Frank Olson's Murder

[Hank Albarelli]

FRENCH GOVERNMENT QUERIES U.S. STATE DEPT. ABOUT LSD ATTACK

Washington, D.C. — According to informed sources, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research has received a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency, Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), concerning a recent account of American government complicity in a mysterious 1951 incident of mass insanity in France. The DGSE is the French counterpart of the CIA.

The incident took place in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France, and is described in a recent book about the 1953 death of an American biochemist, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments. The book, by investigative journalist H.P. Albarelli Jr., was published in late November 2009 by TrineDay, which specializes in books about “suppressed information.”

The strange outbreak severely affected nearly five hundred people, causing the deaths of at least five. For nearly 60 years the Pont-St.-Esprit incident has been attributed either to ergot poisoning, meaning that villagers consumed bread infected with a psychedelic mold, or to organic mercury poisoning. But Albarelli reports that the outbreak resulted from a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He notes that the scientists who produced both alternative explanations worked for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the Army and CIA with LSD.

The effect was devastating, as a contemporary French report made clear: “It is neither Shakespeare nor Edgar Poe. It is, alas, the sad reality all around Pont-St.-Esprit and its environs, where terrifying scenes of hallucinations are taking place. They are scenes straight out of the Middle Ages, scenes of horror and pathos, full of sinister shadows.” Even Time magazine took notice: “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead. Pont-Saint-Esprit’s hospital reported four attempts at suicide.”

A Department of Justice website on the dangers of LSD states that in the early 1950s “the Sandoz Chemical Company went as far as promoting LSD as a potential secret chemical warfare weapon to the U.S. Government. Their main selling point in this was that a small amount in a main water supply or sprayed in the air could disorient and turn psychotic an entire company of soldiers leaving them harmless and unable to fight.” The CIA entertained a number of proposals from American scientists concerning placing a large amount of LSD into the reservoir of a medium-to-large city, but, according to former agency officials, “the experiment was never approved due to the unexpected number of deaths during the operation in France.”

Albarelli also describes a series of small, secret chemical attacks by the CIA on the New York City subway system during the 1950s. Recently, the Army has referred to these experiments as “simulated tests,” but contemporary documents make no reference to simulation. An August 1950 FBI memorandum refers to “planned BW [biological warfare] experiments in the New York Subway System in September, 1950,” expressing concerns about “poisoning the water supply of a large metropolitan area at the source … the poisoning of food … sold to the general public.”

In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Albarelli claims, the Army drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between the years 1953 and 1965, and, with the CIA, experimented widely with LSD and other drugs through secret contracts with over 325 colleges, universities and research institutions in the U.S., Canada and Europe, involving about 2,500 additional subjects, many of them hospital patients and college students.

According to an official with the DGSE, who declined to be identified, “If the details of this book’s revelations prove to be true, it will be very upsetting for the people of Pont-St.-Esprit, as well as all French citizens. That agencies of the United States government would deliberately target innocent foreign citizens for such an experiment is a violation of a number of international laws and treaties.”

###

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Whoaoaoaoaoaooaaoaoaoaoaoaoa Ten Stars and i'm only on page 53. thats my Amazon review.

I am typing this with one hand, because this new book A Terrible Mistake is unputdownable. To operate motor vehicles within three hours of consuming it just might be terrible mistake2. It's mesmerizing.

[Bernice Moore]

http://qwstnevrythg.com/2010/01/a-terrible...ar-experiments/

http://astore.amazon.com/questieveryt-20/detail/0977795373

b

Edited February 26, 2010 by Bernice Moore

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

This book is incredible!!! It really shows like nothing else I have seen before how CENTRAL the MKULTRA Bluebird, Artichoke stuff was. I am continuously amazed at how VIRTUALLY ALL the key players of CIA then and later during JFK assassination were in some way or another involved in these 3 programs from at the latest 1953.

It really repositions these programs in terms of ones schema of CIA history, because it shows that the idea of compartmentalization, can obscure as much as reveal: your Kirkpatrick's might know one angle of a program and your Edwards' might know another, but they both knew important stuff very very early. Given the latter's role along with Houston in later "investigations" of the CIA, it is impossible for the readers new gleaning about the MKULTRA part not to affect his her view of the whole of CIA's later history.

In short, this book is a game-changer for even well read readers on this topic. I recommend people get this book now. Never has such a specific book been so general in its ramifications.

And I'm still only 1/3 of way through.

[John Simkin]

Part of Anthony Frewin's review of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments:

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lob...9/lobster59.pdf

On Thursday 19 November 1953 Olson attended a meeting at Deep Creek Lake with several of his colleagues and was slipped LSD laced with a ‘truth drug’ before being interrogated. He began to display strange behaviour, extreme anxiety, and feelings of paranoia. The loose cannon was now ricocheting about like the ball in a pinball machine. He was taken up to New York to see the CIA-approved Dr Abramson who seems to have realised that there was going to be no easy fix here. Then it was decided that Olson should be taken away to a secure CIA-approved asylum and the forcible removal of Olson from the Hotel Statler was entrusted to two ‘goons’. Things got out of hand in the hotel room and Olson was precipitated out the window with the goons probably thinking, they’ll thank us for this (indeed, they might even

have been instructed to do same). The two goons were Pierre Lafitte and Francoise Spirito. Who they?

Spirio and Lafitte

Spirito has been dubbed the father of modern heroin traffickers. He was born in Sicily in 1898 and spent his formative years in Marseilles. The 1970 French film Borsalino was largely based on his life but left out much of his less pleasing side, such as his Nazi collaboration during the war.

Just before the Olson business Spirito had been released from Atlanta’s Federal Penitentiary where he had been serving a

sentence for drug trafficking. Less than three weeks later he was picked up by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service and deported back to France where he died in 1967.

Spirito had known Lafitte since about 1939 and they had first met in Marseilles. It was Lafitte who engaged him for the job.

Now let’s turn to Lafitte. In 1952 nine large framed paintings including The Flaying of St. Bartholomew, believed to be by Mattis Preti, a famous Neapolitan artist, were stolen from St Joseph’s Cathedral in Bardstown, Kentucky. In April 1953 FBI agents arrested three people in Chicago in connection with the theft: Norton I Kretske, an attorney, Joseph DePietro, a deputy bailiff for a Chicago court, and an individual identified as Gus Manoletti. The case went to trial in October and the government’s second prosecution witness answered to the name of Jean-Pierre Lafitte but as he approached the stand he was recognised as Gus Manoletti.

Lafitte said he lived in San Diego and had been employed for the last three years as a special investigator for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Before that he had been employed overseas on ‘special missions for the United States government.’ He explained that he had been engaged by the FBI to locate the stolen paintings and had posed as a buyer in the art world and after months of undercover work had purchased the stolen paintings from Kretske and DePietro for $35,000. They were then arrested in a sting operation.

Since Lafitte was the government’s star witness, the attorneys for the defendants made strenuous efforts to find out more about his background. The prosecutors objected and the judge sustained their objections citing public interest issues and forbidding any disclosure. So, here we have a man trusted by government agencies and seemingly employed by

them over many years. It’s unclear when and where Lafitte was born; possibly Corsica in the early 1900s. He certainly grew up in Marseilles and in his early teens, either having run away from home or having been abandoned by his mother, was working in restaurant kitchens where he discovered a natural aptitude for cooking, a talent that would stand him in good stead throughout his peripatetic life.

His involvement in the Marseilles underworld parallels his restaurant work. The late 1930s found Lafitte travelling back

and forth between New York, Montreal, Boston, Paris and Marseilles, probably facilitating drug deals. During the 1939-45

war he is thought to have been involved in a number of OSS operations in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Sometime after the war he hooked up with George Hunter White, a buccaneering agent of the Federal Narcotics Bureau, who would provide plenty of work for him. (White had free access to LSD in the early 1950s and was dosing unwitting subjects left, right and centre in the many safe houses he ran for the FNB and other agencies).

In 1951 White enlisted Lafitte’s help in a major narcotics case. A Joe Dornay, an alias of Joseph Orsini, was arrested in

New York for drug trafficking. When he was placed in a cell on Ellis Island prior to deportation who was his cellmate? None

other than Lafitte, put there by the FBN to gather information about Orsini’s network. Orsini spilled the beans thinking that

Lafitte could mind the store while he was away. As it was, Orsini effectively handed the network on a plate to the FBN

and the FBI via Lafitte.

Lafitte’s career as a ‘non-attributable’ agent for various government agencies is described in great detail by Albarelli and includes the remarkable story of Joe Valachi, the Mafia song-bird, who had murdered John Joseph Saupp in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary yard. The US Attorney there had sought the death penalty but Valachi, through a go-between,

got a message concerning his predicament through to Robert Morgenthau who was then the US Attorney for the Southern

District of New York. The message was that he was prepared to tell all about the mob, as he subsequently did, in exchange

for the death penalty going away.4 Albarelli reveals Lafitte was that go-between.

In 1953 Lafitte had been working undercover doing lowly work in several New York hotels, probably for the FBN, certainly for George White. He was working at the Hotel Statler when Olson exited the window.

Shaw, Oswald, New Orleans

Now we’ll go to a contemporary ‘parallel’ universe: Clay Shaw, Lee Harvey Oswald, and New Orleans.

In 1967 the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested Clay Shaw for conspiracy in the assassination of John

F Kennedy. Shaw was a prominent New Orleans businessman and a leading director of the World Trade Center, a ‘non-profit association fostering the development of international trade, tourism and cultural exchange.’ In 1969 Sidney Gottlieb

announced at a staff meeting that the FBI had arrested Lafitte in New Orleans where he was working as the manager-chef of the Plimsoll Club within the World Trade Center5 (Shaw had praised him as ‘the best chef in New Orleans’ (Others who sang his praises included the Louisiana Governor John McKeithen and Mrs Lyndon Baines Johnson who sent him a letter from the White House. See ‘The Gourmet Pirate’, Time magazine, 19 December 1969.). Richard Helms, now director of the CIA, wanted to know what was going on and ordered an inquiry.

It transpires that the Feds had little choice but to pick Lafitte up as six years earlier he had swindled a businessman

out of $400,000 in an elaborate scam that involved diamond mines in South Africa.

However, Lafitte’s ‘interfacing’ with the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath do not end there. Earlier, in 1967 or 1968, with Allan Hughes, a CIA operative who had attended the Deep Creek Lake meeting where Olson had been dosed, and the reporter James Phelan, Lafitte burgled Garrison’s office to retrieve papers relating to Shaw.

And there’s an even more intriguing connection. On 9 May 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald applied for work at the William B Reily Coffee Company in New Orleans. The eponymous Reily was a rabid anti-communist who gave financial support both to Sergio Arcacha Smith’s Crusade to Free Cuba Committee and Ed Butler’s partially CIA-funded propaganda outfit, the Information Council of the Americas (INCA). The Reily vice-president, William Monaghan, was a former FBI agent and was a charter member of INCA. Jim Garrison believed that Reily’s was part of an intelligence apparatus. A view bolstered somewhat by Gerry Patrick Hemming’s claim that William Reily had worked for the CIA for years.

Oswald worked for Reily May through July, and Albarelli notes that ‘Around the time of JFK assassination’ Lafitte too

was working for the Reily company. The world gets smaller and smaller.

Lafitte is unknown in the literature of the JFK assassination. I checked the indices of some ten works. He’s obviously a person for whom further and better partics are needed.

[William Kelly]

http://deconstructingthemanifest.blogspot.com/2010/01/author-hp-albarelli-jr-on-connections.html

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys.

-Emma Bull

Of course it’s all connected; every facet of life is inextricably linked. It all began at the very beginning and continues today and into the future, all as part of the grand plan, all as part of the grand illusion that will be revealed only when the Creator sees fit.

-Eamonn Gabriel

Coincidence is best regarded as a crack in time, a gap in time’s narrative that requires filling in, elaboration. You see, when the entire story is laid before you the concept of coincidence simply vanishes and understanding takes its place.

-Eamonn Gabriel

On Dr. Frank Olson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, George Hunter White, CIA, MK/ULTRA, and MK/NAOMI, or Everything is Oddly Connected in the Clover Covered Fields of Camelot

by H.P. Albarelli Jr.

Many readers of my book, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, have written to me asking for further information about the varied connections between Frank Olson’s death and Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination. The following is an initial effort to answer those questions, and to further detail these connections. Of course, many of these connections are explained in greater detail in my book.

Often overlooked in the chronology of Lee Harvey Oswald’s early years is that when he was 13 years old he lived in New York City for a period of about one year, in 1952-1953. Astute readers will recognize these as critical years in the development and operation of the CIA’s MK/ULTRA safe house in New York operated by Federal Narcotics agent and CIA consultant George Hunter White. The first-floor safe house was located in Greenwich Village at the corner of Bedford and Barrow streets (the address was 81 Bedford Street). According to a 1978 CIA document, “an elusive Frenchman who was engaged in the import-export business” owned the two-story, brick apartment house, just a short walk away from one of White’s favorite watering holes, Chumley’s, perhaps a primary reason for its selection. The building that housed the safe house was torn down several decades ago. Chumley’s, with all its ambiance and ghosts, is still there today.

Marguerite Oswald, along with her son, Lee Harvey, moved to New York City from Texas in August 1952. For their first several weeks there, Lee and Marguerite lived in a small apartment, located at 325 East 92nd Street. The cramped apartment was shared with Lee’s half-brother, John Edward Pic, his 18-year old wife, and their newborn child. Pic was a Hospital Corpsman and Radioman with the United States Coast Guard. Beginning in early January 1952, and continuing for about four months, Corpsman Pic was assigned to assist with an outbreak of streptococcal at a U.S. Navy installation in Bainbridge, Maryland. Bainbridge is about 170 miles away from Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, Dr. Frank Olson’s place of employment. This was at the same time that the CIA initiated Project MK/NAOMI, a joint project with the Agency whereby Fort Detrick’s Special Operations (SO) Division, which Olson headed up, aggressively developed a virtual cornucopia of lethal biochemical weapons that the CIA could use in targeting both individuals and large groups of people for incapacitation or death.

Said one SO Division bacteriologist about MK/NAOMI: “Our mission was pretty simple and to the point: to provide the CIA with every means possible to maim or kill targeted groups or individuals through the use of toxic and lethal biochemical agents. We worked hard at it and delivered.” One the CIA’s earliest documents on the program’s genesis uncharacteristically lists its objectives in part: “How to knock off key people...knock off key guys… make death look as if from natural causes… [such as] method to produce cancer… and to make appear as heart attack.” The same memorandum cited the case of an imprisoned “Russian… who had been subjected to the routine administration of intimidation, bright lights and more severe roughing, followed by insulin shock.”

On site for the Bainbridge epidemic, along with Oswald’s half-brother, were bacteriologists from the U.S. Army’s biological warfare center, Fort Detrick, as well as physicians from the Armed Forces Epidemiological branch. Dr. Charles H. Rammelkamp, Jr., a member of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board (AFEB), was also there for the outbreak. Readers knowledgeable about the findings of the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1995, may recall that the committee took a cursory look at experiments reviewed, approved, and sponsored by the New York School of Medicine and AFEB, at the time of Rammelkamp’s tenure, on physically healthy mentally retarded children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York.

The experiments centered on subject children being fed infected stool extracts obtained from individuals with hepatitis, thus infecting the subject children with the virus. Additionally, Dr. Rammelkamp was at the center of another controversial experiment conducted in the early 1950s. This experiment, conducted concurrently with the Bainbridge outbreak, involved American servicemen stricken with streptococcal which can cause rheumatic fever and heart disease. The servicemen, hospitalized at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, were intentionally not treated with penicillin, which at the time was still being questioned as an effective treatment for rheumatic fever.

In a 1966 TIME magazine article, Harvard University’s Dr. Henry K. Beecher, who was asked by the magazine to consider Dr. Rammelkamp’s experiments, stated he was “concerned about experiments that are designed for the ultimate good of society in general but may well do harm to the subject involved.” Earlier Dr. Beecher had stated in the New England Journal of Medicine, that since World War II, the numbers of patients used as unwitting experimental subjects was increasing at alarming rates. Beecher told TIME editors that the increase was causing “grave consequences” but he declined to name any physicians, hospitals, or universities involved in such experiments. Beecher also did not reveal to TIME magazine, or anyone else, that he too, like other Harvard officials of his day and today, was also involved in such experiments and that for the past thirteen years, or longer, he had served the CIA as a covert informer and consultant on interrogation and mind control techniques, including the use of LSD, as well as his specialty anesthesia. [see my book for details about Dr. Henry Beecher’s work for the CIA overseas, which included several surreptitious meetings with Sandoz Chemical company officials.]

We do not know for sure if Dr. Frank Olson was among the Fort Detrick scientists who traveled to Bainbridge for the outbreak, but we do know that members of his division, Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, were there and that they were especially interested at the time in creating a biological warfare weapon out of the Group A streptococcus infection.

Group A streptococcus is a bacterium commonly found in the throat and skin. Infections can range from mild to life threatening. Detrick’s scientists wanted to employ the bacterium through aerial aerosol spraying, quite similar to what the SO Division had done earlier with an Eyes-Only, top-secret LSD experiment in a village in Southern France. That French experiment produced better than expected results, ,but drew more scientific scrutiny than anticipated. To circumvent this scrutiny, and to offer viable scientific explanations for the outbreak of insanity that took over the town, the CIA dispatched scientists from the nearby Sandoz Chemical company, the same company that provided the agency with the drug used in the experimental attack on the town. [Again, see my book on the so-called Pont St. Esprit “ergot outbreak.”]

From about 1948 on, through to the about 1968, Fort Detrick scientists mounted a variety of plans that involved surreptitious spraying attacks in both domestic and foreign locations. Two of the very first considered, according to once classified Army, FBI, and CIA documents were covert spraying in the New York subway system in 1949 and during the same years a simulated spraying attack using the ventilation system of the Pentagon building. Indeed, at the request of the CIA’s Technical Services Section, George Hunter White, in 1952, detonated a small aerosol device that released a cloud of vaporized LSD on a New York subway car. The reported results of this test were destroyed in 1973.

Also, quite interesting, is that in 1952, Dr. Olson’s Fort Detrick’s SO Division undertook covert advance work, with Army microbiologists posing as state public health workers, in the Florida towns of Avon Park and Carver Park. The covert work was in preparation for secret experiments to be conducted in 1956 through to 1958 with infected mosquitoes that were released in selected low-income African American neighborhoods with dense public housing. As a result, many men, women, and children became dreadfully ill and some died. One account of these secret experiments claims: “Within weeks of the first exposures, hundreds of men, women, and children became sickened with typhoid, mysterious fevers, chills, excruciating abdominal cramps, breathing problems including bronchitis, as well as neurological disorders such as encephalitis. Yet others dropped dead and mysteriously died.” [A FOIA request for documents regarding SO Division Florida experiments filed in 2002 by this author was refused because files were still classified.]

Equally noteworthy is, not long after the Florida experiments, Fort Detrick SO Division microbiologists assisted in several covert attacks against rural and agricultural areas in Cuba. These attacks involved aerial spraying and employed the swine flu virus, dengue, and other lethal bacterium. As a result, hundreds of farm animals and humans died. (Assumably, this type of covert action does not qualify as an act of terrorism against innocent populations because it is carried out against a nation that is not democratically controlled.)

After Bainbridge, from April 1952 to February 1953, Lee Harvey Oswald’s half-brother returned to New York City and was assigned to the Coast Guard’s Port Security Unit at Ellis Island. The Security Unit, an outgrowth of the Espionage Act of 1950, was charged with identifying, investigating, and ridding the New York harbor, longshoreman’s union, and maritime industry of Communists and subversive elements.

This assignment is extremely interesting because earlier, in April 1951, one of Frank Olson’s killers was being held, pending deportation, in a cell on Ellis Island. Later, at the same time that Oswald’s step-brother was assigned to duty on the island, several additional major drug traffickers from France and Corsica, apprehended in a major Federal Narcotics Bureau operation headed up by George Hunter White as a dual narcotics-CIA operative, were being held at Ellis Island. Illicit drugs impounded from these arrests were transferred to a secret holding compound in New Jersey, where according to CIA documents, the drugs were disbursed to various researchers under contract with the CIA and to other unknown places. One of the French traffickers apprehended by White would be sent to a federal prison in Atlanta where he would be subjected to intense mind control experiments. Multiple drugs were used during those experiments, including morphinum, dicain, and heroin. Some readers may recall that these same drugs in 1964 were discovered listed in Lee Harvey Oswald’s stepbrother’s notebook. (Dicain, according to pharmacists, has never been available in the U.S. It can only be purchased overseas, and was used in Eastern Europe.)

Of equal interest, is that earlier still, during World War II, White and a number of other FBN agents assigned to the OSS, precursor to the CIA, worked very closely in New York with Port Security and the Office of Naval Intelligence on what is now commonly called Operation Underworld. This was the top-secret project that involved the freeing from prison of infamous gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano in return for his, and the Mafia’s, assistance with the Allied invasion of Italy. All of the FBN agents assigned to work on Operation Underworld went on to become covert operatives for the CIA, and would become connected in a variety of ways with Projects MK/ULTRA and MK/NAOMI.

Worth noting here is that adjunct to the Espionage Act of 1950 was the Emergency Detention Act of 1950, which created six large internment camps for the purpose of receiving thousands of persons who were to be apprehended and detained in the event of an internal security emergency. Among the six camps nationwide was a barbed-wire surrounded former Army installation in Avon Park, Florida.

After a few tumultuous weeks living with half brother Pic, Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother moved to a small, dank, basement apartment located at 1455 Sheridan Street in the Bronx. Lee complained of having to sleep on the living room’s couch. At the time, Marguerite worked at Lerner’s Dress Shop located at 45 East 42nd Street. Interesting to note, is that George Hunter White’s wife, Albertine, called ‘Tine’ by those closest to her, shopped at Lerner’s and had friends who worked there. Like Marguerite, Albertine also worked in the clothing business as a buyer for the Abraham & Strauss Department Store in Brooklyn at 422 Fulton Street. After working at Lerner’s, Marguerite Oswald, in February 1953, went to work for Martin's Department Store in Brooklyn at 501 Fulton Street, a very short walk from where Albertine worked. Again, we find that Albertine had close friends who worked at Martin’s.

Albertine and George White enjoyed living in New York City. Their apartment was at 59 West 12 Street in the Village. They had many friends, although most of those friends were mainly attracted to the couple because of Albertine’s vivacious personality and charming ways. George could be quite gruff and moody. His consumption of large quantities of alcohol, mainly Gibson’s gin, didn’t serve to enhance his social skills. His propensity to surreptitiously dose visitors to his home with LSD, supplied to him by the CIA, also didn’t help matters much. On one of several such nights, George, much to Albertine’s displeasure, surreptitiously dosed a number of his and his wife’s friends, sending two women to the hospital in total dismay and fear at what was happening inside their heads.

George White used Central Park and the Bronx Zoo as rendezvous points for meetings with criminal-types, confidential informers, intelligence agents, and drug traffickers. White’s alias for conducting business with and for the CIA was “Morgan Hall.” Morgan Hall, named after magnate J.P. Morgan, is a section of the American Museum of Natural History in Central Park, opened in 1900. It houses the minerals and gems collection. According to the Warren Commission’s report, one of the first places Pic took Lee to sightsee was the Natural History Museum. George White’s date book for 1953 contains numerous references to his meetings with unsavory characters. In the interest of full disclosure, several notations cite a person referred to only as “Lee,” but I believe it extremely doubtful that this was 13-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald.

Lee Harvey Oswald apparently greatly disliked attending school in New York. His attendance records state that he was “excessively absent.” Teachers and school officials recall that Lee was an extremely smart youngster, but that he was also “refused to salute the flag” and preferred to be alone. Oddly, some teachers recalled him to be “slight…and thin”, others “well built.” Once, in the spring of 1953, Lee was picked up truant at the Bronx Zoo, a place he visited often, and returned to school by an attendance officer who Oswald angrily called a “damned Yankee.” (Lee’s father, Robert E. Lee Oswald, was named after the famous Confederate general.) Young Lee Harvey Oswald before entering the Marine Corps at age 17 lived in 22 homes, including foster homes and an orphanage, and attended 12 schools.

With continued school absences, in April 1953, Oswald was sent to Youth House located on 12th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues in Manhattan. Here he was placed under psychiatric observation. Observers termed him an “emotionally isolated boy”… “who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self involved and conflicted mother.” He was also described as having “superior mental resources and [he] functions only slightly below his capacity level in spite of chronic truancy from school which brought him into Youth House.” While at Youth House, Lee reportedly told Marguerite, “Mother, I want to get out of here. There are children in here who have killed people, and smoke. I want to get out.” Lee told a social worker at Youth House that he felt like “a veil” separated his life from those of others. He said he liked having the veil there.

Some delinquent boys sent to Youth House that were deemed incorrigible went on to the nearby Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey, a home away from home for what were then commonly called “juvenile delinquents.” This is no evidence that Oswald was ever sent to Bordertown, but physicians who worked at Bordertown also performed work at Youth House. Bordertown is mentioned here because during World War II and also in 1951 through to at least 1964 it was the site of secret CIA and U.S. Army mind control experiments. Dr. Carl C. Pfeiffer of Emory University, Atlanta and the University of Illinois Medical School oversaw some of these experiments, which were intended to both study and trigger “a model psychosis characterized by visual and auditory hallucinations.” Pfeiffer refined his objectives with extensive experiments in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Questioned about these experiments in 1981, the CIA’s Dr. Sidney Gottlieb said, “We learned a lot from the Atlanta experiments. The Agency learned that a person’s psyche could be very disturbed by those means.” (Readers can find far more about Dr. Pfeiffer’s work with the CIA, and with one of Olson’s assassins in my book.)

Earlier, during World War II, the Bordentown Reformatory was used by the OSS, precursor to the CIA, for truth drug experiments. These experiments included then OSS officer Capt. George White and psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie. In the late 1950s, Kubie wrote White a letter within which he “fondly” recalls their time together conducting drug experiments at Bordentown and at a state prison in Baltimore. Wrote Kubie: “I look back fondly on those days. What great fun we had.” (As my book details, Dr. Kubie treated my friend, former Hollywood producer, Bill Hayward, when he was just a youth. This experience, Hayward said, was a psychological low point in his life. I sadly believe it contributed greatly toward Bill’s eventual suicide.)

While at Youth House, Oswald was examined by three physicians. They were Dr. Renatus Hartogs, Chief Psychiatrist at the facility, Dr. Milton Kurian, a psychiatrist working for the New York Court system and Dr. Irving Sokolow, a Youth House psychologist. Dr. Sokolow found Oswald “withdrawn” and “presumably disinterested in school subjects”, but to have an intellectual functioning level “in the upper range of bright normal intelligence.”

Dr. Kurian, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association, who once wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy about Oswald after the assassination, examined Oswald, after Dr. Hartogs, at the request of a New York probation officer assigned to Oswald’s Domestic Relations Court case. Dr. Kurian spoke with Oswald only once, and concluded that the youngster “was withdrawn from the real world and responded to outside pressures to a degree necessary to avoid the disturbance of his residence in a fantasy world.” Kurian would later say that he felt Oswald was “mentally ill” and should have been hospitalized in a facility for children. [see John Armstrong’s interview with Kurian in Harvey & Lee, page 58.]

Youth House Chief psychologist Dr. Renatus Hartogs examined Oswald on May 1, 1953. Hartogs, born and schooled in Germany with additional advanced medical schooling and degrees from New York University and the University of Montreal Medical School, became a U.S. citizen in 1945. He told the Warren Commission in 1964 that he had been “impressed” by Oswald because the young boy “was in control of his emotions” and “showed a cold, detached outer attitude.”

In reply to this observation, Hartogs was leadingly asked, “As you remember what particular thing was it about Oswald that made you conclude that he had this severe personality disturbance?” Replied Hartogs, “It was his suspiciousness against adults, as far as I recall, his exquisite sensitivity in dealing with others, their opinions on his behalf. That is as far as I recall it.”

It is especially intriguing that Dr. Hartogs attended some of the wild LSD sorties that Dr. Harold A. Abramson held on his Long Island estate throughout the 1950s. Dr. Abramson was the “psychologist” to whom the CIA sent Frank Olson for treatment in New York City just days before his alleged “suicide”, which we now know to have been murder. Dr. Abramson was also the linchpin for many of the CIA’s MK/ULTRA and MK/NAOMI drug experiments, as was the much-overlooked Dr. Robert Hyde of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, who continued his work throughout the 1970s at the Vermont State Hospital, a facility with much less than a stellar record in the care of mentally ill patients. It is difficult to imagine that JFK assassination investigators from both the FBI and CIA, and members of the Warren Commission, were not aware of these relationships, yet they are never mentioned in documents detailing investigations.

There is more about Drs. Hartogs and Kurian. Dr. Milton Kurian, in 1964-65 was president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), a position that put him into frequent contact with Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, perhaps the most notorious of all MK/ULTRA experimenters. Cameron, who had been APA president in 1952-53, was an earlier founder, along with French LSD researcher Dr. Jean Delay, of the World Psychiatric Association. Files from the early 1950s reveal that this fledging association received surreptitious assistance from the CIA. Dr. Cameron’s work with LSD and “psychic driving” at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal was the subject of a high-profile lawsuit brought in the late 1970s that was spurred into action by the 1975 Rockefeller Commission revelations about Frank Olson.

It appears that Dr. Hartogs also held himself out as an expert on the occult. In June 1969, Dr. Hartogs appeared on a popular NBC-TV program, First Tuesday. The program focused on the subject of “Witches and Warlocks” and explored the question of why young people were so interested in occultism. Explained Dr. Hartogs: “The occult holds promise that no one else in our society can give. It helps the young person in his hopelessness.” Added Hartogs: “Black magic enables the young person to indulge in some form of aggression. It has a beneficial effect since it releases his pent-up hostilities and he can go on to maturity.” Over the years there have been several reports that Dr. Hartogs was also an aficionado of magic and that he knew famous New York stage magician John Mulholland, who made a brief but notable appearance in the Frank Olson case.

In 1975, a New York jury convicted Dr. Renatus Hartogs of malpractice. The jury awarded $350,000 in damages to Julie Roy, a secretary at Esquire magazine whom Dr. Hartogs had sexually exploited while she was his patient. At the time of the case, Hartogs wrote a widely read advice column for Cosmopolitan magazine. In 1976, Julie Roy co-author with New York Times reporter Lucy Freeman, a widely read book about her case, which was quickly made into a TV movie. Perhaps coincidentally, eleven years earlier, Dr. Hartogs had also co-authored a book with Lucy Freeman, The Two Assassins, about Oswald and Jack Ruby.

And then there is the matter of hypnotism. Highly respected JFK assassination investigator and author Dick Russell in his excellent book, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, reveals that Dr. Hartogs may have been adept at hypnotism, something never before reported anywhere. This information came to Russell from Dr. Milton V. Kline, a well-known authority on hypnotism, who had worked closely with the CIA on its Project Artichoke and MK/ULTRA hypnosis-related interrogation and mind control programs. Kline told Russell that Dr. Hartogs, after losing his license to practice psychiatry in the Julie Roy case, “set up shop as a hypnotist in New York.”

Kline also informed Russell that Hartogs had been involved “in some kind of government consultation”, and then days later reported that Hartogs may have been involved in the 1950s with Dr. Sidney Malitz, a psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), located only about ten blocks from where young Oswald’s New York address. In the early 1950s, hypnotist George Estabrooks wrote to CIA director Allen Dulles about the covert merits of hypnosis. Stated Estabooks, “The hypnotic state places a veil of sorts between the subject and the real world.”

Dr. Malitz worked under Dr. Paul Hoch, NYSPI Research Director. Hoch, a German who came to the U.S. with assistance from the Dulles family, went on to become Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s and New York’s Commissioner of Mental Health. In the early 1950s, Hochwas very much involved in experiments at the Bordentown Reformatory. As early as 1948, Hoch cited his Bordentown involvement in a book he edited, Failures in Psychiatric Treatment. Through Dr. Hoch, Malitz was involved in a number of covert contracts with the CIA and U.S. Army to perform experiments with psychosurgery, electroconvulsive therapy, LSD, mescaline, and other drugs. Kline told writer Russell that Hartogs worked alongside Malitz on some of these experiments.

Apparently, however, what both Kline and Russell did not know, or perhaps that Kline chose to not reveal to Russell, was that at least three of the covert contracts Dr. Malitz worked under were with Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, the unit that Frank Olson headed up at this very same time. As my Olson book details, months prior to Olson’s murder, a NYSPI patient named Harold Blauer died as a result of one of these Fort Detrick funded experiments. Blauer was unwittingly injected with a massive dose of mescaline that immediately sent his body into violent shock. Later, one NYSPI physician involved in the experiment said the Institute knew so little about mescaline that “for all we knew it could have been dog piss we were injecting [blauer] with.” In early 1954, as documented in my book, the Pentagon and CIA colluded to suppress the government’s involvement in the Blauer’s death and conspired to put strong pressure on one of the Blauer family’s attorney to not pursue any legal action.

And the story goes on.

[End of Part One of Three Parts]

Copyright© H.P. Albarelli Jr. 2009-2010. All Rights Reserved. May not be reproduced without express written permission from the author; may be quoted from only with proper crediting. Some of the above material, as well as ample supportive material, is taken from the author’s book: A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments [TrineDay Publishers, November 2009].

[Robert Howard]

http://deconstructin...onnections.html

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys.

-Emma Bull

Of course it's all connected; every facet of life is inextricably linked. It all began at the very beginning and continues today and into the future, all as part of the grand plan, all as part of the grand illusion that will be revealed only when the Creator sees fit.

-Eamonn Gabriel

Coincidence is best regarded as a crack in time, a gap in time's narrative that requires filling in, elaboration. You see, when the entire story is laid before you the concept of coincidence simply vanishes and understanding takes its place.

-Eamonn Gabriel

On Dr. Frank Olson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, George Hunter White, CIA, MK/ULTRA, and MK/NAOMI, or Everything is Oddly Connected in the Clover Covered Fields of Camelot

by H.P. Albarelli Jr.

Many readers of my book, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, have written to me asking for further information about the varied connections between Frank Olson's death and Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination. The following is an initial effort to answer those questions, and to further detail these connections. Of course, many of these connections are explained in greater detail in my book.

Often overlooked in the chronology of Lee Harvey Oswald's early years is that when he was 13 years old he lived in New York City for a period of about one year, in 1952-1953. Astute readers will recognize these as critical years in the development and operation of the CIA's MK/ULTRA safe house in New York operated by Federal Narcotics agent and CIA consultant George Hunter White. The first-floor safe house was located in Greenwich Village at the corner of Bedford and Barrow streets (the address was 81 Bedford Street). According to a 1978 CIA document, "an elusive Frenchman who was engaged in the import-export business" owned the two-story, brick apartment house, just a short walk away from one of White's favorite watering holes, Chumley's, perhaps a primary reason for its selection. The building that housed the safe house was torn down several decades ago. Chumley's, with all its ambiance and ghosts, is still there today.

Marguerite Oswald, along with her son, Lee Harvey, moved to New York City from Texas in August 1952. For their first several weeks there, Lee and Marguerite lived in a small apartment, located at 325 East 92nd Street. The cramped apartment was shared with Lee's half-brother, John Edward Pic, his 18-year old wife, and their newborn child. Pic was a Hospital Corpsman and Radioman with the United States Coast Guard. Beginning in early January 1952, and continuing for about four months, Corpsman Pic was assigned to assist with an outbreak of streptococcal at a U.S. Navy installation in Bainbridge, Maryland. Bainbridge is about 170 miles away from Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, Dr. Frank Olson's place of employment. This was at the same time that the CIA initiated Project MK/NAOMI, a joint project with the Agency whereby Fort Detrick's Special Operations (SO) Division, which Olson headed up, aggressively developed a virtual cornucopia of lethal biochemical weapons that the CIA could use in targeting both individuals and large groups of people for incapacitation or death.

Said one SO Division bacteriologist about MK/NAOMI: "Our mission was pretty simple and to the point: to provide the CIA with every means possible to maim or kill targeted groups or individuals through the use of toxic and lethal biochemical agents. We worked hard at it and delivered." One the CIA's earliest documents on the program's genesis uncharacteristically lists its objectives in part: "How to knock off key people...knock off key guys… make death look as if from natural causes… [such as] method to produce cancer… and to make appear as heart attack." The same memorandum cited the case of an imprisoned "Russian… who had been subjected to the routine administration of intimidation, bright lights and more severe roughing, followed by insulin shock."

On site for the Bainbridge epidemic, along with Oswald's half-brother, were bacteriologists from the U.S. Army's biological warfare center, Fort Detrick, as well as physicians from the Armed Forces Epidemiological branch. Dr. Charles H. Rammelkamp, Jr., a member of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board (AFEB), was also there for the outbreak. Readers knowledgeable about the findings of the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1995, may recall that the committee took a cursory look at experiments reviewed, approved, and sponsored by the New York School of Medicine and AFEB, at the time of Rammelkamp's tenure, on physically healthy mentally retarded children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York.

The experiments centered on subject children being fed infected stool extracts obtained from individuals with hepatitis, thus infecting the subject children with the virus. Additionally, Dr. Rammelkamp was at the center of another controversial experiment conducted in the early 1950s. This experiment, conducted concurrently with the Bainbridge outbreak, involved American servicemen stricken with streptococcal which can cause rheumatic fever and heart disease. The servicemen, hospitalized at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, were intentionally not treated with penicillin, which at the time was still being questioned as an effective treatment for rheumatic fever.

In a 1966 TIME magazine article, Harvard University's Dr. Henry K. Beecher, who was asked by the magazine to consider Dr. Rammelkamp's experiments, stated he was "concerned about experiments that are designed for the ultimate good of society in general but may well do harm to the subject involved." Earlier Dr. Beecher had stated in the New England Journal of Medicine, that since World War II, the numbers of patients used as unwitting experimental subjects was increasing at alarming rates. Beecher told TIME editors that the increase was causing "grave consequences" but he declined to name any physicians, hospitals, or universities involved in such experiments. Beecher also did not reveal to TIME magazine, or anyone else, that he too, like other Harvard officials of his day and today, was also involved in such experiments and that for the past thirteen years, or longer, he had served the CIA as a covert informer and consultant on interrogation and mind control techniques, including the use of LSD, as well as his specialty anesthesia. [see my book for details about Dr. Henry Beecher's work for the CIA overseas, which included several surreptitious meetings with Sandoz Chemical company officials.]

We do not know for sure if Dr. Frank Olson was among the Fort Detrick scientists who traveled to Bainbridge for the outbreak, but we do know that members of his division, Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division, were there and that they were especially interested at the time in creating a biological warfare weapon out of the Group A streptococcus infection.

Group A streptococcus is a bacterium commonly found in the throat and skin. Infections can range from mild to life threatening. Detrick's scientists wanted to employ the bacterium through aerial aerosol spraying, quite similar to what the SO Division had done earlier with an Eyes-Only, top-secret LSD experiment in a village in Southern France. That French experiment produced better than expected results, ,but drew more scientific scrutiny than anticipated. To circumvent this scrutiny, and to offer viable scientific explanations for the outbreak of insanity that took over the town, the CIA dispatched scientists from the nearby Sandoz Chemical company, the same company that provided the agency with the drug used in the experimental attack on the town. [Again, see my book on the so-called Pont St. Esprit "ergot outbreak."]

From about 1948 on, through to the about 1968, Fort Detrick scientists mounted a variety of plans that involved surreptitious spraying attacks in both domestic and foreign locations. Two of the very first considered, according to once classified Army, FBI, and CIA documents were covert spraying in the New York subway system in 1949 and during the same years a simulated spraying attack using the ventilation system of the Pentagon building. Indeed, at the request of the CIA's Technical Services Section, George Hunter White, in 1952, detonated a small aerosol device that released a cloud of vaporized LSD on a New York subway car. The reported results of this test were destroyed in 1973.

Also, quite interesting, is that in 1952, Dr. Olson's Fort Detrick's SO Division undertook covert advance work, with Army microbiologists posing as state public health workers, in the Florida towns of Avon Park and Carver Park. The covert work was in preparation for secret experiments to be conducted in 1956 through to 1958 with infected mosquitoes that were released in selected low-income African American neighborhoods with dense public housing. As a result, many men, women, and children became dreadfully ill and some died. One account of these secret experiments claims: "Within weeks of the first exposures, hundreds of men, women, and children became sickened with typhoid, mysterious fevers, chills, excruciating abdominal cramps, breathing problems including bronchitis, as well as neurological disorders such as encephalitis. Yet others dropped dead and mysteriously died." [A FOIA request for documents regarding SO Division Florida experiments filed in 2002 by this author was refused because files were still classified.]

Equally noteworthy is, not long after the Florida experiments, Fort Detrick SO Division microbiologists assisted in several covert attacks against rural and agricultural areas in Cuba. These attacks involved aerial spraying and employed the swine flu virus, dengue, and other lethal bacterium. As a result, hundreds of farm animals and humans died. (Assumably, this type of covert action does not qualify as an act of terrorism against innocent populations because it is carried out against a nation that is not democratically controlled.)

After Bainbridge, from April 1952 to February 1953, Lee Harvey Oswald's half-brother returned to New York City and was assigned to the Coast Guard's Port Security Unit at Ellis Island. The Security Unit, an outgrowth of the Espionage Act of 1950, was charged with identifying, investigating, and ridding the New York harbor, longshoreman's union, and maritime industry of Communists and subversive elements.

This assignment is extremely interesting because earlier, in April 1951, one of Frank Olson's killers was being held, pending deportation, in a cell on Ellis Island. Later, at the same time that Oswald's step-brother was assigned to duty on the island, several additional major drug traffickers from France and Corsica, apprehended in a major Federal Narcotics Bureau operation headed up by George Hunter White as a dual narcotics-CIA operative, were being held at Ellis Island. Illicit drugs impounded from these arrests were transferred to a secret holding compound in New Jersey, where according to CIA documents, the drugs were disbursed to various researchers under contract with the CIA and to other unknown places. One of the French traffickers apprehended by White would be sent to a federal prison in Atlanta where he would be subjected to intense mind control experiments. Multiple drugs were used during those experiments, including morphinum, dicain, and heroin. Some readers may recall that these same drugs in 1964 were discovered listed in Lee Harvey Oswald's stepbrother's notebook. (Dicain, according to pharmacists, has never been available in the U.S. It can only be purchased overseas, and was used in Eastern Europe.)

Of equal interest, is that earlier still, during World War II, White and a number of other FBN agents assigned to the OSS, precursor to the CIA, worked very closely in New York with Port Security and the Office of Naval Intelligence on what is now commonly called Operation Underworld. This was the top-secret project that involved the freeing from prison of infamous gangster Charles "Lucky" Luciano in return for his, and the Mafia's, assistance with the Allied invasion of Italy. All of the FBN agents assigned to work on Operation Underworld went on to become covert operatives for the CIA, and would become connected in a variety of ways with Projects MK/ULTRA and MK/NAOMI.

Worth noting here is that adjunct to the Espionage Act of 1950 was the Emergency Detention Act of 1950, which created six large internment camps for the purpose of receiving thousands of persons who were to be apprehended and detained in the event of an internal security emergency. Among the six camps nationwide was a barbed-wire surrounded former Army installation in Avon Park, Florida.

After a few tumultuous weeks living with half brother Pic, Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother moved to a small, dank, basement apartment located at 1455 Sheridan Street in the Bronx. Lee complained of having to sleep on the living room's couch. At the time, Marguerite worked at Lerner's Dress Shop located at 45 East 42nd Street. Interesting to note, is that George Hunter White's wife, Albertine, called 'Tine' by those closest to her, shopped at Lerner's and had friends who worked there. Like Marguerite, Albertine also worked in the clothing business as a buyer for the Abraham & Strauss Department Store in Brooklyn at 422 Fulton Street. After working at Lerner's, Marguerite Oswald, in February 1953, went to work for Martin's Department Store in Brooklyn at 501 Fulton Street, a very short walk from where Albertine worked. Again, we find that Albertine had close friends who worked at Martin's.

Albertine and George White enjoyed living in New York City. Their apartment was at 59 West 12 Street in the Village. They had many friends, although most of those friends were mainly attracted to the couple because of Albertine's vivacious personality and charming ways. George could be quite gruff and moody. His consumption of large quantities of alcohol, mainly Gibson's gin, didn't serve to enhance his social skills. His propensity to surreptitiously dose visitors to his home with LSD, supplied to him by the CIA, also didn't help matters much. On one of several such nights, George, much to Albertine's displeasure, surreptitiously dosed a number of his and his wife's friends, sending two women to the hospital in total dismay and fear at what was happening inside their heads.

George White used Central Park and the Bronx Zoo as rendezvous points for meetings with criminal-types, confidential informers, intelligence agents, and drug traffickers. White's alias for conducting business with and for the CIA was "Morgan Hall." Morgan Hall, named after magnate J.P. Morgan, is a section of the American Museum of Natural History in Central Park, opened in 1900. It houses the minerals and gems collection. According to the Warren Commission's report, one of the first places Pic took Lee to sightsee was the Natural History Museum. George White's date book for 1953 contains numerous references to his meetings with unsavory characters. In the interest of full disclosure, several notations cite a person referred to only as "Lee," but I believe it extremely doubtful that this was 13-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald.

Lee Harvey Oswald apparently greatly disliked attending school in New York. His attendance records state that he was "excessively absent." Teachers and school officials recall that Lee was an extremely smart youngster, but that he was also "refused to salute the flag" and preferred to be alone. Oddly, some teachers recalled him to be "slight…and thin", others "well built." Once, in the spring of 1953, Lee was picked up truant at the Bronx Zoo, a place he visited often, and returned to school by an attendance officer who Oswald angrily called a "damned Yankee." (Lee's father, Robert E. Lee Oswald, was named after the famous Confederate general.) Young Lee Harvey Oswald before entering the Marine Corps at age 17 lived in 22 homes, including foster homes and an orphanage, and attended 12 schools.

With continued school absences, in April 1953, Oswald was sent to Youth House located on 12th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues in Manhattan. Here he was placed under psychiatric observation. Observers termed him an "emotionally isolated boy"… "who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self involved and conflicted mother." He was also described as having "superior mental resources and [he] functions only slightly below his capacity level in spite of chronic truancy from school which brought him into Youth House." While at Youth House, Lee reportedly told Marguerite, "Mother, I want to get out of here. There are children in here who have killed people, and smoke. I want to get out." Lee told a social worker at Youth House that he felt like "a veil" separated his life from those of others. He said he liked having the veil there.

Some delinquent boys sent to Youth House that were deemed incorrigible went on to the nearby Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey, a home away from home for what were then commonly called "juvenile delinquents." This is no evidence that Oswald was ever sent to Bordertown, but physicians who worked at Bordertown also performed work at Youth House. Bordertown is mentioned here because during World War II and also in 1951 through to at least 1964 it was the site of secret CIA and U.S. Army mind control experiments. Dr. Carl C. Pfeiffer of Emory University, Atlanta and the University of Illinois Medical School oversaw some of these experiments, which were intended to both study and trigger "a model psychosis characterized by visual and auditory hallucinations." Pfeiffer refined his objectives with extensive experiments in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Questioned about these experiments in 1981, the CIA's Dr. Sidney Gottlieb said, "We learned a lot from the Atlanta experiments. The Agency learned that a person's psyche could be very disturbed by those means." (Readers can find far more about Dr. Pfeiffer's work with the CIA, and with one of Olson's assassins in my book.)

Earlier, during World War II, the Bordentown Reformatory was used by the OSS, precursor to the CIA, for truth drug experiments. These experiments included then OSS officer Capt. George White and psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie. In the late 1950s, Kubie wrote White a letter within which he "fondly" recalls their time together conducting drug experiments at Bordentown and at a state prison in Baltimore. Wrote Kubie: "I look back fondly on those days. What great fun we had." (As my book details, Dr. Kubie treated my friend, former Hollywood producer, Bill Hayward, when he was just a youth. This experience, Hayward said, was a psychological low point in his life. I sadly believe it contributed greatly toward Bill's eventual suicide.)

While at Youth House, Oswald was examined by three physicians. They were Dr. Renatus Hartogs, Chief Psychiatrist at the facility, Dr. Milton Kurian, a psychiatrist working for the New York Court system and Dr. Irving Sokolow, a Youth House psychologist. Dr. Sokolow found Oswald "withdrawn" and "presumably disinterested in school subjects", but to have an intellectual functioning level "in the upper range of bright normal intelligence."

Dr. Kurian, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association, who once wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy about Oswald after the assassination, examined Oswald, after Dr. Hartogs, at the request of a New York probation officer assigned to Oswald's Domestic Relations Court case. Dr. Kurian spoke with Oswald only once, and concluded that the youngster "was withdrawn from the real world and responded to outside pressures to a degree necessary to avoid the disturbance of his residence in a fantasy world." Kurian would later say that he felt Oswald was "mentally ill" and should have been hospitalized in a facility for children. [see John Armstrong's interview with Kurian in Harvey & Lee, page 58.]

Youth House Chief psychologist Dr. Renatus Hartogs examined Oswald on May 1, 1953. Hartogs, born and schooled in Germany with additional advanced medical schooling and degrees from New York University and the University of Montreal Medical School, became a U.S. citizen in 1945. He told the Warren Commission in 1964 that he had been "impressed" by Oswald because the young boy "was in control of his emotions" and "showed a cold, detached outer attitude."

In reply to this observation, Hartogs was leadingly asked, "As you remember what particular thing was it about Oswald that made you conclude that he had this severe personality disturbance?" Replied Hartogs, "It was his suspiciousness against adults, as far as I recall, his exquisite sensitivity in dealing with others, their opinions on his behalf. That is as far as I recall it."

It is especially intriguing that Dr. Hartogs attended some of the wild LSD sorties that Dr. Harold A. Abramson held on his Long Island estate throughout the 1950s. Dr. Abramson was the "psychologist" to whom the CIA sent Frank Olson for treatment in New York City just days before his alleged "suicide", which we now know to have been murder. Dr. Abramson was also the linchpin for many of the CIA's MK/ULTRA and MK/NAOMI drug experiments, as was the much-overlooked Dr. Robert Hyde of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, who continued his work throughout the 1970s at the Vermont State Hospital, a facility with much less than a stellar record in the care of mentally ill patients. It is difficult to imagine that JFK assassination investigators from both the FBI and CIA, and members of the Warren Commission, were not aware of these relationships, yet they are never mentioned in documents detailing investigations.

There is more about Drs. Hartogs and Kurian. Dr. Milton Kurian, in 1964-65 was president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), a position that put him into frequent contact with Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, perhaps the most notorious of all MK/ULTRA experimenters. Cameron, who had been APA president in 1952-53, was an earlier founder, along with French LSD researcher Dr. Jean Delay, of the World Psychiatric Association. Files from the early 1950s reveal that this fledging association received surreptitious assistance from the CIA. Dr. Cameron's work with LSD and "psychic driving" at McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal was the subject of a high-profile lawsuit brought in the late 1970s that was spurred into action by the 1975 Rockefeller Commission revelations about Frank Olson.

It appears that Dr. Hartogs also held himself out as an expert on the occult. In June 1969, Dr. Hartogs appeared on a popular NBC-TV program, First Tuesday. The program focused on the subject of "Witches and Warlocks" and explored the question of why young people were so interested in occultism. Explained Dr. Hartogs: "The occult holds promise that no one else in our society can give. It helps the young person in his hopelessness." Added Hartogs: "Black magic enables the young person to indulge in some form of aggression. It has a beneficial effect since it releases his pent-up hostilities and he can go on to maturity." Over the years there have been several reports that Dr. Hartogs was also an aficionado of magic and that he knew famous New York stage magician John Mulholland, who made a brief but notable appearance in the Frank Olson case.

In 1975, a New York jury convicted Dr. Renatus Hartogs of malpractice. The jury awarded $350,000 in damages to Julie Roy, a secretary at Esquire magazine whom Dr. Hartogs had sexually exploited while she was his patient. At the time of the case, Hartogs wrote a widely read advice column for Cosmopolitan magazine. In 1976, Julie Roy co-author with New York Times reporter Lucy Freeman, a widely read book about her case, which was quickly made into a TV movie. Perhaps coincidentally, eleven years earlier, Dr. Hartogs had also co-authored a book with Lucy Freeman, The Two Assassins, about Oswald and Jack Ruby.

And then there is the matter of hypnotism. Highly respected JFK assassination investigator and author Dick Russell in his excellent book, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, reveals that Dr. Hartogs may have been adept at hypnotism, something never before reported anywhere. This information came to Russell from Dr. Milton V. Kline, a well-known authority on hypnotism, who had worked closely with the CIA on its Project Artichoke and MK/ULTRA hypnosis-related interrogation and mind control programs. Kline told Russell that Dr. Hartogs, after losing his license to practice psychiatry in the Julie Roy case, "set up shop as a hypnotist in New York."

Kline also informed Russell that Hartogs had been involved "in some kind of government consultation", and then days later reported that Hartogs may have been involved in the 1950s with Dr. Sidney Malitz, a psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), located only about ten blocks from where young Oswald's New York address. In the early 1950s, hypnotist George Estabrooks wrote to CIA director Allen Dulles about the covert merits of hypnosis. Stated Estabooks, "The hypnotic state places a veil of sorts between the subject and the real world."

Dr. Malitz worked under Dr. Paul Hoch, NYSPI Research Director. Hoch, a German who came to the U.S. with assistance from the Dulles family, went on to become Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's and New York's Commissioner of Mental Health. In the early 1950s, Hochwas very much involved in experiments at the Bordentown Reformatory. As early as 1948, Hoch cited his Bordentown involvement in a book he edited, Failures in Psychiatric Treatment. Through Dr. Hoch, Malitz was involved in a number of covert contracts with the CIA and U.S. Army to perform experiments with psychosurgery, electroconvulsive therapy, LSD, mescaline, and other drugs. Kline told writer Russell that Hartogs worked alongside Malitz on some of these experiments.

Apparently, however, what both Kline and Russell did not know, or perhaps that Kline chose to not reveal to Russell, was that at least three of the covert contracts Dr. Malitz worked under were with Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division, the unit that Frank Olson headed up at this very same time. As my Olson book details, months prior to Olson's murder, a NYSPI patient named Harold Blauer died as a result of one of these Fort Detrick funded experiments. Blauer was unwittingly injected with a massive dose of mescaline that immediately sent his body into violent shock. Later, one NYSPI physician involved in the experiment said the Institute knew so little about mescaline that "for all we knew it could have been dog piss we were injecting [blauer] with." In early 1954, as documented in my book, the Pentagon and CIA colluded to suppress the government's involvement in the Blauer's death and conspired to put strong pressure on one of the Blauer family's attorney to not pursue any legal action.

And the story goes on.

[End of Part One of Three Parts]

Copyright© H.P. Albarelli Jr. 2009-2010. All Rights Reserved. May not be reproduced without express written permission from the author; may be quoted from only with proper crediting. Some of the above material, as well as ample supportive material, is taken from the author's book: A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments [TrineDay Publishers, November 2009].

Don't Know if its connected, But the potential is there.

George Hunter White obviously, is a person of more than passing interest, CIA "projects" are more of the same.

One of the more esoteric Warren Commission documents are portions of CD's 1516 and 1546, these documents reference, what is to myself a odd set of circumstances involving Marina Oswald, Ruth Paine and a person who I believe very strongly is one of those "intentionally misspelled names," in this case perhaps two different spellings.

Walter Carl Neuson, aka Walter Carl Neunson.

I chanced upon his name while working on an index of Warren Commission documents, in this case CD 1516

http://www.maryferre...911&relPageId=4

As you can see the Warren Commission Document title spells his name Neuson, but when you read the actual document, it is spelled Neunson; obviously that in itself, doesen't have significance, but it does if there is an underlying area that is being muted. Adding to the strange atmosphere of all of this is the fact that an HSCA Administrative

File has the following passage

ADMIN FOLDER-X6: HSCA ADMINISTRATIVE FOLDER, CIA REPORTS LHO pg 49

Found in: FBI - HSCA Administrative Folders

NOTE Classified "Secret as this refers-to-Project Hunter which is so classified by CIA Neunson an SI subject of Newark told Ruth Paine some time after the assassination that his son Edward met

RIF#: 124-10369-10063 (10/19/67) FBI#: 62-117290-ADMIN FOLDER-X6

http://www.maryferre...17&relPageId=49

The mary ferrell database has this entry

NEUNSON, WALTER CARL

Sources: CD 1516; CD 1546, pp. 220-249

Mary's Comments: He wrote letter to Ruth Paine 11/28/63 offering Marina Oswald a home in New Jersey; claimed his son, Edward, had met Marina; Marina remembered young man named Edward in Leningrad November 7 or 8, 1960.

I will forewarn anyone who has the inclination to dig into this obscurity, that the subject matter encompasses a wide swath of names and places, and there is the obvious reminder of a slip-up Marina made when she was interviewed at one time regarding her husband when she got a little confused and started reciting the history of Robert Edward

Webster and the Rand Corporation, instead of Lee Harvey Oswald, who, as far as the historical record goes had never had one iota of association with the RAND corporation, at least not in official documents I am aware of.

But don't take my word for any of the latter, you can read it for yourself courtesy of John Armstrong.

See

Harvey and Lee pages 256-259

there you will find all sorts of interesting Marina tales, these I personally are part of the real Marina Oswald account of what was really going on in Mother Russia, that the Warren Commission, and the HSCA for that matter, was not too excited about jumping into.

more

Marina and Ambassador to Afghanistan

Christopher Bird -RAND Corporation

Robert Edward Webster

See

http://www.maryferre....do?docId=16791

There are a myriad of documents [62 actually] at NARA under the subject HUNTER REPORT

http://www.nara.gov/cgi-bin/starfinder/1609/jfksnew.txt

when searching NARA under "PROJECT HUNTER" there is only one hit

104-10438-10067 MEMO:PROJECT HUNTER REPORT #142

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=8261

......references Boris Waldemar Karapitnitzsky with aliases

with the subject line reading ERROR -- COULD NOT LOCATE SUBJECT TERM!

It would not be out of the question to wonder if ALL of the headings under Hunter Report originally read "PROJECT HUNTER"

It would be very helpful to getting to a clearer picture of what was really going on "Back in The U.S.S.R," is convincing Messr. Armstrong to publish an "English" interview of the Zieger's that was conducted by Ignacio Zuleta circa 1995....

And I say that with all due respect for John......

The time for erasing the speedbumps has arrived.

Edited January 30, 2011 by Robert Howard

[Michael Clark]

A website dedicated to Frank Olson, by his family.

https://frankolsonproject.org/

 

it includes many interesting documents including a 159 page PDF of documents given to Olson's son by William Colby

http://frankolsonproject.org/staging01/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/William_Colby-1975-documents.pdf

 

Shanet Clark, forum member, had noted that a 1953 CIA Assassination Handbook could be found on the Frank Olson site. I did not find it there but this may be that document.....

https://ia801408.us.archive.org/35/items/CIAAStudyOfAssassination1953/CIA - A Study of Assassination (1953).pdf

 

 

Edited April 26, 2018 by Michael Clark

[Ron Bulman]

On 8/15/2010 at 2:19 AM, William Kelly said:

http://deconstructingthemanifest.blogspot.com/2010/01/author-hp-albarelli-jr-on-connections.html

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys.

-Emma Bull

Of course it’s all connected; every facet of life is inextricably linked. It all began at the very beginning and continues today and into the future, all as part of the grand plan, all as part of the grand illusion that will be revealed only when the Creator sees fit.

-Eamonn Gabriel

Coincidence is best regarded as a crack in time, a gap in time’s narrative that requires filling in, elaboration. You see, when the entire story is laid before you the concept of coincidence simply vanishes and understanding takes its place.

-Eamonn Gabriel

On Dr. Frank Olson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, George Hunter White, CIA, MK/ULTRA, and MK/NAOMI, or Everything is Oddly Connected in the Clover Covered Fields of Camelot

by H.P. Albarelli Jr.

Many readers of my book, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, have written to me asking for further information about the varied connections between Frank Olson’s death and Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination. The following is an initial effort to answer those questions, and to further detail these connections. Of course, many of these connections are explained in greater detail in my book.

Often overlooked in the chronology of Lee Harvey Oswald’s early years is that when he was 13 years old he lived in New York City for a period of about one year, in 1952-1953. Astute readers will recognize these as critical years in the development and operation of the CIA’s MK/ULTRA safe house in New York operated by Federal Narcotics agent and CIA consultant George Hunter White. The first-floor safe house was located in Greenwich Village at the corner of Bedford and Barrow streets (the address was 81 Bedford Street). According to a 1978 CIA document, “an elusive Frenchman who was engaged in the import-export business” owned the two-story, brick apartment house, just a short walk away from one of White’s favorite watering holes, Chumley’s, perhaps a primary reason for its selection. The building that housed the safe house was torn down several decades ago. Chumley’s, with all its ambiance and ghosts, is still there today.

Marguerite Oswald, along with her son, Lee Harvey, moved to New York City from Texas in August 1952. For their first several weeks there, Lee and Marguerite lived in a small apartment, located at 325 East 92nd Street. The cramped apartment was shared with Lee’s half-brother, John Edward Pic, his 18-year old wife, and their newborn child. Pic was a Hospital Corpsman and Radioman with the United States Coast Guard. Beginning in early January 1952, and continuing for about four months, Corpsman Pic was assigned to assist with an outbreak of streptococcal at a U.S. Navy installation in Bainbridge, Maryland. Bainbridge is about 170 miles away from Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, Dr. Frank Olson’s place of employment. This was at the same time that the CIA initiated Project MK/NAOMI, a joint project with the Agency whereby Fort Detrick’s Special Operations (SO) Division, which Olson headed up, aggressively developed a virtual cornucopia of lethal biochemical weapons that the CIA could use in targeting both individuals and large groups of people for incapacitation or death.

Said one SO Division bacteriologist about MK/NAOMI: “Our mission was pretty simple and to the point: to provide the CIA with every means possible to maim or kill targeted groups or individuals through the use of toxic and lethal biochemical agents. We worked hard at it and delivered.” One the CIA’s earliest documents on the program’s genesis uncharacteristically lists its objectives in part: “How to knock off key people...knock off key guys… make death look as if from natural causes… [such as] method to produce cancer… and to make appear as heart attack.” The same memorandum cited the case of an imprisoned “Russian… who had been subjected to the routine administration of intimidation, bright lights and more severe roughing, followed by insulin shock.”

On site for the Bainbridge epidemic, along with Oswald’s half-brother, were bacteriologists from the U.S. Army’s biological warfare center, Fort Detrick, as well as physicians from the Armed Forces Epidemiological branch. Dr. Charles H. Rammelkamp, Jr., a member of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board (AFEB), was also there for the outbreak. Readers knowledgeable about the findings of the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1995, may recall that the committee took a cursory look at experiments reviewed, approved, and sponsored by the New York School of Medicine and AFEB, at the time of Rammelkamp’s tenure, on physically healthy mentally retarded children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York.

The experiments centered on subject children being fed infected stool extracts obtained from individuals with hepatitis, thus infecting the subject children with the virus. Additionally, Dr. Rammelkamp was at the center of another controversial experiment conducted in the early 1950s. This experiment, conducted concurrently with the Bainbridge outbreak, involved American servicemen stricken with streptococcal which can cause rheumatic fever and heart disease. The servicemen, hospitalized at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, were intentionally not treated with penicillin, which at the time was still being questioned as an effective treatment for rheumatic fever.

In a 1966 TIME magazine article, Harvard University’s Dr. Henry K. Beecher, who was asked by the magazine to consider Dr. Rammelkamp’s experiments, stated he was “concerned about experiments that are designed for the ultimate good of society in general but may well do harm to the subject involved.” Earlier Dr. Beecher had stated in the New England Journal of Medicine, that since World War II, the numbers of patients used as unwitting experimental subjects was increasing at alarming rates. Beecher told TIME editors that the increase was causing “grave consequences” but he declined to name any physicians, hospitals, or universities involved in such experiments. Beecher also did not reveal to TIME magazine, or anyone else, that he too, like other Harvard officials of his day and today, was also involved in such experiments and that for the past thirteen years, or longer, he had served the CIA as a covert informer and consultant on interrogation and mind control techniques, including the use of LSD, as well as his specialty anesthesia. [see my book for details about Dr. Henry Beecher’s work for the CIA overseas, which included several surreptitious meetings with Sandoz Chemical company officials.]

We do not know for sure if Dr. Frank Olson was among the Fort Detrick scientists who traveled to Bainbridge for the outbreak, but we do know that members of his division, Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, were there and that they were especially interested at the time in creating a biological warfare weapon out of the Group A streptococcus infection.

Group A streptococcus is a bacterium commonly found in the throat and skin. Infections can range from mild to life threatening. Detrick’s scientists wanted to employ the bacterium through aerial aerosol spraying, quite similar to what the SO Division had done earlier with an Eyes-Only, top-secret LSD experiment in a village in Southern France. That French experiment produced better than expected results, ,but drew more scientific scrutiny than anticipated. To circumvent this scrutiny, and to offer viable scientific explanations for the outbreak of insanity that took over the town, the CIA dispatched scientists from the nearby Sandoz Chemical company, the same company that provided the agency with the drug used in the experimental attack on the town. [Again, see my book on the so-called Pont St. Esprit “ergot outbreak.”]

From about 1948 on, through to the about 1968, Fort Detrick scientists mounted a variety of plans that involved surreptitious spraying attacks in both domestic and foreign locations. Two of the very first considered, according to once classified Army, FBI, and CIA documents were covert spraying in the New York subway system in 1949 and during the same years a simulated spraying attack using the ventilation system of the Pentagon building. Indeed, at the request of the CIA’s Technical Services Section, George Hunter White, in 1952, detonated a small aerosol device that released a cloud of vaporized LSD on a New York subway car. The reported results of this test were destroyed in 1973.

Also, quite interesting, is that in 1952, Dr. Olson’s Fort Detrick’s SO Division undertook covert advance work, with Army microbiologists posing as state public health workers, in the Florida towns of Avon Park and Carver Park. The covert work was in preparation for secret experiments to be conducted in 1956 through to 1958 with infected mosquitoes that were released in selected low-income African American neighborhoods with dense public housing. As a result, many men, women, and children became dreadfully ill and some died. One account of these secret experiments claims: “Within weeks of the first exposures, hundreds of men, women, and children became sickened with typhoid, mysterious fevers, chills, excruciating abdominal cramps, breathing problems including bronchitis, as well as neurological disorders such as encephalitis. Yet others dropped dead and mysteriously died.” [A FOIA request for documents regarding SO Division Florida experiments filed in 2002 by this author was refused because files were still classified.]

Equally noteworthy is, not long after the Florida experiments, Fort Detrick SO Division microbiologists assisted in several covert attacks against rural and agricultural areas in Cuba. These attacks involved aerial spraying and employed the swine flu virus, dengue, and other lethal bacterium. As a result, hundreds of farm animals and humans died. (Assumably, this type of covert action does not qualify as an act of terrorism against innocent populations because it is carried out against a nation that is not democratically controlled.)

After Bainbridge, from April 1952 to February 1953, Lee Harvey Oswald’s half-brother returned to New York City and was assigned to the Coast Guard’s Port Security Unit at Ellis Island. The Security Unit, an outgrowth of the Espionage Act of 1950, was charged with identifying, investigating, and ridding the New York harbor, longshoreman’s union, and maritime industry of Communists and subversive elements.

This assignment is extremely interesting because earlier, in April 1951, one of Frank Olson’s killers was being held, pending deportation, in a cell on Ellis Island. Later, at the same time that Oswald’s step-brother was assigned to duty on the island, several additional major drug traffickers from France and Corsica, apprehended in a major Federal Narcotics Bureau operation headed up by George Hunter White as a dual narcotics-CIA operative, were being held at Ellis Island. Illicit drugs impounded from these arrests were transferred to a secret holding compound in New Jersey, where according to CIA documents, the drugs were disbursed to various researchers under contract with the CIA and to other unknown places. One of the French traffickers apprehended by White would be sent to a federal prison in Atlanta where he would be subjected to intense mind control experiments. Multiple drugs were used during those experiments, including morphinum, dicain, and heroin. Some readers may recall that these same drugs in 1964 were discovered listed in Lee Harvey Oswald’s stepbrother’s notebook. (Dicain, according to pharmacists, has never been available in the U.S. It can only be purchased overseas, and was used in Eastern Europe.)

Of equal interest, is that earlier still, during World War II, White and a number of other FBN agents assigned to the OSS, precursor to the CIA, worked very closely in New York with Port Security and the Office of Naval Intelligence on what is now commonly called Operation Underworld. This was the top-secret project that involved the freeing from prison of infamous gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano in return for his, and the Mafia’s, assistance with the Allied invasion of Italy. All of the FBN agents assigned to work on Operation Underworld went on to become covert operatives for the CIA, and would become connected in a variety of ways with Projects MK/ULTRA and MK/NAOMI.

Worth noting here is that adjunct to the Espionage Act of 1950 was the Emergency Detention Act of 1950, which created six large internment camps for the purpose of receiving thousands of persons who were to be apprehended and detained in the event of an internal security emergency. Among the six camps nationwide was a barbed-wire surrounded former Army installation in Avon Park, Florida.

After a few tumultuous weeks living with half brother Pic, Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother moved to a small, dank, basement apartment located at 1455 Sheridan Street in the Bronx. Lee complained of having to sleep on the living room’s couch. At the time, Marguerite worked at Lerner’s Dress Shop located at 45 East 42nd Street. Interesting to note, is that George Hunter White’s wife, Albertine, called ‘Tine’ by those closest to her, shopped at Lerner’s and had friends who worked there. Like Marguerite, Albertine also worked in the clothing business as a buyer for the Abraham & Strauss Department Store in Brooklyn at 422 Fulton Street. After working at Lerner’s, Marguerite Oswald, in February 1953, went to work for Martin's Department Store in Brooklyn at 501 Fulton Street, a very short walk from where Albertine worked. Again, we find that Albertine had close friends who worked at Martin’s.

Albertine and George White enjoyed living in New York City. Their apartment was at 59 West 12 Street in the Village. They had many friends, although most of those friends were mainly attracted to the couple because of Albertine’s vivacious personality and charming ways. George could be quite gruff and moody. His consumption of large quantities of alcohol, mainly Gibson’s gin, didn’t serve to enhance his social skills. His propensity to surreptitiously dose visitors to his home with LSD, supplied to him by the CIA, also didn’t help matters much. On one of several such nights, George, much to Albertine’s displeasure, surreptitiously dosed a number of his and his wife’s friends, sending two women to the hospital in total dismay and fear at what was happening inside their heads.

George White used Central Park and the Bronx Zoo as rendezvous points for meetings with criminal-types, confidential informers, intelligence agents, and drug traffickers. White’s alias for conducting business with and for the CIA was “Morgan Hall.” Morgan Hall, named after magnate J.P. Morgan, is a section of the American Museum of Natural History in Central Park, opened in 1900. It houses the minerals and gems collection. According to the Warren Commission’s report, one of the first places Pic took Lee to sightsee was the Natural History Museum. George White’s date book for 1953 contains numerous references to his meetings with unsavory characters. In the interest of full disclosure, several notations cite a person referred to only as “Lee,” but I believe it extremely doubtful that this was 13-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald.

Lee Harvey Oswald apparently greatly disliked attending school in New York. His attendance records state that he was “excessively absent.” Teachers and school officials recall that Lee was an extremely smart youngster, but that he was also “refused to salute the flag” and preferred to be alone. Oddly, some teachers recalled him to be “slight…and thin”, others “well built.” Once, in the spring of 1953, Lee was picked up truant at the Bronx Zoo, a place he visited often, and returned to school by an attendance officer who Oswald angrily called a “damned Yankee.” (Lee’s father, Robert E. Lee Oswald, was named after the famous Confederate general.) Young Lee Harvey Oswald before entering the Marine Corps at age 17 lived in 22 homes, including foster homes and an orphanage, and attended 12 schools.

With continued school absences, in April 1953, Oswald was sent to Youth House located on 12th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues in Manhattan. Here he was placed under psychiatric observation. Observers termed him an “emotionally isolated boy”… “who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self involved and conflicted mother.” He was also described as having “superior mental resources and [he] functions only slightly below his capacity level in spite of chronic truancy from school which brought him into Youth House.” While at Youth House, Lee reportedly told Marguerite, “Mother, I want to get out of here. There are children in here who have killed people, and smoke. I want to get out.” Lee told a social worker at Youth House that he felt like “a veil” separated his life from those of others. He said he liked having the veil there.

Some delinquent boys sent to Youth House that were deemed incorrigible went on to the nearby Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey, a home away from home for what were then commonly called “juvenile delinquents.” This is no evidence that Oswald was ever sent to Bordertown, but physicians who worked at Bordertown also performed work at Youth House. Bordertown is mentioned here because during World War II and also in 1951 through to at least 1964 it was the site of secret CIA and U.S. Army mind control experiments. Dr. Carl C. Pfeiffer of Emory University, Atlanta and the University of Illinois Medical School oversaw some of these experiments, which were intended to both study and trigger “a model psychosis characterized by visual and auditory hallucinations.” Pfeiffer refined his objectives with extensive experiments in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Questioned about these experiments in 1981, the CIA’s Dr. Sidney Gottlieb said, “We learned a lot from the Atlanta experiments. The Agency learned that a person’s psyche could be very disturbed by those means.” (Readers can find far more about Dr. Pfeiffer’s work with the CIA, and with one of Olson’s assassins in my book.)

Earlier, during World War II, the Bordentown Reformatory was used by the OSS, precursor to the CIA, for truth drug experiments. These experiments included then OSS officer Capt. George White and psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie. In the late 1950s, Kubie wrote White a letter within which he “fondly” recalls their time together conducting drug experiments at Bordentown and at a state prison in Baltimore. Wrote Kubie: “I look back fondly on those days. What great fun we had.” (As my book details, Dr. Kubie treated my friend, former Hollywood producer, Bill Hayward, when he was just a youth. This experience, Hayward said, was a psychological low point in his life. I sadly believe it contributed greatly toward Bill’s eventual suicide.)

While at Youth House, Oswald was examined by three physicians. They were Dr. Renatus Hartogs, Chief Psychiatrist at the facility, Dr. Milton Kurian, a psychiatrist working for the New York Court system and Dr. Irving Sokolow, a Youth House psychologist. Dr. Sokolow found Oswald “withdrawn” and “presumably disinterested in school subjects”, but to have an intellectual functioning level “in the upper range of bright normal intelligence.”

Dr. Kurian, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association, who once wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy about Oswald after the assassination, examined Oswald, after Dr. Hartogs, at the request of a New York probation officer assigned to Oswald’s Domestic Relations Court case. Dr. Kurian spoke with Oswald only once, and concluded that the youngster “was withdrawn from the real world and responded to outside pressures to a degree necessary to avoid the disturbance of his residence in a fantasy world.” Kurian would later say that he felt Oswald was “mentally ill” and should have been hospitalized in a facility for children. [see John Armstrong’s interview with Kurian in Harvey & Lee, page 58.]

Youth House Chief psychologist Dr. Renatus Hartogs examined Oswald on May 1, 1953. Hartogs, born and schooled in Germany with additional advanced medical schooling and degrees from New York University and the University of Montreal Medical School, became a U.S. citizen in 1945. He told the Warren Commission in 1964 that he had been “impressed” by Oswald because the young boy “was in control of his emotions” and “showed a cold, detached outer attitude.”

In reply to this observation, Hartogs was leadingly asked, “As you remember what particular thing was it about Oswald that made you conclude that he had this severe personality disturbance?” Replied Hartogs, “It was his suspiciousness against adults, as far as I recall, his exquisite sensitivity in dealing with others, their opinions on his behalf. That is as far as I recall it.”

It is especially intriguing that Dr. Hartogs attended some of the wild LSD sorties that Dr. Harold A. Abramson held on his Long Island estate throughout the 1950s. Dr. Abramson was the “psychologist” to whom the CIA sent Frank Olson for treatment in New York City just days before his alleged “suicide”, which we now know to have been murder. Dr. Abramson was also the linchpin for many of the CIA’s MK/ULTRA and MK/NAOMI drug experiments, as was the much-overlooked Dr. Robert Hyde of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, who continued his work throughout the 1970s at the Vermont State Hospital, a facility with much less than a stellar record in the care of mentally ill patients. It is difficult to imagine that JFK assassination investigators from both the FBI and CIA, and members of the Warren Commission, were not aware of these relationships, yet they are never mentioned in documents detailing investigations.

There is more about Drs. Hartogs and Kurian. Dr. Milton Kurian, in 1964-65 was president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), a position that put him into frequent contact with Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, perhaps the most notorious of all MK/ULTRA experimenters. Cameron, who had been APA president in 1952-53, was an earlier founder, along with French LSD researcher Dr. Jean Delay, of the World Psychiatric Association. Files from the early 1950s reveal that this fledging association received surreptitious assistance from the CIA. Dr. Cameron’s work with LSD and “psychic driving” at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal was the subject of a high-profile lawsuit brought in the late 1970s that was spurred into action by the 1975 Rockefeller Commission revelations about Frank Olson.

It appears that Dr. Hartogs also held himself out as an expert on the occult. In June 1969, Dr. Hartogs appeared on a popular NBC-TV program, First Tuesday. The program focused on the subject of “Witches and Warlocks” and explored the question of why young people were so interested in occultism. Explained Dr. Hartogs: “The occult holds promise that no one else in our society can give. It helps the young person in his hopelessness.” Added Hartogs: “Black magic enables the young person to indulge in some form of aggression. It has a beneficial effect since it releases his pent-up hostilities and he can go on to maturity.” Over the years there have been several reports that Dr. Hartogs was also an aficionado of magic and that he knew famous New York stage magician John Mulholland, who made a brief but notable appearance in the Frank Olson case.

In 1975, a New York jury convicted Dr. Renatus Hartogs of malpractice. The jury awarded $350,000 in damages to Julie Roy, a secretary at Esquire magazine whom Dr. Hartogs had sexually exploited while she was his patient. At the time of the case, Hartogs wrote a widely read advice column for Cosmopolitan magazine. In 1976, Julie Roy co-author with New York Times reporter Lucy Freeman, a widely read book about her case, which was quickly made into a TV movie. Perhaps coincidentally, eleven years earlier, Dr. Hartogs had also co-authored a book with Lucy Freeman, The Two Assassins, about Oswald and Jack Ruby.

And then there is the matter of hypnotism. Highly respected JFK assassination investigator and author Dick Russell in his excellent book, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, reveals that Dr. Hartogs may have been adept at hypnotism, something never before reported anywhere. This information came to Russell from Dr. Milton V. Kline, a well-known authority on hypnotism, who had worked closely with the CIA on its Project Artichoke and MK/ULTRA hypnosis-related interrogation and mind control programs. Kline told Russell that Dr. Hartogs, after losing his license to practice psychiatry in the Julie Roy case, “set up shop as a hypnotist in New York.”

Kline also informed Russell that Hartogs had been involved “in some kind of government consultation”, and then days later reported that Hartogs may have been involved in the 1950s with Dr. Sidney Malitz, a psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), located only about ten blocks from where young Oswald’s New York address. In the early 1950s, hypnotist George Estabrooks wrote to CIA director Allen Dulles about the covert merits of hypnosis. Stated Estabooks, “The hypnotic state places a veil of sorts between the subject and the real world.”

Dr. Malitz worked under Dr. Paul Hoch, NYSPI Research Director. Hoch, a German who came to the U.S. with assistance from the Dulles family, went on to become Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s and New York’s Commissioner of Mental Health. In the early 1950s, Hochwas very much involved in experiments at the Bordentown Reformatory. As early as 1948, Hoch cited his Bordentown involvement in a book he edited, Failures in Psychiatric Treatment. Through Dr. Hoch, Malitz was involved in a number of covert contracts with the CIA and U.S. Army to perform experiments with psychosurgery, electroconvulsive therapy, LSD, mescaline, and other drugs. Kline told writer Russell that Hartogs worked alongside Malitz on some of these experiments.

Apparently, however, what both Kline and Russell did not know, or perhaps that Kline chose to not reveal to Russell, was that at least three of the covert contracts Dr. Malitz worked under were with Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, the unit that Frank Olson headed up at this very same time. As my Olson book details, months prior to Olson’s murder, a NYSPI patient named Harold Blauer died as a result of one of these Fort Detrick funded experiments. Blauer was unwittingly injected with a massive dose of mescaline that immediately sent his body into violent shock. Later, one NYSPI physician involved in the experiment said the Institute knew so little about mescaline that “for all we knew it could have been dog piss we were injecting [blauer] with.” In early 1954, as documented in my book, the Pentagon and CIA colluded to suppress the government’s involvement in the Blauer’s death and conspired to put strong pressure on one of the Blauer family’s attorney to not pursue any legal action.

And the story goes on.

[End of Part One of Three Parts]

Copyright© H.P. Albarelli Jr. 2009-2010. All Rights Reserved. May not be reproduced without express written permission from the author; may be quoted from only with proper crediting. Some of the above material, as well as ample supportive material, is taken from the author’s book: A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments [TrineDay Publishers, November 2009].

Wow.  I've never come across this thread before.  Hank, John Simkin and Bill Kelly, who as always get's really deep. "Mother, I want to get out of here (Oswald)."