EP 088 Frank Olson’s Hotel Fall | MKUltra Conspiracy and Narrative Control

[00:00:00] Tracy Brinkmann: November 28th, 1953. It was just before 2:30 in the morning in [00:00:05] Manhattan. A night manager at the Statler Hotel hears something hit the sidewalk out front, a man [00:00:10] in his underwear. He fell from the 13th floor. He's still alive for a moment. He tries [00:00:15] to speak, but then he's gone. His name is Frank Olson. He's 43 years old.

[00:00:19] He has a wife [00:00:20] and three kids back in Maryland, and the man who was sharing the room with him, well, he doesn't call the police [00:00:25] first. Nope. He picks up the phone, and he calls someone else. For 23 years, the Olson family [00:00:30] is told Frank had a breakdown, and he jumped. A sad, private tragedy. Then [00:00:35] one day in 1975, his son opens a newspaper and finds out that almost none of that [00:00:40] was the whole truth.

[00:00:41] And what he found in that paper and what his family dug up after it [00:00:45] is the story the government spent decades trying to make disappear. So settle in [00:00:50] because you're about to hear what happens when the government decides your mind is fair game. This [00:00:55] Is some unapproved thinking

[00:00:56] Intro Lady: Beneath the headlines, behind the timelines, [00:01:00] there is a story no one wants you to find.

[00:01:02] Welcome to Some Unapproved Thinking, where [00:01:05] forgotten truths, buried patterns, and invisible systems rise to the [00:01:10] surface. You weren't crazy. You were just early. Let's begin.

[00:01:14] Tracy Brinkmann: To understand [00:01:15] what happened in that hotel room, I have to take you back three years to a fear. It's [00:01:20] 1950. World War II is barely over.

[00:01:22] The Soviets have a bomb, and American soldiers [00:01:25] captured in Korea start showing up on enemy radio and film, and they're saying [00:01:30] America is the bad guy, confessing to things like germ warfare. Meanwhile, back home, [00:01:35] people are rattled. How do you turn a regular American kid against his own country? [00:01:40] A writer named Edward Hunter gives that fear a name: brainwashing.

[00:01:44] He [00:01:45] puts it into print in 1950, and it spreads like a grass fire. Here's what people don't [00:01:50] know. Hunter wasn't just some curious reporter. No, he worked for OSS during the war, [00:01:55] the outfit that came before the CIA, and later reporting tied him [00:02:00] to the agency's propaganda work. So the word that scared America into [00:02:05] accepting mind control research may have come from the same world that wanted to do the [00:02:10] research in the first place.

[00:02:12] Now, is this proven to the hilt? No, [00:02:15] but hold on to that for a minute. You'll see this move again coming up here. The CIA's [00:02:20] answer comes in steps. Project Bluebird in 1950. Project Artichoke in [00:02:25] 1951. In plain words, the questions were simple. Can we make someone talk? Can we [00:02:30] make someone forget? Can we make someone do something they would have never chosen [00:02:35] to do?

[00:02:35] Then on April 13th, 1953, CIA Director [00:02:40] Allen Dulles signs off on the big one, MKUltra. He puts a chemist in charge, Sidney [00:02:45] Gottlieb, and Gottlieb doesn't look like your normal movie villain. Do they ever? Right? I [00:02:50] mean, he has a stutter, and he has a club foot. He lives on a farm. He raises goats. For God's [00:02:55] sake, the man even goes folk dancing.

[00:02:57] I want you to remember that. People who run programs like this almost [00:03:00] never look the sinister part. They look like your neighbor, and they almost always believe [00:03:05] that they are the good guys. Gottlieb's big bet is this new drug, LSD. [00:03:10] Barely anyone in America had heard of it at this point. He thinks it could be a truth serum, [00:03:15] a way to crack a spy, maybe even a weapon But to find out, he needs to know what [00:03:20] it does to someone who doesn't see it coming in the first place.

[00:03:23] November 19th, 1953, [00:03:25] seven months into MKUltra, a group of scientists from Camp Detrick, the Army's [00:03:30] biological weapons lab in Maryland, they drive into a cabin at Deep Creek Lake [00:03:35] for a work retreat. CIA men are there, too. Gottlieb is there. One of the scientists is [00:03:40] Frank Olson. After dinner, there's a bottle of Cointreau.

[00:03:42] Gottlieb has had it spiked with [00:03:45] LSD. Most of the men drink. About 20 minutes later, Gottlieb tells them what was in it. [00:03:50] Most of them have a strange night, and afterwards they shake it off. Frank Olson does [00:03:55] not. After a few days, he's agitated. He can't sleep. He tells his boss he wants to quit. He tells [00:04:00] his wife he made a terrible mistake, but he won't say what that mistake is.

[00:04:04] The CIA [00:04:05] takes him to New York to see a doctor, but not just any doctor, a doctor with CIA clearance. And on the [00:04:10] night of November 27th, he checks into room 1018A of the Statler Hotel with a [00:04:15] CIA officer named Robert Lashbrook. You already know how that night ends. I already told you that. [00:04:20] What we don't know yet is why it took 22 years to hear the truth about it, and for that, [00:04:25] you have to see how big this thing really was.

[00:04:27] Frank Olson was one man in one [00:04:30] cabin. MKUltra, yeah, it was a machine. According to the CIA's own records, as [00:04:35] laid out to Congress in 1977, the program ran 149 sub-projects [00:04:40] through more than 80 places. And these are not sinister black rooms. These were [00:04:45] universities and hospitals and prisons and drug companies.

[00:04:48] Most of them had no [00:04:50] idea who was really paying. The money ran through front companies with harmless names. One was the [00:04:55] Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Sounds like a book club. It was a pipeline. [00:05:00] And I want you to watch who ends up on the other end of that pipeline. In San [00:05:05] Francisco, a narcotics officer named George Hunter White runs an apartment on the CIA's [00:05:10] dime.

[00:05:10] They called it Operation Midnight Climax. I went deeper into this one back in episode [00:05:15] 22, but for those of you who haven't heard that episode, let me give you a brief summary. Sex [00:05:20] workers would bring men back to the hotel room. The men get dosed without knowing it. Agents sit behind [00:05:25] a two-way mirror with a drink and a notepad.

[00:05:27] Think about who they chose, men who could never go to [00:05:30] the police. I mean, what are they gonna say? "I was with a prostitute, and I think the government drugged me." [00:05:35] No, nobody files that report. That's not luck, my friends. That's [00:05:40] design. Meanwhile, in Lexington, Kentucky, at a federal facility for people fighting addiction, a [00:05:45] doctor named Harris Isbell tests drugs on the inmates.

[00:05:48] Records show men [00:05:50] were given LSD for 77 days straight. Their pay, in some cases, the very [00:05:55] drugs that they were addicted to. And in Montreal, a respected psychiatrist named Ewen [00:06:00] Cameron takes money from that same front group. Cameron thinks he can wipe a mind [00:06:05] clean and rebuild it. He calls the first step de-patterning.

[00:06:08] His patients, they [00:06:10] come in for ordinary problems, things like anxiety and depression. One woman comes in after having a [00:06:15] baby, and what they get is heavy electroshock, weeks of drugged sleep, and [00:06:20] recorded messages played into their ears over and over again, sometimes days on [00:06:25] end. Some of them walk out unable to remember their own children, their own homes, and even years of [00:06:30] their own lives.

[00:06:30] Every one of these had a reason attached. Wait for it. Yeah, national [00:06:35] security or the Soviets. We had to know before they knew how to [00:06:40] do it. We had to is the oldest excuse there is out there. It's the sentence that lets [00:06:45] ordinary people sign off on horrific and terrible things. And look at the people on the receiving end, [00:06:50] men who couldn't report it, prisoners.

[00:06:52] Addicts, patients, the people [00:06:55] least likely to be believed. Pick the ones who can't complain. Yeah, that's the pattern. [00:07:00] So now here's a twist that the CIA definitely did not plan for. In [00:07:05] 1959, a young writing student named Ken Kesey signed up to be a paid [00:07:10] test subject at a veteran's hospital in Menlo Park, California.

[00:07:13] They give him LSD and [00:07:15] other drugs, and they take notes. Later reporting tied research like this [00:07:20] to government funding, though how directly it connects to MKUltra is still being [00:07:25] argued about, so I'm not gonna get into that here. Kesey goes on to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's [00:07:30] Nest, and then he throws parties called the Acid Tests.

[00:07:33] And a lot of what we call the [00:07:35] 1960s counterculture flows out of rooms like that. Maybe we'll dig into that in a future [00:07:40] episode. So a program built to control minds may have helped kick off the biggest wave of [00:07:45] question everything this country ever saw. You can't make this up. Uh, heck, [00:07:50] you don't have to make this up.

[00:07:51] Let, let's fast-forward to the early 1970s, shall we? Watergate is [00:07:55] blowing up. Congress is starting to ask what the spy agencies are even doing out [00:08:00] there. And in 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb order the [00:08:05] MKUltra files to be destroyed. Not a bonfire, a process. Paperwork filed, [00:08:10] boxes pulled, records poof, gone, clean, quiet, and official.

[00:08:14] [00:08:15] That's the part I want you to sit with for a moment. When the truth gets erased, it almost [00:08:20] never looks dramatic like you see on TV or in the movies. It looks like a routine. It looks [00:08:25] like record policy. June 1975, a presidential commission, the Rockefeller [00:08:30] Commission, releases its report on the CIA. Buried inside that report is a [00:08:35] short passage about an unnamed army scientist who was given LSD without his knowledge [00:08:40] and days later jumped from a hotel window.

[00:08:42] No name, just a paragraph. The Olson [00:08:45] family reads it and knows instantly that was Frank. 22 years, and they [00:08:50] find out from a damn newspaper. The story explodes. President Ford invites the family to the [00:08:55] White House and apologizes. Congress eventually approves a payment of about seven hundred and fifty [00:09:00] thousand, and the CIA director hands over some files.

[00:09:02] Case closed, right? A tragic accident during [00:09:05] a reckless experiment. The government says sorry, and let's move on. Frank's son, Eric, [00:09:10] did not move on. Thank goodness. Meanwhile, a researcher named John Marks keeps pushing with [00:09:15] freedom of information requests, and in 1977 Something wild happens. About [00:09:20] 20,000 pages of MKUltra records turn up, magically I guess, right?[00:09:25]

[00:09:25] They survived the purge, and they survived for one reason. They were financial records that were [00:09:30] stored somewhere else. Expense reports, receipts, you know, all the boring stuff. The [00:09:35] people who erased the program knew what to look for, you know, reports, experiments, [00:09:40] results, clinical trials, all that noise. But they missed the money, and the money always leaves a trail, [00:09:45] right?

[00:09:45] So on August 3rd, 1977, the Senate holds a hearing. CIA director [00:09:50] Stansfield Turner testifies. The 149 projects, the 80-plus institutions, the [00:09:55] testing on people who didn't know, it's all on record, not because the system confessed, but because [00:10:00] someone misfiled the damn receipts. Now, let's go back to Eric Olson, shall we?

[00:10:03] Because he never bought the [00:10:05] story, not the first story, and certainly not the second one either. In 1994, after his mother [00:10:10] passed away, Eric has his father's body exhumed. A forensic scientist named James [00:10:15] Starrs examines it. Here's what bothers Starrs. Frank Olson supposedly went through a closed [00:10:20] window, glass and all, but there were no cuts to his face or neck, and there's a blow [00:10:25] on the left side of his head that Starrs believes happened before his body hit the ground.

[00:10:29] [00:10:30] His conclusion? The evidence pointed more towards homicide than suicide. Then let's [00:10:35] add this, shall we? The CIA manual from that exact same era, a manual on [00:10:40] assassination, talks about how the most efficient accident is a fall from a height of 75 [00:10:45] feet or more onto a hard surface. So here's the question. Was Frank Olson murdered?

[00:10:49] Was he a [00:10:50] scientist who saw too much and wanted out, or perhaps he even became a risk? Let's be honest [00:10:55] about where the evidence stops. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office reopened the case. No [00:11:00] charges, no final ruling. Robert Lashbrook, the man in the room, always said Olson [00:11:05] jumped. Gottlieb, he died in 1999.

[00:11:07] Lashbrook died in 2002. So [00:11:10] no, it's not proven, but the official story, let's be honest, that's not airtight [00:11:15] either, and the people who could have closed the gap had 20 years in order to do it, and they [00:11:20] chose the paper shredder instead. There's one more question that's still hanging in the air [00:11:25] out there.

[00:11:25] The CIA's position has always been that MKUltra mostly failed. [00:11:30] No reliable truth drug, no reliable mind control, and maybe that's true But s- [00:11:35] stop and look at who's telling you this. That's the same agency that destroyed the damn evidence. [00:11:40] So, "Trust us, it didn't work," isn't a conclusion, it's a claim, and we don't have any files [00:11:45] to check on that claim, now do we?

[00:11:46] And what about all the internet stuff that's out there? You know, like the idea the [00:11:50] Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was an MKUltra creation. Here's what's real. As a Harvard student, he [00:11:55] was in a harsh psychology study run by Henry Murray, a man who had worked for the OSS. [00:12:00] Here's what's not. No document I've been able to come across ties that study to [00:12:05] MKUltra money.

[00:12:05] Creepy? Yes. Proven? No. Consider it, but don't [00:12:10] swallow it, my friends. So step back, because this was never really about LSD. It was [00:12:15] about shape. And once you see the shape or the pattern, you can't stop seeing it [00:12:20] almost everywhere. First, a scare. In this case, brainwashing. The enemy has a new weapon. [00:12:25] Then, secrecy, justified by that scare.

[00:12:28] We can't tell you or [00:12:30] they will know. Then, the cost lands on the people with the least power, the man in the [00:12:35] apartment, the prisoners, the patients, the scientist who wanted out. Then, when the [00:12:40] heat comes down, the records get culled quietly, "by process," he says with air [00:12:45] quotes. Then the truth comes out, but it comes out late.

[00:12:47] Maybe it comes out by accident, but [00:12:50] only partly. Decades later, when most of the people involved are retired or dead. And [00:12:55] finally, the line that closes the entire loop, "That was a long time ago. Things are different now." [00:13:00] Are they? You can lay this same pattern over the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, [00:13:05] the Operation Paperclip, which we dug into back in episode 70, or more [00:13:10] stories than you can even want to count.

[00:13:12] They're all out there. History doesn't repeat. We [00:13:15] do. I put together a free MKUltra case file for this episode. Uh, it's the full [00:13:20] timeline, what's on record versus what's still argued about, the questions that nobody have answered, and the links to [00:13:25] the actual government documents so that you can read them for yourself.

[00:13:27] It's free. No email needed. That link, [00:13:30] I'm gonna put that down in the show notes so you can check it out for yourself. If this one got under your skin, maybe you [00:13:35] wanna go check out my episode on Howard Hughes, which, you know, I'm calling the Epstein prototype. Same [00:13:40] era, same agency, a billionaire, a secret deal, and the CIA hiding [00:13:45] behind a front.

[00:13:45] You'll see this exact pattern play out all over again. That link, again, will also [00:13:50] be down in the, in the show notes. Here's what I keep coming back to. Frank Olson's family waited [00:13:55] 22 years to learn how he died, and they've waited even more than 70 to learn why. [00:14:00] Heck, that clock is still ticking. They may never know.

[00:14:02] And the only reason we know any of [00:14:05] this is because a stack of receipts that somebody somewhere forgot to shred. So [00:14:10] the next time someone tells you, "Trust us, it's for your safety," I want you to ask yourself [00:14:15] one question. What's in the boxes that they didn't miss putting into the shredder? Yeah. This, my friends, has [00:14:20] been some unapproved thinking.

[00:14:21] Tracy out.

[00:14:22] Intro Lady: If this story didn't sit right with you, [00:14:25] good. You're not here to be comforted. You're here to see what others overlook. [00:14:30] Thanks for exploring some unapproved thinking. Learn more at [00:14:35] someunapprovedthinking.com. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe, share, [00:14:40] and keep questioning because the pattern's still playing out, and next time we're going [00:14:45] deeper.