The video explores the alarming covert activities of the CIA during the height of the Cold War, focusing on their endeavors in mind control and biological warfare. It begins with the mysterious death of Frank Olson, a biological weapons researcher who fell from a hotel window under suspicious circumstances, which is later associated with his involvement in top-secret CIA projects. The narrative unfolds the extent of the CIA's experiments, including brutal testing on prisoners, civilians, and even its employees, highlighting their quest to master mind control and develop chemical war tactics against communism.

The investigative journey raises questions about the ethical boundaries the CIA crossed in the name of national security. The video delves into the CIA's use of LSD, hypnosis, and other experimental techniques to develop and test mind-altering substances on unwitting subjects, reflecting the moral compromises deemed necessary during the Cold War. It also touches on various international collaborations and the sharing of information meant to curtail the communist threat.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. espionage [ˈɛspiəˌnɑʒ] - (noun) - The practice of spying or using spies to obtain secret information, especially regarding a government or business. - Synonyms: (spying, surveillance, intelligence gathering)

espionage is the name of the game.

2. innocuous [ɪˈnɒkjʊəs] - (adjective) - Not harmful or offensive. - Synonyms: (harmless, safe, non-threatening)

An innocuous term for a frightening variety of unorthodox weapons.

3. surreptitiously [ˌsʌrəpˈtɪʃəsli] - (adverb) - Done in a secretive or stealthy manner to avoid notice. - Synonyms: (secretly, covertly, stealthily)

They surreptitiously drop harmless bacteria onto the tracks.

4. guinea pig [ˈɡɪni pɪɡ] - (noun) - A subject of experimentation or trials. - Synonyms: (subject, test subject, volunteer)

By volunteering, Ken Earl becomes an unsuspecting guinea pig in the war against the Soviets.

5. claustrophobic [ˌklɔːstrəˈfoʊbɪk] - (adjective) - Uncomfortably closed in or hemmed in, often causing a feeling of panic. - Synonyms: (confined, trapped, enclosed)

I became absolutely claustrophobic.

6. amnesia [æmˈniːʒə] - (noun) - A condition in which memory is disturbed or lost. - Synonyms: (memory loss, forgetfulness, blackout)

You create this new identity and side that's hidden from the main part of the person by an amnesia barrier

7. guise [ɡaɪz] - (noun) - An external appearance or semblance, often used to conceal the true nature of something. - Synonyms: (appearance, semblance, disguise)

Cameron applies his techniques under the guise of normal therapy.

8. demeanor [dɪˈmiːnər] - (noun) - Outward behavior or bearing. - Synonyms: (manner, attitude, appearance)

Several witnesses notice his trance like demeanor.

9. fathom [ˈfæðəm] - (verb) - To understand a concept thoroughly. - Synonyms: (comprehend, grasp, understand)

I never found any evidence at all that Olson was pushed out that window. I think you have to face the facts here that when you're doing this kind of government, illegal, immoral, top secret work, you have to be prepared to face the consequences, which include disposal of problematic people.

10. insidious [ɪnˈsɪdiəs] - (adjective) - Proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects. - Synonyms: (stealthy, cunning, deceitful)

Hypnotized by the CIA to assassinate Kennedy. The culmination of two decades of mind control research.

Exposing the Dark Secrets of the CIA - Undercover History Updates (Full Episode) - Nat Geo

It's the height of the Cold War. In New York, a man mysteriously falls from a hotel window. In Kentucky, a secret experiment beats prisoners LSD for two and a half months. In Montreal, a doctor delivers hundreds of electroshocks to his psychiatric patients. How far did the Central Intelligence Agency go to fight the new communist threat? Germ warfare, brainwashing, even murder. Will families of the victims ever know the truth? What's the real story behind the CIA's secret experiments?

Manhattan, 1953. 2am on a chilly Thanksgiving weekend. The Statler Hotel on 7th Avenue. A man plunges to his death from the 13th floor. Night manager Armen Pastor is first to the scene. I rushed out and there I see a body lying next to this partition. I never expected him to be alive, but he was laying there looking at me, trying to speak to me. A very earnest look in his eyes, wide open. Was it suicide or something more sinister? The man is 43 year old Frank Olson, a biological weapons researcher for the army at Fort Detrick, Maryland. What few yet know is that Frank Olson also worked for the CIA. Olson's subsequent death is just one mysterious piece in a far greater puzzle. One that would shock the average American had they only known.

In the wake of World War II, the US government is engaged in a large number secret medical experiments designed to help win the Cold War. Exposing unknowing members of the public to biological and chemical agents. Developing techniques for mind control to create a so called Manchurian candidate. Even planning assassinations on powerful third world leaders. What was the extent of these brainwashing experiments? How did the CIA become involved in such far reaching and disturbing research?

D Day the end of World War II reveals the full extent of Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps. Medical research on captives includes experiments with their minds as well as their bodies. The Germans were doing an experiment at Dachau on things like hypnosis and the use of drugs for interrogation. Try and find out ways of controlling people, of making people tell against their will. An attempt to master the art of mind control. In the years that follow, the Cold War escalates at an alarming rate. With the superpowers competing for military and scientific supremacy. espionage is the name of the game.

The CIA embarks upon a multimillion dollar highly classified research program into the COVID use of biological and chemical materials. An innocuous term for a frightening variety of unorthodox weapons. Bacteria to infect the enemy. Poisons for assassinations. Truth drugs for interrogations. Spearheading these undercover efforts is Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA's top secret chemical division, Gottlieb works closely with army scientists at Fort Detrick, Maryland, developing biological weapons for the agency's use. Included in the medicine chest at Fort Detrick would have been anthrax, the plague, brucellosis, all the major diseases in 1953.

These special operations at Fort Detrick are headed up by Frank Olson. The week of Thanksgiving, Olson is in New York on a doctor's visit, but details are unclear. He never makes it home. His family learns of his death early Saturday morning. Olson's son Eric is nine at the time, they basically said, you know, we have something we have to tell you, and proceeded to say that my father had fallen or jumped out of a window in New York City. The story is as mystifying as it is devastating. There were no details, absolutely none.

According to the medical report, Olsen's neck and face are badly lacerated at the funeral. The casket remains closed, and the explanation there was that they said he was too badly injured to be seen. Unbeknownst to the family, present at the funeral are two men from the CIA, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy, Dr. Robert Lashbrook. There's something Olsen's family doesn't yet know. Agent Lashbrook was in the New York hotel room when Olsen fell out the window and died.

The mysterious circumstances of Olson's death raise many questions. Some answers lie buried in his secret life working for the CIA. Olson's specialty is aerosol delivery systems. But by 1953, his career has evolved into top secret research into germ warfare and more. Together, the CIA and the army's special operations plan experiments on the dispersal of their new biological weapons. More than once, they simulate an attack on an entire city. One target, the nation's most populous metropolis, New York. The intention? To evaluate how easy it is to poison a city by releasing bacteria into the subway system.

Staff from Fort Detrick, posing as industrial contractors, position themselves over the subway vents. They surreptitiously drop harmless bacteria onto the tracks while monitoring agents wait to take samples throughout the network. Turbulence from the trains quickly carries the germs through the tunnels, infecting the entire subway system in a matter of minutes. With a more lethal substance, a similar attack on an enemy city could be efficient and deadly.

The CIA is not alone in its effort to develop new weapons against the communists. America forms a tripartite agreement with Canada and Great Britain, the three nations working together to win the cold war. British research into biochemical warfare is carried out at the army base in Porton Down. Southwest England. Porton Down led the world in biochemical research during the 30s and 40s. Porton Down knew about the attempt to infiltrate the subway system in New York. There was a constant exchange of information. It was very normal on any given day to find one or more American scientists at Porton Down.

In May 1953, scientists at Porton Down are researching one of the most lethal nerve agents known to man. Sarin. The experiments are conducted on military volunteers, but the young servicemen have no idea what they are letting themselves in for. On the board there was a separate notice, typed which said in so many words, volunteers wanted to help find a cure for the common cold. Those taking part will receive extra pay. By volunteering, Ken Earl becomes an unsuspecting guinea pig in the war against the Soviets.

On May 4th at Porton Down, he and five other Air Force men are led into a small room by two technicians. We were told by the two men to roll up the left sleeve so the left arm was exposed. These two men then took two pieces of material and they taped them to our forearm. They then gave us each a respirator and that we were not under any circumstances to take off the respirator. And the door was sealed behind us. It was very, very pokey, a small building. And I found out since it was a gas chamber, which puts the fear of death into you of course.

And this technician with a vial and a pipette went round each of us and he dripped onto this pieces of material. 20 drops in two rows and it was a colorless liquid and I didn't know what it was. I didn't question it. The clear liquid is sarin nerve agent. It is quickly absorbed into the arm through the skin. The effects are immediate. I became absolutely claustrophobic. I didn't know what sheer terror there is in being trapped and not being able to breathe properly. You feel you can't breathe. I was sweating profusely and I was just. I felt so ill and I now him today. I have nightmares about it.

After half an hour we were released, gasping and spluttering and sweating into the open air. Beautiful sunny May morning. Absolute bliss. What a wonderful thing to be alive. The corresponding paperwork clearly states the purpose of the experiment is to determine the lethal dose of sarin. They quickly get their answer. Two days later, another group of six had exactly the same thing done to them. But sitting in my seat was a young 20 year old called Ronald Madison. And quite frankly, he was dead within 45 minutes. The most hideous death anybody can ever have.

Foaming at the mouth an ambulance driver described it as like frog spawn coming out of his mouth. Terrible death. Based on the dates in his passport and known previous visits to Porton Down, there is a good chance that Frank Olson witnesses this fatal experiment. According to investigative reporter Gordon Thomas, Olson voices his concerns to a man named William Sargent. Dr. Sargent was the most eminent psychiatrist in Britain. He ran the department of psychological medicine in St. Thomas's Hospital during the Cold War.

Sargent's expertise is sought by both British and American intelligence. He would decide whether one of our agents, one of MI5 or 6 agents was okay, whether you're going to blow the whistle or not. Frank Olson tells Sargeant what he's seen at Porton Down. You told him I've seen things that shouldn't be going on. Sargent apparently has doubts about Olson. Can the Americans still be trusted with top secret research of the Cold War?

Concerns that highly sensitive information would be leaked to US enemies permeates the CIA. There was a real fear in the CIA that the communists had ways of doing things, of interrogating people, of making people act against their will. That could be breakthroughs. To combat the new threat, the CIA launches its own quest to master the art of mind control. They were looking for ways to manipulate and control human behavior. They looked at chemical substances, they looked at things like electroshock.

One drug in particular catches their attention. Lysergic acid, dithylamide, better known as LSD. The hope was you could use these drugs to soften up somebody for interrogation or you could use them offensively for mind control programming and getting somebody set up for operations. Ten years before its recreational heyday, LSD becomes the focus of the CIA's quest for the perfect truth drug. There's just one hitch how to find suitable subjects. So they found street people, they found prostitutes, they found prisoners, they found minorities to whom the CIA at the time did not put as much value on their lives as other people.

At the Federal Addiction Research center in Lexington, Kentucky, Dr. Harris Isbell is contracted by the CIA to study the effects of prolonged exposure to ls. His subjects are incarcerated heroin addicts, mostly African American. The deal down there was unbelievably gauche. They had prisoner volunteers who came in and they would be given LSD as part of the experimentation and then as a reward, given heroin. In one experiment, prisoners are kept on increasing doses of LSD for 77 straight days. Even Dr. Isbel himself is amazed that such high quantities of narcotic can be tolerated for so long.

A lot of these things just violate any kind of common sense and basic medical ethics that you. You would think it would be impossible that doctors would do experiments on drug addicts, giving them hallucinogens, and then as a reward for participation, they would get more drugs of addiction. But these things actually happen. They're absolutely documented. These tests use incarcerated volunteers who know they are taking a drug. The CIA has a different mission in mind. To test the drugs covertly. You might give it to a Russian diplomat at a cocktail party and you wanted to see how it would react. Could you recruit him after he'd been given lsd? So unwitting testing was the name of the game.

The CIA establishes safe houses in Manhattan and San Francisco. They enlist prostitutes to lure in possible suspects and slip them lsd. Local gangsters are used as guinea pigs to represent enemy agents with secrets to share. The agency listens in, hoping the combination of girls and drugs will get the men to talk. Narcotics agent Ira Feldman is responsible for finding those unwitting subjects. We got prostitutes to come in and speak to these guys. And these prostitutes would put something, which I found out later on was LSD, and did a drink and make them talk.

And 10, 15 minutes later they'd be spilling their guts, Whether it be state secrets or narcotics or murder. But at the height of the cold War, interrogating domestic gangsters is just a practice run. The real challenge lies in field operations overseas. On the fringe of the Iron curtain in Occupy Germany, the CIA hones its techniques for getting at the truth. The potential victims for interrogation are endless. Defecting scientists with valuable information to share. Suspected double agents selling secrets to the communists. All are fair game for the CIA.

A person would be taken to a safe house in a secure location. They would be kept there for a period of at least days. They might have sleep and food deprivation. They would have possibly alcohol, barbiturates, hallucinogens, and other medications administered. And then a variety of interrogation techniques would be applied. In order to fully test these techniques, the agency must pursue the interrogations to the bitter end. There was an expression the CIA was using called terminal experiments, which were experiments that would lead to death or vast injury to the person.

Among those who witnessed these experiments is Fort Detrick scientist Frank Olsen. His passport shows several trips to Germany, including summer 1953. He is deeply disturbed by what he sees. On his way home through England, Olson visits once more with intelligence consultant William Sargent. To quote what Sargent told me, you know, Frank was very different when he came back that time. He was quite aroused, in a sense, angry, upset. William Sargent is convinced the CIA now has a serious problem. He believes secrets from the Cold War are no longer safe in the hands of Frank Olsen.

Summer 1953. Cold War paranoia grips America. In Europe, Frank Olsen witnesses extreme interrogations at the hands of the CIA. His British confidant, William Sargent no longer thinks Olson can be trusted. Frank Olson had an incredible storehouse of knowledge about top, top secret matters concerning biological weapons and substances. And as such, he would have been a person who there would have been great concern if he had started to talk publicly. As head of Mind control Research, Sidney Gottlieb is the one man who knows the full extent of Olson's knowledge.

If Olson's been sharing state secrets, Gottlieb needs to know. He decides to conduct a little experiment of his own. Deep Creek Lodge in Maryland. Wednesday, November 18, 1953. Frank Olson and six colleagues from Special Operations at Fort Detrick attend a clandestine meeting. They are joined by counterparts from the CIA, including Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy, Robert Lashbrook. According to CIA documents, after dinner on Thursday night, Gottlieb slips a small amount of LSD into a bottle of Cointreau.

It's according to Gottlieb, when I met him, they were concerned that what if a scientist was kidnapped by the communists, and what if the enemy drugged that scientist, you know, would he be forthcoming? And they were going to test this by staging a scientific meeting and drugging the participants, and that my father was just one of a number who got this drug. Allegedly, all but two of the scientists present are drugged unwittingly. Twenty minutes later, Gottlieb tells them what he's done. And the meeting gradually deteriorates as the narcotic takes effect. But what happens after that remains disputed.

Some believe Olsen is interrogated. When Olson returns home, he is profoundly affected. He wasn't hallucinating or anything remotely like that. He was simply somber and was upset. He used that phrase that he'd made a terrible mistake and he had decided he wanted to quit his job. Instead of accepting Olson's resignation, his boss sends him to New York for psychiatric counseling. He's accompanied by Robert Lashbrook from the CIA. But the attending, doctor, Harold Abramson, is not a psychiatrist. He's an allergist. He's been experimenting with LSD for the CIA's mind control research.

The doctor's notes show several meetings with Olson over the course of the week. On the Friday evening, Olson calls home to his wife, Alice. He said he was feeling much better. He just wanted to reassure her and said he, you know, I look forward to seeing her the next day. But at 2:00 on Saturday morning, Frank Olsen falls from the 13th floor of the hotel to the sidewalk below. The CIA claims it is suicide. They offer no explanation to the family, but secretly conclude it was triggered by the LSD given nine days previously.

If William Sargent was right and Frank Olson was a security threat to the agency, his death silences him forever. The secrets of the CIA's experiments remain safe for the time being. After the Korean War, disturbing new intelligence reaches Washington. Hundreds of American troops are still being held captive, subjected to brainwashing experiments and then killed. Mind control research back home intensifies. The new goal is to cause an individual to become subservient to an imposed control to the point where he will perform acts against his will and then have no memory of the act. The search for a real life Manchurian Candidate begins.

In the 1962 Hollywood classic the Manchurian Candidate, directed by John Frankenheimer. A hypnotized soldier is programmed to assassinate a presidential candidate. Like a clip from the movie. The CIA attempts to create its own Manchurian assassins. Using hypnosis and drugs. You create this new identity and side that's hidden from the main part of the person by an amnesia barrier. Then using an access code, you can call out this new identity for whatever mission purpose to produce such an assassin.

The CIA faces two main challenges. How to induce amnesia and how to program in new behavior. In 1957, Dr. Ewan Cameron, an eminent psychiatrist in Montreal, believes he has the answers. The agency sought him out because they had noticed his work. In particular with two techniques, intensive electroshock and what he called psychic driving. Cameron applies his techniques under the guise of normal therapy. It's hard to say just how awful and horrendous what Cameron proposed and what our government financed was. There's a three part technique which started with an effort to wipe out past patterns of behavior.

And this was accomplished through the use of particularly intensive, repeated high level electroshocks until no more convulsions could be elicited from a patient. Cameron then plays tape recorded messages through helmets that are locked to his patients heads. This forces them to listen to repetitive statements for weeks on end to program in new behavior. The final phase was to try to wipe out all recollection of what had happened. And that was accomplished by putting people to sleep for 30, 40 days accompanied by different kinds of cocktails of drugs. Now that's not any kind of therapy, that's a brainwashing experiment.

For four years, the CIA fully funds Cameron's work hoping to use his techniques to create a Manchurian candidate. Psychiatrists throughout the nation at hospitals, prisons and some of the top universities are similarly on the agency's payroll. Every possible brainwashing technique is explored. One in particular consumes the agency for years. Hypnosis. One of the things the CIA was looking for was could you give a person an order under hypnosis to assassinate someone else that would have been a Manchurian candidate. But the assassin must not remember his act.

You can take an ordinary person off the street, put him through basic training, get him to go out the field and shoot the enemy. The purpose of the hypnosis is not to get the person go pull the trigger. It's so that they don't remember, so that if they're captured and interrogated they can't talk about it. In 1968, an assassination takes place that seems to resemble a Manchurian operation. According to some, it is the work of a programmed assassin hypnotized by the CIA.

Thanks to all of you. And now it's on to Chicago and Let's win there. June 4, 1968. Election night in the California Democratic primary. It's midnight and Senator Robert Kennedy delivers his victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel. He's ushered out through the crowded pantry. Suddenly shots are fire. 26 hours later, Kennedy is pronounced dead. As the gunman, 24 year old Sirhan Bashara Sirhan is led away. Several witnesses notice his trance like demeanor. He seemed to be in a daze.

He didn't recollect any of the details of what he had just performed and he couldn't explain it. He was told what he had done and he was bewildered. Conspiracy theorists latch on to Sirhan's alleged memory loss. They are convinced Sirhan's a Manchurian candidate hypnotized by the CIA to assassinate Kennedy. The culmination of two decades of mind control research. But why would the CIA want Robert Kennedy dead? Sirhan's attorney believes there are three motives. Number one, Vietnam.

Bob Kennedy was diametrically opposed to the war in Vietnam. The ending of the war in Vietnam would have gone adversely to the bottom lines of some of the major corporate entities in the United States who were making fortunes on that war. Cuba. Bob Kennedy himself had come to the conclusion that the time was ripe for a deal to be done with Castro in Cuba. And that was not making him very popular. And finally, his own brother's death.

He was going to reopen the investigation of the assassination of his brother. That was making a lot of people edgy. Was Sirhan's mind hacked. Had he been hypno programmed by the CIA? Before Sirhan's trial, psychiatrist Bernard diamond examines him many times and believes he was being controlled by the CIA through hypnosis. That girl, I followed her, she led me to a dark place. And diamond was convinced that he was programmed. And this programming was very intensive and very, very deep into his psyche.

And it has remained with him to this day. To this day, he doesn't know what happened. Programmed amnesia is the key ingredient to a Manchurian operation. Sirhan also claims he's been hypnotized before. He'd recently been studying the Rosicrucians, an ancient mystical order devoted to self improvement. Hypnosis is one of the tools they teach for focusing the mind inward. Sirhan Sirhan described some self hypnosis meditation type exercises. And his journals have a lot of repetition, repetition, repetition.

RFK must die. RFK must die. Which looks to me like trance state repetition. Focusing on the mission. Focusing on the mission. Focusing on the mission. The hypnotized Sirhan allegedly pulls out his gun on cue, but does not fire the fatal shot. You have to understand so much pandemonium. It's almost as though Sirhan was programmed to distract the entire group that was there, allowing someone to do what had to be done in terms of actually killing Kennedy by shooting him in the back of the head.

Ballistics evidence seems to support this claim. Kennedy is struck by three bullets, all fired from the rear. The fatal shot is fired within inches of his skull. But Sirhan never gets that close. There's no account that pushes him any closer than three or four feet away from Bob Kennedy in the front of him. Adding to the alleged evidence for a conspiracy is the number of bullets fired. Kennedy is struck three times. Five bystanders are also hit, but several more bullet holes are identified in the doors and ceiling, suggesting at least 10 shots are fired.

Sirhan's pistol, a.22 caliber, only holds eight rounds. More than eight bullets would require a second gun. Historian Mel Ayton has spent years investigating the assassination. He believes that Sirhan could have shot Kennedy at close proximity, from behind, even while standing three feet in front of the senator. When Kennedy was moving through with the crowd through the pantry, he turned to his left to shake hands with the kitchen workers. Kennedy reaches across with his right arm, presenting Sirhan with the right side of his body as a target.

And then Robert Kennedy was shot under the armpit because obviously his arm was. His right arm was being raised as a defensive reaction. And then the arc of the gun was pursuing Kennedy's head as Kennedy was going down. To determine the number of bullets fired, Ayten sends acoustics expert Steve Barber a copy of the only complete audio recording to exist of the assassination. All of a sudden I hear pop, pop, pop. And then a blood curdling high pitched female scream.

Just after the shots, two unidentified thumps occur just three seconds before the first pop. I rule thump number one completely out. It sounds like the microphone has bumped into something. Thump number two, I think is either a door banging into a wall or a balloon exploding. A graph of the recording clearly shows a spike each time the gun is fired. Distinctly eight bullets were fired. If the conspiracists believe there are more than eight gunshots, then they're going to have to explain the lack of those gunshots being captured on this recording.

There is no doubt in Ayton's mind that Sirhan was the lone assassin and the CIA had nothing to do with it. By 1968, after investing millions of dollars, the agency abandons its research into programming a hypnotized assassin, concluding it can never work. You do not relinquish your will. You do not become a dupe, a patsy or a mindless automaton. Despite some public beliefs that this may be the case, in 1972 Sidney Gottlieb terminates the agency's research into the biological and chemical control of human behavior, citing its decreasing relevance to covert operations.

The American public remains oblivious that the CIA's mind control program ever existed. But that is about to change. On June 11, 1975, the Washington Post reports on a civilian scientist who was unwittingly given LSD and jumped from a Manhattan hotel window. No names are mentioned, but the Olsens immediately recognize the story of their father's death 22 years before. The source for the article describing Frank Olson's death is the Rockefeller Commission Report. Triggered by Watergate, it's a presidential inquiry into illegal domestic activities by the CIA.

The Olsons decide to sue the agency for their father's wrongful death. And within 10 days we were sitting in the Oval Office of the White House getting an apology from Gerald Ford himself. The family received $750,000 for Frank Olson's death. Spurred by the media reports, Congress launches its own investigation into the CIA, chaired by Senator Frank Church. Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook are summoned to testify. Had a hypnotist do some experiments, primarily to see what the limitations of hypnosis might be. Can you make a person do something under hypnosis that he would not ordinarily do.

The revelations are staggering. 80 institutions have been contracted by the CIA for mind control research, costing taxpayers the equivalent of nearly $40 million today. The committee concludes the agency demonstrated a fundamental disregard for the value of human life. Former CIA director Richard Helms reveals that in 1973 he instructed Sidney Gottlieb to destroy all records pertaining to the mind control experiments. But some documents managed to escape the shredder. You can be sure in any government agency, there's always an accountant somewhere who has got an extra set of the documents.

And the financial records included program descriptions and project proposals. Among the files released by the agency are several internal memos written immediately after Frank Olson's death. The documents describe the incident at Deep Creek Lodge as a mild experiment using a very small dose of lsd, targeting all but two of the men at the meeting. Apparently, no one had an abnormal reaction to the drug. But there's also a memoir from CIA consultant Harold Abramson, who saw Olsen the following week. According to him, the experiment had in fact been designed specifically to trap Frank Olsen.

The contradictions plague Eric Olsen for many years. He is convinced there was foul play at hand in his quest for answers. He finally turns to the one man he knows he can trust. His father. When the backhoe started digging, it was early June, warning 1994. I thought, yes, finally we're going to open this thing up. Supervising the exhumation is forensics expert Professor James Stars. The body was, as I would say, in unusually well preserved condition. One thing is immediately apparent.

There were no lacerations evident on his face and head. This is in direct contrast to the medical report and the story told to the Olsens. There was something else the CIA didn't want the family to see. What is present, but not mentioned in the medical report is a large bruise above the left eye. But Olson hit the ground feet first and then fell backwards. Could have been that someone did as we anticipated, initially cost him, hit him on the head, rendering him unable to protect himself, and then did the inevitable threw him out the window.

If true, then Frank Olson was murdered. During his investigation, Eric Olsen makes an alarming discovery. The same year Frank Olsen dies, the CIA publishes its first assassination manual. And that assassination manual specified the ideal way in which you murder somebody, but you make it look like an accident. And the best way they said to do this was from a fall from a high window at least 75ft. And they said you should stun the subject. That's the verb. Stun the subject before dropping them with a blow to the temple above one of the eyes.

The pattern was identical in every respect to what we found and what we interpreted from the remains of Dr. Olson. I think that Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out that window. But investigative reporter John Marks disagrees. I spent an incredible amount of time researching this question. I never found any evidence at all that Olson was pushed out that window. I think you have to face the facts here that when you're doing this kind of government, illegal, immoral, top secret work, you have to be prepared to face the consequences, which include disposal of problematic people.

Well, what other cover story can you tell besides suicide? Frank Olson's children say that when they first learned LSD had led him to his death, they were relieved that suicide was not really his idea. Then they became angry. They are still angry. Over 60 years after Frank Olson's death, his sons, Eric and Niels Olsen, continue to seek justice for their father. We intend to sue the Central Intelligence Agency for the wrongful death of my father. In so doing, we hope the full story of Frank Olsen's death will emerge.

The court case filed in November 2012 accused the CIA of concealing the truth about their father's death in 1953. If the court challenged the CIA to open its files, the Olsons might find the missing pieces to the puzzle. The Olsen family argued that their prior settlement was received under a false assumption that the CIA had provided all relevant documents surrounding Frank Olson's death. But after months in deliberation, in 2013, US District Judge James E. Boasberg ruled that the case must be dismissed. The $750,000 settlement received in 1975 and the decade's delay in filing the suit left Boasberg unable to process the case any further.

The Olsen family could not sue the US Government. In the fight against Communism, the government sacrificed the rights of many individuals, individuals including Frank Olson and his family. During the Cold War, it seemed that almost everything was justified. And if you were against it, you weren't patriotic. In the climate of the Cold War, or in all of human history, the basic motto is war is hell, and you've got to do a lot of bad stuff and a lot of people die and get hurt. But we justify it because we need to do what we need to do to protect America. This is the bind that we're in as a culture.

What can we justify in the name of national security? Can we justify medical atrocities? Apparently, it is a dark chapter in America's history, the full details of which we may never know.

Cia, Cold War, Mind Control, Science, Technology, Conspiracy, National Geographic