ARSENAL OF DEATH: THE NEW FRANKENSTEINS

"You've Just Got To Trust Us. We Are Honorable Men." - Richard Helms,
Former CIA Director

Missing chapters in an old, ghoulish tale recently exhumed could add
new dimensions of barbarity to revelations in the press, and
subsequent admission by the U.S. government, that thousands of
Americans were exposed to radioactive, chemical and biological agents
in the 1940s and '50s.

But the government's swift and uncharacteristic
expiation-by-confession of past trespasses could imply more than just
a willingness to lay bare a tarnished conscience. It might instead be
a Cheshire cat ploy to keep far more sinister secrets frozen beneath
the thick ice of official censorship.

Like an iceberg, U.S. complicity in the rewiring, robotizing and
subversion of the minds and bodies of thousands of unsuspecting
Americans runs far deeper than imagined. And, because such trickery -
allegedly dictated by the need to thwart equally demonic Cold War
threats - calls for absolute secrecy, the government nearly succeeded
in keeping a tight lid on this ultracovert component of its war
machine. Nearly.

Leaks have since sprung from the warlocks' overflowing cauldrons.
Most were swiftly swabbed clean. A short memory and a phlegmatic
unconcern for the inscrutable ways of government helped appease
America's scruples and dissipate the telltale noxious fumes from its
delicate nostrils.

Providentially, however, a number of cases escaped skullduggery and
oblivion, among them the mysterious death of tennis pro Harold Blauer.

On the morning of Jan. 8, 1953, the 42-year-old Blauer was taken from
his room at Manhattan's New York State Psychiatric Institute, where
he was being treated for depression, to receive an injection. Blauer
resisted. A month earlier, four injections had made him horribly ill,
physically and mentally.

Shortly before 10 a.m., against his wishes, Blauer was given 450mg of
an experimental mescaline derivative code-named EA-1298. Within
minutes, his body snapped as if struck by lightning. His face became
contorted, his eyes rolled in their sockets, saliva foamed down his
chin. Oxygen and glucose were administered, as was sodium amytal.
Artificial respiration was then applied, to no avail.

Blauer was pronounced dead shortly after noon. His death certificate
said that an undisclosed chemical compound had triggered a
pre-existing heart condition, causing a massive coronary.

Blauer was one of many victims of a fiendish relationship between the
U.S. Army Chemical Corps, which insisted on fast results, and
psychiatrists who were loyal to their research interests - not their patients.

The facts concerning the case first became public in 1975, 22 years
after Blauer's agonizing death, when his daughter, Elizabeth Barrett,
sued the U.S. government for using her father as a guinea pig and for
causing him a painful and needless death.

It took 12 more years of Byzantine courtroom proceedings and secret
negotiations between the CIA, the Army and the plaintiffs before U.S.
District Court Judge Constance Baker Motley finally ruled against the
government and awarded Barrett and her sister, Belinda Blauer, the
paltry sum of $702,044, instead of the $50 million they had sought.

Nine months after Blauer's death, at 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 28, 1953,
Robert Lashbrook was awoken by the sounds of shattering glass. By the
time Lashbrook reached the gaping hole in the window of his New York
City hotel room, Dr. Frank Olson, whose mind and body had been in his
charge, lay dead, splayed like a disembodied puppet on the pavement
13 floors below.

Lashbrook was in a hell of a fix. He called his bosses at the CIA,
and the agency hurriedly concocted a story that prompted the
otherwise fastidious New York police to drop the investigation.

By knitting a tale of carefully tangled thread, the CIA was able to
conceal its role in Olson's death for more than two decades. In 1975,
a single sentence in a government report provided Olson's widow with
the clue that enabled her to fit the mangled pieces of her husband's
death. (See page 387, Final Report, Select Committee to Study
Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Book
I: Foreign and Military Intelligence, U.S. Senate, 1976).

The CIA, she discovered, had spiked Dr. Olson's Cointreau with LSD to
determine whether the hallucinogenic drug "would have a disabling or
otherwise useful effect on the psyche."

The effect was beyond anything the experimenters could have
anticipated. After nine days of forcible and repeated exposure to the
mind-bending power of LSD, Dr. Olson, clad only in his underwear,
escaped madness through the closed windows of New York's Statler Hotel.

Olson's story does not end there. His death was not only cruel but
also senseless. Nothing was learned from the experiment for which the
CIA had "volunteered" him. So casual was the Agency's approach to the
(then) most powerful and popular of the psychotropic drugs that no
one had bothered to modulate the dosage.

The CIA knew LSD was a powerful and dangerous chemical before it
condemned Olson to certain death. It did not demur.

There's more. Results of a forensic examination released recently
also contradict government assertions that Olson jumped to his death
from his Manhattan hotel.

Multiple fractures to his skull did not appear consistent with a
13-story fall, according to James Starrs, a George Washington
University professor of law and forensics, who was asked by Olson's
family to examine the body.

It is now widely believed that Olson, one of this country's top germ
warfare researchers, was assassinated when the LSD he unknowingly
ingested caused him to compromise highly classified information.

Harold Blauer's and Frank Olson's immolation at the altar of national
security, however tragic, will go down as a minor episode in a much
larger grand design by a number of U.S. agencies that play
Frankenstein with the bodies and souls of Americans.

Willy E. Gutman of Tehachapi is a veteran journalist on assignment in
Central America since 1991. His column reflects his own views, and
not necessarily those of The Signal.