Written by ilene proctor   

CIA Gone Wild: Hank Albarelli’s True ThrillerL A Terrible Mistake, The Murder of Frank Olsen and the CIA’s Secret Cold War

Taking on the CIA is not for the faint of heart. It takes toughness, tenacity, and an undisputed moral compass. It’s those core values that compelled Hank Albarelli Jr. to spend ten years uncovering the dark truths in his formidable expose: A Terrible Mistake - The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments.

This book reveals a rogue government agency whose defining characteristic is dirty, scorched-earth policies carried out at any cost. It brings to light of day important new information from the 1950's heyday of Olson's work, delving into military and CIA Cold War experimentation, information which Olson’s death was intended to bury. Unwitting citizens were the subjects of mind-control experiments which lead to the development of techniques still employed today at Black Sites around the world. Among the details revealed are efforts to weaponize LSD for battlefield use and unconscionable tests on innocent civilians, including children.

Albarelli takes the mystery out of the darkest corners in CIA’s history – and he relates the story with character, with conviction, and with the blinders off. This is a riveting read, his text, defiantly disturbing, his writing style passionately grounded in reality; the whole, mesmerizingly capable of big, smacking, rhetorical home runs.

The scenes in his book are filled with characters deep into intrigue, their identity always in flux, like floating human jello. And yet these people, some, we discover, still in power, have the ability to tear somebody in two like they were a slice of bread. The conclusions of his detective work fit together like sword and scabbard. The book reads like fiction, yet we are reminded over and over again that we are dealing with long-denied truths.

The hard dirty facts of the CIA’s history come alive as you obsessively turn the pages. You’re riveted as he 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 .

Albarelli has racked 10 years of rough mileage researching this book, culling over 100,000 pages of classified documents, his track record cratered with deliberate potholes created by the Manhattan district attorney's office, which was also investigating the case, was nothing less than an exercise in squaring off with subterfuge.

I won't reveal the mystery Albarelli solves, i.e., who killed Frank Olson and why, but the long build-up describing the various covert operations of the intelligence agencies, well-documented in the book, builds to a startling pay-off.

Albarelli gives his readers so much juicy information, a veritable tsunami of exposed secrets and incrementing evidence. He details a myriad of CIA drug experiments and exposes a large number of previously anonymous physicians and business officials who contracted with the agency. The experiments resulted in the deaths of a number of people, permanently destroying the minds of others and sending many more seeking medical help.

The human faces of evil come alive. We become acquainted with some of the Agency’s creepiest characters including: Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the notorious MKULTRA program, whose mind control techniques included extensive use of LSD; the evil psychiatrist Dr. Harold Abramson; various Corsican mafia kingpins; and the ultimate spy, Pierre Lafitte who was not only ignominiously descended from the famous pirate captain, Jean Lafitte, he was also a paid CIA assassin, who just happened to be working as a bellman at the Statler Hotel the night Olson plunged to his death on a November night in 1953.

Frank Olson’s short descent from respected biochemist to an obituary footnote didn’t take long. But, there are no statute-of-limitations on murder.

What did Dr. Olson, a CIA scientist himself, do to deserve such a violent demise? After having been previously dosed with LSD, Olson crashed through a closed and shaded 10th story window of the Hotel Statler on 7th Ave in Manhattan. It was called a suicide. In the 1970’s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld succeeded in blocking his family's request for a new investigation into his death. Later, the Bush administration pushed for the legalization of some of the very torture techniques they had so successfully protected in the 1970's.

Whose secrets were being protected?

Hank Albarelli's chiller of a thriller "A Terrible Mistake, the Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments", a 900+ page volume based on over 100,000 pages of documents and interviews show how Frank Olson was actually murdered.

Why? The CIA was hell-bent on perfecting mind control techniques, including the creation of a “truth drug,” for use in interrogation of captured enemy operatives and to root out “the enemies within”.

Beginning in the 1940s Project BLUEBIRD began. These experiments were used on American citizens held captive in mental hospitals, without informed consent. The CIA also birthed synthetic THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, used in Project MKULTRA using human beings as guinea pigs with LSD and hypnosis.

A TERRIBLE MISTAKE reads like a roadmap to the drug culture of the 1960s and beyond. This investigation of unprecedented depth, including numerous first hand interviews, links yesteryear’s electric KoolAid with today’s “shock doctrine.”

In 1995, when Albarelli began to seriously investigate the strange death of Dr. Olson, 42, little did he suspect his investigations would span over 10 years and take him down the rabbit hole of history into the CIA’s deep involvement with drugs. Encountering fierce opposition from varied and surprising forces, he persisted, learning for himself the harsh lessons one gains in the pursuit of truth.

The seemingly unrelated mysteries of Dr. Olson's strange "suicide" in New York City in 1953 and the bizarre hallucinogenic outbreak in a small French village in August 1951 have independently provoked and perplexed serious investigators as related in countless accounts on the Internet and televised news features and documentaries for decades. While Olson’s death has long been suspect, little was offered in the way of real evidence, which now smacks of a classic government cover up which for years went undetected in the innocence of pre Vietnam 1950's America. Now, Olson's death can be definitively ruled a murder and the French outbreak explained as a sloppy military maneuver which resulted in the callous disregard of hundreds of innocent unwitting lives, some of whom took their own lives as an escape from the horror, others were doomed to a subsequent lifetime of insanity.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/24/818682/-A-Terrible-Mistake:-

The shocks never stop.

In late 1953 a high-ranking official of the Sandoz Chemical Company meeting with a CIA official made a startling revelation, that the 1951 so-called ergot outbreak in the French town of Pont St. Esprit was actually the result of a planned and secret biochemical experiment which resulted in the deaths of five people and also caused 300 people to seek medical care or to be placed in insane asylums for treatment. At the outset of Albarelli’s investigation, the outbreak was but a minor footnote in the bizarre history of LSD, but over time, fueled by the receipt of several never-before viewed CIA and White House documents it became amply apparent that the two events were inextricably connected.

------------------------------------------- The cursed bread of Pont-Saint-Esprit 50 years ago has turned out to have been a CIA mind control experiment.

It happened in 1951, a quiet little village in France become struck with a sudden wave of hallucinations and insanity. It had been believed for some time that the incident was caused by accidental bread poisoning but an investigative journalist now believes that it had actually been an intentional experiment conducted by the CIA during the cold war. -------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------- Today in the French News, was the startling announcement that the French Government is demanding explanations from the United States for a mysterious outbreak of mass insanity in the South Eastern Village of Pont-Saint-Esprit that occurred almost 60 years ago. 500 hundred people were affected and there were 5 deaths. The implications could have long range effects on Franco-American relations.

Motives behind Olson’s killing reveal the identities of the men who committed the act. Ties, hitherto unknown link Lee Harvey Oswald establishing for instance that young Oswald was seen by some of these same CIA mind control doctors in New York City, where so much of this experimentation took place, when he was only 13 years old and the murder of JFK, as well as to the infamous French Connection drug case. -------------------------------------------

The dynamics of state-sponsored assassination, the alliance in the 1950s and 1960s between the CIA and organized crime in America become startlingly clear.

The Artichoke Project, MK/ULTRA, MK/NAOMI, MK/DECOY and QK/HILLTOP are no longer dusty, frightening symbols of the past. Many of these Cold War programs served as the basis and templates for those controversial rendition and interrogation techniques employed by the Army and CIA today. Albarelli includes 42 pages of photographs and supporting documents from the files of The Agency for those in doubt.

This information has eluded two congressional hearings in the 1970's and, another requested investigation by Olson's family, was also blocked in 1975 by Cheney and Rumsfield. Once you start reading. A Terrible Mistake, it becomes painfully clear why such determined attempts were made to keep this information from the public.

Can the truth change this perception? If the truth can heal, then this book is a prescription for accountability. Make no mistake; this book will sear reader’s souls. It is a must-read for anyone who believes that following our constitution must be mandatory for the pursuit of good government and our democracy is not for sale for the highest bidder or the too-clever-for-words machinations of the CIA.

The story has done a full revolution around the planet! From France to UK, then from Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, Russia to Australia and Brazil...What's next?

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/cia-used-lsd-to-make-french-lose-the-loaf-2095194.html

Publisher: TrineDay November 2009 $34.94 USD $38.95 Canada

H.P. Albarelli Jr.

H.P. Albarelli Jr. is an investigative reporter and writer who lives in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. Other articles he has written about Frank Olson's death, as well as about the post-9/11 anthrax investigation, biological warfare, and other subjects, appear on the World Net Daily web site. Other writings by Albarelli may be found in WITNESS, a literary journal, and Tampa's alternative newspaper, The Weekly Planet. A graduate of Antioch Law School, Albarelli has worked as a researcher, scriptwriter, and technical consultant on several television documentaries including A&E's recent Investigative Report on Frank Olson produced by London's Principal Films. In 1977-80, Albarelli worked in the White House under the Carter Administration and then later served on the Senior Policy Staff for the Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C. Albarelli is a former board member of the London-based Transnational Information Centre and has traveled extensively throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. His novel THE HEAP was published in 2005. Albarelli's book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder Of Frank Olson And The CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, was published in 2010.