LSD STORY CAUSES FLASHBACKS

The `Times' Digs Up Old CIA Death

The New York Times Magazine always delivers at least one great story,
and last week it was an investigation into the claim that the CIA
drugged and murdered scientist Frank Olson in 1953 to stop him from
blowing the whistle on their secret experiments in mind control.

Kudos are in order for Harvard scholar Michael Ignatieff, who was a
wise choice to write the piece. He went to school with Olson's son
Eric, and as a human rights expert, he was able to build a credible
case against the CIA from the son's point of view.

Here are some of the facts, according to Ignatieff: By the early 1950s,
the CIA had begun to study LSD as a truth serum for use in covert
assassinations. In the summer of 1953, the CIA sent Olson to Sweden,
Germany, and Britain on business. According to a British journalist,
Olson became disturbed by something he witnessed at a research facility
near Frankfurt and confided as much to a psychiatrist employed by
British intelligence. Thereupon, someone at the CIA raised the issue
that Olson had become a security risk.

Enter Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a/k/a the Timothy Leary of the CIA. At a
meeting of CIA scientists in rural Maryland in November 1953, Gottlieb
dropped a hit of LSD into Olson's Cointreau. Nine days later in New
York, Olson went out the window of a 10th floor hotel room, hit the
sidewalk and died soon after. The CIA's position was that he had
either "fallen or jumped."

Although Ignatieff approached the M-word carefully in the Times,
waiting until about two-thirds of the way through the piece to suggest
that dosing Olson was a "prelude to murder," the allegation was
clearly on his mind--as was the unstated conclusion that an aggressive
investigation into Olson's death is long overdue.

Instead, what the public has gotten so far is a whitewash, and long
stretches of silence from the Times. According to a database search,
the Olson story first surfaced in the Times in July 1975. Having
learned 22 years after the fact that Frank Olson had been fed LSD, the
dead man's family gave an exclusive to the Times' Seymour Hersh.
Through Hersh, the family announced its plans to file a wrongful-death
suit against the U.S. government. (They later settled.)

The revelations about the CIA and LSD begat a flurry of stories in the
Times in July 1975, and that month, even the editorial page weighed
in, calling the agency's experiment on Olson an example of "the
arrogance and danger of unchecked power." But for the next 26 years,
the Times mentioned Olson only a few times in passing, as when his
wife Alice died in 1993.

That's when things got hairy. In 1994, Eric Olson had his father's
body exhumed and autopsied, a difficult choice that paid off when
forensic experts concluded that Olson had been knocked out with a blow
to the head, then thrown out the hotel window. So much for the theory
that he had "jumped."

Did the CIA deliberately kill Frank Olson? In the wake of the autopsy,
the murder charge became credible enough to attract attention from the
likes of the AP, CBS, CNN, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune,
the Los Angeles Times, and smaller newspapers across the country.
Regardie's reported the story as a feature in 1994; the Daily Mail
followed in 1998. But The New York Times was nowhere to be found.

When asked to comment on the omission, a Times Company spokesperson
said, "We certainly can't hope to reconstruct a 1994 news decision
tonight."

As for coverage of psychedelic experiments by Sidney Gottlieb, the
Times' only significant story in 20 years appeared in 1999, when Tim
Weiner wrote Gottlieb's obituary. During the 1950s and 1960s, Weiner
reported, the CIA secretly tested LSD on human guinea pigs, including
U.S. prisoners, drug addicts, and prostitutes. A mental patient in
Kentucky was dosed "continuously for 174 days."

Oddly, Ignatieff's story omitted this piece of context. But what's
important is that the Times is finally positioned to help bring an
extraordinary case to justice. Eric Olson has besieged the Manhattan
district attorney's office to open a new investigation, and Ignatieff
suggests that there might be hope yet. With the facts freshly laid
out, the Times and other opinion leaders should demand that Frank
Olson's death be fully investigated before the few remaining witnesses
drop out of sight altogether.