when all three studied together at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute in Germany. According to 1998 interviews with former-CIA
official Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, it was Rinkel's close associate, Dr. H.E.
Himwich, along with the Army's Dr. L. Wilson Greene, who first drew the CIA's
attention to the wonders of LSD.
When he died in 1965, Hoch was eulogized by two of his closest friends, Dr.
D. Ewen Cameron, who would soon be exposed as administrator of some of the
most horrendous CIA-funded experiments on record, and New York Gov. Nelson A.
Rockefeller.
For nearly five years, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's
cold-case unit has been conducting an unprecedented criminal investigation
into the mysterious death of Fort Detrick biochemist Frank Olson. On Nov. 28,
1953, Olson allegedly dove through a closed and shaded 10th-floor hotel
window in the middle of the night.
He plummeted 170 feet to his death on the sidewalk below. Uniformed
policemen, summoned to the hotel by night manager Armondo Diaz Pastore,
discovered CIA official Robert V. Lashbrook calmly sitting in the room he
shared with Olson. Lashbrook identified himself only as a consultant
chemist for the Defense Department and inexplicably told the officers that
he saw no reason to go down to the street to check on his colleague.
Lashbrook also told police that Olson had journeyed to Manhattan to be
treated by Abramson for depression related to an ulcer.
Two detectives from the 14th Precinct dispatched to the Statler Hotel were
suspicious about what they observed. At first, they suspected they had a
homosexual affair gone bad on their hands. Detective James Ward initially
referred to the case as a possible homocide in his report. Ward and his
partner, detective Robert Mullee, took Lashbrook to the precinct house for
interrogation. Within less than two hours, Lashbrook was set loose and the
case was closed out as D.O.A. Suicide. The final police report makes no
mention whatsoever of the CIA or any drugs, nor does the report on Olson's
death filed by
