rigorousintuition.ca

H.P. Albarelli Jr. on his book, A Terrible Mistake, the Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Cold War Experiments

Talk Nation Radio for April 28, 2010

http://talknationradio.com/?p=1204

Mack White and I are interviewing Mr. Albarelli this Sunday night LIVE from 7-9pm CST.

PsiOp-Radio Sunday with guest H.P. Albarelli on MK-Ultra and the Murder of Frank Olson

Illustration by Mack White of biochemist Frank Olson, victim of a government LSD experiment, for Raw Deal: Horrible and Ironic Stories of Forgotten Americans by Ken Smith. (Blast Books, 1998)

http://psiopradio.com/2010/04/29/psiop- ... ank-olson/

For those of you who have or are reading the book please feel free to email me any specific questions you'd like pursued during the interview.

Other RI thread on this topic and book:

US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... =8&t=27163

Podcast is now online:

PsiOp Radio podcast 113 – 100502 with guest H.P. Albarelli
http://psiopradio.com/media/2010/POR100502a.mp3

Great job SMiles! Thanks for posting.

One of the best shows ever, Smiles. He could go on too, and on.

Project Willow wrote:Great job SMiles! Thanks for posting.

Sweejak wrote:One of the best shows ever, Smiles. He could go on too, and on.

Thanks PW and Sweejak. We had a great time talking with him. Gonna have him on again and am hoping to start significant email correspondence. His book is certainly a monumental resource.

This almost became a stream of consciousness mega meta meditation on mayhem, man. After listening to your show I went in for 2 hours of Scott Horton interviewing Peter Lance which had a similar effect. OD.

Sweejak wrote:This almost became a stream of consciousness mega meta meditation on mayhem, man. After listening to your show I went in for 2 hours of Scott Horton interviewing Peter Lance which had a similar effect. OD.

Sweet!


Yeah, that Horton interview was pretty interesting too.

Albarelli interviewed by UFO radioshow host Jerry Pippin...

CIA Dirty Tricks- They Hurt and They Kill- In this program Jerry talks with H. P. Albarelli, Jr. about his true Thriller: A Terrible Mistake - The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments. The conversation goes far beyond this incident from the cold war 50s, to what is happening today. The writer has spent ten years investigating in detail the hard dirty facts of the CIA’s history. This program explores 1950's Military and CIA Cold War Scientific and Medical experimentation in the fields of Mind Control, Psychological Operations, Interrogation, Torture, Psycho-Weaponry, Chemical and Biological Assassination and follows the trail that leads to the same activities still going on today.

MP3 Running time: 1 hour, 3 seconds
http://www.jerrypippin.com/MurderIncCIA(April2010).mp3

Windows Media Version Part 1
http://www.jerrypippin.com/Murder,%20In ... 25-10).wma

Windows Media Version Part 2
http://www.jerrypippin.com/Murder,%20In ... 25-10).wma

http://www.jerrypippin.com/Murder-Inc.htm

BBC Radio 4 documentary to be broadcast later on today
podcast will be available

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tg1y1

DOCUMENT

23/08/2010 20:00 on BBC Radio 4

Synopsis
On August 16th 1951 a number of people in the quiet southern French town of Pont St.Esprit began to fall ill. Stomach pains were soon followed by violent and often terrifying hallucinations. Local hospitals were soon overwhelmed and more than thirty people were taken to asylums in nearby towns. It was soon decided that the cause was bread poisoning and the evidence pointed to just one Bakery. The reason, it was believed was 'ergot', a fungal infection found in Rye bread which had often caused mass poisonings in Medieval times.

But documents obtained by the American writer Hank Albarelli suggest that rather than simple 'ergot' there was a strong possibility that the symptoms and the nature of the outbreak were not a tragic accident. In his research in to the mysterious death of the CIA biochemist Frank Olson and his post-war work on LSD and its uses as a biochemical weapon he got hold of papers implying Olson's connection with the Pont St Esprit outbreak.

Mike follows up the claims talking to experts in LSD and its impact, historians of the cold-war search for the perfect biochemical weapon and agricultural scientists specialising in ergot poisoning. He also visits the town of Pont St Esprit and talks to one survivor, the local postman Leon Armundier, about the events of 1951. Leon describes of the horrors he faced as a young man, being forced into a straight-jacket for a week as burning sensations and images of snakes raged around him.
Many in the town are uneasy at re-opening the old story about Le Pain Maudit - the evil bread - preferring the establishment 'truth' that it was just a tragic accident. But there are some who believe a proper examination of the facts still hasn't taken place.

Finally finished the book last night. The end is Chinatown brutal, and the appendix is better than most other books on the subject of CIA mind control experiments. Albarelli is a rare thing, I'm grateful he exists. This book was my top pick for this year:
http://www.brainsturbator.com/articles/ ... ding_list/

Great picks on your reading list, Wombat.

Wombaticus Rex wrote:Finally finished the book last night. The end is Chinatown brutal, and the appendix is better than most other books on the subject of CIA mind control experiments. Albarelli is a rare thing, I'm grateful he exists. This book was my top pick for this year:
http://www.brainsturbator.com/articles/ ... ding_list/

Thanks for vouching the book, I'd been wary since IIRC Albarelli uses the word "synchronicity" in a description of the project he's currently working on.

Dag, dawg, really? If the word "synchronicity" makes you uncomfortable, living here on Earth must really suck on a daily basis. You seem so hip and carefree, too.

Terrible Mistake is a single sourcebook, including tons of actual document scans, it is very carefully written, and it offers a total survey of everything published before it. I will be very interested to see how an author with Albarelli's levels of quality control will treat a subject as slippery as Synchronicity.

That said, I've seen it stated pretty clearly a number of times that his next project is a biography of Federal Narcotics agent extraordinaire George Hunter White, and it will be another heavy tome of serious journalism about a very murky and important subject. Meh. Here I am, doing free PR for this guy just because he's a Vermonter or something.

Anyways, some excerpts that I thought were important enough to take notes on...

Page 463:

On December 27 [1974], five days after [Seymour] Hersh's "massive spying" story hit news-stands, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Richard Cheney, advised President Gerald Ford to establish an executive branch blue-ribbon commission to investigate possible CIA activities. Cheney, who served in 1969-70 as a Special Assistant to Donald Rumsfeld, then director of the US Office of Economic Opportunity, told Ford he needed to act quickly to avoid the White House being "whipsawed by prolonged Congressional investigations" that were sure to come as a result of Hersh's revelations. Cheney advised that by appointing "a blue-ribbon investigative commission," the White House could seize the offensive, demonstrate leadership in troubled times, help re-establish public trust and faith in government, and perhaps circumvent "Congressional efforts to further encroach on the Executive Branch."

Cheney and Rumsfeld, along with the President's trusted counsel, Philip Buchen, futher advised Ford that he needed to exercise caution in appointing commission members so to avoid charges of initiating a whitewash effort.

Page 233. Some dubious clarity from Sidney Gottlieb...

"It's important to know I was not on the ARTICHOKE team, in the ARTICHOKE group that the Office of Security or Security Research ran. My knowledge of ARTICHOKE teams stems from my attendance at conferences and meetings at which I represented technical services [TSS]. ARTICHOKE and technical services were, in nearly every sense of the word, separate. They had separate purposes, separate supervision, not all the time in synch with one another... The Church Committee blurred the lines between all these programs, MKULTRA, ARTICHOK, Bluebird, QKHILLTOP, Chemical Corps, NAOMI, SHADE, all of them became one and I was... I didn't have any problem with answering for them all but I didn't... I didn't oversee all those projects. Let's leave it at that.

pg. 156 - CIA counsel Lawrence Houston on classified crimes...

"From time to time information is developed within the Agency indicating the actual or probably violation of criminal statutes. Normally all such information would be turned over to the Department of Justice for investigation and decision as to prosecution. Occasionally, however, the apparent criminal activities are involved in highly classified and complex covert operations. Under these circumstances investigation by outside agency could not hope for success without revealing to that agency the full scope of the covert operation involved as we as this Agency's authorities and manner of handling the operation. Even then, the investigation could not succeed without the full assistance of all interested branches of this Agency. In addition, if investigation developed a prima-facie case of a criminal violation, in many cases it would be readily apparent that prosecution would be impossible without revealing highly classified matters to public scrutiny.

The law is well settled that criminal prosecution cannot proceed in camera or on production of only part of the information. The Government must be willing to expose its entire operation if it desires to prosecute. In those cases involving cover operations, therefore, there appears to be a balancing of interest between the duty of enforece the law which is in the proper jurisdiction of the Department of Justice and the Director's responsibility for protecting intelligence sources and methods. This is further affected by physical considerations."

Interesting picks Wombat.

My copy is so dog-eared it's practically ruined at this point.

If I were to post a selection for the general RI community, although somewhat ironic considering my usual stance, it would be this beginning p.263:

H.P. Albarelli wrote:It is certainly intriguing, for a number of reasons, that the Agency included this reference [to Hasan-Dan-Sabah] in its assassination manual. First and Foremost is the nexus among Hasan-Dan-Sabah (also known as The Old Man of the Mountain), Hassan-I-Sbbah, and Iranian born in 1056 near modern-day Tehran, and the Knights Templar, a legendary group that nearly all of the CIA's founders and earliest employees openly admired and sought to emulate.

Respected writer and former Newsweek editor, Evan Thomas, writes in his masterful book, The Very best Men, that Willam Colby, an OSS officer who would later become DCI, "credited [Frank] Wisner [the former OSS officer who founded the CIA] with creating the atmosphere of an order of Knights Templar to save Western freedom from Communist darkness." Other prominent early CIA officials strove to perform "work worthy the Knights Templar" and to belong to a "cultish crusade."

That was from the chapter titled "Magic, Hypnosis, and High Strangeness" which goes on to a short review of the Agency's interest in UFOs.
Why high strangeness? Jeff, what is the origin of the phrase high weirdness?

further on the same page:

H.P. Albarelli wrote:Related to these esoteric and occult explorations is another CIA-requested task for Mulholland: "an examination and explanation of certain of the Masonic designs and architectural features incorporated into the Federal City." Among those listed for examination were "the capitol complex, the zodiacs of the Library of Congress, Meridian HIll Park, and the recently [1952] installed Mellon Fountain."

Your quote from p.233 Wombat, that is Gottlieb. One important issue that Albarelli points out is that nearly all published timelines of the projects are incorrect. Artichoke was not superseded by MKUlTRA, rather their timelines overlapped. Gottlieb and his TSS ran MKULTRA with former Bluebird director Morse Allen of the SRS still heading the earlier Artichoke until at least 1958. He did a lot of the initial work in hypnosis and became a skilled practitioner himself. I still think this quote a stunner:

H.P. Albarelli wrote:Certain fundamental questions were specifically answered in the course of the instruction and are regarded as being of extreme importance in BLUEBIRD work. The questions are set out in question and answer form below:
Question: What percent of subjects can be subjected successfully to hypnosis techniques?
Answer: 85% to 95%.
Question: Can a person under hypnosis commit an act against his religious or moral scruples or against his training or upbringing?
Answer: Yes. Anything could be done by a person under hypnosis, including murder.

Albarelli p. 224. (Morse Allen report, 1951)


Albarelli talks more about Gottlieb in a radio interview here:

http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/20 ... 3-SUB.html