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China’s ‘Indigenous Innovation’ Policy
How is the country's new innovation policy affecting companies?
Shin Su
As China continues to develop, concerns have been raised about the nation’s reliance on foreign technology. In the eyes of the central government, the country’s economic growth would be better handled if its own technology was used to drive its production capacity. That way, Chinese companies, not foreign-owned ones, will dominate the marketplace, something which they feel will promote long-term economic sustainability.
That’s why the Chinese government has put in place a policy of ‘indigenous innovation’, a system which gives preferential treatment to ideas and products created by Chinese companies. Almost every conceivable industry comes under the indigenous innovation policy, putting foreign companies, regardless of their speciality, at a considerable disadvantage.
It seems as if there’s a different set of rules for foreign companies operating in China. For example, 80% of all IP thefts from US based companies came from China in 2013, causing $300 billion in losses as cheap counterfeits became successful in the Chinese market. This led the US Trade Representatives to question China’s patent protection policy, especially if they want to become a technological powerhouse over the course of the next decade.
There’s evidence to suggest that China is now just too difficult a landscape to navigate. Pfizer, the US drugmaker, had to call a halt to its vaccine sales operations in the country after an import license for one of its most successful products was not renewed. The medicine, which was being used to treat children who have pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis, will be sorely missed, highlighting the somewhat backward nature of China’s innovation policy.
Some argue that the policy would make more sense if Chinese innovations were in fact homegrown. Many point to China’s attempt to create its own operating system as proof of this, as it was largely based on American company Linux’s open source system. This highlights that China still needs outsider influences to create technology that has the capacity to improve its public’s lives.
On the face of it, China’s indigenous innovation policy protects its own interests and puts the future of its economy in its own hands. It seems as if China, however, is resigned to the fact that it will have to relinquish some of its technology marketshare to companies from different countries. It was announced at the end of last year that China had dropped tariffs within 200 categories, a move which is likely to bring in $1 trillion in trade. This is the first time China has done this in 17 years.
Whether China can truly keep to the guidelines stated within its indigenous innovation policy remains to be seen. Its impact, however, could be substantial and damage the chances of us moving towards a truly globalized economy.
Panel Session: The Cultural Shift
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Crowdsourcing Opportunities and Pitfalls: Foreign Policy and Boaty McBoatFace
August 22, 2017/Michelle Bovée/No Comments
A vast population of nearly four billion people, more than the entire population of China, India, and the United States combined, inhabits the internet, which spells potential for many industries. We are all potential consumers for the goods, services, advertising campaigns, financial institutions, et cetera that can be found with the push of a button. We are also all possible contributors: a global base available 24/7 to provide insight, feedback, ideas, and funding to any project that needs help. With everything from developing card-based party games to finding and patching security flaws to book publishing capable of relying on some form of crowdsourcing, it is only natural to think of ways in which we could tap into the global potential available online in order to crowdsource foreign policy. While some possible applications, like crowdsourcing policy positions or laws, seem more trendy than actually useful, there are areas that could benefit from the wisdom of the crowd: counter-terrorism, climate change, and humanitarian assistance, for example.
Image courtesy of Agencia Brasil, © 2015.
The term “crowdsourcing,” or outsourcing work to a crowd, was coined in 2006 by a Wired columnist who wrote an article detailing some of the many uses of internet crowds, but the basic philosophy behind the term has been around for centuries. With the rise of the internet, however, crowds are exponentially larger, offering more varied skills and insights, and is more readily available. Four billion people around the world account for more than half of all households, many orders of magnitude beyond crowds of the past. Some of those people, like the ones who contribute to Wikipedia, are willing to share their knowledge and expertise for free, while others, like those who participate in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, will complete tasks for a small fee. Some donate money to projects that pique their interest (crowdfunding), some offer ideas for new inventions (crowd creation), some try to solve problems (crowdsolving), and much more. With all of these different applications of crowdsourcing, the possibilities are boundless.
The field of foreign policy has not been immune to the crowdsourcing trend. Already, Brazil has tested the idea of soliciting citizen input to create a Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, tech companies have collaborated with the U.N. to come up with ways to enforce a cease-fire in Syria, and a variety of initiatives have popped up to support and fund international development, just as a start. In the future, crowdsourcing could be used to harness global expertise to come up with solutions for the challenges like climate resilience and sustainable development that cross international borders. Anyone familiar with internet comments sections and the psychological phenomenon known as the online disinhibition effect will be a bit skeptical of the wisdom of relying on a crowd of anonymous strangers to draft a new law or participate in a productive policy discussion, though. For all the potentially beneficial uses of crowdsourcing, there are also opportunities for trolls to distort results and come up with deliberately bad ideas. Brazil’s internet civil rights law seems to have been a success so far, but that does not mean that all future attempts will meet the same fate.
As with anything, the key to successfully leveraging the opportunities offered by crowdsourcing while avoiding the pitfalls of having internet trolls run a project into the ground will be to apply the practice intelligently, and with restraint. Many governments have already learned the hazards that can come from falling to the temptation to jump on the bandwagon and let global digital crowds name new projects, like the British polar research ship dubbed Boaty McBoatFace or Slovakia’s Chuck Norris Bridge. Hopefully, they will apply the lessons learned if they are tempted to open up online polls for questions like how foreign aid should be distributed or how a particular law should be worded.
Projects that use crowdsourcing for data collection and problem solving, rather than voting or policy creation, seem to be the most likely to be beneficial. The United Nations, for example, has been testing different ways in which elements of crowdsourcing and big data posted on social media sites can be used to track food insecurity, provide feedback (not solicit ideas) on government decision-making, monitor online discourse on climate change, and evaluate the success of international development programs. Crowdsourcing intelligence to aid counter-terrorism efforts also seems like a promising avenue, especially since ISIS has been known to use crowdsourcing as a tactic to build notoriety by asking supporters the best way to eliminate enemies and execute strategy. Governments and international organizations can provide avenues for citizens to share information related to national security and, ideally, use that data to identify “lone wolf” terrorists and disrupt terrorist plots before they can be enacted.
There are, of course, ways in which this could go horribly wrong as well—see the popularity of swatting, which has itself been called a form of terrorism—but the ability to prevent violent actions and disrupt terrorist cells may outweigh those potential pitfalls. If we have learned anything from the Boaty McBoatFace fiasco, though, it is that the line between “democratic decision-making” and “international prank” can be easily crossed, so those looking to apply crowdsourcing techniques to issues more serious than naming a research ship will need to tread carefully.
Michelle Bovée
Michelle Bovee is a Market Intelligence manager at MAGNA Global, where she focuses on global advertising revenues and media cost trends, particularly in Western and Northern Europe. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master's degree in International Relations in 2013 and is currently living in New York City. You can connect with her on Twitter @boveemc.
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HomePosts tagged 'Hot Season'
Hot Season
Can a childless novelist write about moms?
February 28, 2018 Sue Fagalde Lick books about being childfree, books about childlessness, childless writer, Uncategorized After You, Azorean Dreams, books with no babies, books without children, childless women, Hot Season, Jojo Moyes, Me Before You, mom club, Rum and Coke, Susan DeFreitas, Up Beaver Creek, writers without children
An early reader of my new novel Up Beaver Creek, coming out in June, thanked me for writing about a woman who has no children. My protagonist, who calls herself PD, is unable to conceive with her husband. They are starting to look into adoption when he is diagnosed with cancer. He dies, and she moves west to the Oregon coast to start a new life as a musician. Lots of things happen along the way to make it interesting, but none of it is about having babies.
PD meets a colorful group of new friends, including a lesbian couple, a bipolar man who has created a garden out of glass and cast-offs, a young soprano who becomes her best friend, and a music store owner who likes to jam.
Most of the characters don’t have children. Even for those who do, the children do not play a big role in this book. Did I do this on purpose? No, I think it’s the just the way I see life. I do not live in the circle of mothers and grandmothers. I occupy the circle of women who live alone. Occasionally those circles cross. Is this a handicap? Can I write about something I have never experienced? I worry about that sometimes.
Ages ago, I wrote a never-to-be-published novel titled Alice in Babyland. I was still fertile back then. Our main character, Alice, is surrounded by people having babies. It’s driving her nuts. It’s not a very good novel, but it’s how I was feeling at the time.
My published novel Azorean Dreams ends with Chelsea and Simão getting married and preparing to “start a family.” You just know they’re going to have a flock of Portuguese kids. But readers will have to imagine that part.
I have been rewriting another novel I’m calling Rum and Coke. The characters do have children. One of them is pregnant. I’m struggling to get it right, to make the children real people and the relationships and challenges among parents, grandparents and kids authentic. I will never know how it feels from the inside, only from the outside. There are a lot of other things I have never experienced. I count on research, observation, and imagination to write about them. Can I do that with motherhood? I sure hope so.
Think about the books you have read or, if you don’t read books, the movies and TV shows you watch. How often are people portrayed as permanently childless by choice or by chance? We see a lot of single parents and a lot of couples with kids, but how many do we see without children?
The book I just finished reading yesterday, Hot Season by Susan DeFreitas, has no children, but the characters are mostly college students under age 25. Presumably, they’ll think about that later. In the book before that, Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You, nobody was talking about babies, either, but Louisa was very young, and Will was a quadriplegic contemplating suicide. The focus was on making him want to stay alive. I have ordered the sequel, After You. We’ll see if babies show up there. (If you have read it, don’t tell me.)
Is the tide turning? Are we getting more books where the characters are not moms and dads? Is fiction beginning to reflect the fact that one out of five women in the U.S. and other developed nations is not having children and the number seems to be growing?
I’m pleased to offer PD as a strong, childless woman. I hope that not being a mother doesn’t mean I can’t write about mothers or anyone else.
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March 14, 2018 / California, Los Angeles, Travel, USA / 0 comment
Getty Center Art Museum Los Angeles
Perched atop a hill with a stunning view, the Getty Center art museum in Los Angeles is worth visiting to see it’s incredible architecture and gardens as well as their art collection.
To reach the Getty Center, park or take a cab/bus to the visitors’ parking garage at the bottom of the hill and take the funicular up to the top.
The Getty Center houses the Getty Museum’s collection of pre-20th-century European paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, and decorative arts; and 19th- and 20th-century American, Asian, and European photographs. Keep your eyes peeled for the beautiful Vincent Van Gogh painting Irises.
We loved the Central Garden with its fountain flowing over rocks into a pool at the bottom, surrounded by a maze of azaleas and trees, and the outdoor sculptures on display throughout the terraces and gardens.
Visit the Family Room with kids to explore art with hands-on activities such as mask-making, playing with camera lenses, creating a tube sculpture and decorating a giant illuminated manuscript. .
Or, use the Art Detective Cards to engage kids in art around the galleries and garden. There is even a free multimedia GettyGuide® Family Tour with stories, music, and sounds inspired by art available at the GettyGuide Desk in the Museum Entrance Hall. Get more info on the Getty Center programs for families here.
1200 Getty Center Dr, Los Angeles
getty.edu
Entry into the Getty Center is free!
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SUBMARINE ENTERTAINMENT
By One9
SUBMARINE ENTERTAINMENT - as SALES All rights, World
Time Is Illmatic is a feature length documentary film that delves deep into the making of Nas’ 1994 debut album, Illmatic, and the social conditions that influenced its creation.
Nasir Bin Olu Dara JONES
Erik PARKER (Illa Films )
Time Is Illmatic is a feature length documentary film that delves deep into the making of Nas’ 1994 debut album, Illmatic, and the social conditions that influenced its creation. Twenty years after its release, Illmatic has become a hip-hop benchmark that encapsulates the socio-political outlook, enduring spirit, and collective angst of a generation of young black men searching for their voice in America.Time is Illmatic tracks the musical legacy of the Jones family, handed down to Nas from his jazz musician father, Olu Dara. It also examines the social conditions and environmental influences that contributed to Nas’ worldview. Along the way, Time Is Illmatic shows how Nas—with the support of his Queensbridge neighborhood crew, the loyalty of his younger brother Jabari “Jungle” Fret, and sacrifices of his mother, Ann Jones—overcame insurmountable odds to create the greatest work of music from hip-hop’s second golden era.
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Tag Archives: Finding Nemo
Top 25 Animated Films of the Decade: Part 1
The list-athon continues here at Cinematropolis, as we get closer and closer to year’s end. Last week I took a look at the top 15 Asian films of the decade, and today I’ve got animation on the roster. One of the things I learned from the last list, is that 15 is just too brief a number to really capture some of the decade’s best in a given category. I’m a HUGE animation fan and to even suggest that the achievements of the last decade can be distilled into even just 25 choices, let alone 15, is difficult. As it has to be limited, I have settled for a two-part list: one for the first ten, and one for the second, with 5 choices for honorable mention. Altogether that’s 25, and the honorable mentions and numbers 20-11 are up first. Enjoy! Continue reading →
Tags: A Scanner Darkly, animation, Beowulf, Best animated films, Best of the Decade, Brad Bird, cartoons, Disney, entertainment, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Finding Nemo, Gil Kenan, Kung-Fu Panda, Monster House, movies, Nocturna, Pixar, Princess and the Frog, Princess and the Frog review, Ratatouille, Richard Linklater, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, Tokyo Godfathers, top 25 animated films of the decade, Treasure Planet, Wallace and Gromit, Waltz with Bashir, Zemeckis
Movie Review: Pixar’s ‘Up’ soars in 3-D
Pixar’s Up is a grand adventure and a heart-warming drama that reaches new emotional heights for the animated film team. It’s not surprising that Up works as a superb family entertainment; after-all Lasseter and gang have yet to really miss. What is surprising is that Up, similar to last year’s brilliant Wall-E, manages to raise the bar for Pixar and gives us a film that exceeds both our expectations and the boundaries of its own premise. Like its protagonist Carl Fredrickson, Up takes off early and heads into the stratosphere, floating with ease for its entire running time and finally coming down to bask in the glow of the voyage.
For Pixar, Up marks a more adult journey than its predecessors. After Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2, Pixar had cornered the market on wonderful children’s films that appealed to both young tykes, their parents and everyone else in between. However, they were still, essentially, “kid’s films’. With Monster’s Inc. this began to change. The world of Monsters was a complete original and it took childhood imagination and married it to working class comedy and embedded something at the heart; a parent/child bond between Sully and little Boo. It was an enticingly complex and poignant relationship for a mere children’s film and it signified the move to a broader genre camp–the ‘family’ film. Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo boldly launched the company forward into that kind of family epic, and Brad Bird improved it with The Incredibles. And then, using the enjoyable Cars as a transition piece, the Pixar films changed. Ratatouille, Wall-E and now Up all share the fact that they don’t have a simple or easily marketable idea at their core; a rat who wants to be a French chef, a little worker robot who doesn’t speak and spends the first half of the movie puttering around an abandoned Earth, and now, the story of an old curmudgeon sailing his house to South America via thousands of balloons anchored through his chimney.
The new Pixar films aren’t limited to being simply kiddie or family pictures but are capable of functioning simply as ‘good movies’. Up(directed by Monsters helmer Pete Doctor) is like that, starting with an emotionally charged set-up and moving into a captivating lost world adventure worthy of a 30’s fantasy serial. The animation has reached such a level of sophistication that Pixar can combine stylized representations with nearly photo-real imagery and it all blends together perfectly. Some of the visual enchantments include a floating house lifted into the sky by thousands of shimmering balloons, a massive air-ship releasing canine-piloted planes, and characters who represent their own brand of animated evolution; an old man squared down by age and experience and a small, round little asian boy who has yet to encounter the defining and shaping events of life. All of it looks spectacular and there is a mesmerizing beauty to the soaring sky sequences and the passages that occur in South America.
Up’s strongest feature is the writing and character development. Carl Fredrickson is an old, house-bound widower who has ceased making contact with the outside world. The house that he bought and fixed up with his loving wife is still intact, but all around high-rises and skycrapers have cropped up and businessman are pursuing Carl’s property. Shortly after meeting the young and determined Russel, an overweight and clingy boy scout, Carl is faced with the possibility of losing his house and all the memories of his beloved wife along with it. His solution is the massive clot of balloons he attaches to the house which propel it airborne, tearing it from its foundation and floating away towards Paradise Falls, a lost world in South America that he and his wife had long dreamed of going to.
To say more of the journey, or how exactly Carl and Russell happen to be stranded in the floating house together would be to rob the film of some of its best moments. What is important is the way in which the filmmakers imbue Carl with a heartfelt quest and a desire to have one more great adventure for the sake of his wife. Their relationship is presented to us in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, when a young boy meets a hyperactive tomboy dreaming of far-off lands and exciting travel. That fifteen minutes, nearly as silent as the early parts of Wall-E, are the most emotional of the film; I was in tears half-way through. Ed Asner as Carl brings a weight to the role that carries all of that emotional currency with him through the fast-paced adventure segments. Russell, the little boy that accompanies Carl is primarily a bundle of energy but his home life has issues and he has latched onto this old man in a way that forces Fredrickson to consider something besides his own loneliness for the first time in years.
The theme of Up is refreshing as well. In the face of time and tragedy, which moments of our life are the ones that gave it meaning? The wide-eyed thrills or the smaller pieces? What Up does is give care and craft to both; the human drama is stronger here than it is in any ten live-action Hollywood dramas. The adventure in South America has a high-flung, good natured excitement to it and the action scenes in the air are far more rousing than anything in the last Indiana Jones film.
How about the 3-D? For the first time, I was enthralled by its use. When it requires dropping an extra four dollars to see a film in three dimensions instead of two, it really needs to work if I’m going to recommend seeing something that way. I totally recommend Up in 3-D. Instead of focusing on a series of “set pieces’ the animators have painstakingly designed each sequence of Up in a way that it immerses the viewer into the world of the movie. The 3-d only accentuates and deepens this immersion. Whether its seeing Carl’s house sail under darkening storm clouds or watching Russell dangle thousands of feet above the jungle, the 3-D opens up the animated world like a cinematic version of a pop-up book. There is a weight and texture to the flawlessly concieved art.
In any form, Up is worth a look. It stands at the forefront of this year’s most ambitious movies and so far it’s the best.
Tags: 3-D, animation, best films 2009, cinema, Disney, Ed Asner, fantasy, film, Finding Nemo, flying house, glasses, John Lasseter, Monsters Inc, movies, old man, Pete Doctor, Pxar, Toy Story, Up!
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'They' is Merriam-Webster's 2019 Word of the Year
Meghan Collie GlobalNews.ca
WATCH: The expanded definition of the word "they" comes with a goal of being more inclusive of people with non-binary gender identities.
The team at Merriam-Webster Dictionary has declared the personal pronoun “they” the 2019 Word of the Year.
In the last year, there was reportedly a 313 per cent increase in searches of the word “they” on the company’s online dictionary.
“I have to say it’s surprising to me,” said Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer and Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large, ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.
“It’s a word we all know and love. So many people were talking about this word.”
READ MORE: Non-binary pronoun ‘they’ added to Merriam-Webster dictionary
Sokolowski and his team monitor spikes in searches. “They” got an early start last January with the celebrated arrival of transgender non-binary model Oslo Grace on top fashion runways. They have since walked in both men’s and women’s shows around the world.
Another search spike occurred in April when U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal got emotional while talking about her gender-nonconforming child during a House committee hearing as she advocated for LGBTQ2 rights legislation.
The definition of “they” in relation to a person whose gender identity is non-binary was only added to Merriam-Webster in September this year. In October, the American Psychological Association (APA) endorsed “they” as a singular third-person pronoun in its latest style guide for scholarly writing.
READ MORE: Thanks, Forky — ‘Existential’ is Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year
“We believe writers should try to use a person’s self-identified pronoun whenever feasible,” said Jasper Simons, chief publishing officer for the APA. “The singular ‘they’ is a way for writers to avoid making assumptions about gender when it is not known.”
According to Helen Kennedy, executive director at Egale Canada, adding “they” to the dictionary as a non-binary pronoun is an important move.
“We often focus on legal changes and policy reforms to advance inclusion of LGBTQI2S people, but smaller steps like having they/them defined as a pronoun in the dictionary not only lifts a weight off of trans, non-binary, two-spirit and gender-diverse people when navigating everyday life, it also shows that our society is becoming more inclusive,” Kennedy previously told Global News.
“It also means there are zero excuses at this point for not respecting a person’s gender identity, and that is huge.”
Sokolowski told the Associated Press that “they,” one of a handful of non-binary pronouns to emerge in recent years, is “here to stay.”
Nick Adams, director of transgender representation for the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD, said Merriam-Webster’s choice is a positive step in acknowledging non-binary people.
“There is a long road ahead before language, policy and culture are completely affirming and inclusive,” Adams said.
The runners-up for Word of the Year included “quid pro quo,” “impeach” and “crawdad.”
READ MORE: Dictionary.com names ‘misinformation’ as 2018 Word of the Year
Last week, Dictionary.com named “existential” its 2019 Word of the Year.
“In our data, it speaks to this sense of grappling with our survival, both literally and figuratively, that defined so much of the discourse,” said John Kelly, senior research editor for the site, ahead of the announcement.
The word earned top-of-mind awareness in sustained searches at Dictionary.com in the aftermath of wildfires and hurricane Dorian and mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas. It also reared itself in presidential politics and pop culture, including Forky the white plastic spork, who was the breakout star of Toy Story 4.
READ MORE: Top of mind — ‘Justice’ is Merriam-Webster’s 2018 Word of the Year
The soiled utensil is convinced his destiny is in the trash until he embraces his purpose as a treasured toy of kindergartener Bonnie.
“Forky underscores how this sense of grappling can also inspire us to ask big questions about who we are, about our purpose,” Kelly told the Associated Press.
Oxford Dictionaries picked “climate emergency” as its Word of the Year, noting usage evidence that reflects the “ethos, mood or preoccupations of the passing year,” the company said in a statement.
— With files from the Canadian Press and Global News’ Laura Hensley and Arti Patel
Follow @meghancollie
Meghan.Collie@globalnews.ca
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About CWI
Our Objects
New Technology and the Law
Protection of Children’s Rights
Access to Justice for Victims of Domestic Violence in Russia
Access to Justice for Vulnerable Groups in Russia
Raising the Professional Standards of Defence Lawyers in Russia
Study Visit to London February 2016
New Technology & the Law
A Human Rights Perspective
Herzen University, St Petersburg
The international conference “New Technology and the Law – a Human Rights Perspective” took place on 4 November 2019 at Herzen University, St Petersburg.
Lawyers, academics and law students were invited to discuss the impact of modern technology on legal proceedings and the society.
Topics of the conference included:
Justice by algorithm and the role of artificial intelligence in policing and criminal justice systems
Transformation of criminal justice in the digital era
Access to justice, technology and human rights
The guidelines of the Council of Europe on the use of IA in judicial systems
Protecting the rights to equality, and discrimination in machine learning systems
Boriss Cilevics
Rapporteur of the PACE Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights
Christina Blacklaws
Immediate past President of The Law Society and Chair of the Technology and the Law Policy Commission
Clementina Barbaro
European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice
Roger Smith OBE
Lidiya Voskobitova
Moscow State Law University
Mike Rebeiro
Senior Advisor for Digital and Innovation, Macfarlanes law firm (London)
The international conference ‘New Technology & the Law – a Human Rights Perspective’ was the first event in Russia on the subject. We are proud of our pioneering role in opening the discussion in Saint Petersburg on the development of technology and Lawtech and its resulting human rights issues and challenges. The conference was attended by 70 participants: practising lawyers, law professors and students from various universities, IT specialists and human rights workers. It gave a good start for further discussion and research to be done by law students and legal professionals.
Benefiting from three screens, simultaneous translation equipment, built-in microphones at every seat, and excellent wi-fi, our distinguished speakers covered the following topics:
Boriss Cilevičs, a former computer scientist and a member of parliament from Latvia, spoke on Justice by algorithm: the work of the Council of Europe on the role of artificial intelligence in policing and criminal justice.
Christina Blacklaws, former President of the Law Society of England and Wales and Chair of its Legal Technology Policy Commission, which produced a wide-ranging report and recommendations about the use of algorithms in the justice system, shared her perspective on Technology and Innovation in Law.
Lidiya Voskobitova, professor of law at Moscow State Law University and author of 70 publications, examined the transformation of criminal justice basics in the digital era and human rights safeguards.
Clementina Barbaro, at the Council of Europe (CoE) for 16 years, presented the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) European Ethical Charter on the use of artificial intelligence in judicial systems, which is the first ever document on this issue in Europe and in the world.
Roger Smith OBE, a visiting professor of law at London South Bank University and an authority on legal aid, spoke of access to justice, human rights and technology.
Mike Rebeiro, senior advisor for Digital and Innovation, Macfarlanes LLP (London) rounded off the conference with his talk on protecting the rights to equality and non-discrimination in machine learning systems.
Contact Us for Further Details
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Indianapolis, Indiana Area
Michael founded M Productions with just a keyboard and laptop while he was still in high school in late 2006. Today, M Productions is home to a full roster of recording artists, engineers, producers and management, and has served as a commercial recording studio in Indianapolis, Indiana. Upon graduation from Full Sail University, Michael received his B.S. in Entertainment Business at the same time he continued to build M Productions, affectionately nicknamed “MPRO” by it’s fans and supporters. Today, Michael divides his time between managing & branding his artists and writing / producing songs for others and himself.
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I started music production / recording studio, M Productions L.L.C., in 2006 at the age of 15. The company grew from my house into a commercial space in Indianapolis and soon became one of the top Pop / Hip Hop recording studios in the city.
http://www.facebook.com/mproco
I have managed and developed a full roster of artists for a number of years and have built their brands accordingly to the ever changing music industry.
I built and operated a commercial recording studio in the city of Indianapolis and built a large client list of recording artists in various music genres.
http://www.mproco.com
Michael is awesome, plain and simple. It is extremely rare to come across a young person that is as devoted and driven as Michael. If you are needing any type of work in terms of music production or recording, contact him now!
Kyle Lacy Source: LinkedIn
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How to Write a Thesis That Is Not Too Broad or Too Narrow
By Ruth Nix
••• Digital Vision./Digital Vision/Getty Images
A thesis statement is a claim, usually made in the form of a single sentence at the end of an essay's introductory paragraph, that presents an argument or idea for the reader's consideration. The essay that follows provides and explores evidence that supports the writer's initial assertions. The thesis statement operates as a kind of "road map" to the body of the essay, allowing readers to see what key concepts and issues will be touched upon. The trouble for some writers, however, is knowing whether their thesis statements are attempting to cover too much ground, or, perhaps, too little. That said, finding a happy medium is essential to an essay's success.
Ask a series of questions about your essay topic. For example, if you are told to compose an essay on fast food, you might ask questions like: How much has the consumption of fast food contributed to the United States' obesity epidemic? Which fast food chain offers the best French fries? Can an individual support himself working at a fast food restaurant?
Strong thesis statements answer a specific question. To adequately narrow your topic, make sure you choose a detailed question with a debatable answer. Then ask: Is this something I can write about for the requisite number of pages? If the answer is "no," you might have outdone yourself, leaving too little to say.
Choose One Main Idea
Compose your thesis statement with a single claim in mind. Readers can easily become overwhelmed or confused if a thesis statement seems to present more than one idea. The Writing Tutorial Services at Indiana University, Bloomington, make example of the following: "Companies need to exploit the marketing potential of the Internet, and Web pages can provide both advertising and customer support."
The above statement tries to cover too much. This lack of organization can leave readers wondering not only what the essay hopes to achieve, but whether the writer is skilled enough to construct an accessible and intriguing argument.
Explain Your Thinking
Anticipate readers' initial questions. It isn't enough for a writer to state what he believes; he must also add what are often referred to as "because clauses" in order to further narrow his argument, helping readers to see not just the "what," but also the "why" behind his thinking. It can be helpful to fit your thesis to a prescribed form, such as: I argue that __, because __.
To prevent yourself from composing a thesis that is too complicated and too narrow, limit the number of reasons that follow the word "because" to no more than two or three.
Contain Your Topic
Place your subject in the smallest category possible when making an evaluative argument. For example, different film genres (or categories) work to achieve different artistic goals. A person who sees "Schindler's List" might not seek the same experience as someone who sees "Jaws." That's because one is a WWII-era historical drama and the other is a man vs. beast thriller. To compare the two would be akin to comparing apples and oranges.
Arguing that "'Titanic' is the best romantic historical drama" is far easier than arguing it's "the best movie." However, a thesis can become too narrow once the category given is so small, there is no longer room for debate, e.g., "'Titanic' is the best romantic historical drama of 1997 starring both Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio."
The Writing Center - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Thesis Statements
Writing Arguments: John D. Ramage, John C. Bean and June Johnson
Vanderbilt Writing Studio: How Do I Write a Thesis Statement
Writing Tutorial Services – Indiana University, Bloomington: How to Write a Thesis Statement
Purdue Online Writing Lab: Tips and Examples for Writing Thesis Statements
Dartmouth Writing Program: Writing a Thesis
Ruth Nix began her career teaching a variety of writing classes at the University of Florida. She also worked as a columnist and editorial fellow for "Esquire" magazine. In 2012, Nix was featured in the annual "Best New Poets" anthology and received the Calvin A. VanderWerf Award for excellence in teaching from the University of Florida.
Digital Vision./Digital Vision/Getty Images
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Posts Tagged Christina Resasco
Women’s Health in a Digital World
Posted by Darshana V. Nadkarni, Ph.D. in Big Data -Cloud -IoT-Software -Mobile -Entrepreneurship, Biotech - Medical Device - Life Science - Healthcare on May 27, 2014
At www.healthtechnologyforum.com annual conference in San Francisco, a group of eminent panel members, discussed opportunities and challenges in women’s health. Not only healthcare in general is undergoing a major transformation, but the panelists highlighted how the world of women’s health might also transform in the coming decade, as technology is increasingly used to address and bridge the gap that currently exists in women’s health and wellness.
Intel Health Guide remote monitoring system (Photo credit: connectologist)
Christina Resasco, Founder of Mobilize for Cure and Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s 2013 “Woman of the Year” award winner, moderated the panel, and asked insightful questions. Below are some highlights.
Robin Farmanfarmaian is a serial entrepreneur. Hear early diagnosis and battling an auto immune disease, later gave her the inspiration and passion for health and wellness. Farmanfarmaian has been a driving force behindSingularityUniversity’s highly successful FutureMed conferences. Farmanfarmaian said, the practice of medicine will be completely disrupted in 2-5 years and will involve POC devices that will enable consumer to be a key decision maker; devices that will help in early diagnoses of several diseases taking the doctor out of it.
Fiona Ma http://bit.ly/1pK4k5R, incumbent democratic candidate for State Board of Equalization, a reputed politician, and a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, California State Assembly. She has long a standing interest in health and wellness and is a tireless campaigner and spokesperson for “San Francisco Hepatitis B Free” campaign. Ma herself has battled Hepatitis virus. According to Ma, technologies that help the efficient and seamless transition to EMR or electronic medical records, will be very important. She also talked about how the government needs to find creative ways to work with the private sector, and not work in functional silos. Her advice to women seeking to compete in the men’s world was to be proactive in taking on greater responsibilities and self selecting when required, rather than waiting for others to appoint them.
Panelist Danielle Posa was diagnosed with stage 3 Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma http://bit.ly/QIKSHn, at the age of 5 and learned early about the value and limitations of human life. She campaigns and consults on health and wellness, and helps in fund raising efforts for Leukemia and Lymphoma societies. Posa has been interviewed by Deepak Chopra on his show “One World” and has also spoken alongside him. According to Posa, we need to integrate both the science and the art in implementing healthcare in the workplace. She seeks to connect the public and the private sector leaders and help them broaden their focus from traditional metrics like GDP to more wholistic measures that reflect the quality of life.
Anne DeGheest (http://bit.ly/176Ij4j ) founded Healthtech Capital and MedStars Venture Partners several years ago, with a mission to save lives, through utilization of technology. She believes, we need to think outside the box to influence positive change in consumer behaviors, in order to disrupt healthcare. She firmly believes that data for the sake of data does not do anything; instead technology focus will have to be on solving pain points. She said entrepreneurs often neglect the market and focus on building prototypes or products. She advised that instead the entrepreneurs focus on understanding the market and the value proposition they are offering, in to solve the pain points. She said historically healthcare has been sold to men, but in many households, the “chief medical officer” at home, are moms. One of the disruptions will occur on account of the wider role that pharmacy chains will likely play in healthcare, in future. Most of the Americans live within 3 mile radius of pharmacy chains and these chains will step in to provide basic care.
Vanessa Mason serves as Senior Manager with eHealth and ZeroDivide. She manages the project portfolio, contributing to design, development, and adoption of products and services that promote health equity. With a strong focus on healthcare disparity and how that negatively impacts women, Mason has sought to bridge the gap through efficient use of technology. By some estimates, in certain geographical areas in the US, about 4 in 10 women, do not receive healthcare. Rates of women without health insurance have been higher among African American women. Some recent projects “text for wellness” and “mobilize”, focused on cardivascular health prevention for African-American women. This was a great example of efficient use of technology that did not add to the costs, but effectively connected people to keep them informed and focused on meeting their wellness goals. Often these women are pursuing career opportunities while single handedly taking care of families and have to navigate multiple worlds. Technology can only help if it is easily accessible and affordable. She advised entrepreneurs that they focus on enhancing quality of life of the 80% of population towards the bottom of the pyramid, where there are many gaps that also represent huge opportunities.
Anne DeGheest, “mobilize”, “One World”, “San Francisco Hepatitis B Free”, “text for wellness”, “Woman of the Year” award, California State Assembly, cardivascular health prevention for African-American women, Christina Resasco, Danielle Posa, Deepak Chopra, Digital World, eHealth, Electronic Medical Records, EMR, Fiona Ma http://bit.ly/1pK4k5R, healthcare disparity, Healthtech Capital, http://bit.ly/176Ij4j, http://bit.ly/QIKSHn, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, MedStars Venture Partners, Mobilize for Cure, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Robin Farmanfarmaian, San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Singularity University FutureMed, State Board of Equalization, Vanessa Mason, Women’s Health, www.healthtechnologyforum.com, ZeroDivide
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David Varela in a cybernetic nutshell.
The Revelation of Miss White
Meet Lucy
AI-Spy
Balance of Powers
Five Days, Five Dates
Live Writing Series
A Knight’s Peril
Charge of the Light Brigade
Frozen Indigo Angel
Emergency SubNET
Dare You Watch?
National Maritime Museum: Compass Stories
Bill Hogan
Time Traveller’s Bureau
100 Hours of Solitude
100 Hours of Solitude: On Reflection
Nesta Hot Topics
Lewis Hamilton: Secret Life
Samurai Siege
Perplex City
Petra’s Planet
The Pepperhood
Art Heist
Some Change
Olivia’s Line
Postcards from a Cataclysm
The Parson
Voices through the Wall
Mother’s Ruin
Better Than Life
Memento at Trinity Buoy Wharf
Drinking to Remember
Flatpack
Bulletproof Interrogation
Sherlock: The Network
Wallace & Gromit in The Big Fix Up
Hollyoaks: DocYou
Writing for Games
TEDx: Throw your Story from a Plane
In defence of zombie rights
I took a bit of a chance on this one. Rather than go through the usual BBC commissioning process, I decided to write the script in full before sending it to a producer. Fortunately, they liked it and made it. You can listen to it online.
The story is told entirely from the perspective of two brothers, Ali (aged 15) and Steven (11). When their parents separate, Ali stays with their father while Steven heads off to live with their mother and her new lover. Isolated and confused, the lads try to piece together events from what they overhear.
The play was Critic’s Choice in the Daily Mail and Financial Times:
“David Varela’s two-hander is affectionately observed (there are no villains, only unhappy people doing their best), accurately charted and beautifully performed…” – Financial Times
The Seed: Facebook Fictions and Immersive Theatre
Posted on August 21, 2012 by Davidvarela
This piece first appeared on The Literary Platform on 20 August 2012.
Making a live, interactive story work across different platforms sounds daunting, but for the creator it can be just as thrilling as going up on stage yourself.
My name is David, and over the summer of 2012, I spent 10 weeks pretending to be a 27-year-old botanist called Helen Furnival. Helen was a fictional character in a project called The Seed, which incorporated four site-specific plays, a treasure hunt, and Helen’s online story, which unfolded in real time on Facebook. It was produced by Goat & Monkey Theatre as part of the Cultural Olympiad.
Helen’s Facebook profile clearly marked her as a Fictional Character – Facebook has a specific type of page for such entities – but that didn’t stop her striking up some very strong friendships and attracting a marriage proposal from somebody in Pakistan. The gallant gentleman refused to be put off by Helen’s insistence that she was fictional.
The transmedia writer Maureen McHugh has described this kind of work as “stories that come at you the same way life does” – and so many of our modern friendships are maintained through social media that it’s easy for us to suspend disbelief and engage with a fictional character on Facebook as though we were chatting with a friend. While Helen was portrayed in videos and photos by the actress Tam Dowsett, her words were mine. Almost every day, I would post long diary-style status updates and field comments and messages, replying to them all in character. It was a 10-week live performance.
Online improv
There is a unique joy in this kind of live interaction. Its closest equivalent is performing stand-up comedy, where the audience’s reaction is immediate and there is often an open dialogue with the performer (welcome or otherwise). And as in any part-improvised performance, there is huge pleasure in spontaneous creation.
Creating a realistic life for Helen meant that she was writing and replying to messages at all times of the day and night. Her insomnia mirrored mine, and when she was apparently in Shanghai, the timing of my posts had to suit her time zone. It was a 24-hour job.
Performing on a platform like Facebook has the additional thrill of analytics. There is something oddly addictive about racking up more and more ‘likes,’ seeing where your fans come from, and figuring out which posts have the most impact. By the end of the 10 weeks, Helen’s page had over 5,000 followers from all over the world.
Stretching the truth
This is all the more remarkable because The Seed was a very local and particular project. It was based on the true adventures of four Victorian plant hunters, who risked their lives searching for plants and seeds which they brought back to Britain for profit and the advancement of science. Robert Fortune, George Forrest, Frank Kingdon-Ward and Ernest Wilson all led incredible Indiana Jones lives, but many of their collections are gathered in the stately grounds of four gardens clustered together just outside London. That’s where the site-specific plays about each of their lives were performed. One of the gardens, Wakehurst Place, is also home to the Millennium Seed Bank.
While their biographies are incredible enough, I added a small layer of fiction suggesting that all of them had been looking for one seed in particular – and that Helen, a modern-day researcher at the MSB, had now stumbled on the trail over a century later. And that trail would lead to the resting place of the eponymous seed, which happened to be encased in a rather lovely piece of gold jewellery for whoever found it.
This story was literally rooted in the soil of a small corner of England. This limited the likely audience for the plays, but there are some types of interaction that can only happen in person. The one-to-one experience of a really immersive theatre production is hard to match any other way.
The plays were not typical Shakespeare in the Park outdoor productions. These were promenade shows that surrounded the audience. At one point, we had them running across a smoke-filled battlefield at night, dodging snipers and artillery fire.
Taking theatre out of the auditorium helps to break down that barrier between the audience and the actors, which can be extremely powerful if unpredictable. When one audience-member encountered a villainous character in the woods, he was so taken aback that he pushed the actor to the ground and ran away. He was very apologetic afterwards, saying he’d got carried away by the atmosphere. That’s a pretty wonderful compliment.
The surprising audience
This very unpredictability is what makes interactive projects endlessly entertaining to write. During The Seed, the biggest surprise of all came from a French-Canadian audience member named Ginette Racine. After complaining about the quality of Facebook’s automatic translation, she took it upon herself to translate everything Helen wrote into French, within hours or sometimes minutes of it going live. She also translated the scripts of the four plays as they were released, free of charge and in her own time.
Ginette is a playwright and drama teacher, and she is now drawing up plans to write and stage her own adaptation of The Seed for a Quebecois audience. I’m delighted to let her – and anyone else who wants to take it on in any other country or language. The Seed was a one-time-only, site-specific show designed for a particular audience. It was only supposed to live on in memory. But now it seems that it will stay alive far longer than we ever intended.
Prometheus and the Midichlorian Problem: When Storytellers Should STFU 1 Reply
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30 Years Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Europe, News
West and East Germans at the Brandenburg Gate in 1989 / Reproduction by Lear 21 (wikimedia.org) / CC BY-SA 3.0 / Edited
This Saturday, 9 November, marks 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The anniversary offers an important opportunity to look back at three decades of human rights wins in Europe. It is also a reminder to look ahead and highlight the work left to do.
It has been 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, marking the end of the cold war. The dissolution of the Soviet Union became a reality, and new states emerged. Most of them were eager to establish a democratic social structure, and many of them succeeded. But some, like Belarus and Turkmenistan, are still a long way from achieving constitutionality and democracy.
“Europe has seen great developments in many respects since the German reunification. But progress has not been without its tragedies. In the 90’s, the world watched as hundreds of thousands of people fell victim to brutality and war crimes during the war in former Yugoslavia,” says Anders L. Pettersson, Executive Director, Civil Rights Defenders.
Civil Rights Defenders was founded as The Swedish Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in 1982, in the midst of the cold war. Since then, Civil Rights Defenders has worked to safeguard the individual’s right to know and act upon their rights, as stated in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act.
“Civil Rights Defenders has supported the establishment of many human rights organisations and independent media in Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. We have seen first-hand how a strong and independent civil society is key to a functioning democracy. This was true then, and is still true today,” says Anders L. Pettersson.
While human rights standards have improved significantly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is again facing a democratic backslide. The growing number of neo-Nazis, right-wing extremists, and populist politicians is now a substantial threat to democracy and civil and political rights in European countries like Poland, Hungary, and Turkey.
“These are worrying trends. For a long time, European leaders seemed to have learned from the history. But now we see how politicians are once again using an us-and-them rhetoric and closing their borders to others in need of help. We will keep standing up for civil and political rights, also in Europe,” says Anders L. Pettersson.
Tags Europe, Latest
Coalition for RECOM Holds 9th Assembly Session and International Forum in Zagreb
Europe, Statements
On 15 December 2019, Civil Rights Defenders took part in the 9th Assembly Session of the Coalition for RECOM in Zagreb, Croatia. The following day, on 16 December 2019, it participated on the 12th For...
Effectiveness of NHRIs in Western Balkans Report Released at DEVAP Forum
A report by Civil Rights Defenders measuring the effectiveness of National Human Rights Institutions in the Western Balkans was released on Tuesday afternoon at a human rights forum in Skopje. Entitle...
Human Rights Defenders in the Western Balkans Report Published
The Human Rights Defenders in the Western Balkans Report has been published today, and handed to participants of the ‘Defending European Values in the Accession Process’ forum in Skopje, N...
Turkey: Charges against 19 LGBTI+ rights defenders must be dropped
Civil Rights Defenders, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Front Line Defenders and International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex association (ILGA- Europe) call upon Turkish...
Human Rights Organisations in Turkey Condemn Treatments Following Operation Peace Spring
Civil Rights Defenders has joined human rights organisations in Turkey in issuing a statement condemning the treatment of human rights defenders in light of Operation Peace Spring. The joint-statement...
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MSNBC: Obama’s Latest Keystone Delay Hard To Defend, Bad Policy
It hurts the very red state Democrats who need it
04.21.2014 | News | Jerome Hudson |
Obama’s dumb decision to delay the development and completion of the Keystone Pipeline was blasted by Democratic Senators over the weekend. “Today’s decision by the Administration amounts to nothing short of an indefinite delay of the Keystone Pipeline,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), chairwoman of the Energy Committee. “This decision is irresponsible, unnecessary and unacceptable,” Landrieu wrote along with 11 other pro-Keystone Democratic Senators.
This morning, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” panel piled on the criticism. MSNBC contributor Mark Halperin said, “Leave the politics aside, as you said, just to go to the jobs and the ability of the United States to do big things. I don’t understand the delay.”
Even “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski–a reactionary defender of the Obama administration–couldn’t “defend” the decision to delay the pipeline saying, “There have been like four state department reviews approving or opening the door for it to move forward. It’s hard to defend.”
“I think it’s bad policy, I think it’s bad for jobs when we need jobs, sends a bad message to Vladimir Putin and we need to send a strong message. Let’s just look at it politically; I don’t understand the politics of it because it hurts the very red state Democrats who need,” Joe Scarborough said.
Later, on another one of the left-leaning peacock network’s affiliate channels, CNBC contributor John Harwood echoed his liberal colleagues saying this latest Keystone delay is “100% politics” and is not the finest hour for the Obama administration.
Jerome Hudson
Jerome Hudson has written for numerous national outlets, including The Hill, National Review, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was recognized as one of Florida’s emerging stars, having been included in the list “25 Under 30: Florida’s Rising Young Political Class.” Hudson is a Savannah, Ga. native who currently resides in Florida.
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November 15, 2010 July 1, 2015
February 2011 Criterion Collection New Releases Announced! Fish Tank, Sweet Smell Of Success, Senso, Amarcord, Still Walking!
by Ryan Gallagher
Yesterday I put up a post on what I was expecting to see today, and Criterion didn’t disappoint! While I was off on a few guesses, I am incredibly excited about what we’re going to be getting this February of 2011.
First up are the two Blu-ray upgrades. We’re getting Krzysztof Kieslowski’s incredible piece, Double Life Of Veronique on the first. The following Tuesday, on the 8th, we’re getting Amarcord, which I had predicted yesterday!
For our new titles we’re getting a whole list of movies that we’ve written about previously on the site. Still Walking is hitting stores the same day as the Amarcord Blu-ray. The week after, we’re getting three new DVD and Blu-ray releases: Fish Tank, The Sweet Smell Of Success, and Senso!
As I wrote yesterday, we’ve been talking about Fish Tank and Still Walking entering into the Collection ever since the IFC deal went down, and now we have an end date in sight. The Sweet Smell Of Success was teased at earlier this year via Twitter, and we chatted about it on our one-year anniversary episode with Scott Weinberg.
Senso is also one that we’ve written about, as it was teased at this year in a post on Criterion’s Current blog. This is a title that Studio Canal has released on Blu-ray in Europe, but Criterion managed to keep Lionsgate’s hands off of.
What do you think of these February releases? Which are you pre-ordering today?
Double Life Of Veronique
Krzysztof Kie?lowski
Criterion #359, Blu-ray on 2/1/2011
Krzysztof Kie?lowski’s international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. Irène Jacob is incandescent as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher. Though unknown to each other, the two women share an enigmatic, emotional bond, which Kie?lowski details in gorgeous reflections, colors, and movements. Aided by Slawomir Idziak’s shimmering cinematography and Zbigniew Preisner’s haunting, operatic score, Kie?lowski creates one of cinema’s most purely metaphysical works. The Double Life of Véronique is an unforgettable symphony of feeling.
http://www.criterion.com/films/214-the-double-life-of-veronique
Criterion #4, Blu-ray on 2/8/2011
In this carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy during the Fascist period, Federico Fellini’s most personal film satirizes his youth and turns daily life into a circus of social rituals, adolescent desires, male fantasies, and political subterfuge, all set to Nina Rota’s classic, nostalgia-tinged score. The Academy Award’“winning Amarcord remains one of cinema’s enduring treasures.
Disc Features
SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES:
All-new, restored high-definition digital transfer
Audio commentary by film scholars Peter Brunette and Frank Burke
American release trailer
Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
New and improved English subtitle translation
New 45-minute documentary, Fellini’s Homecoming, on the complicated relationship between the celebrated director, his hometown, and his past
Video interview with star Magali Noël
Fellini’s drawings of characters in the film
‘Felliniana,’ a presentation of ephemera devoted to Amarcord from the collection of Don Young
Audio interviews with Fellini, his friends, and family by Gideon Bachmann
New restoration demonstration
PLUS: A book featuring a new essay by scholar Sam Rohdie, author of Fellini Lexicon, and the full text of Fellini’s 1967 essay, ‘My Rimini”
Still Walking
Kore-Eda Hirokazu
Criterion # , DVD and Blu-ray on 2/8/2011
Beloved director Kore-Eda Hirokazu (AFTER LIFE, NOBODY KNOWS) returns to the forefront of world cinema with STILL WALKING – an exquisitely detailed family drama that shines with warmth and understanding. The film was one of the most critically acclaimed works at the Toronto, Tribeca, and San Francisco International Film Festivals. Lushly photographed, and with an expert script that incorporates elements of director Kore-Eda’s personal experience, STILL WALKING is a quiet pleasure unlike anything else you will see this year.
Fifteen years ago, Junpei, the youngest son of the Yokoyama family died while rescuing a boy from drowning. On the anniversary of his death, the remaining siblings visit the quaint home of their parents with their families in tow. Over the course of a beautiful day, new relatives become acquainted telling stories and squabbling over sizzling tempura and an elegant graveside ritual is performed for Junpei. Recalling the delicate splendor of Yasujiro Ozu’s TOKYO STORY, Kore-Eda shows complete mastery of his characters while revealing the complex dynamics of an ultimately loving family with humor and warmth.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:
New high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Hirokazu Kore-eda and director of photography Yutaka Yamazaki (with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
New video interviews with Kore-eda and Yamazaki
Making ‘Still Walking’
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by film critic Dennis Lim and recipes for the food prepared in the film
Andrea Arnold
DVD and Blu-ray on 2/22/2011
Fifteen-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) is in a constant state of war with her family and the world around her, without any creative outlet for her considerable energies save a secret love of hip-hop dance. When she meets her party-girl mother’s charming new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender), she is amazed to find he returns her attention, and believes he might help her start to make sense of her life. A clear-eyed, potent portrait of teenage sexuality and vulnerability, FISH TANK confirms writer/director Arnold’s status as one of the leading figures of new British cinema.
New high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Andrea Arnold, director of photography Robbie Ryan, and editor Nicolas Chaudeurge (with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
All three of Arnold’s short films: Milk (1998), Dog (2001), and the Oscar-winning Wasp (2003)
New video interview with actor Kierston Wareing
Interview with actor Michael Fassbender from 2009
Audition footage
Stills gallery by on-set photographer Holly Horner
Original theatrical trailer
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Ian Christie
J.J. Hunsecker, a powerful New York newspaper columnist, is dead set against his sister’s marrying a jazz musician. Sidney Falco, a sleazy PR man, will do anything to get publicity for his clients, and he sees Hunsecker’s situation as an opportunity to win the writer’s favor. So, he sets out to break up the affair anyway he can.
New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
New audio commentary by film scholar James Naremore
Mackendrick: The Man Who Walked Away, a 1986 documentary featuring interviews with director Alexander Mackendrick, actor Burt Lancaster, producer James Hill, and more
James Wong Howe: Cinematographer, a 1973 documentary about the Oscar-winning director of photography, featuring lighting tutorials with Howe
New video interview with film critic and historian Neil Gabler (Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity) about legendary columnist Walter Winchell, inspiration for the character J. J. Hunsecker
New video interview with filmmaker James Mangold about Mackendrick, his instructor and mentor
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Gary Giddins, two short stories by Ernest Lehman featuring the characters from the film, notes about the film by Lehman, and an excerpt from Mackendrick’s book On Film-making
1866. Venice is the target of Italian patriots who want to liberate the city from the Austrians. Lieutenant Ussoni challenges an Austrian officer, Mahler, to a duel but then Countess de Serpieri enters the picture. She becomes Mahler’s mistress and helps him to desert.
New, restored high-definition digital transfer, created in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, supervised by director of photography Giuseppe Rotunno (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
The Making of ‘Senso,’ a new documentary featuring Rotunno, assistant director Francesco Rosi, costume designer Piero Tosi, and Caterina D’Amico, daughter of screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico and author of Life and Work of Luchino Visconti
Viva VERDI, a new documentary on Visconti, Senso, and opera featuring Italian film scholar Peter Brunette, Italian historian Stefano Albertini, and author Wayne Koestenbaum
The Wanton Countess, the rarely seen English-language version of the film
Visual essay by film scholar Peter Cowie
Man of Three Worlds: Luchino Visconti, a 1966 BBC special exploring Visconti’s parallel masteries of cinema, theater, and opera direction
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by filmmaker and author Mark Rappaport and an excerpt from actor Farley Granger’s autobiography, Include Me Out
Ryan Gallagher
More from Ryan Gallagher
All of the Films Joining FilmStruck’s Criterion Channel This May
Featuring films from Billy Wilder, Kelly Reichardt, Jules Dassin, and more!
Drew Struzan To Return To Design Posters For New Star Wars Trilogy?
Netflix Facing Class Action Antitrust Lawsuit From Subscribers
Flicker Alley Announces Two New Upcoming Cinerama Blu-ray Releases
‘The Last Picture Show’ Gets A New Run On The Big Screen; Cast To Reunite With A Live Streamed Panel
New Home Video Releases for the Week of June 19th, 2018
Films Of Federico Fellini – The Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston – June 16-27, 2010
Large Marge says:
Really nice list of criterion films. But what I found for new releases 2011 at http://www.filmcrave.com/dvd_new.php is kind of along those same lines of being impressive.
where might i find an english-dubbed version of kurosawa’s “high and low”? i owned one years ago, and it was shown on U.S. TV in the 1970’s. I thought Criterion might have done it, but apparently not. I’m interested because I was one of the leads (the crazed killer) when toho dubbed it in tokyo in the 60s.
I’m a big Criterion fan. LOVE the new version of “Sweet Smell of Success.” Waited years for a cleaned-up version that does justice to James Wong Howe’s brilliant photography.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Blu-ray) $22.97
Wanda (Blu-ray) $22.97
Do the Right Thing (Blu-ray) $22.97
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Blu-ray) $39.99 $37.13
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Viscous Myths (2017/2018)
Michael Hirschbichler | Baku (Azerbaijan)
The works of the series ‘Viscous Myths’ arose from an investigation of the Absheron Peninsula in Azerbaijan – the landmass in the Caspian Sea, which is held to be the place of origin of industrial oil production. Here, where burning fountains of oil have spurted from the ground for thousands of years and nurtured Zoroastrian fire cults, the first industrial oil drilling was carried out in the nineteenth century. And from here the bigger part of the oil produced worldwide was shipped in the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus the Absheron Peninsula, the subject of many ancient myths, can also be seen to have given rise to a key myth of modernity: our contemporary world order, which is still largely based on the combustion of oil.
In a wider sense the artworks can be understood as a collection of gestures aimed at the ground. These gestures reflect and transform – in a sometimes playful way – what has been inscribed into the landscape or extracted therefrom by various other gestures: gestures of industrial or post-industrial transformation, of changing political systems and their respective territorial claims to power, of daily life, and of myths and religious ideas closely linked with the landscape and its modifications. The artworks respond to this with a series of artistic gestures that can be related to well-known techniques and movements such as landscape painting, painting en plein air, action painting and land art. Thereby the constructed landscape is at the same time a subject and a material reservoir, a witness and a recording of traces, events and stories, which are enmeshed in painterly, photographic, sculptural, sonic and performative gestures.
Michael Hirschbichler works on the threshold of art, architecture and anthropology. He studied at ETH Zurich, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and Universität der Künste Berlin, and taught at ETH Zurich, HSLU Lucerne and the Papua New Guinea University of Technology in Lae. After having lived in various countries, such as the United States, Papua New Guinea, Italy, Azerbaijan and France, he is currently based in Switzerland and Germany. Bridging various disciplines Michael conceives of his artistic practice as a form of spatial anthropology. By moving between research and its speculative transformation and employing a wide range of media, he explores how cultural, social, political, religious and scientific narratives, mythologies and ideologies materialize and shape the spaces we live in. Thereby the exertion of power through spatial arrangements, myths and histories embedded in everyday landscapes and built environments, and the ritual and transformative qualities of spaces and cultural signs are recurring themes. Michael has exhibited, lectured and published widely, and was awarded residencies at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome, YARAT Contemporary Art Space in Baku, the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, Stiftung BINZ39 in Zurich and at Villa Kamogawa (Goethe Institute) in Kyoto.
www.atelier-hirschbichler.com
mythological landscape, ritual, land-art, painting, traces, transformation
Francis Edgar Williams, Drama of Orokolo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940).
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1975).
Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Leipzig: Insel, 1910).
Hirschbichler_VISCOUS MYTHS
Bodies + Borders (2017 – present)
Alternative Arrangements: Walking the Border in Ireland (2016 – ongoing)
Stori Mwd (A Story of Mud), (2019)
not nothing (August 2019)
Time on Site (2019)
Civic Pedagogy, learning as critical spatial practice (2019)
A Weird-Tender in progress (2019)
A walk in your words (25.01.2019)
The House Alice Built (2017 / 2019)
Caring for Communities (2017-2019)
Matter of the Manor (2015-19)
Female Futures Lexicon on Space (2018/2019)
An environmental history of La Guajira (2019)
The Pass (October 2017–June 2018)
Portal Zaryadye: A Portal Not Only to Heaven, But Aslo To Hell (24 July – 12 August 2018)
Text-isles: sowing an idea, October (2018)
Objects removed for study (2018)
Uppland (2016-18)
windwoundweatherwovenwirewoman [performance] (2017)
Request for the unrequested voluntary interlinguisticality (2017)
a place called … (Spring 2017)
Music for Masterplanning (2016-17)
P | A | N – Proyecto Amasandería Nacional (2016)
Make Me Yours: How Art Seduces (2016)
In My Mothers’ Garden: Memories and practices of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (2016)
Having not felt like eating, but eaten, I sat down to eat / tea … (2016)
Bamboo dialogues (2016)
Act#5 & Act#6: What does Mai Mai Mean? (March 2014 – December 2016)
The First World Congress of the Missing Things (2014)
Private Choices, Public Spaces (2014)
Hanging Matters (2014)
Negotiating Conflict: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut (2010 – 2014)
Palimpsest Performances (2010-2014)
Expanded Architecture (2010-2014)
A Game of Dominoes (2013)
Lina & Gio: the last humanists (February-June 2012)
Learning-through-Touring (2012)
Empty Words Build Empty Homes (2012)
Ridley’s (2011)
Unfixing Place: A Study of Istanbul through Topographical Practices (2008)
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Beethoven Piano Sonatas
François-Frédéric Guy: Conquering the universe with Beethoven
By The Cross-Eyed Pianist | October 5, 2019
Guest interview by Michael Johnson
François-Frédéric Guy was just finishing his 20th performance at the piano festival of La Roque d’Anthéron in the south of France. The 2200-seat outdoor amphitheatre was almost full as Guy displayed his love of Beethoven – playing two of his greatest sonatas, No. 16 and No. 26 (“Les Adieux”). After the interval, Guy took his place at the Steinway grand again and shook up the audience with the stormy opening bars of the Hammerklavier sonata. It was like a thunderclap, as Beethoven intended. The audience sat up straight and listened in stunned silence. Monsieur Guy joined me and a colleague after his concert for a question-and-answer session about his playing, the role of the piano in his life, and his future as a conductor of Beethoven symphonies.
Question: Can you describe your technique for creating such a stormy opening for Hammerklavier? The audience was thrilled.
Answer: I try to achieve several things at once with those opening bars – signaling immediately the dimension of the complete work, its conquering majesty, and the vital energy that begins to build from those enormous, outsized chords. I try to give it weight and pace, as Beethoven wanted. It is as if Beethoven was saying, “Let’s go conquer the universe!”
Q. And your surprising low-key encore? What were you thinking?
A. I enjoy the idea behind this little piece which is probably the best-known and simplest work of Beethoven. I chose it to come immediately after the most dense and complex of Beethoven’s work, one that is relatively little known to the general public. But “Elise” is also Beethoven and can, as you say, touch people to the point of tears.
Q. What does music mean to you, as a career pianist. Since we have known each other – nearly 25 years – you have dedicated yourself entirely to music.
A. Music fills my life, my existence. Even when I am not at the instrument, even when I am speaking of other things…. Through music, one can express things that words cannot.
Q. I see you are busy – 50 concerts and recitals per year.
A. Yes, now it’s closer to 60, apportioned among concertos, chamber music and solo recitals. I try to maintain a balance of about one-third for each format.
Q. Your new career seems to be taking off – now you are an orchestral conductor …
A. Yes, I am doing some conducting. I started by conducting from the keyboard, the so-called “play and conduct” format. Seven or eight years ago I started doing the Beethoven piano concertos that way, and it’s becoming more a part of my life. Now I have booked about ten play-and-conduct engagements in which I add a performance on the podium, conducting the full orchestra.
Q. Alone on the podium? What drove you to undertake this new challenge?
A. Actually it’s an old dream dating back to adolescence. I started conducting from the keyboard, and gravitated to the podium. My conducting has been well-received so I am continuing. For the moment, I conduct only Beethoven.
Q. Only the symphonies?
A. Yes, I have already done the Fourth and Fifth at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées and will conduct the Seventh in October at the Opéra de Limoges, with its very good orchestra that I have worked with frequently. I enjoy it very much, and will conduct Beethoven’s “Fidélio” there in 2022.
Q. Will you do what Rudolf Buchbiner did in Aix recently, all five piano concertos in one day?
A. Yes, I am scheduled to do just that in January, again at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. We will start at 7 p.m. with Nos. 1 and 3, then a break, returning for Nos. 2 and 4, and finally at 10 p.m. the Fifth.
Q. This sounds like a major exploit!
A. That’s not at all why I am doing it. I merely want to take the public on a journey with me to better understand the evolution of these concertos. I find this idea very exciting and I think the public will as well. In addition, these concertos are all works of genius and so individual – each one has its own character. They do not encroach on each other. It’s like a great crossing of seas on an ocean liner. I will be taking the public with me.
Q. I was also thinking of it as a physical marathon.
A. Yes, both musically and intellectually. It’s even more true in a play-and-conduct format because I have to control what’s going on around the piano. We must remember, though, that in Beethoven’s time all concertos were performed like this. There were no conductors. Same goes for Mozart.
Q. So you are putting yourself in Beethoven’s and Mozart’s shoes, so to speak?
A. Well yes, somewhat, a bit. It’s a return to the concertos as they were intended. The piano is not king – it’s there for a dialogue with the instrumentalists, like a big family.
Q. Do you like the feeling of disappearing into the orchestra when you play-and-conduct?
A. Yes indeed. The pianist turns his or her back on the audience and is encircled by the other players. So there is a sort of fraternity – no rivalry – but it’s not easy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does, there is a kind of unity, and that’s what is so interesting.
Q. You have said that keyboard conducting gives you a new understanding of the music. What do you mean? Does it really change your perspective?
A. Absolutely. When you play traditionally with a conductor, one must be familiar with the orchestral parts while concentrating essentially on the piano part – that’s our role. But when the pianist and the conductor are the same person, it becomes clear how completely the piano is integrated into Beethoven’s concept, and Mozart too, and then later Brahms and Schumann.
Q. How did you go about studying for your role as a conductor?
A. Well I am largely self-taught, an autodidact. But I have been counseled by some eminent conductors, notably Philippe Jordan, conductor of the Bastille Opera and soon to direct the Vienna Staatsoper, when he leaves the Bastille next year. He is a fabulous conductor, an extraordinary talent. He has helped me tremendously. And another one is Pascal Rophé, conductor of the Orchestre des Pays de Loire – Nantes and Angers. He has been a big help with the Beethoven symphonies. But I am essentially self-taught and I have no ambitions to become a full-time conductor.
Q. Ah no? That was my question – isn’t there a temptation to leave the piano behind? Solti, Bernstein and many others abandoned the piano to conduct.
A. No, no, that’s not my plan. Conducting is an extension of my interests in music. For example, I have played practically all of Beethoven’s piano music, all his chamber music, all his important piano works. And it seemed natural to try conducting. I could not imagine NOT conducting one of the symphonies. So I had to learn how to do it.
Q. Contemporary music in one of your big interests. You have collaborated with the composer Tristan Murail, I believe, and others?
A. Yes, I am currently on a concerto Tristan Murail is composing for me. What matters for me is new ideas in composition that still retain traditional structures. I want innovation, ideas that change the piano and the orchestra. Sounds we have never heard before. That’s what interests me with Tristan Murail.
Q. Are you spending your life focused solely on the piano to the exclusion of all other activities? Some pianists wear blinkers.
A. I am not wrapped up in a bubble. Nothing stops me from following important events, such as Korea, or the relations between the two Koreas.
Q. You are in touch with people outside the world of music?
A. Yes, I am very involved in astronomy, for example. I study mushrooms!
Q. Mushrooms?
A. Yes. The other day I found ten kilos of cepes on my property in the Dordogne. I have always had a passion for mushrooms of all types.
Q. John Cage was also a mushroom enthusiast. He wrote books about them. He even created the New York Mycological Society for the study of mushrooms.
A. I am a specialist too. I know all the names of different species in Latin.
Q. Tell us about your tenth Beethoven cycle planned for Tokyo. What does it consist of?
A. What it means is that I will play all of the 32 Beethoven sonatas from memory over a ten-day period, about three weekends, for the tenth time. Almost twelve hours of music.
Q. Do you have a loyal fan base in Japan?
A. Yes, yes. I usually play in a very beautiful hall in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo. Two years ago I played there with the Dresden orchestra conducted by Michael Sanderling. And last year I played all the Beethoven violin and piano sonatas there.
Q. If you give 60 recitals and concerts a year, as you said at the start of this interview, can you still find time to develop new repertoire?
A. Yes, I try to master one or two important works every year. I recently accepted to learn and play a concerto by Enescu. I always try to put aside time for new works.
Q. But at your age, don’t you find you learn more slowly?
A. Yes, I am 50 years old. But I have many things I want to do in music. I am not stopping.
Artist portrait by Michael Johnson
Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. He worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his writing career. He is the author of five books and divides his time between Boston and Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to The Cross-Eyed Pianist
(This article first appeared on the Facts & Arts site. Illustrations by the author.)
Posted in General and tagged as Beethoven Piano Sonatas, concert pianist, Francois-Frederic Guy, French concert pianist, Hammerklavier Sonata, interviews with pianists, Michael Johnson.
The Humanity of Beethoven
By The Cross-Eyed Pianist | August 17, 2019
Guest post by Nick Hely-Hutchinson
If Beethoven were alive today, there has to be a decent chance – likelihood, even – that he would have been cured of the deafness which beset him for the last fifteen years of his life.
Of the various remedies which were suggested to him, and there were plenty, amongst them was the suggestion to use olive oil.
In Cornwall last year, I managed to collect some water in my left ear which refused to come out, with the result that by April this year I could barely hear a thing if I blocked my right one. Nearly two hundred years after the great man, I was also recommended the use of olive oil, but as a precursor to having the ear syringed, as the oil softens the wax and thereby reduces the risk of damage to the drum during the procedure.
Beethoven is unlikely to have collected too much water in his ear, for his personal hygiene was almost nonexistent. I am equally sure that it would have taken more than syringing to deal with his problem. But my own experience has given me the teensiest sense of what it is like not to hear properly.
Summing up the work of any composer in just one piece is not just difficult, it is verging on the daft. Beethoven’s enormous output in his miserable life had many landmarks, many ‘firsts’. His third symphony, the Eroica, changed symphonic writing for good. His ninth was the first to include a choir. I could go on…
But if I had to single out just one piece which summed up the core frustration in his life, it would be his 23rd (of 32) piano sonata, now known as the Appassionata.
Writing about music is notoriously hard, and, some would say, a little futile, because it is the hearing of it and the experience which is personal to each of us. Beethoven, however, who once quipped that he would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet, speaks to us so directly in his music, and this piece in particular, that it is not at all difficult to understand its message.
Beethoven has something of a reputation for tumultuous, even ballsy music. Because of this, it is easy to forget that the man wrote some of the most exquisite and sensitive slow movements in the entire repertoire. It’s like a lion stopping in his tracks and scooping up a lesser mortal to tend and nurture, rather than trample or devour.
So today I’m giving you the last two movements of the Appassionata, played with appropriate passion and wonderful clarity by Valentina Lisitsa. It starts with a simple theme, followed by three distinct variations, before returning to the original. At first it may seem a little pedestrian, but as it unfolds, Beethoven’s mastery of counterpoint, the ability to have two or more tunes singing at the same time, comes to the fore. It becomes five minutes of pure tenderness, which grow on you each time you hear it. As it comes to its close, Beethoven launches straight into the final movement without a pause.
This is Beethoven ranting at the world at the loss of his hearing. Listen to that circular motif after the first few seconds, which remains a theme throughout: it is the cry of an anguished man, pacing up and down in his room. Anger; frustration; desperation; turmoil. In the unlikely event that he has not made his point, the final minute will leave you in no doubt. And yet, in the midst of it all this, a pleading beautiful melody, begging for a cure.
(I was once advised by a piano teacher to concentrate on the left hand and the right will take care of itself. Not a chance that works here.)
This is Beethoven laid bare in the sound. Of all composers, few reach us on such a human level: he goes directly to our souls like no other. Some of Beethoven’s greatest works were written when he was completely deaf. Imagine that for a moment: to know how it’s going to sound without the experience of actually hearing it. What a genius.
I have deterred you too long. Listen to this and be glad you can. And if you haven’t had your ears syringed, you might like to consider it. I’m now turning the volume down, not up.
Just need to stop saying ‘what?’, which has become something of an irritating habit.
This article originally appeared on Nick Hely-Hutchinson’s Manuscript Notes site.
Nick Hely-Hutchinson worked in the City of London for nearly 40 years, but his great love has always been classical music. The purpose of his blog, Manuscript Notes, is to introduce classical music in an unintimidating way to people who might not obviously be disposed towards it, following a surprise reaction to an opera by his son, “Hey, dad, this is really good!“. He is married with three adult children and is a regular contributor to The Cross-Eyed Pianist.
Posted in General and tagged as Apassionata sonata, Beethoven, Beethoven Apassionata Sonata, Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Beethoven's deafness, guest post, piano sonatas.
A letter to Bill after performing the Hammerklavier Sonata at Festival Baltimore
By The Cross-Eyed Pianist | July 15, 2019
Guest post by Beth Levin, concert pianist
The thing about this last concert was the pre-concert depression. I sunk really low and felt so incredibly sad. I don’t really know what that was about. I tend to get down beforehand but this felt suicidal. I was staying with friends in Baltimore and the night before the concert all of the mistakes of my life seemed to surround me and grip me. Everything felt wrong. So wrong! At home I would normally lie on the couch in invalid mode but I was with friends and had to come out of myself and act at least halfway normal. Haha – it all feels slightly ludicrous in retrospect. My friends (of the delicious crab cake recipe – I was told that crab cake on a Saltine was the way they grew up eating it) had a beautiful Steinway at their home and I got in some excellent practicing before the concert. Their piano was vintage and had a certain sweetness to the tone. The piano at the hall was “state of the art” – almost murmuring, “I dare you!”. No sweetness there, but power and one certainly could make music on it. Just so new, shining black and devoid of quirks. In ten years it will be a gem. The hall was beautiful – I remember that much. I don’t remember much about the recital itself. I take that as a good sign – not being haunted by it, but having it flow, happen and come to an end.
The people stood at the end – that was lovely for me. I made a mistake right at the beginning in a scale going up in the Handel – but after that I think I played with more mastery.
The Hammerklavier felt like playing a great role like King Lear. The piece really demanded everything – deepest emotion, color, reaction, assertiveness, richness, tenderness, extreme contrast in mood, the limit of technique – just to describe some of what that work asks from the performer. I played the first movement on the slow side but I think it worked – you could really hear what Beethoven was doing – and the phrasing is so gorgeous that way. The final movement may be the biggest challenge, at least technically – it verges on being unplayable I think. I know the singers felt that about his Missa Solemnis – not singable. I took the Adagio faster, and I think that worked well too. The Adagio feel was still there, but you could hear the long line and things held together… like a good crab cake! A good title: “The Hammerklavier on a Saltine!” The piece grabs you and puts you through your paces as they say from the opening chords – which had always cowed me in practicing – you have to truly Live that piece and portray it at the same time – which is why it feels like a dramatic role I think.
I honestly felt in the last few pages that I was almost home and feeling a slight relief at that – and then at the true end of the concert the audience reaction overtook me for several minutes – I ran backstage and ripped off my rather fancy dress in such a hurry and got into plain clothes. I don’t know why I did that. It is a week later now and I still feel a bit “off”. All of the depression is gone, but is there such a thing as post-Hammerklavier stress syndrome? Kidding, but you don’t play that work and stay the same.
It leaves you very tired and kind of nostalgic for the music and for everything in your life – lived and unlived. And it forces you to explore everything you’re made of at the piano – pure and simple. I’ve been practicing chamber music for a rehearsal next week – and my heart hasn’t been in it fully. I think the word “force” is so relevant to the Hammerklavier. The piece is a force of nature – like Beethoven – and it forces things from the performer – like a tough fight, one that you can’t exactly win, but can see end in a draw.
~Beth xxx
Beth Levin at Earl & Darielle Linehan Concert Hall, Baltimore
Beethoven – Hammerklavier Sonata | programme note by Max Derrickson
Crab Cake Recipe
Meet the Artist – Beth Levin
Posted in General and tagged as American concert pianist, Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Beth Levin pianist, describing the concert experience, Hammerklavier Sonata, performing the Hammerklavier. 2 Comments
Shock and Awe: Igor Levit at Wigmore Hall
Igor Levit, Wigmore Hall, 13 June 2017
Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Opp 109, 110 and 111
I first heard Igor Levit in this sonata triptych back in 2013. It seemed a bold programme choice for a young man, yet Levit’s assertion that this music was “written to be played” makes perfect sense and is a view I’m sure Beethoven would concur with. Then I felt there was room for development and maturity, important attributes for any young artist in the spring of their professional career. Now I hear an artist who has lived with – and in – the music and has crystallised his own view about it.
He crouches over the piano like an animal coiled for attack, yet the sound in those opening bars of the Sonata in E major, Op.109, was so delicate, so lyrically ethereal, it felt as if the music was emerging from some mystical outer firmament, entirely appropriate for these sonatas which find Beethoven in profoundly philosophical mood. It is music which speaks of shared values and what it is to be a sentient, thinking human being; it “puts us in touch with something we know about ourselves that we might otherwise struggle to find words to describe” (Paul Lewis). The Prestissimo second movement, urgent and anxious in its tempo and atmosphere emphasised by some ominous bass figures, contained Levit’s trademark “shock and awe” stamping fortes and fortissimos, only to find him and the music back in meditative mood for the theme and variations, which reprised the serenity of the opening, the theme spare and prayer-like with more of that wonderfully delicate shading at the quietest end of the dynamic spectrum that he does so well.
Read my full review here
(photo ©Igor Levit)
Posted in Concert Review and tagged as Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Beethoven's last sonatas, concert review, Igor Levit, Wigmore Hall.
Igor Levit launches his Beethoven cycle at Wigmore Hall
Igor Levit is, along with Daniil Trifonov, the pianist du jour. Lauded for his disc of the Goldberg Variations and Diabelli Variations and Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated, and with a slew of critical superlatives for his debut disc of late Beethoven piano sonatas, Levit is a pianist who concerns himself with the most serious edifices of piano literature, while Trifonov tends towards the more romantic virtuoso repertoire.
Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas represent the loftiest Himalayan peaks of the repertoire, both in terms of the arc of their composition (three distinct periods which mirror significant stages in the composer’s life, artistically and emotionally), and the demands these works place on the pianist. The complete Beethoven cycle, a performance of all the piano sonatas, usually over eight concerts, is a Herculean task, not to be undertaken lightly. It fully tests the mettle of any performer, but the perennial appeal of presenting these works in a cycle is a mark of their significance and the special reverence they have accrued.
On Wednesday night, Igor Levit embarked on his Beethoven sonatas cycle at the Wigmore Hall, bringing his intelligent and distinctive approach to these great works.
(Photo © Igor Levit)
Posted in General and tagged as Beethoven Piano Sonatas, concert review, Igor Levit, Wigmore Hall. 4 Comments
Here I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me.
– Arvo Pärt
Why pick ‘quietude’ rather than simple ‘quietness’? Principally because I think the word has more resonance, more depth: it has a physical component, as well as one of simple silence. It is almost meditative. It is the deep breath (exemplified by Jessye Norman, perhaps) before the opening notes; and – if you’re fortunate – that precious, eternal, ethereal stillness between the final lifting of the fingers from the keys, the release of the sustaining pedal, and the subsequent applause. In both cases – even in a minimal amount of time – there is (can be, or perhaps should be) reflection, absorption, of the music in between.
Sometimes, music itself contains quietude (the most logical culmination of this being John Cage’s 4′ 33″) – although this may not necessarily mean indicated rests or pauses. Before I began to lose my hearing (which, for me, was not the descent into silence that some may expect – as Cage said, “what we hear is mostly noise”: and I experience almost constant tinnitus and occasional “musical hallucinations”), I was obsessed with a short piece, Secret Song No.6, by Peter Maxwell Davies: which, initially, appeared to begin with just a random selection of slow, sustained, intensifying, single tones. Even sitting on the settee, simply staring at that page for long periods of time – in all-consuming stillness, apart from the melody weaving through my mind – trying to understand its implications, its meaning, how one could possibly interpret it – was liable to drive me crazy. It was only a sudden realization (an emergence) that “the silence between the notes is where the magic lies” which led me to some sort of comprehension, and the confidence to return to the piano, to let the music sing for itself. (Technically, it is not a difficult piece. Emotionally, I found it extremely challenging – if only because of the self-examination it provoked. (Which one could argue is the purpose of all art…. Discuss.))
Q is also for Quakers, of course; and, although I am by no means religious (except perhaps in my addiction to creativity), one of their most inspiring qualities (even for me: someone whose tastes evolved in large, echoey gothic buildings resonating with Byrd, Tallis, Howells…) is the silent worship – listening for that “still small voice”. Sitting in true peace – whether alone, or with others – can be a truly overwhelming experience. It is therefore not for everyone.
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
– TS Eliot: Little Gidding (Four Quartets)
Reading this back, I appreciate that some may find hints of mindfulness. To me, though, quietude is almost its antithesis – a momentary letting go; an untethering – although not ‘mindlessness’, per se. It is an absence of intrusion of both internal and external forces. It is a caesura – but one that you may only recognize when immersed in its fragility, its transiency, its elusiveness. What follows must be sound. The rest is silence.
Stephen Ward, Writer in Residence for the Orchestra of the Swan, and blogger at The Bard of Tysoe
Quasi – As if…..
Perhaps the most famous work for piano which utilises the word “Quasi” is Beethoven’s piano sonata Opus 27 No. 2, the “Moonlight”. The first edition of the score is headed Sonata quasi una fantasia, a title the work shares with its companion piece, Opus 27, No. 1.
This is extraordinary music, this “Sonata like a fantasy”, with its first movement of delicately veiled sounds, hushed melodic fragments, those peaceful, certain triplets, the slight hesitancy in the dotted figure in the right hand, the suggestion throughout of improvisation, the pedal markings, senza sordini, indicating that the dampers should be lifted only fractionally away from the strings to allow a slight blurring between the new harmony and the old. A twilight first movement, shimmering, shifting, hinting at the tension between the forward pull of Beethoven’s revolutionary vision, and the solidity and simplicity of the classical ideal, the use of thematic material and texture beautifully demonstrated in the construction of the initial melody. A prophetic theme built on a single note, G-sharp, this the composer’s core idea. A single note, repeated six times, proceeds to A, then returns. A single note, reharmonized on its return, not by the initial C-sharp minor chord, but with luminous E-major. A single note forms a single theme; there is no second subject in the first movement, only that the triplet accompaniment assumes a more melodic role, only that tension rises as new harmonies are initiated. A single note, a single theme, now heard for the first time in the left hand in the coda. A single note, foreshadowed in the opening measures, recollected at the close. A single note, a simple triplet accompaniment, a crescendo and decrescendo first in the right hand, then in the left. The movement ends as quietly as it began…..
Posted in A pianist's alphabet, General and tagged as Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Moonlight Sonata, Quasi, quietude, silence in music.
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Home » Visual Marketing » How Visit Lex’s Horse-Filmed Commercials Became their Most Successful to Date
How Visit Lex’s Horse-Filmed Commercials Became their Most Successful to Date
From the grass growing beneath their feet to the flags flying above their head, everything in Lexington, Kentucky is dedicated to its horses.
It all relates back to the limestone shelf that sits under the state of Kentucky, which is credited for giving the grass its blue tinge and for helping its horse population develop strong bones. Located smack dab in the middle of bluegrass country sits a city that’s home to 450 horse farms, a statue of a famous horse that bears the city’s name, as well as about 80% of all history’s Kentucky Derby winners.
Lexington Kentucky, the Horse Capital of the World
Lexington Kentucky is so devoted to its horses that they’ve even put one on its flag, colored blue in a nod to the unique land they graze on.
“The city has totally adopted it,” says Gathan Borden, the Vice President of Marketing for Visit Lex. “We have a total love affair with horses.”
While Lexington is also home to a burgeoning craft beer and foodie culture, as well as just a short drive from just about every bourbon distillery in America, the “Horse Capital of the World” naturally tries to find ways to promote its own unique X factor.
Sharing the city’s love for its horses with outsiders — who may only have a casual relationship with horse racing — has always been a challenge, but Borden and his team recently devised a way to put audiences right in the saddle, and the result has been a clear winner.
“One of the trends that we’re trying to follow along with in tourism marketing across the board is how to get more personal with the end user of the video.”
He continued, “For us, right now, we’re into this content game where we’re using locals and influencers to tell the story of Lexington from a first-person point of view.”
This past February, however, Borden and his team decided to look to its city’s most famous influencers.
Turning the cameras over to Lexington’s thoroughbred horses
“We wanted people to know that horse farms are actually fun. Horses are really fun animals, so wouldn’t it be cool to see what a horse sees on its daily journey?” he said. “We thought it was a unique perspective you couldn’t get anywhere else in the world.”
After coming up with the concept Borden and his agency partners, Cornett, strapped GoPros to the horses at a local farm using harnesses originally designed for dogs, though he says they fit the horses surprisingly well. What resulted is a series of videos, published to their Facebook page in June, filmed entirely by horses.
The videos include some regular horse activities, like grazing and running through an open field, but one of the series’ four videos stands out to Borden the most. In it a young horse is seen jumping and running in circles around a horse-pen.
“That foal is actually being filmed by its mother. It might be a stretch, but travel is all about creating memories, and when families come they’re always filming their kids enjoying the destination, so having a mother horse film their offspring is pretty exciting for us.”
After publishing the videos to YouTube as well as Facebook, and promoting them with a modest social media campaign, they soon became one of Visit Lex’s most successful and least expensive projects to date.
Creating a big impact out of a smart spend
Borden says filming and editing totaled less than $9,000, plus an additional $5,000 spent promoting it through Facebook. When the first video was published it received over 167,000 views alone, with the entire campaign totaling more than 280,000 to date. As a point of comparison, Borden says a previous campaign of four videos cost over $32,000, and wasn’t nearly as successful.
The campaign also attracted the attention of local newspapers, including the Lexington Herald Leader, equestrian publications like HorseChannel.com and advertising industry publications like AdWeek.
“To me that shows that money is the last thing you should worry about. As long as you’ve got a good idea, that’s all you should worry about.”
Visit Lex’s next equestrian marketing ventures
Borden is hoping to follow up the latest campaign with something similarly simple and direct, again putting the viewer in the subject’s horseshoes, but hasn’t yet settled on exactly what that will look like.
“Maybe we film them in the fall and the winter time, the same horses, like we’re creating a trilogy of movies,” said Borden. The team has also considered 3D video, though the cameras are more difficult to stabilize on horseback than the GoPros.
Whatever which way Visit Lex decides to follow up their latest campaign, expect it to put the viewer in an immersive environment, riding along with the city’s most beloved residents.
Enjoyed this story? There are 21 more in this free eBook!
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La Belle Des Oceans, (MSP) Cruising Canada ex Montreal Return
9 Night Cruise sailing from Montreal to St Pierre aboard La Belle Des Oceans. Hotel stay post-cruise in Montreal.
Departure: 01 Aug 2020
From: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Cruise line: CroisiEurope
Cruise Ship: La Belle Des Oceans
10 Night(s) From
01/08/2020 Montreal, Quebec, Canada Embark
02/08/2020 Montreal, Quebec, Canada
03/08/2020 Quebec City, Quebec, Canada
04/08/2020 Saguenay River & Fjord, Quebec, Canada
05/08/2020 Tadoussac, Quebec, Canada
06/08/2020 Baie-Commeau, Quebec
07/08/2020 Gaspe, Quebec. Canada
08/08/2020 Magdalene Islands, Canada
08/08/2020 Cap-aux-Meules, Quebec CA
09/08/2020 St Pierre, St Pierre & Miquelon
10/08/2020 St Pierre, St Pierre & Miquelon Disembark Flight to Montreal
10/08/2020 Montreal, Quebec, Canada Hotel
Cruise the Saint Lawrence River and visit the vibrant cities, vast expanses of nature, and quaint islands found in and around its waters.
Day 1 MONTREAL
Passengers are welcome to board our ship at 6:00 p.m. After comfortably settling into your cabins, we’ll introduce our crew at a welcome cocktail. We’ll enjoy dinner on board. The rest of the evening is yours to do as you please.
Join us for a guided tour of Montreal this morning to see the city’s musts and get a feel for its outstanding diversity. In Old Montreal, we’ll see Saint-Paul Street, Place Jacques-Cartier, and the outside of the Notre-Dame Basilica.
In the afternoon, we’ll set off on an optional panoramic visit and guided tour of the sophisticated city for a different view. We’ll drive along Saint Catherine Street—considered the main cultural and commerce artery in the downtown area—prestigious Sherbrooke Street, and through laid-back Plateau-Mont-Royal. We’ll have a tasting of some Montreal-style smoked meat before spending some free time in the Jean Talon farmer’s market—one of the oldest public markets in the city, situated in the heart of Little Italy. After we return on board, our ship will begin to cruise.
Day 3 QUEBEC CITY
We’ll arrive in Quebec City at the beginning of the morning. Join us for a tour of Old Quebec City. Cobblestone streets, charming boutiques, and the emblematic Château Frontenac await us! We'll visit Old Quebec on foot, stopping off at Dufferin Terrace to take in the spellbinding views of the river and castle before heading over to the fairytale-like Petit-Champlain neighborhood.
In the afternoon, join us for an optional excursion to the Île d’Orléans, where farming is active year round. We’ll set off on a countryside stroll that includes a bite of some local, tasty products. The island was one of the first French colonies, and a large percent of French Canadians can trace their heritage back to the Île d’Orléans. Although fishing and boat construction have been abandoned here, its rich history and gorgeous scenery make it one of the top tourist spots in the region. We’ll also stop off at Montmorency Falls and take in a spectacular view of the crashing waters. This evening, our ship will begin to cruise to Saguenay. Our ship will cruise through the night.
Day 4 SAGUENAY
We’ll spend the morning cruising the Saguenay River. The Saguenay Fjord is home to an incredible array of wildlife and breathtaking scenery. Join us for an optional excursion to La Pulperie, a regional tourism center dedicated to the arts and history of the city of Chicoutimi. Set within an old paper mill, the museum highlights how paper manufacturing played a significant role in the development of the region at the beginning of the 20th century.
Day 5 SAGUENAY - TADOUSSAC
We’ll cruise back along the Saguenay River to reach the Saint Lawrence, arriving in Tadoussac at the end of the morning. Tadoussac is known worldwide for its beauty, scenery, and wildlife—whales, in particular! Located at the confluence of the two rivers, the colorful village only has 800 residents but is a major tourist destination nonetheless.
Thar she blows! Take advantage of our optional whale watch and climb aboard a local boat to catch a glimpse of some of the most elegant mammals in the world. If you have never been on a whale watch before, this is the chance to live a truly unforgettable experience.
Day 6 BAIE-COMEAU
Join us for an optional excursion to the Garden of the Glaciers and the Village Forestier d’Antan. The Garden of Glaciers is a giant leap back in time for an encounter with the last Ice Age. The multi-sensory experience tells the fascinating story of the dramatic climate changes that have affected our earth, the migration of the first people to set foot in North America, and the ancient Goldthwait Sea. We’ll also take in the views at the St-Pancrace Fjard Lookout. Our next stop will be the lumberjack village in Franquelin, where we’ll tour rustic log cabins and see the everyday items from the pioneer times. After our tour, we’ll return on board the ship. Our ship will begin to cruise to Gaspé.
Day 7 GASPÉ
We’ll arrive in Gaspé at the beginning of the morning. Located at the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula, this is the location where Jacques Cartier took possession of New France in the name of King Francis I. We’ll set out on an optional excursion to Percé, the small city that sits directly across from the impressive sheer rock formation known as Percé Rock. We’ll take a boat tour around the beautiful, red-hued rock and continue to Bonaventure Island, a bird sanctuary containing the largest gannet population in North America during the summer months. Enjoy a stroll along one of the paths during our stay on the island. Afterwards, we’ll return on board our ship and begin to cruise to the legendary Magdalen Islands.
Day 8 MAGDALEN ISLANDS - CAP-AUX-MEULES
The Magdalen Islands are a breathtakingly beautiful enclave in the middle of the Saint Lawrence River. Our ship will reach Cap-aux-Meules in the early morning. Cap-aux-Meules is known as the gateway to the archipelago. Join us for an optional tour of the island, beginning with the gorgeous scenery from the Hérissé Cape lighthouse and then moving on to historical Grave and the Fumoir d’Antan smokehouse, product shop, and Economuseum®. After we return on board, we’ll begin to cruise to Saint Pierre.
Day 9 SAINT PIERRE
We’ll arrive in Saint Pierre in the afternoon. Located at the mouth of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Saint Pierre and Miquelon is a slice of France in North America. Although there is evidence of prehistoric settlements on the islands, there were no native inhabitants when the Europeans began exploring the New World, and these islands were not spared the constant French and English battles from the 17th to 19th centuries. The French finally claimed victory in 1815, and French fishermen once again took up residence and created a prosperous market. Saint Pierre itself is a living postcard. Join us for an optional tour of L'Île-aux-Marins. We’ll take a tour boat for a guided visit of the wind- and water-ravaged island(1). Although it once had a population of 700, there are currently no permanent residents. Time stands still at the abandoned settlement—a ghost town that includes a church, cemetery, school, and homes. Tonight is our festive gala evening.
Day 10 SAINT PIERRE - Montreal
This morning will be dedicated to a guided tour of Saint Pierre and the Arche Museum and Archives. Discover the history and stories of the archipelago through remembrances of the past. We’ll have lunch in a restaurant before being transferred to the airport for a flight to Montreal(2). On arrival, you’ll be transferred to your four-star hotel for check-in and dinner.
Day 11 Montreal
Your stay at the hotel in Montreal includes breakfast on your final day.
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Home / California, USA and World / Repeal of Obamacare bad news for millions of Americans
Repeal of Obamacare bad news for millions of Americans
Repeal of Obamacare means California would lose $20 billion in annual federal funding for Medi-Cal expansion and Covered California subsidies By VIJI SUNDARAM, Contributing Writer SAN FRANCISCO (NAM) – President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to repeal and replace
New America Media
Repeal of Obamacare means California would lose $20 billion in annual federal funding for Medi-Cal expansion and Covered California subsidies
By VIJI SUNDARAM, Contributing Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (NAM) – President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to repeal and replace Obamacare is bad news for millions of Americans, but the poor and people of color are going to be hit hardest, say health care advocates.
“The winners and losers from repealing Obamacare will depend crucially on the details of whatever replacement plan materializes,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation during a webinar last December. “ Based on what those replacement plans look like so far, it seems that the poor and people with pre-existing medical conditions could end up worse off.”
Trump has yet to reveal details of what he plans to do to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, other than to say that he intends to dismantle it soon after he takes office. It is likely that some parts of it will be left untouched – like the pre-existing condition provision – and replacement could be delayed by a couple of years.
The webinar was organized by the non-profit California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), to give journalists an overview of what California, the state that took the lead in implementing some of the key provisions of Obamacare, could face if Trump makes good on his threat.
Among those provisions were expanding Medi-Cal (California’s name for Medicaid) and setting up a health insurance marketplace for people to purchase federally subsidized coverage best suited to their budget, said Amy Adams, CHCF’s senior program officer. Additionally, even before the ACA became law, the state banned the prevalent practice of gender-based premium cost variations – younger women were paying more than men.
As a result of its robust implementation, the state’s uninsured rate for residents under 65 fell by nearly half, from 22 percent in 2009 to 9.5 percent in 2015, according to a California Health Interview Survey (CHIS). More low-income people who historically were shut out of health insurance were able to gain coverage, as were people in minority communities.
The survey showed that uninsured rates fell by nearly 7 percent among Asian- Americans and African-Americans, and 6.5 percent among Latinos.
More than 10 percent of the populations in the counties of Fresno, Kern, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Joaquin, and Tulare got coverage, according to a just-released UC Berkeley Labor Center study.
A repeal would mean that California would lose around $20 billion in annual federal funding for Medi-Cal expansion and Covered California subsidies, making it virtually impossible for it to continue offering those programs.
“It is a very large amount of money and would be difficult for the state to generate a comparable amount of revenue,” to go it alone, pointed out Adams.
“It would be difficult for any individual state to try to raise the money required and provide benefits comparable to the ACA,” Levitt said. “That would put the state significantly at odds with other states in terms of tax rates and public benefits.”
But critics of the ACA say that one of the least popular provisions of the law – forcing individuals to have health insurance and companies to cover their employees or face a penalty – would be eliminated with a repeal. An estimated $1.3 billion would be lost in eliminated penalties.
One idea Trump’s advisory team has been floating is to allow insurance carriers to sell insurance across state borders, something some insurers already do. That could come with its own set of problems, Levitt said, because it could drive people to states where the insurance industry is less regulated. He said California has been able to rein in its providers to some degree because of “its stringent regulations.”
Levitt pointed out that the safety net provided by Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC), clinics that provide health care to underserved communities, would weaken if the ACA were repealed. Those unable to retain their insurance coverage would likely flock to FQHCs, putting an extra burden on them.
“There are a lot of moving pieces,” at this time, Levitt said. “No doubt that people are split on the ACA,” he said. “But ACA is status quo.”
New America Media is the first and largest national collaboration and advocate of 2,000 ethnic news organizations in the U.S. More than 57 million ethnic adults connect to each other, to home countries and to America through 3,000+ ethnic media -- the fastest growing sector of American journalism.
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Meet our Team of Dance Instructors
Jacky started dancing to Hip Hop in his NUS days under NUS Dance Blast. For more than 10 years, he has coached a few hundred students under his direct tutorship – within his studios, at pre-schools, MOE schools, tertiary institutes, government and private entities. Overtime he has also groomed many of his students to become instructors themselves.
Sean started dancing at age 15, beginning with a style called ‘Popping’. He then moved on to other styles of Hip-Hop, and was under direct tutorship of Mr Jacky Lim, the director of DF. Over time he began to compete in various competitions, and became mentor of the group ‘Escape’ which placed in the top 2 for many street dance and K-Pop competitions. He is also the mentor for ‘Gen.Z’ which placed 1st is Pulse Street dance. Sean also currently has few group under his mentorship which he trains for events and competitions.
At age 3, Ashleigh started learning Ballet, Drama and Theatric activities at the school ‘The Theatre Practice’. She continued dancing in primary and secondary school, and eventually became Vice-Chairperson of her school’s Traditional Chinese Dance CCA. Throughout this time she did countless school and external performances and also expanded into other genres such as Hip-Hop, Jazz, Modern and Contemporary dance. While in Ngee Ann Polytechnic she joined their Hip Hop Club ‘New Revolving Age’ (NRA).
Lynette began her dancing journey with Chinese Dance, Acrobatics and Ballet in Primary School. She continued Chinese Dance in Secondary School, and was selected as the lead dancer for the school’s Singapore Youth Festival (SYF) piece in 2011. In order to pursue her dance passion more holistically, she began learning Hip-Hop at DF where she was offered many more performance opportunities. She also has a Grade 6 Hip-Hop Honour under the Australian Teachers of Dancing (ATOD) Syllabus.
Chewy started her dance journey at SP dance club, Strictly Dance Zone (SDZ) at the age of 17, focusing mainly on hip hop, street Jazz and kpop. After graduating, she continued to partake in SIM dance club, Dreamwerkz (DWZ). Throughout these years, she has joined numerous performance and competitions inside and outside of school. Furthermore, she is a dance instructor of SST dance club currently and she has taken up quite a number of dance projects all these years. For example, she choreographed twice for SIM annual dance production, coaching of enrichment programs, helping out in various companies’ dinner and dance and etc.
Pink started dancing at age 13, as a Chinese dancer in her secondary school. She started taking up classes at DF under Mr Jacky Lim and Orange when she was 16, and was also in Singapore Polytechnic’s dance club Strictly Dance Zone, where she did Modern Dance and also performed for their annual production, ‘Waves 15’. She was also a dancer on a Mediacorp drama series ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.
Wei Ling was exposed to Hip-Hop under Mr. Jacky Lim and was actively involved in the school’s various programmes such as the Overseas Dance Tours to Sydney and Hong Kong.
Denise started dancing at the age of 13, as a Chinese/Modern Dancer in her secondary school. She then started learning hip hop under Mr Jacky Lim at the age of 15. In poly, she was in Temasek Polytechnic Dance Ensemble (TPDE) where she was exposed to other genres such as House, Street Jazz, Popping, etc. She represented TPDE in competitions such as Super24 in year 2017, 2018, and 2019. She also represented TPDE in several performances and productions throughout her 3 years in poly. She has been representing DFA in competitions such as Dansa Mania (finalist), Upgrade (first runner up), PULSE (first runner up), etc. She is self-motivated and has a strong passion for dance as she drills and trains everyday to constantly improving herself.
Orange started dancing when she was 18. In her polytechnic days, was actively involved in events and joined many competitions such as Suntec Dance Competition 2004, 2005 and 2007, Funkamania 2005-2008, and many others. Her crew also represented Singapore in Melbourne, Australia, for an international dance competition ‘Battlegrounds 2007’, where they were placed fourth. Orange has also gone to Hong Kong for training (exchange program) under Instructor Rico.
Kevin started dancing at age 15. He got the inspiration to dance from his idol, Harry Shum Jr. Beginning with Hip-Hop, he started taking more classes as his interest in dance grew. Having been a fan of K-Pop for a long time, he joined Korea Dance Wave as his CCA in school, and performed for school events such as CCA fair and Emblazon 2014.
Cravis started dancing when he was in Secondary 1; when his school introduced a Dance Educational Program into their weekly timetables. He became interested in B-boying, and started practicing with a group of classmates during recess and after school every day. As Cravis started taking this art form more seriously, he went out of his way to connect and learn from other B-boys. In 2009 he joined Pre Skool Funk where his b-boy journey was taken to the next level.
Zhen Yi
Zhen Yi started dancing at the age of 9 in her primary school’s Chinese Dance CCA. At 16, she started Hip Hop at DF under Jacky Lim and Keisha. She is also currently an active member of NUS Dance Blast. Click to read more…
With 20 year of dance experience, Keisha is no stranger to the stage. She trained in Classical Indian dance (Barathanatyam) under the tutelage of Usha Rani Maniyam from age 4 up until age 17. At 13 she began learning contemporary dance, street jazz and hip hop upon joining her secondary school’s dance team. She represented her schools in various competitions and was also vice-president of the SAJC dance society in her senior year where her passion for choreography developed.
Ridzuan first developed his interest in dance in Junior College where he self-learnt and explored Urban Choreography. This further developed his interest to join NUS Dance Blast, where he further ventured into Girls’ Style and Hip Hop. This is also where he became one of the Executive Committee members to lead the dance club and its members. It has been 7 years since he started dancing.
Jaydon started dancing at age 7, as a Chinese Dancer in his primary school and like any other teens, he developed much interest in K-Pop, which drove him to join and be a part of Temasek Polytechnic Dance Ensemble (TPDE) where he focuses mainly on Hip Hop, Street Jazz and K-Pop. He is part of a renowned dance crew in Singapore, Limited Edition SG.
At the young age of 18, Gina started her journey in fitness with the simple yet common goal of losing weight. After a successful weight loss of 6kg in 4 months through yoga and strength training, she got hooked onto fitness. Upon graduating from polytechnic, Gina got bonded under a talent program and worked as a Group Fitness Instructor.
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W = Wrought Iron French Style, French Faves - A to Z Challenge
French wrought iron is one of the most decorative and finely made elements used for architectural interest.
French Wrought Iron and Cartier Store on left, Paris, by DG Hudson
W = Wrought Iron
Ironwork can be any weapon, artwork, utensil or any architectural feature made of iron which is used for decoration. There are two main types: wrought iron and cast iron.
From medieval times, ironwork has flourished as decoration on doors, windows, balconies, and funereal monuments, and to offer security against robbers or raiders. Ironwork was used in Notre Dame de Paris, the Eiffel Tower, Canterbury and Winchester Cathedrals.
During the Baroque and Rococo periods of the 16th century, ironwork became ornate, elevating it from its more common uses and establishing it a desired architectural addition.
Eiffel Tower Wrought Iron at Dusk by DG Hudson
Wrought iron is quintessential Paris, but also appears in other cities in Canada (in Montreal) and the USA (in New Orleans).
Conformity and Cleanup
The street plans and distinctive appearance of buildings and wrought iron railings seen in the center of Paris today is largely the result of Georges-Eugène Haussmann's renovation of Paris, which was commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III between 1853 and 1870.
Wrought Iron Railing on Window, Paris Apartment, by DG Hudson
Architect and Designer of Wrought Iron
Hector Guimard (1867 - 1942), a French architect and designer, is now the best known representative of the Art Nouveau style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its application to architecture and ironwork.
The building shown below is a work of French designer Hector Guimard, signed in stone.
Hector Guimard's building, WC*
The curious, inventive Guimard was also a precursor of industrial standardization, insofar as he wished to diffuse the new art on a large scale. His greatest success in France – in spite of some scandals – was his famous entrances to the Paris Metro.
The entrance of the Porte Dauphine metro station in the 16th arrondissement of Paris is shown below.
An Entrance to Paris' Metro, by Hector Guimard - WC*
Guimard's fear of war forced him into exile in 1938 and he died, his past accomplishments unheralded. He is buried in New York City.
Do you like the look of wrought iron embellishing buildings? Have you seen any cities with extensive wrought iron details on its architecture? Did you know the lower edge of the Eiffel Tower had such intricate styling?
Wiki on Ironwork
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironwork
Hector Guimard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Guimard
Haussmann's Renovation of Paris
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann's_renovation_of_Paris
Hector Guimard building
This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons.
I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so:
I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
Porte Dauphine metro station
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. From Wikimedia Commons.
Labels: architectural ironwork in Paris, Art Nouveau Metro signs, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Hector Guimaud, wrought iron
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Winner’s Circle Dale Earnhardt #3 Radio Control C...
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Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero
Posted by Albert | Feb 20, 2013 | Books, Sport Books | 0 |
by David Maraniss
On New Year’s Eve 1972, following eighteen magnificent seasons in the major leagues, Roberto Clemente died a hero’s death, killed in a plane crash as he attempted to deliver food and medical supplies to Nicaragua after a devastating earthquake. David Maraniss now brings the great baseball player brilliantly back to life in Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, a book destined to become a modern classic. Much like his acclaimed biography of Vince Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered, Maraniss uses his narrative sweep and meticulous detail to capture the myth and a real man.
Anyone who saw Clemente, as he played with a beautiful fury, will never forget him. He was a work of art in a game too often defined by statistics. During his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he won four batting titles and led his team to championships in 1960 and 1971, getting a hit in all fourteen World Series games in which he played. His career ended with three-thousand hits, the magical three-thousandth coming in his final at-bat, and he and the immortal Lou Gehrig are the only players to have the five-year waiting period waived so they could be enshrined in the Hall of Fame immediately after their deaths.
There is delightful baseball here, including thrilling accounts of the two World Series victories of Clemente’s underdog Pittsburgh Pirates, but this is far more than just another baseball book. Roberto Clemente was that rare athlete who rose above sports to become a symbol of larger themes. Born near the canebrakes of rural Carolina, Puerto Rico, on August 18, 1934, at a time when there were no blacks or Puerto Ricans playing organized ball in the United States, Clemente went on to become the greatest Latino player in the major leagues. He was, in a sense, the Jackie Robinson of the Spanish-speaking world, a ballplayer of determination, grace, and dignity who paved the way and set the highest standard for waves of Latino players who followed in later generations and who now dominate the game.
The Clemente that Maraniss evokes was an idiosyncratic character who, unlike so many modern athletes, insisted that his responsibilities extended beyond the playing field. In his final years, his motto was that if you have a chance to help others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth. Here, in the final chapters, after capturing Clemente’s life and times, Maraniss retraces his final days, from the earthquake to the accident, using newly uncovered documents to reveal the corruption and negligence that led the unwitting hero on a mission of mercy toward his untimely death as an uninspected, overloaded plane plunged into the sea.
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Posts Tagged ‘The White House’
Posted: December 2, 2019 in Miscellaneous, Roadside Attractions
Tags: D.C., electric trains, model trains, National Christmas Tree, National Christmas Tree Railroad, President’s Park, The Ellipse, The White House
Celebrating it’s 25th year, the National Christmas Tree Railroad is again part of the display for this year’s National Christmas Tree and Santa’s Workshop, located in President’s Park on The Ellipse (MAP) in front of The White House. And during this lunchtime bike ride I stopped by to enjoy the display for a little while.
The railroad is comprised of a group of large-scale model trains which has expanded each year and now include multiple tracks, trains, bridges and buildings. It is sponsored and constructed by a group of non-paid volunteers who operate the electric trains in an elaborate display around the base of the tree. It is one of my favorite aspects of the display, and makes a trip to see the National Christmas Tree worth it, even during the daytime.
As the trains pass by, spectators try tossing coins into some of the train’s cars, much like a wishing well.
The money collected goes towards the cost of maintaining the National Christmas Tree Railroad.
Posted: October 1, 2019 in Historic Figures, Memorials
Tags: Adolph Alexander Weinman, Aline Straus Hockstader, Constitution Avenue, DC, Department of Commerce, Federal Triangle, Independence League Party, Liberty of Worship, Mildred Straus Schafer, Oscar Solomon Straus, Ottoman Empire, Pennsylvania Avenue, President Benjamin Harrison, President Grover Cleveland, President Harry S. Truman, President Theodore Roosevelt, President William Howard Taft, President William McKinley, Progressive Party, Roger Williams Straus, Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Sarah Lavanburg, The Hague, The White House, Voice of Reason
The Oscar S. Straus Memorial is located just two blocks south of The White House, in the Federal Triangle on 14th Street between Pennsylvania Avenue and Constitution Avenue, in front of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center (MAP), and was the destination of this lunchtime bike ride.
The memorial commemorates the accomplishments of the first Jew to be a member of the cabinet of a U.S. president, having served as Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Theodore Roosevelt from 1906 to 1909. He also served under Presidents William Howard Taft, William McKinley, and Grover Cleveland, and was offered a cabinet position by Theodore Roosevelt.
Oscar Solomon Straus was born on December 23, 1850, in Otterberg, Rhenish Bavaria, now in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate (now Germany). At the age of two he immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States, joining their father, Lazarus, who had emigrated in 1852. The family settled in Talbotton, Georgia. At the close of the Civil War in 1865, Straus’s family moved to New York City, where he graduated from Columbia College in 1871 and Columbia Law School in 1873. In 1882, Strauss married Sarah Lavanburg, and they had three children: Mildred Straus Schafer (born the following year), Aline Straus Hockstader (born in 1889), and Roger Williams Straus (born in 1891).
Straus first served as United States Minister to the Ottoman Empire from 1887 to 1889, and then again from 1898 to 1899. In January of 1902, he was named a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague to fill the place left vacant by the death of ex-President Benjamin Harrison. Then in December of 1906, Straus became the United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Roosevelt. This position also placed him in charge of the United States Bureau of Immigration. Straus left the Commerce Department in 1909 when William Howard Taft became president and became U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire until 1910. In 1912, he ran unsuccessfully for Governor of New York on the Progressive and Independence League tickets. And in 1915, he became chairman of the public service commission of New York State.
The memorial fountain was designed by Adolph Alexander Weinman, and funded with a public subscription beginning in 1929. It was dedicated on October 26, 1947, by President Harry S. Truman. It was disassembled and placed in storage in 1991 during the construction of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. After the building was completed, the fountain was reinstalled with all original materials. It was rededicated on October 26, 1998.
In the center of the memorial is the massive fountain with the inscription “statesman, author, diplomat.” To the sides are two statues. The one to the left is one entitled Justice, which depicts a woman representing “Justice,” with her arm resting on the Ten Commandments. It is intended to symbolize the religious freedom which allowed a Jew to serve in such a position of authority. The inscription on this statue reads, “Our Liberty of Worship is not a Concession nor a Privilege but an Inherent Right.” To the right of the fountain is the statue entitled Reason. It depicts a partially draped male figure and a child holding a purse, key, and hammer, symbolizing the capital and labor efforts put forth by Straus throughout his career.
Straus died on September 3, 1910, and is buried at Beth El Cemetery in Ridgewood, New York. For more on his life and career, you can read his memoirs, entitled “Under Four Administrations,” which he wrote and published in 1922.
Posted: April 15, 2019 in Buildings, Historic Sites, Presidential
Tags: Abigail Adams, American Civil War, Americans with Disabilities Act, and neoclassical style, Bess Truman, Blair House, Caroline Harrison, Charles G. Ross, Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Elisha Hunt Allen, Ellen Wilson, Executive Mansion, Fredrick Dent, James Hoban, Julia Grant, Leinster House, Letitia Tyler, Lincoln Bedroom, Mar-a-Lago, Margaret Wallace, Martha Washington, Patti Lease, Pete Souza, President’s House, President’s Palace, President’s Park, Reds Arrington, Sir Winston Churchill, The Ellipse, The War of 1812, The West Wing, The White House, Trump Tower, Willie Lincoln
The White House – South Portico
I have taken lunchtime bike rides to, and subsequently written in this blog about, a number of things that are either part of or in some way connected to the White House. I’ve written about Blair House, the White House’s guest house. I’ve written about the White House’s annual gingerbread exhibit. I’ve written about the White House Peace Vigil in Lafayette Square Park adjacent to the White House. I’ve written about the post-presidential residences of former presidents Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama. I’ve also written about a secret entrance to the White House. I even have a page about presidents and other politicians riding bikes. But despite having been there countless times, I have never written about the actual White House itself.
So during today’s lunchtime bike ride I rode by the building (MAP), which at various times in history has been known as the “President’s Palace,” the “President’s House,” and the “Executive Mansion.” It wasn’t until 1901 that President Theodore Roosevelt officially gave it its current name. And then after I got back I learned more about what is now known as the White House.
President George Washington chose the site for the White House in 1791. The cornerstone was laid in 1792 and construction began soon after. Irish-born architect James Hoban, who won the right to design it by winning a competition in 1792, designed the neoclassical architectural-style building. He modelled his design on Leinster House in Ireland, which today houses the Irish legislature. It took eight years to construct the building, with completion occurring in 1800. However, President Washington died in 1799, meaning he never set even set foot in the completed building. Its first residents were President John Adams and his wife Abigail, and they moved in before the house was actually finished. His term in office was almost over by the time they moved in, and only six rooms had been finished.
The White House has changed significantly over the years. When President Thomas Jefferson moved into it in 1801, he had the building expanded outward, creating the two colonnades that were meant to conceal stables and storage. Then in 1814 (during the War of 1812) the interior was destroyed and much of the exterior was charred by the British Army, necessitating that it be rebuilt. In 1817, during President James Monroe’s administration, the south and north porticos were added. The West Wing was added in 1901 during President William McKinley’s presidency, and during President William Howard Taft’s administration, the Oval Office was first constructed in 1909. Other expansions, additions and remodeling projects took place under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft. And during the administration of President Harry S. Truman, it underwent a complete renovation, at which time all of the interior rooms were completely dismantled and a new internal load-bearing steel frame was constructed inside the walls before the interior rooms were rebuilt.
Although the original White House was completed in 1800, it wasn’t until 1833 that President Andrew Jackson had indoor plumbing installed. And it took another 20 years, until 1853 during President Franklin Pierce’s administration, that all of its bathrooms had hot and cold water running to them. And the White House didn’t have electricity until 1891, nearly a century after it was first built. Electric lighting was still a fairly new concept when President Benjamin Harrison had it installed. And because he was worried he would be shocked if he touched a light switch, he never once personally turned a light on or off himself. In fact, he and his family were so scared of touching the switches that they would leave the lights on all night.
Today the White House measures 168 feet long and 85 1/2 feet wide without porticoes, or 152 feet wide with porticoes. The overall height of the White is 70 feet on the south and 60 feet 4 inches on the north. The building totals 55,000 square feet of floor space on six levels, two basements, two public floors, and two floors for the First Family. This makes President Donald Trump’s current primary residence more than five times the size of his 10,996 square-foot penthouse that occupies sections of floors 66 through 68 of the Trump Tower skyscraper on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, but smaller than his 62,500-square-foot mansion named Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
The White House is comprised of 132 rooms and 35 bathrooms, and contains 412 doors, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, eight staircases, and three elevators. It has two dining rooms, the larger of which can comfortably seat 140 people. And its other amenities include a movie theater (officially called the White House Family Theater), a billiard room, a music room, a jogging track, a tennis court, and a putting green, as well as a bowling alley, a flower shop, a chocolate shop, a carpenter’s shop, and a dentist’s office in the basements. It also has indoor and outdoor swimming pools. But only the outdoor pool is currently in use. The indoor pool, which opened in 1933 for use by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was filled in by President Richard Nixon and is underneath the floor of what is currently the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room.
Other interesting facts about the White House:
The White House was accredited as a museum in 1988.
The grounds of the modern-day White House complex, which includes the Executive Residence, West Wing, East Wing, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (which houses offices for the President’s staff and the Vice President), and Blair House, a guest house, and The President’s Park and The Ellipse, covers just over 18 acres.
The White House was the biggest house in the United States until the Civil War. It is currently tied with two other homes for the 34th place. The Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, is now the largest house in the country. And at 175,856 square feet, The Biltmore is well over three times the size of the White House.
The initial construction of the White House is reported to have cost of $232,371.83, which would be equal to $3,279,177 today. A recent appraisal valued the White House building and its property at just under $400 million.
The White House is ranked second, coming in behind the Empire State Building, on the American Institute of Architects list of “America’s Favorite Architecture.”
The White House requires 570 gallons of paint to cover its outside surface and keep it white.
Each week the White House receives up to 30,000 visitors and 65,000 letters, plus nearly 3,500 phone calls, 100,000 emails, and 1,000 faxes. It receives up to 30,000 visitors each week.
The White House never advertises staff positions. All employees of the White House are found via word-of-mouth or recommendations. As a result, many employees belong to families that have been working in the White House for generations.
In addition to numerous dogs and cats, the White House has been home to a number of unusual pets of presidents and their families. Some of the more unusual animals include: two opossums named Mr. Protection and Mr. Reciprocity, kept by President William Henry Harrison; a pair of tiger cubs that were gifted to President Martin Van Buren; President Zachary Taylor’s horse, named Old Whitey; a mockingbird named Dick, which President Thomas Jefferson’s allowed to fly freely around the house; a snake named Emily Spinach that belonged to President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter; President John Quincy Adams’ alligator that lived in one of the bathrooms, and; two other alligators that belonged to President Herbert Hoover’s sons and sometimes roamed free within the residence. In addition to the above, a raccoon was sent to President Calvin Coolidge to be eaten for Thanksgiving dinner, but he instead named it Rebecca and kept it as a pet. The raccoon was in addition to President Coolidge’s other pets, that included a bear cub, two lion cubs, a bobcat, a wallaby, and a pygmy hippopotamus.
Because President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was paralyzed below the waist due to polio, he added elevators and ramps in 1933, making the White House one of the first wheelchair accessible government buildings in D.C., a full 57 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act mandated it.
President Lyndon Johnson drove White House plumbing foreman Reds Arrington to the point of being hospitalized with a nervous breakdown over his constant demands for more water pressure in his unusual White House shower. Mr. Arrington spent five years working on getting the White House shower up to the president’s standards, adding nozzles, upping water pressure and making the water piping hot. The next president, Richard Nixon, took one look at the shower and said, “Get rid of this stuff.”
George Washington is the only president to never have lived in the White House, but his wife, Martha Washington, grew up and lived at an estate named White House Plantation.
Room is free for residents of the White House, but board is not. At the end of each month, the president receives a bill for his and his family’s personal food and incidental expenses, such as dry cleaning, toothpaste, and toiletries, etc., which is then deducted from his $400,000 annual salary.
Eighteen couples have gotten married at the White House, the most recent of whom tied the knot in 2013, when White House photographer Pete Souza was married to Patti Lease in the Rose Garden.
To date, a total of 10 people have died within the White House walls. Presidents William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor both died in the White House. Three First Ladies, Letitia Tyler, Caroline Harrison, and Ellen Wilson, passed away there, too. Willie Lincoln, son of President Abraham Lincoln, Fredrick Dent, First Lady Julia Grant’s father, Elisha Hunt Allen, Minister of the Kingdom of Hawaii to the United States, and Margaret Wallace, First Lady Bess Truman’s mother all died there. And one employee. Charles G. Ross, White House Press Secretary to President Truman, died there as well.
Like many other buildings and places in D.C., The White House is reported to be haunted. Many stories persist. But of all the haunted White House anecdotes out there, the one that really sticks involves Sir Winston Churchill. He refused to ever again stay in the Lincoln Bedroom after President Lincoln’s ghost appeared to him beside the fireplace as he was emerging from a bath, fully nude.
This blog post contains just a small fraction of the vast amount of information and copious number of stories about the White House and its occupants. Entire books, many of them, have been written about the famous and historic residence. But I hope you found the information in this post interesting, and maybe learned some things you didn’t know before about the house located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The White House – North Portico
The Assassination Site of President Garfield
Posted: March 19, 2019 in Historic Sites, Presidential
Tags: Alexander Graham Bell, Almon Ferdinand Rockwell, Baltimore and Potomac rail station, Charles Julius Guiteau, Civil War, D.C., Downtown, Dr. Willard Bliss, Elberon New Jersey, Half-Breed Republican, Long Branch New Jersey, National Gallery of Art, National Mall, President Abraham Lincoln, President James A. Garfield, President John F. Kennedy, President Ronald Reagan, President William McKinley, Sitting Bull, Stalwart Republican, the Republican Party, The White House, U.S. Army, Vice President Chester A. Arthur
President James A. Garfield was the 20th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1881, until his death by assassination six and a half months later while waiting to catch a train at the Baltimore and Potomac rail station. The site where it happened s just a few hundred yards from the 20th President’s official Presidential Memorial in an area of the city that has gone through many changes since the train station’s building and tracks were demolished in 1908 during a redesign of the National Mall. The National Gallery of Art’s West Building is now located there (MAP). But one thing stayed the same at the site for the first 137 years after President Garfield’s assassination. That was the absence of a plaque or historical marker to indicate what happened there on July 2, 1881. But that recently changed. So on this bike ride, I went there to see the new historical marker.
When President Garfield was elected in 1880, a man named Charles Julius Guiteau falsely believed he had played a major role in his victory. He also thought he should be rewarded with a consulship for his efforts in electing the new President. So he submitted applications to serve in Paris or Vienna, despite the fact he spoke no French or any other foreign language. But when the Garfield administration rejected his applications, he decided it was because he was part of the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party, and President Garfield was affiliated with the opposing Half-Breed faction of the party. Guiteau was so offended at being rejected for a consular position that he decided President Garfield had to die so that Vice President Chester A. Arthur, who was a fellow Stalwart, would succeed him. He thought this would not only end the war within the Republican Party, but would lead to rewards for fellow Stalwarts, including himself.
As difficult as it is to imagine in today’s political world, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln was seen as a fluke due to the Civil War, and Garfield, like most people, saw no reason why the president should be guarded. In fact, the President’s plans and schedule were often printed in the newspapers. Knowing his schedule and where he would be, Guiteau followed Garfield several times. But each time his plans to kill the President were frustrated, or he lost his nerve. Then in the summer of 1881, when the President had been in office for only four months, Garfield decided to take a train trip to New England to escape the swampy summer heat of D.C. Right after he arrived at the Baltimore and Potomac rail station, Guiteau emerged from where he had been hiding by the ladies’ waiting room and walked up to Garfield and shot him twice, once in the back and once in the arm, with an ivory-handled pistol, a gun he thought would look good in a museum. Guiteau was quickly apprehended, and as he was led away, he stated, “I did it. I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President.”
The wounded President was taken upstairs to a private office in the train station, where several doctors examined him. There they probed the wound with unwashed fingers, another thing that is difficult to imagine today. At Garfield’s request, he was then taken back to The White House. The physician who took charge at the train station and then at the White House was Willard Bliss, an old friend of the President’s. About a dozen physicians, led by Dr. Bliss, were soon probing the wound, again with unsterilized fingers and instruments.
Although in considerable pain despite being given morphine, the President did not lose his sense of humor. He asked Dr. Bliss to tell him his chances, which Bliss put at one in a hundred. The President then replied, “Well, Doctor, we’ll take that chance.” In addition to his treatment, Garfield was also being given oatmeal porridge and milk from a cow on the White House lawn for nourishment. However, he hated oatmeal porridge. So when he was told that Indian chief Sitting Bull, a prisoner of the U.S. Army, was starving, Garfield initially said, “Let him starve,” but then quickly changed his mind and said, “Oh, no, send him my oatmeal.”
During the President’s treatment, Alexander Graham Bell attempted to locate the bullet with a primitive metal detector. (The use of X-rays, which likely would have helped the President’s physicians save his life, would not be invented for another fourteen years.) However, he was unsuccessful. But they were able to help keep Garfield relatively comfortable in the stifling heat that he had been trying to escape with one of the first successful air conditioning units, which reduced the temperature in the sickroom by 20 degrees.
During the weeks of intensive care after being shot, Garfield would alternately seem to get better and then take turns for the worse. He developed an abscess around the wound, which doctors probed but most likely only made worse. He also developed infections that cause him to have a fever of 104 degrees, and he lost a considerable amount of weight. Eventually, Dr. Bliss agreed to move him to Elberon, part of Long Branch, New Jersey, where his wife had been recovering from an illness at the time her husband was shot.
There, Garfield could see the ocean as officials and reporters maintained what became a death watch. Garfield eventually succumbed to a combination of his injury and his treatment. On September 18, Garfield asked Almon Ferdinand Rockwell, a friend and business associate who was at his bedside, if he would have a place in history. Rockwell assured Garfield he would, but told him that he still had much work to do. The President responded, “No, my work is done.” He died later that night.
According to many medical experts and historians, Garfield most likely would have survived his wounds had Dr. Bliss and the other doctors attending to him had the benefit of modern medical research, knowledge, techniques, and equipment. In fact, much like President Ronald Reagan after the assassination attempt at The Washington Hilton here in D.C., Garfield would probably also have survived being shot. Instead, the treatment he received at least contributed, and most likely caused his death. It is thought that starvation also played a role in President Garfield’s death.
Four presidents have been assassinated while in office. And two of them occurred here in D.C. President Lincoln was killed at Ford’s Theater in 1865, and just 16 years later President Garfield was shot by Guiteau less than a thousand yards away from where President Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Boothe. There were already official markers for President Lincoln at The Petersen House in D.C. where he died, President William McKinley in Buffalo, New York, and President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Now all four sites have been properly recognized. I’ve now been to the two sites here in D.C. The other two, however, are a little too far away for a lunchtime bike ride.
Iran Freedom March
Posted: March 8, 2019 in Events, Protests
Tags: D.C., Freedom Plaza, Iran Freedom March 2019, Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, Iranian-Americans, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Maryan Rajavi, National Council of Resistance of Iran, Organization of Iranian American Communities, Pennsylvania Avenue, State Department, Tehran, The White House
While I was sitting in my office working this morning I received a message from our security personnel advising all employees to use caution if exiting the building around 1:00pm because many of the streets in the Downtown area would be shut down by the police for a large group of people. However, the message simply urged caution. It contained no specific information or explanation of what was going to be happening. So naturally I was curious enough to schedule today’s lunchtime bike ride for the same time so I could go out and see first hand what was going on.
It turned out to be the Iran Freedom March, an annual protest in which Iranian-Americans march down Pennsylvania Avenue, from 10th Street to Freedom Plaza, where members and supporters of the Organization of Iranian American Communities gather for speeches and to draw attention to their call for a regime change in Tehran and ask the U.S. They then finish by marching the last couple of blocks to The White House, where they call on the U.S. government to label Iran’s military and intelligence agency as terror organizations. The group seeks an uprising in Iran and regime change to establish a democratic, secular and non-nuclear nation.
Among other speakers, Maryan Rajavi, president-elect of the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran, addressed the marchers. In prepared remarks, she noted that the rally was held on International Women’s Day and congratulated women fighting for equality under a “misogynist regime.” She stated, “On this day, Iran and Iranians take pride in the women of Iran who have risen up and waged one of the greatest resistances of the modern era. They have given tens of thousands of martyrs, prisoners and torture victims, and for four decades have been active on all the fields of battle.” Rajavi then called on the U.S. State Department to designate Iran’s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Ministry of Intelligence as foreign terrorist organizations, asserting “Doing so would be a positive message to the Iranian people, and a decisive message against the clerical regime.”
It wasn’t the way I planned to spend my lunchtime today. But those plans can wait until next week. I’m glad I was able to observe the march, and learn more about their cause.
Edward R. Murrow Park
Posted: July 6, 2018 in Parks, Public Figures
Tags: Alexander Kendrick, Bill Downs, CBS, Columbia Broadcasting System, D.C., Dan Rather, Downtown, Ed Bliss, Edison Washington, Edward R. Murrow, Egbert Roscoe Murrow, Eric Sevareid, International Communication Agency, Pennsylvania Avenue, Polecat Creek North Carolina, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Skagit County Washingto, The White House, U.S. Information Agency, USIA, Washington State College
The late Edward R. Murrow was the first journalist to have Federal parkland named after him, when a tiny triangle of land on Pennsylvania Avenue just west of The White House was dedicated to him almost 40 years ago. And during today’s lunchtime bike ride I stopped by the park to see it.
Located on Pennsylvania Avenue between 18th and 19th Streets (MAP) in northwest D.C.’s Downtown district, it is just opposite the former U.S. Information Agency (USIA), which Murrow headed from 1961 to 1963. The USIA’s successor, the International Communication Agency, is now headquartered in the same building at 1776 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Edward R. Murrow was born Egbert Roscoe Murrow at Polecat Creek, North Carolina in April of 1908. He was the youngest of three brothers born to Quaker parents. When Murrow was six years old, his family moved across the country to Skagit County in western Washington, just 30 miles south of the U.S.-Canada border. He attended high school in nearby Edison, excelled on the debate team, and was president of the student body in his senior year. After graduation from high school, Murrow enrolled at Washington State College, where he was also active in college politics. After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1930, he moved back east to New York.
It was in New York that Murrow joined the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) as director of talks and education in 1935, and remained with the network for his entire career. He first gained prominence as a broadcast journalist and war correspondent during World War II with a series of live radio broadcasts from Europe for the news division of the CBS. During the war he recruited and worked closely with a team of war correspondents who came to be known as the Murrow Boys.
A pioneer of radio and television news broadcasting, Murrow produced a series of reports on his television program See It Now which helped lead to the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Fellow journalists Eric Sevareid, Ed Bliss, Bill Downs, Dan Rather, and Alexander Kendrick consider Murrow one of journalism’s greatest figures, noting his honesty and integrity in delivering the news.
Regardless of your political persuasion, most people can agree that we could use a lot more honesty and integrity in our current news reporting. I guess you could say that society needs another Edward R. Murrow. Unfortunately, there was only one.
A President’s Surprise Visit to the Lincoln Memorial
Posted: May 9, 2018 in Events, Historic Sites, Presidential
Tags: Cambodia, D.C., Elvis Presley, hippies, House of Representatives, Kent State University, King of Rock and Roll, Laugh-In, Lincoln Memorial, Manolo Sanchez, Mayflower Hotel, National Mall, Old Executive Office Building, Oval Office, President Richard Nixon, Ron Ziegler, Secret Service Agents, the Vietnam War, the war on drugs, The White House
During this morning’s bike ride I not only rode by The Lincoln Memorial, but I also rode back in history. As I paused at the memorial, I went back in time as I thought about this day in 1972.
Today is the anniversary of one of the strangest things to happen during President Richard Nixon’s time in office. And that’s saying something when you think about some of the other things that happened during his time as commander in chief, such as the time, when he was still running for president, when he appeared on the politically charged, sketch comedy TV show “Laugh-In” and awkwardly asked, “Sock it to me?” By the way, for the rest of his life Nixon contended that “appearing on Laugh-In is what got him elected.” Other incidents during his presidency include: the time he met in the Oval Office with Elvis Presley, during which the King of Rock and Roll lobbied to be deputized as a federal agent in the War on Drugs, and; the time he declared to a roomful of newspaper editors during a press conference in Disney World at the height of the Watergate scandal, “I am not a crook.”
It all began days earlier, on April 30, 1972. The anti-war movement was shocked when President Richard Nixon announced a major new escalation in the Vietnam War – the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. It took many people by surprise inasmuch as he had addressed the nation just ten days earlier, outlining his plan for the withdrawal of 150,000 troops from Vietnam, seemingly signaling that he was serious about his promise to get America out of the war. Near the end of his announcement about Cambodia, Nixon appealed for calm, especially on America’s college campuses. He nonetheless expected blowback. And that is exactly what he got.
Campuses across the country exploded in dissent, culminating on May 4th when National Guardsmen unleashed a 13-second, 67-shot barrage of gunfire toward student demonstrators at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding nine, one of whom was paralyzed from the waist down with a bullet lodged in his spine. In the tense days following Kent State, more than 450 U.S. colleges, universities, and even high schools were disrupted by strikes.
Locally, impromptu rallies erupted all over the D.C. region, and a major demonstration was planned for May 9 on the National Mall. Law enforcement entities went on alert, mobilizing all available resources including the entire D.C. police force and 5,000 military personnel from the 82nd Airborne Division who were stationed in the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House, which was encircled by D.C. transit buses parked bumper to bumper as an additional security barrier.
The above information is provided to give a sense of what a highly-charged and volatile atmosphere existed nationally, and especially here in D.C., at that time. Because it was within this setting that one of the most bizarre moments of Nixon’s presidency took place when, in the early morning hours of May 9, 1970, the president made an impromptu visit to The Lincoln Memorial.
At approximately 4:00 a.m., Nixon was awake and listening to a composition by Rachmaninoff as he took in the majestic view that The White House affords of the Lincoln Memorial. He also observed students protestors beginning to gather for the protest planned for later that day. Inspired to visit the hippie contingent, Nixon asked his valet, Manolo Sanchez, if he wanted to take in the Memorial up close at night. The Secret Service was astonished but adhered to the orders of their commander in chief to take the impromptu trip. Nixon, Sanchez and approximately four agents took the presidential limousine to the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.
It was there that Nixon engaged a small group of students. He began by acknowledging that most surely thought of him as a real “S.O.B.” Irregardless, he explained that they all shared the same goal – stopping the killing in Southeast Asia. And despite varying interpretations of his recently announced invasion of Cambodia, his overall actions proved this contention as he did more to extricate the U.S. from that conflict than his predecessors. During his discussion with the protestors, he also spoke about his views as a pacifist, given his Quaker background. Nixon explained that he changed after WWII to a view war as only useful as long as it was necessary.
The discussion also vacillated with lighter subjects, which was the socially awkward Nixon’s attempt to communicate with young people on their terms. He spoke about the benefits of traveling and dating while young. Nixon discussed the Syracuse football team with students from New York, and surfing with a student from California. This was a leader not naturally at ease with people. Yet it was Nixon who was willing to open a dialogue with individuals naturally opposed to him in a manner few with such power have ever attempted.
As the sun began to rise, Nixon, having exhausted both himself and his welcome, began walking back to the presidential limousine. As he did, a student Nixon describes as “a bearded fellow from Detroit” rushed up and asked if he could have his picture taken with the president. Nixon instructed the White House doctor to take the student’s picture with the president. “He seemed to be quite delighted,” Nixon says of that bearded fellow from Detroit. “It was, in fact, the broadest smile that I saw on the entire visit.”
The president along with Sanchez and his entourage, including the Secret Service agents, whose numbers had increased during the course of the visit, then departed. But they did not return to the White House. Not yet. Sanchez had never seen the famous “well” of the House of Representatives, either. Having roused security there, the President was sitting at one of the House desks as his valet took to the same podium used for State of the Union addresses. From there, and now also with press secretary Ron Ziegler in tow, the presidential entourage proceeded to the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue for breakfast, before heading back to the White House.
There were no news crews or fanfare. There was no prepared speech, talking points, or plan on what to do when Nixon arrived. And all that remains are a few photographs and the recollections of those involved, including Nixon’s, as can be heard on the video below.
A Post-White House Presidential Residence
Posted: April 19, 2018 in Buildings, Presidential
Tags: Belmont Road, Chicago, Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood, D.C., Giovanna Gray Lockhart, Homefront Holdings LLC, Joe Lockhart, Kalorama, Pennsylvania Avenue, President Barack Obama, President John Adams, President Woodrow Wilson, Secret Service Agents, Sidwell Friends, The White House
Unlike when most presidents’ terms in office conclude, when President Obama left The White House in January of 2017 he and his family chose to stay here in D.C. In fact, the only other former President to live in D.C. after leaving the presidency was Woodrow Wilson, who also has the distinction of being the only former president interred in D.C.
The Obamas’ reason for staying in the national capital city was so that Sasha (the youngest daughter), could stay and graduate from high school. At the time she was a sophomore at a private high school named Sidwell Friends, where her older sister Malia graduated in 2016. As President Obama explained, “We’re going to have to stay a couple of years in D.C. probably so Sasha can finish. Transferring someone in the middle of high school? Tough.”
So after living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for eight years, what kind of home did the Obama family move into? On today’s lunchtime bike ride I stopped by to see their current home, located at 2446 Belmont Road (MAP) in northwest D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood, to find out.
While not as impressive as the White House, the Obama family’s current home is newer than it. The White House has been the residence of every U.S. President since John Adams in 1800. The Obamas’ Belmont Road house was built 128 years later, in 1928. The White House has 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms and 6 levels in the residence, while the Obamas’ current house has 13 rooms, eight and a half bathrooms, and three levels. The Obama family’s previous residence has 35 fireplaces, while their current home has only one. The White House has formal gardens, vegetable gardens and a rose garden. Their new home has only a formal garden. Lastly, the White House is approximately 55,000 square feet and sits on 784,080 square feet of fenced in land, while the Belmont Road house is 6,441 square feet and sits on fenced in lot that measures 11,915 square feet.
The White House also has a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a movie theater, three elevators, butlers and personal assistants, groundskeepers, and five full-time chefs. The Obamas do not yet have a pool but recently were approved for a permit to build one. And the Belmont Road house has a lower level au-pair suite for Barack’s mother-in-law.
Although not for sale, the White House is worth $397.9 million. The Belmont Road house was listed for $5,750,000 in 2008, and then listed and relisted twice in 2012 for $7,995,000. Having not found a buyer, it was subsequently listed again in 2014 for $5,750,000. It sold in may of that year for $5,295,000 to former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart and his wife, Giovanna Gray Lockhart. An Obama family corporation, Homefront Holdings, LLC., then purchased the home from them in 2017 for $8.1 million, which is more than quadruple the price of comparable real estate listings in the area, where the median price is $1,995,000.
Despite the fact that last year’s move from their home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was a substantial step down for Barack, Michelle, and Sasha, their current home is much larger and more valuable than the home they still own at 5046 South Greenwood Avenue in south side Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood, where they lived prior to the White House, and still stay on some visits back home to Chicago.
The Obamas will most likely remain in their current home in the nation’s capital until at least the summer of 2019, after Sasha graduates. After that, they may continue to reside here, they may return to Chicago, or they may end up somewhere else.
NOTE: Unlike all of the other photos on this blog, I did not take the above photos of the Obama family’s current home. Those photos were taken from the real estate listing at the time they bought the home. Because the Secret Service, which guards the former president’s homes here in D.C. and in Chicago have restricted access to the roads on which they are located, the following photos were the only ones I was able to take of what I could see on my bike ride. They show uniformed Secret Service officers at blockades at either end of the road, and one of the black SUVs I saw while I was riding around the neighborhood in which sat plain clothes Secret Service agents.
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Technical Support Fundamentals
4.8 (20,481 Bewertungen) | 180K Teilnehmer angemeldet
This course is the first of a series that aims to prepare you for a role as an entry-level IT Support Specialist. In this course, you’ll be introduced to the world of Information Technology, or IT. You’ll learn about the different facets of Information Technology, like computer hardware, the Internet, computer software, troubleshooting, and customer service. This course covers a wide variety of topics in IT that are designed to give you an overview of what’s to come in this certificate program. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to: ● understand how the binary system works ● assemble a computer from scratch ● choose and install an operating system on a computer ● understand what the Internet is, how it works, and the impact it has in the modern world ● learn how applications are created and how they work under the hood of a computer ● utilize common problem-solving methodologies and soft skills in an Information Technology setting
Binary Code, Customer Support, Linux, Troubleshooting
4.8 (20,481 Bewertungen)
Great introduction to IT and the different standards that are used in the field. It really gives you an idea of what to expect and the different aspects that you may encounter while you're on the job.
Starting from scratch, I feel like I've gained a great basic understanding of IT support. It was informative, and it has motivated me and left me hungry for more. I am pumped to start the next course!
In the fourth week of this course, we'll learn about computer networking. We'll explore the history of the Internet and what "The Web" actually is. We'll also discuss topics like Internet privacy, security, and what the future of the Internet may look like. You'll also understand why the Internet has limitations even today. By the end of this module, you will know how the Internet works and recognize both the positive and negative impacts the Internet has had on the world.
Module Introduction3:26
Basics of Networking7:43
Networking Hardware3:49
Language of the Internet2:01
The Web3:45
Victor First Job1:24
Now that we understand what networks are, let's talk about how they're connected. There are a lot of ways you can connect computers to a network. We'll only cover a few of the major ones in this course. First, there is an Ethernet cable, which lets you physically connect to the network through a cable. On the back of the desktop we worked in the previous lessons, there's a network port that you plug your Ethernet cable into. Another way to connect to a network is through Wi-Fi, which is wireless networking. Most modern computing systems have wireless capabilities like mobile phones, smart televisions and laptops. We connect to wireless networks through radios and antennas. The last method will go over uses fiber optic cables to connect to a network. This is the most expensive method since fiber optic cables allow greater speeds than all the other methods. Fiber optic gets its name, because the cables contain glass fibers that move data through light instead of electricity. This means that we send ones and zeros through a beam of light instead of an electrical current, through a copper wire. How cool is that? But our cables have to connect to something. We don't just have millions of cables going in and out of computers to connect them together, instead, computers connect to a few different devices that help organize our network together. The first device that your computer connects to is a router. A router connects lots of different devices together and helps route network traffic. Let's say we have four computers, A, B, C and D, connected together through a router in the same network. You want to send a file from Computer A to Computer B. Our packets go through the router and the router utilizes network protocols, to help determine where to send the packet. We'll cover network protocols in the next video. For now, just know that our router uses a set of rules to figure out where to send our data. So, now our packet gets routed from Computer A to Computer B. What if you wanted to send a packet to a computer not in our network? What if we wanted to send a packet to our friend Alejandro's computer. Alejandro is on a different network altogether. Fortunately, our router knows how to handle that too. The packet will get routed outsider network to our ISP's network. Using networking protocols, it's able to figure out where Alejandro's computer is. During this process, our packet is traveling across many different routers switches and hubs. Switches and hubs are also devices that help our data travel. Think of switches like mailrooms in a building. Routers get our letters to the building. But once we're inside, we use the mailroom to figure out where to send a letter. Hubs are like company memos. They don't know who to send the memo to, so they send it to everyone. Working with network devices is important to understand, because it's likely that one day you'll have users reporting problems accessing the Internet. You want to investigate your way up the network stack. A technologies stack, in this case a network stack is just a set of hardware or software that provides the infrastructure for a computer. So, the networks stack is all the components that makes up computer networking. You might need to investigate the networks stack and your job. You'd start with making sure the end user computers are working properly. Then you'd turn your attention to other possible points of failure like the cabling, switches and routers, that work together to access the Internet. We'll dive a little deeper into the different networking devices in the Networking course. For now, let's route ourself to the next lesson, the language of the Internet.
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Tag Archives: Fred Sanders
Top 5 Reformedish Books of 2016
This has been a busy year of reading for me. Most years are. But the difference with grad school (at least during courses) is that you don’t have quite the flex you had before in terms reading for pleasure, or randomly choosing what you wanted to take up at any given moment. You also have much less time for popular level works. With all that said, I managed to get in some very fun books this year, and so I figured I’d keep up my cliche tradition of giving you a list of my top 5 Reformedish books of the year.
As always, these come in no particular order. My criteria are pretty basic: was it theologically-stimulating and well-written? Did I enjoy it even when I was disagreeing with it? Etc.
Without further ado, then, here they are.
Who Shall Ascend to the Mountain of the Lord? A Biblical Theology of the Book of Leviticus by L. Michael Morales.
Leviticus is a much-ignored book largely because it seems arcane and disconnected from the rest of the dynamic story of Scripture. Morales corrects both of those problems for readers, by setting Leviticus within the broader storyline of the Torah and the Scriptures as a whole, tying it to the basic movement of exile and entrance into the Presence of the LORD. The New Studies in Biblical Theology series is one of my favorites in general, but this volume in particular distinguished itself. I highly recommend it.
The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ by Fleming Rutledge
I have already reviewed this work and I have to say it might be the most beautiful piece of theological writing I have read in a while. In my review, I said: “Aimed at reinvigorating the dying tradition of “Good Friday” preaching of the Church, Rutledge sets herself the task of examining the cross of Christ in its various biblical, theological, historical, and social dimensions. In other words, while she engages at a fairly academic level at points, she’s not so much concerned with the academy, but with the pulpit—which is why the book is rich with illustrations and reflective sections interacting not only with historical and biblical theology, but with literature, poetry, and newspaper headlines. Essentially, it’s a work aimed at pastor-theologians.” In the review, I note that it’s not without its theological problems, but worth the read all the same.
Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical by Tim Keller
I have a recent write-up of this one too. Also, we had Keller on the Mere Fidelity podcast this week as well. Basically, you need to know that it’s classic Keller. It’s a bit of pre-evangelism aimed at provoking the apathetic to curiousity about Christ, less than defending Christ against the animosity of the skeptic. In the post-Christian culture we’re entering, believers who care about evangelism or explaining the relevance of their faith to their neighbors need to start thinking about how to do this better. Keller offers guide for the path.
The Triune God by Fred Sanders
I also wrote a review for this one. Here’s a bit of what I said: “Yes, it’s a work of trinitarian doctrine, but it’s also a master class in how to constructtrinitarian doctrine. Sanders doesn’t just set about telling you how to think about the Trinity, but also how to think about thinking about the Trinity. In that sense, Sanders is concerned with trinitarian doctrine as a species of Theological Interpretation of Scripture; he wants to show us how to read the Bible to arrive at the doctrine of the Trinity without misconstruing either the Bible, or even worse, the Trinity. And all of this for the sake of rightly praising our glorious God.”
Delivered From the Elements of the Universe: Atonement, Justification, and Mission by Peter Leithart
I also reviewed this one last week. Like Rutledge’s, this one had some moments of significant disagreement, but it was just such good book despite it. I described his work of atonement theology like this: “Indefatigable polymath that he is, Leithart is “cheerful, even giddy” about his limitations as he sets about constructing the argument of his self-described “Big Red Book About Everything”, drawing broadly upon a variety of discourses to get the job done. Within its pages, one can find forays into comparative anthropology, religious theories of sacrifice, OT studies, Pauline studies, Gospel studies, theories of secularization, Medieval and Reformation metaphysics, and so much more. The through-line connecting the disparate fragments is Leithart’s typological reading of the whole of Scripture and even human history. Indeed, you can characterize the work as a “systematic typology.””
Finally, I should note that Kevin Vanhoozer’s book that came out this year just won the CT Book of the Year for Theology and Ethics. I would have put it my list but he’s my advisor, so y’all might not believe me. I also did a write-up for that one.
spirituality, theology, trinity
To Dance, or not to Dance with the Trinity?
Me: Read for your paper. Other Me: Write about that Dancing with the Trinity thing for an hour. Nothing bad can happen.
Fred Sanders critiqued a new book by Richard Rohr on the Trinity, The Divine Dance, yesterday at TGC. As with most of Sanders’ writing, it was playful, with puckish humor. It was also atypically forceful for the ever-genial Sanders, condemning the work as crossing the bounds of Nicene and general Orthodoxy at various points. (FWIW, the location surprised some, as well, because Sanders is a quite openly Wesleyan theologian, quite uninterested in defending Calvinism. Apparently, they asked him because he is a well-respected, expert on trinitarian theology in general.)
In any case, it provoked dismay and chagrin among Rohr’s fans and even some more neutral onlookers. I’ll touch on that below, but one interesting question it raised for me was the issue of whether or not we should use the very popular image of the Trinity as a “Divine Dance” in our preaching and teaching.
Dancing with Lewis and Keller
If you’ve heard a sermon on the Trinity in an Evangelical church in the last 50 years, I would not be surprised if you’ve seen the pastor appeal to a very famous passage in C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity where he appeals to the image to explain the dynamic, inner life of the Triune God. I mean, I know I’ve used it. In any case, here it is:
And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance. The union between the Father and the Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person. I know this is almost inconceivable, but look at it thus. You know that among human beings, when they get together in a family, or a club, or a trade union, people talk about the ‘spirit’ of that family, or club, or trade union. They talk about its ‘spirit’ because the individual members, when they are together, do really develop particular ways of talking and behaving which they would not have if they were apart. It is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence. Of course, it is not a real person: it is only rather like a person. But that is just one of the differences between God and us. What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God.
So we see that Lewis is in the middle of a discussion of what it means for God to be love. In the middle of it, he appeals to the image of a dance to begin to speak of the procession of the Holy Spirit from Father and Son as the loving union of Father and Son (per Augustine, ‘the bond of love’).
Beyond the fact that people suck down anything Lewis writes (yours truly included), I don’t know how many books on the Trinity in the last 50 years have simultaneously appealed to the Greek word perichoresis used by some of the Fathers (Gregory, Maximus, later John of Damascus). Originally, the term was used to describe the interpenetration of Christ’s two natures in the incarnation. Later, the term was expanded to speak of the mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity a la the Johannine discourses (“I am in the Father and the Father is in me”).
Now, the word’s etymology can be linked to the idea of movement and aroundness, and so somewhere along the line, the link between perichoresis and dance was born. In the 20th Century, it’s been used by a number of Trinitarian theologians like Jurgen Moltmann, Miroslav Volf, and others as a key way of speaking about the unity of the persons of the Trinity, the God/world relationship, and sundry other uses that extend beyond the original purposes of the term. We’ve experienced something of a perichoretic overload. The dance has gotten out of hand. (BTW, we had a Mere Fidelity episode on it here.)
In any case, Sanders’ critique may have left the impression that to use the image at all was heretical in itself. Mike Morell, Rohr’s co-author/transcriber, responded to Sanders’ criticism by pointing out that if the image is off-limits, that’s quite awkward since one of TGC’s co-founders, Tim Keller, has appealed to the image himself in places like The Reason for God. Here is the quote:
The life of the Trinity is characterized not by self-centeredness but by mutually self-giving love. When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom moves around the other two. So it is, the Bible tells us. Each of the divine persons centers upon the others. None demands that the others revolve around him. Each voluntarily circles the other two, pouring love, delight, and adoration into them. Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. That creates a dynamic pulsating dance of joy and love. The early leaders of the Greek church had a word for this—perichoresis. Notice the root of our word ‘choreography’ is within it. It means literally to “dance or flow around.”
Awkward, right? So do Keller and Lewis fall afoul of Sanders’ critique? How about the likely dozens and hundreds of other authors who have used it? Are they immediately to be considered heretics? Should we ditch the dance? What’s going on here?!
To Dance or Not To Dance
Well, given that I’ve gone back and forth about the image myself, I’ve got a few thoughts on the subject.
First, I think it’s important to distinguish between perichoresis and the dance image. The two are different things and you can appeal to perichoresis without invoking the dance. Perichoresis has gotten a bit buzzwordy and goofy, but that’s no reason to ditch the classic terminology. Just use it properly.
Second, there are at least two different uses of the dance image. It can be deployed in an illustrative and modest way, or an intensive and extensive way. In other words, it’s the difference between an image and a model.
I think Lewis is a good example of the illustrative image use. He spends a good deal of time in the book trying to explain things like the eternal generation of the Son, differences in between divine and human personality, and establishing a fairly standard, Nicene view of the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Spirit. And then he casually deploys the dance as an image of the livingness and movement of the divine life without trying to figure out if the dance is a mambo, or a waltz, or something else. It’s quick, it’s illustrative, and it’s done. (Given that he basically uses it briefly in a couple books, I tend to think that this is where Keller fits, too, even if he may fall afoul of the common etymological fallacy Sanders’ mentions in his footnote of the review.)
Others seem to take it as something more of a full-blown model, especially when linking it to a view called social trinitarianism, which takes the persons of the Trinity to be more like modern individuals, with three distinct, centers of consciousness, will, and so forth, who are united in being, but tend to look something more like a family. When the dance image gets invoked, at that point it starts to take on a whole different level of meaning, and we have all sorts of psychological and relational dynamics worked out and so forth. It can become far more intensive and extensive.
Finally, as an extreme version of this, you might do what Sanders says Rohr does: make the image central, set it within a relational metaphysic that has shades of pantheism and panentheism, gesture at a fuzziness in the Creator/creature distinction, downplay Scriptural language for the Trinity, openly disdain hundreds of years of reflection on the issue, talk about femininity within the interstitial spaces between the persons of the Trinity, start suggesting humans belong within it, and, on top of that, suggest we should “ignore the dancers” we were talking about in the first place. (Now, I admit I haven’t read the book, but Sanders has provided direct quotes, and since he has sneezed more Trinitarian theology than I have read, I tend to take his word for it.) If that’s what’s going on, then at that point the problem isn’t the dance image, but this whole, relational, “flow” metaphysic that has started to do all sorts of heterodox things with the rest of our theology.
With these differences in view, I think it’s possible to say that the dance image itself, if used modestly, quickly, and as just that—an image, not a model—is still kosher. I do think it’s good to be careful with these things, though. If you’re preaching, we need to connect to our people, and speak to them about the dynamic, living God. But we also need to remember that the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit has given us the best image of himself in his works in history as the Son comes from the Father in the power of the Spirit to live, die, rise again, and bring us new life in the gospel.
What God has shown and said about himself needs to be our touchstone for everything we eventually say about him. Use the image as and only if you can reinforce something revealed, but be careful you don’t build an entire world around it.
Theology and Idolatry
And this brings me to a final point I want to make. It came up over the summer when this whole Trinity debate happened as well. Some people were shocked yesterday that someone would come out so forcefully to debate about the Trinity (also, there was probably a difference in interpretation of Sanders’ tone).
Still, I think there’s this thought in broader Evangelicalism, both conservative and progressive, that beyond the mere affirmation of it, it’s super esoteric, difficult, and not the sort of thing to get crazy about, because if you do, you’re probably just an academic protecting your turf, or someone who just likes being right for the sake of being right.The order and nature of the persons, the single being of God, and so forth–that’s no reason to write off a person’s work is it?
I have to admit that, in the abstract, there’s part of me that sympathizes.
But this has not been the attitude of the church for most of its history. What’s more, the Bible contains very strong language about idolatry. In Exodus 20, the first commandment is to not worship other gods, while the second is to avoid making up images of God out of your own head. Don’t picture God as he hasn’t pictured himself. Because when we do, we inevitably get it wrong, and start to shrink God down to our size, distort him, and remold him in our image. All throughout the Scriptures the warnings against falsely worshipping him resound, especially in the prophets. It’s not a minor theme.
That matters because, (a) God is holy and majestic and glorious and we shouldn’t distort that, but also because (b) God wants us to know him, relate to him, love him, and receive love from him in truth. And wrong, distorted, heretical thoughts about him hurts that. Eugene Peterson says “a lie about God is a lie about life.” This is not about logic-chopping but about worshiping God in Spirit and in truth (John 4). God gives himself to be known and loved by us, but not in whichever way we want or find congenial, or fires our creativity. He wants to be loved as he is. If anybody is going to accommodate God to our knowledge, it is God himself.
Listen, I get that the Trinity is hard to think and write about. I have struggled to get my own trinitarian theology straight for so long. And if you’re struggling with it, that’s fine. Especially if you’re someone in the pew who is not ordained, or going around teaching people about it. Or maybe writing entire books on it.
But if people do go writing entire books on it, teaching on it with authority, and then if they get it severely wrong in a way that threatens to mislead many, many people, this seems like the kind of thing it seems worth having a go around about.
atonement, book review
Locating Atonement: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics (Review)
Fred Sanders and Oliver Crisp sure know how throw a party. Or “theology conference.” This past year’s LA Theology Conference was focused on the idea of “locating atonement” and they pulled out all the stops, drawing in names like Bruce McCormack, Matthew Levering, Michael Horton, and a host of others. Their stated aim was to take us beyond the important, yet typical questions plaguing atonement discussions over the last 70 years such as: How many typologies or “theories” of atonement are there? Which one is right? How do we relate them? and so forth. Instead, they tasked their presenters with examining the subject of atonement in light of its relations to other doctrines. Ten months later, they’ve delivered an exciting new volume on atonement theology Locating Atonement: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics.
As a general comment on the collection of essays as a whole, it’s important to note that they’re not presented as one, unified work. There is a diversity among the contributors with respect to issues like impassibility, penal substitution, how much “ontology” plays a role in our accounts of atonement, and so forth. That said, a few characteristics come through. First, they’re all top-notch. Second, they demonstrate a broadly catholic, if predominantly Western orientation, attuned to the theological tradition that comes before it. Finally, as technically erudite as these essays can get, all of them have their eye on the preaching and teaching of the Church, not merely the formulations of the academy.
Though all the essays were worth engaging–so I will–my comments on each will vary because, well, this review got away from me. That said, length of summary should not be necessarily read as an indication of the relative value of each essay.
After Sanders and Crisp’s intro, Adonis Vidu opens up the constructive essays by taking up a thread in his work in Atonement, Law, and Justice on simplicity and divine action (one of my favorites of 2014). Specifically, he sets about trying to set the atonement in the context of the trinitarian principle that the external works of the Trinity are undivided. In other words, there are no works that the Son does in which the Father and the Spirit are not intimately and also equally involved since they have one shared nature, will, and mind even though possessed their own particular way. So, while it is the Son who becomes incarnate, he does so in the power of the Spirit and in accordance with the will of the Father and so forth. Using this classic principle and a strongly Thomistic account of simplicity and pure being, Vidu tries to help smooth out some of the less helpful ways we popularly think about atonement, specifically with the idea that the Father is somehow acting on or against the Son in a way that threatens the unity of the Godhead. In doing so, Vidu raises some important and salutary concerns, trying to direct our attention to the classic tradition which formed the theological context in which our atonement doctrines were originally formulated and outside of which, it can likely only suffer distortion. My only concern is that while he has forcefully and rightly protected the undivided unity of action, I’d love to see him fill out the distinctness within that unity a bit more.
Matthew Levering’s delightful essay relates the doctrine of creation and atonement by engaging Nicholas Wolterstorff on the issue. Wolterstorff recently challenged the “reciprocity principle” at the heart of satisfaction accounts of atonement, essentially by appealing to Jesus’ rejection of the principle in the Sermon on the Mount. This, in turn, shapes his objections to classic satisfaction accounts. In response, first, Levering counters by showing that Wolterstorff’s reading of Jesus and the New Testament is simply wrong on its own terms. Jesus actually reaffirms the reciprocity principle in a number of places as do the apostles. Second, he grounds this reading theologically by expounding Aquinas’ account of God’s gift of distributive justice with the gift of creation. But I won’t blow that for you. Suffice it to say that this is a quintessentially careful piece of theological reasoning from Levering that you won’t want to ignore.
In his piece, Jeremy Treat argues that covenant is an integrative doctrine for atonement theology, which allows us to cut through a number of false dichotomies plaguing us in the contemporary discussion. In a sense, he strives to give a broadly covenantal approach, situating Jesus’ work as the recapitulation and fulfillment of the story of Adam and Israel, attempting to appeal even to the non-Reformed. Using covenant as the key grid for organizing our understanding of atonement, Treat argues that atonement can be both legal and relational, individual and corporate, retributive and restorative, as well as make sense of the unity of Christ’s atoning life, death, and resurrection. These twenty pages would save us all a lot of grief if they were broadly digested within the church. Also, if you haven’t picked up Treat’s The Crucified King–which you should have–this ought to whet your appetite for it.
Benjamin Myers offers up a piece relating atonement and incarnation by expositing the “patristic model” of atonement. In doing so, he’s trying to move us past Gustaf Aulen’s rather skewed “classical” ransom account of atonement offered up in Christus Victor, which tended to obscure things a bit. In past times, writers like J.N.D. Kelly had referred to this stream of thought as something of a physicalist account because it hinges on the Son becoming man, joining his immortal deity to our mortal natures, passing through life, and overcoming death by filling our mortality with his unconquerable life through resurrection. And that’s a horrible summary of Myers’ careful 12-step case. Myers has done us all a favor in highlighting and recapturing a stream of Patristic thought often lost to us in the post-Aulen discussion–a 12-step program, if you will. My one argument is with his treatment of Athanasius that, for my money, tries a little too hard to screen out the penal and forensic elements within it. Indeed, it’s rather instructive to compare his essay at this point to Levering’s earlier appeal to those same passages in conjunction with Thomas. All the same, strong showing from the Australian contingent.
Kyle Strobel and Adam Johnson have a rather unique essay on the relationships between wisdom and atonement. It’s a rather phenomenal little piece that treats the atonement as a work of God’s Wisdom, rescuing the world from its folly through the foolishness of the cross. I’m temped to say it’s almost a way of retelling the whole economy of redemption from the angle of wisdom. It’s a treasure trove of theological insight (might have been the most surprising essay at the conference for me) and word on the street is Johnson is following it up with a little work on atonement that should be smashing.
Luke Stamps treats the often-forgotten yet crucial doctrine of dyothelitism (that Christ had two wills, a human and a divine one according to each nature) with respect to the atonement. This is one of those places where clear, systematic thinking is most helpful with exegesis. There are number of key insights here, but for me, the bit that finally clicked was the way monothelitic accounts of Christ’s will, of necessity, require a social trinity doctrine. Without understanding that Christ has two wills–one human and one divine will shared with Father and Spirit–the only way Christ can pray “Not my will but yours”, is if the Son as God has a will distinct from that of the Father and the Spirit. Some might want to go there, but Stamps shows why this reading might have some costs to our doctrine of the Trinity we should not be willing to pay.
Daniel J. Hill and Joseph Jedwab’s essay focuses on relating atonement and the very concept of punishment. Without actually arguing for its justness, they present an argument for the conceptual coherence of the idea of the Son being punished for or assuming responsibility for the sins of others. It’s a fairly analytic essay and, for what it aims to do, fairly helpful. That said, it’s necessarily quite limited.
Eric T. Yang and Stephen Davis offer up a piece analyzing the link between wrath and atonement. They present a somewhat standard defense of the notion of the appropriateness of affirming wrath as an affection or emotion in God, with a disappointing but typical rejection of impassibility. What’s more, they argue that not simply penal substitutionary accounts, but other forms ought to consider incorporating a robust notion of divine wrath in their readings of the atonement.
T. Mark McConnell relates the doctrine of atonement with the much-neglected issue of shame as distinct from guilt. Guilt says, “I have done wrong”, while shame says, “I am wrong.” According to McConnell, not only are we living in a society that is awash in shame, even if it’s lost its sense of guilt, at the heart of the Scriptures is a story about God overcoming Adam’s nakedness and shame in the Garden. Drawing on Ireneaus and the theology of the vicarious humanity of Christ from T.F. Torrance, McConnell lays out the way that understanding atonement as recapitulation allows us to see Christ reconstituting and remaking us as overcoming of our alienating shame in his reconciling life, death, and resurrection. Jesus is the one who bears our shame away, killing it on the cross, and clothing us once more. Overall, this is a very important pastoral dimension to the atonement that ought to be regained where it has been lost. That said, I would definitely shy away from adopting the “fallen humanity” view which McConnell has forwarded–I think something like his model can and must be constructed without it–nor would I necessarily foreground shame as prior and deeper to the problem of guilt as McConnell has. Bracing essay, nonetheless.
Alongside Vidu’s, Bruce McCormack’s essay on atonement and human suffering is the densest of the various pieces, defying easy summary. It’s also one of the most conflicted for me. In order to treat the problem of suffering and the will of God, McCormack develops a theological account of the death of Jesus as the will of God. First, he treats it in terms of the Gospel accounts where Jesus’ death is seen as the apocalyptic outpouring of the wrath of God upon the Son. McCormack then turns to deepening the New Testament witness through H.U. Von Balthasar’s profound theology of the cross and his account of the judgment of hell and being with the dead. Though, of course, with his own Christological corrections. With this account in place he argues for the uniquely redemptive nature of Jesus’ death as an answer, not to mere physical death, but as the foundation for the resurrection. It is a condemnation of the old order, paving a way for the new. For myself, I couldn’t go with this tinkering with impassibility, view of synthetic construction of the gospels, and a couple other Barthian themes related to God’s being and history. All in all, though, a stimulating and moving read.
I’ll be blunt and say that Elenore Stump’s was the most frustrating for me. Of course, it was sharp work. It is Stump; she’s brilliant. But theologically, her attempt to offer a cut-rate account of the atonement’s relation to the Eucharist thinly-conceived, had some some rather semi-Pelagian tendencies. That said, her discussion of second-person experiences and the role of story in our spiritual formation was illuminating.
Michael Horton rounds out the books with his chapter on Ascension and atonement. He provocatively sets out to answer H.U. Von Balthasar’s charge that Protestantism can’t encompass or reckon with Ireneaus’ basic attitude in theology. He does so in tracing out two streams of thought on ascent and descent, salvation, and metaphysics. One is an Irenaean stream and another Origenist, with Origen the less congenial of the two. It’s a tale of two ascensions, two deifications, two Eucharists, and two metaphysics. Unsurprisingly, Calvin and the Reformed tradition a la Bavinck are clearly the heroes here. And I agree with that point. But Horton does his best to show them in continuity with a broader “catholic” tradition, as well. Again, this one defies simple explanation, but it’s really a first-rate piece to close down the house.
Well, that about wraps it up. If you haven’t picked up on it, yet, I highly recommend the volume. Oliver Crisp and Fred Sanders have done a bang-up job pulling this all together.
apologetics, Bible, biblical studies
Torrey on the Trustworthy Temple of Scripture
Fred Sanders put together a nifty little collection of evangelist, expositor, Bible college dean, and pastor R.A. Torrey’s sermons entitled How God Used. R.A. Torrey. Sanders introduces the work with a little bio, then adds brief introductory commentary before 13 representative sermons and addresses by Torrey. I’ve been reading it for a couple of days between other works and it’s been a fun little work so far. The preaching is dynamic, personal, and spiritually compelling. Also, as a preacher, it’s just interesting to see how much the game has changed, so to speak, since Torrey was calling people back to faith.
One address I enjoyed, in particular, was his famous “10 Reasons Why I Believe the Bible is the Word of God.” Torrey, of course, famously edited the collection of essays in defense of orthodoxy known as The Fundamentals at the height of the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversies, so it’s unsurprising he dedicated significant preaching to the subject of the trustworthiness of the Scriptures.
Well, the whole sermon holds up remarkably well 100 years later on, but the section I enjoyed most was his argument about “the unity of the book”:
This is an old argument, but a very satisfactory one. The Bible consists of sixty-six books, written by more than thirty different men, extending in the period of its composition over more than fifteen hundred years; written in three different languages, in many different countries, and by men on every plane of social life, from the herdman and fisherman and cheap politician up to the king upon his throne; written under all sorts of circumstances; yet in all this wonderful conglomeration we find an absolute unity of thought.
A wonderful thing about it is that this unity does not lie on the surface. On the surface there is oftentimes apparent contradiction, and the unity only comes out after deep and protracted study.
More wonderful yet is the organic character of this unity, beginning in the first book and growing till you come to its culmination in the last book of the Bible. We have first the seed, then the plant, then the bud, then the blossom, then the ripened fruit.
Suppose a vast building were to be erected, the stones for which were brought from the quarries in Rutland, Vermont; Berea, Ohio; Kasota, Minnesota, and Middletown, Connecticut. Each stone was hewn into final shape in the quarry from which it was brought. These stones were of all varieties of shape and size, cubical, rectangular, cylindrical, etc., but when they were brought together every stone fitted into its place, and when put together there rose before you a temple absolutely perfect in every outline, with its domes, sidewalls, buttresses, arches, transepts–not a gap or a flaw anywhere. How would you account for it? You would say:
“Back of these individual workers in the quarries was the master-mind of the architect who planned it all, and gave to each individual worker his specifications for the work.”
So in this marvelous temple of God’s truth which we call the Bible, whose stones have been quarried at periods of time and in places so remote from one another, but where every smallest part fits each other part, we are forced to say that back of the human hands that wrought was the Master-mind that thought.
—How God Used R.A. Torrey, pp. 23-24
I have to tell you, this “argument” isn’t one that you just trot out in the middle of an apologetic dispute, especially with someone predisposed to disbelieve or be hostile to Scripture. Still, year after year, this insight into the unity of Scripture–it’s ability to consistently point to Christ through Law, Prophets, and Gospels, across various genres, generations, authors, and centuries is a continuous marvel. This is especially the case when you take off the modernist blinders and begin to pour over the various narratival and typological continuities.
The Scriptures truly are a marvelous Temple of God’s truth. But Torrey is right–it’s not a unity that just lies there on the surface. It’s the kind of thing that you come to see once you give it the sustained attention and care that it deserves. But once you see it, much as Moses face coming down from Sinai, it shines with the reflected glory of God.
theology, trinity
Defending #ClassicalTheism One Tweet at a Time
I just finished John W. Cooper’s masterful work Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers yesterday. It’s often charged that ‘classical theism’, the Augustinian tradition of theological reflection held broadly across Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions, is ‘the God of the philosophers’ that was forged via the synthesis of Greek Philosophy and the Gospel. Usually this charge is leveled by those putting forward an alternative, more biblical, or whatever view, often coming from a panentheistic framework, or largely influenced by it. Cooper’s main task in this judicious, fair-minded, and quite comprehensive work is to trace the philosophical lineage of panentheism beginning with Neoplatonism through thinkers like Eriugena, Bohme, Cusa, Schelling, Hegel, and so forth on down into contemporary thinkers such as Hartshorne, Moltmann and Clayton.
Well, feeling a bit feisty and inspired, I took to twitter and began tweeting a series of one-line defenses of ‘classical theism.’ Some are snarky, others not so much. It’s Twitter so they lack the precision, and probably the charity of Cooper’s work. Twitter theology is always a risk. Still they were kinda fun and some friends joined in, so I figured I’d share them here.
Classical Theism: the God who doesn’t have to wait for others so he can be himself.
— Derek Rishmawy (@DZRishmawy) September 25, 2014
@DZRishmawy Classical Theism: the God whose nature and character doesn’t depend on “the kind of God I would believe in” — John Starke (@john_starke) September 25, 2014
Classical Theism: Because God doesn’t need to save himself.
Classical Theism: the God who doesn’t need creation or history to work out his personal issues.
@DZRishmawy the God who can dialogue without falling to pieces
— Jon Wymer (@RuralVitality) September 25, 2014
Classical Theism: Because Augustine > Hegel.
Classical Theism: Because theology should take its cues from Irenaeus more than the guys he was arguing against.
Classical Theism: Because the Trinity is the eternal foundation of our faith, not its dialectical outcome.
Classical Theism: Because God *is* the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Classical Theism: Because the angels’ cry ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ is doxology rooted in ontology.
@DZRishmawy Classical Theism: Because friends don’t let friends read world history as God’s Bildungsroman.
— Fred Sanders (@FredFredSanders) September 25, 2014
Classical Theism: the God who isn’t hoping it all turns out.
Classical Theism: the God with only one physical body–that of the Incarnate Son.
OR, Classical Theism: the God for whom the Incarnation isn’t a redundancy.
Classical Theism: because we shouldn’t confuse physics with metaphysics when doing theology.
@DZRishmawy Classical Theism: The God who can speak and act, but cannot suffer.
Classical Theism: Because the Psalmist didn’t mean quicksand when he said “God is my rock.”
@DZRishmawy@FredFredSanders OK I can’t resist: Classical theism: because it’s good news that God is not a story.
— Scott R. Swain (@scottrswain) September 25, 2014
Finally, he’s not actually on Twitter to participate, but it’s not a party without Kevin.
#ClassicalTheism: Because “history is not God’s finishing school.” –@KevinVanhoozer
And we’ll sign off on that note. Feel free to add your own in the comments below.
Stealth Calvinist Ninjas (Or, Throw Me a Bone Here)
The title of this blog is ‘Reformedish’, and while I’ve traveled deeper into the Reformed tradition since its inception, I’ve tried to remain something of a “friendly Calvinist”, as my buddy Morgan put it. I know that the Christian tradition is broad and extends widely beyond the Reformed world. What’s more, there are a great number of non-Reformed theologians–Wesleyans like Fred Sanders, Thomas Oden, and my own prof Donald Thorsen–whose work I profit from greatly and would commend to anyone. In other words, I try not to be “unreasonably Calvinist” about things. I don’t think I’ve written a post in the two years I’ve been blogging picking on, or even arguing with Arminians. I’ve even been the guy pleading with my Reformed compatriots to extend grace, be humble, and so forth.
Calvinist ninjas trained by John Piper come take over your church.
I say all that to caveat my comments on Roger Olson’s recent foray out from scholarship (some of which I honestly have found very helpful, insightful, and even-handed) into conspiracy-theory: “Beware of Stealth Calvinism!” (Subtle title, I know.) In the post he outlines a scenario in which Calvinists are sneakily trying to take over and convert innocent Arminian churches under the guise of combating Open theism (the view that God does not have an exhaustive foreknowledge of the future). What apparently is happening is that Calvinist pastors are drafting belief statements that are putatively designed to rule out an open theist view of foreknowledge (or lack thereof), and in the process are sneaking in statements that actually rule out Arminianism as well:
Under the guise of attempting to exclude open theists the denomination has asked its member churches to affirm the following:
We believe God’s knowledge is exhaustive; that He fully knows the past, present, and future independent of human decisions and actions. The Father does everything in accordance with His perfect will, though His sovereignty neither eliminates nor minimizes our personal responsibility.
…my main objection is that no Arminian should sign such a statement and any church that adopts it is automatically affirming Calvinism—whether they know it or not. Only a Calvinist (or someone who believes in the Calvinist view of God’s sovereignty) can say that God’s knowledge is independent of human decisions and actions. Even a Molinist cannot say that and mean it.
Now this, Olson takes it, can only be an act of incompetence, or is evidence of a nefarious intent to convert unsuspecting Arminians to Calvinism. He continues:
This appears to me to be another case, on a grander scale, of stealth Calvinism.
…This statement (above in italics) is probably being promoted as a guard against open theism, but it’s much, much more than that. If adopted by my church I would have to give up my membership—not because I’m an open theist (I’m not) but because whether intentionally or not it excludes classical Arminianism. It makes any church that adopts it automatically, de facto, Calvinist.
Arminians—beware! This tactic is continuing among evangelicals. Privileging Calvinism is already the case in many evangelical organizations that have always included both Calvinists and Arminians.
Olson’s a competent theologian, so I won’t argue with his contention that he’d have to give up his membership at the church should they adopt the statement. I suspect some theologians might dispute his judgment and say that an Arminian could affirm it, but I’ll let that alone for more qualified hands than my own.
What I want to point out in the middle of this is the bald-faced cynicism of the post. Here we don’t simply have a theological correction, dispute, or caution about inadvertent theological drift. No, here we have a warning about Calvinist tactics in general, about their alleged strategic maneuvering to crowd out and stamp out divergent thought by “stealthily” taking advantage of people’s ignorance.
I know I’m a lot younger, but if we’re dealing in anecdotes, I suppose part of the reason I find the whole thing silly is that three out of the four Christian colleges nearby me, including my own seminary, are explicitly non-Reformed, and the fourth is definitely blended. Fuller has, maybe a few Reformed theologians, certainly not of the militant sort. They’re not cranking out Calvinists ready to take over churches there. But maybe that’s just a Southern California thing.
In any case, like I said, I’ve been the guy who’s written the “Hey Reformed guys, stop being jerks so people will pay attention” post. I’ll be honest, I don’t regret writing it for a moment. I stand by it and would continue to issue a plea for helpful humility in conversation with our brothers and sisters in “other rooms of the house” as Lewis put it. What I will say is that posts like these give the lie to the idea that Calvinists are the only ones running around making accusations, imputing false motives and so forth, about their fellow believers. I don’t doubt there’s some churches here and there where something like this has happened. I mean, just about everything has happened in church before. But Olson is here taking about some widespread conspiracy to take over churches by subterfuge and deceit. Honestly, it’d be silly if it weren’t so shameful–especially for a scholar of his stature. At best it’s uncharitable, and at worst it’s cheap slander.
I’m reminded of a post by Todd Pruitt a while back writing on the ‘mean Calvinist’ trope:
But I don’t buy the hype. I suppose we could trade anecdotes. For example I could write posts about the fact that the meanest and most self-righteous people I have ever encountered are Arminians. But what would that accomplish? Honestly, some of these posts sound a bit like, “I thank you Lord that I am not like this mean Calvinist.” What is more, until prominent Arminian theologians stop publicly comparing “the god of Calvinism” with Satan, then the reports of mean Calvinists are going to ring a bit hollow.
(By the way, Olson’s one who keeps going on about the God of Calvinism as “the devil”, or a “moral monster.” For an alternative approach to arguing with Calvinists, see this essay by Fred Sanders.)
Where am I going with all of this? Well, I guess what I’m saying is, if you want Calvinists or Reformed types to cool it, be charitable, and so forth, maybe don’t give credence to, or traffic in this sort of thing. Calling for a unified line of attack on the other side usually doesn’t do much for the two linking arms for the sake of the gospel.
In other words, I’ll do my part, but throw me a bone here?
Mere Fidelity
Mere Fidelity Podcast: The Trinity and the Bible w/ Fred Sanders!
This week’s podcast we had the honor of having Fred Sanders on the show. For those of you who don’t know him, he’s one of my favorite people and an excellent trinitarian theologian working over at the Biola Torrey Honors program. We talked with Fred about what goes into developing the doctrine of the tradition based on the Bible, tradition, and so forth. As usual, Fred’s great. If you like the discussion and are interested in Fred’s work, you can check him blogging at Scriptorium Daily or his excellent book on the Trinity The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything.
A couple of things to note, though. First, the sound quality on my end is a bit shoddy. It’s mostly fine, but the first minute there is rough. We’re working on it.
Second, please do take time if you can to rate and if possible review the podcast over at our iTunes RSS feed. Also, feel free to subscribe.
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How Nipsey Hussle’s death led DeSean Jackson to Boys’ Latin
Posted by deseanjacksonsfoundation in NFL Players Giving Back, Social Justice
#MarathonContinues, DeSean Jackson, DeSean Jackson Foundation, Morehouse College, National Football League, Nipsey Hussle, Philadelphia Eagles
Tim McManus
Repost by: DeSean Jackson Foundation, 5/24/2019
http://www.espn.com/video/clip?id=26651401
PHILADELPHIA, PA — Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson was about halfway through his Q&A session with the students at Boys’ Latin Charter School in West Philly on Wednesday, and to that point he had fielded only football-related questions. Knowing there were bigger issues at hand, he took it upon himself to change the direction of the conversation.
“Let’s try to switch it a little bit,” Jackson finally said to a group of about 150 high schoolers, who sat at rapt attention as Jackson spoke from the stage in a surprise appearance. “Let’s go to everyday life, when you all leave from school, any obstacles you are all going through.”
Jackson was aware of the series of tragedies that had struck this community. Boys’ Latin, the only public all-boys school in Philadelphia, lost four students to homicide or suicide in the 2017-18 school year alone, according to lead student support officer Kenyon Meeks. One of the victims was William Bethel, a 16-year-old athlete who was slain on Easter Sunday in 2018. Bethel shared a connection with Jackson, having attended Jackson’s youth football camp during his first stint with the Philadelphia Eagles.
Meeks was a supporter of that camp and built a relationship with the star receiver over time. He helped arrange Jackson’s first trip to Boys’ Latin in 2013. It was the death of artist Nipsey Hussle, Jackson’s longtime friend, that prompted Meeks to reach out to Jackson for a return appearance, as he identified a common thread that could tie a success story to a group of young men in need of some hope and direction. Jackson was moved to help.
“We brought in DeSean Jackson today because of the recent Nipsey Hussle situation, related to the loss of some of our students,” Meeks said. “One of the key things for me was, how do I bridge that gap with our students that are feeling down and depressed, or just have to deal with the everyday aspect of being out here in West Philly?
“We have had our shares of ups and downs, and it was nice to finally have some joy here.”
Jackson remained hidden behind a side door in the school cafeteria before being introduced by the principal. He was greeted by a roar of applause when he emerged, and he went down the line shaking the hands of all the boys in the first row before hopping up on stage. He spoke of his journey from the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles to the NFL, and the pitfalls that had to be navigated along the way. It wasn’t long before he evoked Hussle’s name for the first time.
“I’m sure everybody in this room heard about the Nipsey Hussle situation, right?” Jackson asked, the crowd responding with a resounding “Yeah” in unison. “That was my boy, man. I grew up with him. That still hurts my heart to this day. Because it’s not really the enemies, it’s the people in your inner circle you’ve got to watch out for. You get to a certain point where you feel comfortable. You’ve got everybody praising you for what you do where you come from, sometimes you let down your guard. I’m going to tell you guys here today, just be careful.
Rapper Nipsey Hussle was fatally shot outside of his store in Los Angeles, Marathon Clothing, in late March. AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File
“You have to really understand: What are you in it for? Are you in it to win or to lose? Every day I chase to win. I don’t chase to lose. We’re not losers. Everybody in this room today has a destination in life. You’ve got a born date and you’ve got a death date. In between that time, how are you going to make the most out of it?”
Hussle was fatally shot outside his store in Los Angeles, Marathon Clothing, in late March. According to Meeks, Hussle’s death affected his students “on a level that you wouldn’t even believe,” saying that it “just uprooted everything that we have been through as a school community.”
Besides his music, Hussle was known for being an agent of change for the area in which he grew up, a neighborhood he stayed loyal to his entire life.
Hailing from the same area in South Central Los Angeles, Jackson and Hussle were friends for more than 15 years. Jackson will be wearing custom cleats to honor him this season.
Once he redirected the conversation, Jackson was asked about the neighborhood he came from and difficulties it presented. He spoke of his upbringing in the Crenshaw district, where “all people know is Crips and Bloods,” and where wearing the wrong color clothing can put you in peril. He had a decision to make: go into the streets and “hang out with my homeboys that’s just killing, that’s robbing, that’s selling drugs” or try to make a positive impact by pursuing his dream to be a professional football player.
“It’s obstacles,” Jackson said. “And I’m sure in your neck of the woods, where you come from, it’s the same.”
“It really touched me, because my uncle and a couple of my friends were killed due to gun violence,” said Jeremiah Carter, a Boys’ Latin senior and defensive lineman who is slated to attend Morehouse College in the fall, “so it helped to see somebody that comes from the same situation as that being in a higher place in life, and it motivates me to focus on, OK, even though bad things happen to people, that you can still push through that.”
Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson speaks to a group of students from the Boys’ Latin Charter School in West Philadelphia on Wednesday.
That spoke to Jackson’s overall message, one inspired by Hussle: to make something of yourself so you can one day create the change you want to see in your community.
“It’s the same stuff Nipsey was on,” Jackson said. “Like Jay Z said, ‘Go buy up the block.’ That’s what we need to do as young black men, and any other race, you’ve really got to go back and buy up the block.
“Anytime you’re able to do anything, put your best foot forward and change the culture. We’ve got to come together as one.”
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Google’s new Chromebook: too little, too late?
By Patricio Robles May 12th 2011 05:28
Even if tablet computers, namely the iPad, aren’t killing desktops,
notebooks and kittens, many in the tech and marketing industries
express the sentiment that the tablet is going to be the source of
fundamental change in many markets.
So where does that leave Google’s Chromebook, which the search giant unveiled to the world yesterday?
The Chromebook, as the name implies, is a smallish notebook computer that runs on Google’s Chrome OS.
The assumption behind Chrome OS: as more and more applications get pushed onto the web and into the cloud, you don’t need the desktop; you can simply create an operating system that is little more than a thin layer providing access to the web.
Since Chrome OS was first announced, not much has changed. Google is promoting its Chrome OS-driven notebooks as being “built and optimized for the web, where you already spend most of your computing time. So you get a faster, simpler and more secure experience without all the headaches of ordinary computers“.
The core selling points “instant on, always connected, all-day battery, access your stuff anywhere, gets better over time, security built in” are compelling on paper, even if some of them, like security, should be considered questionable until proven in the real world.
Initially, Acer and Samsung are producing the first versions, which will make their way into the hands of consumers in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain next month. Carriers in those countries will reportedly be offering Chromebook 3G plans.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Chromebook is Google’s pricing model. For consumers, the devices range in price from $349 to $499, but Google is also offering businesses and educational institutions the ability to lease them for $28 and $20 per month, respectively, with a three year commitment that can’t be backed out of.
While some are impressed, it’s not quite clear that paying $720 to $1,008 over three years for a small laptop that can only access the web is a compelling offer, particularly for businesses whose employees often need Windows-based productivity and other professional software.
Even less clear: that in the age of the iPad, consumers will jump to spend up to $500 on a laptop that’s little more than a web browser. Google isn’t pitching the Chromebook as a tablet alternative (which is smart) but obviously, when an iPad that has much of the same capabilities and is far more portable can be purchased for a similar price, it’s hard to figure out where the device fits in.
From this perspective, the success or failure of the Chromebook is not likely going to be determined by the technical merits of the product itself, but rather by Google’s ability to find a market for it.
Here, it’s worth noting that Google has no Steve Jobs to sell its vision, and given that the Chromebook looks and feels like a regular old notebook, it’s difficult to see them finding a significant place in a tablet-obsessed world.
Blog Apple Google iPad Strategy tablets User Experience and Usability
Blog Process and Project Management
PaaS: why businesses should pass
Forget about Saas (software-as-a-service). The newest next big thing is PaaS (platform-as-a-service).
As the name implies, the concept behind PaaS is that an entire platform-specific technology stack as a service. As with SaaS offerings, buzzwords like ‘cloud‘ and ‘scalability‘ are typically thrown around when pitching the benefits of PaaSes.
May 12th 2011 07:24
Blog Multichannel Marketing
Glenn Beck launches group buying site
Group buying websites, popularized in large part by Groupon and LivingSocial, is one of the hottest markets on the consumer internet right now. As a result, established businesses and entrepreneurs have flooded the space, hoping to capture a little piece of the action.
Despite the fact that online group buying is now generating billions of dollars per year in sales globally, some believe that market is overhyped and, more importantly, unsustainable.
May 23rd 2011 20:37
Blog Affiliate Marketing
Google Multi-Channel Funnels: why the turkeys voted for Christmas
Not since Google plumped for pay-per-click sponsored listings in 2000 has ‘The Big G’ made a decision as strategically significant as its recent commitment to path-to-conversion reporting in the guise of ‘Multi-Channel Funnels’.
May 4th 2011 14:58
Blog Data and Analytics
Five ways data science can help optimise your marketing budgets
Despite all the progress and innovations, marketing still remains a numbers game, at least to some extent. What changed is that instead of merely multiplying audience numbers (and, consequently, budget lines), savvy marketers look at the figures at hand and attempt to understand the message behind these.
January 22nd 2020 10:17
Blog Ecommerce
What is China’s live commerce trend? And what does Pinduoduo’s livestreaming launch mean?
The fusion of ecommerce and livestreaming, known as ‘live commerce’, is a huge and growing trend in Chinese ecommerce.
January 21st 2020 15:28
Blog Advertising
The ad industry is in denial about the death of third-party cookies but there are alternatives
Google plans to block third-party cookies in its Chrome browser by 2022 and the ad industry is up in arms.
How the BBC is setting the bar for creative outdoor advertising
Back in January 2016, the BBC launched its own in-house creative agency, BBC Creative, which now comprises over 150 staff.
Jobs by MW
Registered office at Econsultancy, Floor M, 10 York Road, London, SE1 7ND
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War of the Rebellion: Serial 036 Page 0464 Chapter XXXVI. Mississippi, WEST TENNESSEE, ETC.
On the 27th, about 2 a. m., I received a note from Colonel Ferguson and from General Featherston, informing me that the enemy had retreated through Black Bayou and made their escape. The Lower Deer Creek country for 6 miles above Wilson's was almost entirely under water from the high stage of water, and its was difficult to find sufficient ground even at Wilson's for bivouacking troops. The creek not having been cleared out, the small steamer could only get up about 3 miles from the mouth, and the other 3 miles troops and supplies had to be transported in two large wood-boats by hauling up the creek by the trees and bushes, the water being too deep for poling and boats not being arranged for and too large for the use of oars. These difficulties rendered transportation very difficult. The number of skiffs at my control being very few, could not be depended on for furnishing supplies. These difficulties, taken in connection with the limited supply of rations at Snyder's Mill, and the country being overflowed in my front, prevented my making any serious advance on the enemy. Therefore, I sent a force of 75 men to the place next above Wilson's (Hardee's), distant from the pickets of the enemy about 7 miles. This detachment to reach its post had to wade through water 3 1/2 feet deep for a mile. The enemy having retreated, I immediately commenced re-embarking the troops for Snyder's Mill.
I left Wilson's place on the 29th, and arrived in this city the same date. A squadron of cavalry was left on Black Bayou to picket and report in case the enemy should return. I consider it highly improbable that the enemy will ever attempt to reach the Yazoo River through Lower Deer Creek. The creek from Hill's lower place (Kelsaw) to Paxton's, 3 miles from the mouth, has never been cleared out, the trees generally overlapping. The water is deep enough for steamers, but it would require a great deal of labor to make it practicable. The part uncleared is about 20 miles, and the country on either side of the creek overflowed except a narrow skirt of bank. Should the enemy attempt this route, it will be necessary to establish our work in front of Wilson's place (say at Hardee's, the place beyond Wilson's), as the communication between Wilson's Hardee's by land is impracticable, and by the creek about 9 miles. The route by Geary [Greasy?] Bayou to Hardee's will have to be used. By this route the steamer can go to within 3 miles of Hardee's, and from the steamer large flat boats can go through the overflow to within 100 yards of Hardee's. All that is necessary to be done by this route is to have the route blazed through the overflow. To operate in this creek, it will be necessary to have a great many, skiffs, as they really afford the only means of moving about until Hill's Kelsaw place is reached, from which there is a good road to Black Bayou, about 6 miles. I discontinued the felling of trees in Deer Creek, as, in my opinion, the creek was more obstructed by the standing timber than by the timber felled. The timber is very heavy, and on being felled sinks to the bottom, and the boats can generally run over it, or, after being felled, it can readily be pushed into the overflow from the creek. the trees by being felled make a clearing or road for the boats, so the felling of timber at the present high water rather assists the enemy than other-wise. The water is now rising, and the higher it rises the more the standing timber is an obstruction to boats. The timber generally is not tall enough to reach across the creek, or sets back so far from the creek that, when felled, the limbs only reach the deepest water.
I would respectfully recommend that a number of skiffs be at once constructed for service on Lower Creek, and a small force (say 100 men) be left to watch the enemy above Hardee's.
‹ Serial 036 Page 0463 Chapter XXXVI. THE STEELE'S BAYOU EXPEDITION, ETC. up Serial 036 Page 0465 Chapter XXXVI. THE STEELE'S BAYOU EXPEDITION, ETC. ›
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Sales and Trading
Principal Investments
Financing your firm
Investor protection under MiFID II
Annual Ukraine Investor Conferences
Dragon Capital Acquires Aladdin Shopping Mall in Kyiv
UCPIH Ltd, a member of the Dragon Capital group of companies, has completed the acquisition of Aladdin, a 16,466 square meter shopping mall in Kyiv, from Meyer Bergman. The deal value was not disclosed.
Aladdin Shopping Mall, with a gross leasable area of 10,571 sq. m., is located in a densely populated residential district right next to Pozniaky metro station and close to Piramida, a shopping center the company acquired in 2016.
“We are very pleased to have completed this acquisition and add Aladdin to our portfolio of shopping centres, which now will consist of Piramida and Aladdin (Kyiv), Sky Park (Vinnytsia) and Victoria Gardens (Lviv) occupying in total over 160,000 sq.m. The shopping centre has been properly managed by an institutional foreign investor and has demonstrated stable operating performance through market down cycles of 2008 and 2014. We believe the key to Aladdin’s success is its unique location and are determined to capitalize on it by optimizing the centre’s concept and tenant mix.” says Volodymyr Tymochko, Managing Director of Private Equity, Dragon Capital.
About Dragon Capital
Dragon Capital is one of the largest groups of companies in Ukraine that works in the field of direct investments and financial services, providing a full range of investment banking and brokerage services for corporate and private clients. The company was founded in 2000 in Kyiv and has a successful 19-year track record of private equity investments in Ukraine.
About UCPIH Ltd
UCPIH Ltd (Ukrainian Commercial Property Investment Holding) is an investment holding company that specializes in commercial real estate investments in Ukraine. Its main shareholder is Dragon Capital Investments Limited.
Dragon Capital Acquires Office Building in Kyiv
Dragon Capital has completed the acquisition of a 1,795 m2 office building in Kyiv from Alfa-Bank.
Dragon Capital Signs Agreement to Acquire Idea Bank Shares
The Dragon Capital group of companies, together with a private investor, signed an agreement to acquire 100% of shares in Idea Bank (Lviv) from Getin Holding S.A. (Poland).
Frontmen Agency
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The African openbill (Anastomus lamelligerus) is a species of stork in the family Ciconiidae. It is native to large parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Order: Ciconiiformes
Family: Ciconiidae
Genus: Anastomus
A. lamelligerus
Anastomus lamelligerus
Temminck, 1823
2 Habitat and distribution
3 Behavior
4 Breeding
The African openbill is a stork 80–94 cm long with a weight of 1–1.3 kg. Its adult plumage is generally dark overall, with glossy green, brown, and purple on the mantle and breast. The bill is brownish and notably large. The legs are black and the eye is grey. The juvenile plumage is more dull and brown, with areas of pale feather tips.[2]
Habitat and distributionEdit
The African openbill is found in throughout sub-Saharan Africa from Senegal east to Ethiopia and then south as far as KwaZulu-Natal in eastern South Africa.[1][3]
It is a bird of shallow wetlands and can be found wherever its molluscan prey is available, including temporarily flooded pans, flood plains, swamps, marshes, ponds, streams, river shallows, dams, rice paddies, lagoons, lake margins and intertidal mud flats.[3]
BehaviorEdit
Basking with a spread-wing posture
Adult on a nest
The African openbill feeds almostly exclusively on aquatic snails and freshwater mussels.[3] It will, however, also eat terrestrial snail, frogs, crabs, fish, worms, and large insects. It uses its bill to detects its prey, and can use it in such a way that it easily pries open molluscs. It tends to feed singly or in small groups.[2]
The African openbill is mainly resident and non-migratory; however, it may undertake nomadic movements. Sometimes flocks move away from arid regions when the dry season begins.[3]
BreedingEdit
African openbills breed during the rainy season, when snails are more available. During that period, they perform complex displays, often involving bobbing, bill-clattering, and rocking back and forth with the head held between the legs. They nest in colonies in trees, as is typical of storks. The nest is made of sticks and reeds, and is roughly 50 cm wide. Storks typically lay 3–4 oval, chalky-white eggs. Eggs are incubated by both sexes for 25–30 days. The chicks and downy and black, with a smaller bill, and they leave the nest 50–55 days later.[2]
GalleryEdit
Close-up of the head
With Bulinus freshwater snail
A juvenile bird
^ a b BirdLife International (2018). "Anastomus lamelligerus". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN. 2018: e.T22697664A132274733. doi:10.2305/IUCN.UK.2018-2.RLTS.T22697664A132274733.en.
^ a b c Bouglouan, Nicole. "African Openbill". oiseaux-birds.com. oiseaux-birds. Retrieved November 1, 2015.
^ a b c d "Anastomus lamelligerus (African openbill, Openbilled stork)". Biodiversity Explorer. Iziko Museums of South Africa. Archived from the original on 2011-10-03. Retrieved 2016-11-08.
Wikispecies has information related to Anastomus lamelligerus
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Anastomus lamelligerus.
This bird-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=African_openbill&oldid=931828801"
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"Wild Men" depicted on the facade of the Colegio de San Gregorio
Church of San Pablo, adjacent to Colegio de San Gregorio.
The Valladolid debate (1550–1551) was the first moral debate in European history to discuss the rights and treatment of an indigenous people by conquerors. Held in the Colegio de San Gregorio, in the Spanish city of Valladolid, it was a moral and theological debate about the conquest of the Americas, its justification for the conversion to Catholicism, and more specifically about the relations between the European settlers and the natives of the New World. It consisted of a number of opposing views about the way natives were to be integrated into Spanish society, their conversion to Catholicism, and their rights and obligations.
A controversial theologian, Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas, argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order despite their practice of human sacrifices and other such customs, deserving the same consideration as the colonizers.[1] Opposing this view were a number of scholars and priests, including humanist scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued that the human sacrifice of innocents, cannibalism, and other such "crimes against nature" were unacceptable and should be suppressed by any means possible including war.[2]
Although both sides claimed to have won the disputation, there is no clear record supporting either interpretation. The affair is considered one of the earliest examples of moral debates about colonialism, human rights of colonized peoples, and international relations. In Spain, it served to establish Las Casas as the primary, though controversial defender of the Indians.[3] He and others contributed to the passing of the New Laws of 1542, which limited the encomienda system further.[4] Though they did not fully reverse the situation, the laws achieved considerable improvement in the treatment of Indians and consolidated their rights granted by earlier laws.[4] More importantly, the debate reflected a concern for morality and justice in 16th-century Spain that only surfaced in other colonial powers centuries later.
2 Debate
4 Reflection in art
Bartolomé de las Casas was the principal defender of the Indians in the Junta of Valladolid
Spain's colonization and conquest of the Americas inspired an intellectual debate especially regarding the compulsory Christianization of the Indians. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar from the School of Salamanca and member of the growing Christian Humanist movement, worked for years to oppose forced conversions and to expose the treatment of natives in the encomiendas.[3] His efforts influenced the papal bull Sublimis Deus of 1537 which established the status of the Indians as rational beings. More significantly, Las Casas was instrumental in the passage of the New Laws (the Laws of the Indies) of 1542, which were designed to end the encomienda system.[4]
Moved by Las Casas and others, in 1550 the King of Spain Charles V ordered further military expansion to cease until the issue was investigated.[4][5] The King assembled a Junta (Jury) of eminent doctors and theologians to hear both sides and to issue a ruling on the controversy.[1] Las Casas represented one side of the debate. His position found some support from the monarchy, which wanted to control the power of the encomenderos. Representing the other side was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, whose arguments were used as support by colonists and landowners who benefited from the system.[4]
DebateEdit
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, supporter of the war "jousts" against the Indians
Though Las Casas tried to bolster his position by recounting his experiences with the encomienda system's mistreatment of the Indians, the debate remained on largely theoretical grounds. Sepúlveda took a more secular approach than Las Casas, basing his arguments largely on Aristotle and the Humanist tradition to assert that some Indians were subject to enslavement due to their inability to govern themselves, and could be subdued by war if necessary.[1] Las Casas objected, arguing that Aristotle's definition of barbarian and natural slave did not apply to the Indians, all of whom were fully capable of reason and should be brought to Christianity without force or coercion.[4]
Sepúlveda put forward many of the arguments from his Latin dialogue Democrates alter sive de justi belli causis,[6] to assert that the barbaric traditions of certain Indians justified waging war against them. Civilized peoples, according to Sepúlveda, were obliged to punish such vicious practices as idolatry, sodomy, and cannibalism. Wars had to be waged "in order to uproot crimes that offend nature".[7]
Sepúlveda issued four main justifications for just war against certain Indians. First, their natural condition deemed them unable to rule themselves, and it was the responsibility of the Spaniards to act as masters. Second, Spaniards were entitled to prevent cannibalism as a crime against nature. Third, the same went for human sacrifice. Fourth, it was important to convert Indians to Christianity.[8]
Mendoza Codex showing in the same drawing the kind of arguments used by both sides, advanced architecture versus brutal killings
Las Casas was prepared for part of his opponent's discourse, since he, upon hearing about the existence of Sepúlveda's Democrates Alter, had written in the late 1540s his own Latin work, the Apologia, which aimed at debunking his opponent's theological arguments by arguing that Aristotle's definition of the "barbarian" and the natural slave did not apply to the Indians, who were fully capable of reason and should be brought to Christianity without force.[9][10]
Las Casas pointed out that every individual was obliged by international law to prevent the innocent from being treated unjustly. He also cited Saint Augustine and Saint John Chrysostom, both of whom had opposed the use of force to bring others to Christian faith. Human sacrifice was wrong, but it would be better to avoid war by any means possible.[11]
The arguments presented by Las Casas and Sepúlveda to the junta of Valladolid remained abstract, with both sides clinging to their opposite theories that relied on similar, if not the same, theoretical authorities, which were interpreted to suit their respective arguments.[12]
In the end, both parties declared that they had won the debate, but neither received the desired outcome. Las Casas saw no end to Spanish wars of conquest in the New World, and Sepúlveda did not see the New Laws' restricting of the power of the encomienda system overturned. The debate cemented Las Casas's position as the lead defender of the Indians in the Spanish Empire,[3] and further weakened the encomienda system. However, it did not substantially alter Spanish treatment of the Indians.[4]
Reflection in artEdit
In 1938 the story of the German writer Reinhold Schneider "Las Kasas and Charles V" ("Las Casas vor Karl V. Szenen aus der Konquistadorenzeit") was published.
In 1992 the Valladolid debate became an inspiration source for Jean-Claude Carrière who published the novel La Controverse de Valladolid (Dispute in Valladolid). The novel was filmed for television under the same name. The director — Jean-Danielle Veren, Jean-Pierre Marielle played Las Casas, Jean-Louis Trintignant acted as Sepúlveda.
Catholic Church and the Age of Discovery
Sublimis Deus
^ a b c Crow, John A. The Epic of Latin America, 4th ed. University of California Press, Berkeley: 1992.
^ Ginés de Sepúlveda, Juan (trans. Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo and Manuel Garcia-Pelayo) (1941). Tratado sobre las Justas Causas de la Guerra contra los Indios. Mexico D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica. p. 155.
^ a b c Raup Wagner, Henry & Rand Parish, Helen (1967). The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas. New Mexico: The University of New Mexico Press. pp. 181–182.
^ a b c d e f g Bonar Ludwig Hernandez. "The Las Casas-Sepúlveda Controversy: 1550-1551" (PDF). Ex Post Facto. San Francisco State University. 10: 95–104. Archived from the original (PDF) on April 21, 2015. Retrieved September 13, 2011.
^ Hanke, Lewis (1974). All Mankind is One: A study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indian. Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press. p. 67.
^ Anthony Padgen: The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, page 109. Cambridge University Press, 1982.
^ Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda: Tratado sobre las Justas Causas de la Guerra contra los Indios, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1941.
^ Losada, Angel (1971). Bartolome de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work. The Northern Illinois University Press. pp. 284–289.
^ Angel Losada: The Controversy between Sepúlveda and Las Casas in the Junta of Valladolid, pages 280-282. The Northern Illinois University Press, 1971.
^ Silvio Zavala: Aspectos Formales de la Controversia entre Sepúlveda y Las Casas en Valladolid, a mediados del siglo XVI y observaciones sobre la apologia de Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, pages 137-162. Cuadernos Americanos 212, 1977.
^ Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense, pages 212-215
^ Brading, D.A.: The First America: the Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492-1867, pages 80-88. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Crow, John A. The Epic of Latin America, 4th ed. University of California Press, Berkeley: 1992.
Hernandez, Bonar Ludwig (2001). "The Las Casas-Sepúlveda Controversy: 1550-1551" (PDF). Ex Post Facto. San Francisco State University. X: 95–105. Archived from the original (PDF) on April 21, 2015. Retrieved September 22, 2015.
Losada, Ángel (1971). "Controversy between Sepúlveda and Las Casas". In Juan Friede; Benjamin Keen (eds.). Bartolomé de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and his Work. Collection spéciale: CER. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. pp. 279–309. ISBN 0-87580-025-4. OCLC 421424974.
The Black Legend and American History
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Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State
Find sources: "Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
The Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State was a transitional post established in January 1922, lasting until the creation of the Irish Free State in December 1922.
The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 was passed by the Irish Republic's Dáil Éireann. The British government also required it to be passed by the House of Commons of Southern Ireland, and for a legal government to be established. Michael Collins became Chairman of the Provisional Government (i.e. prime minister). He also remained Minister for Finance of Arthur Griffith's republican administration.
After Collins and Griffith's deaths in August 1922, W. T. Cosgrave became both Chairman of the Provisional Government and President of Dáil Éireann, and the distinction between the two became increasingly confused and irrelevant until the creation of the Irish Free State in December 1922.
Office holders[edit]
1. Michael Collins 16 January 1922 22 August 1922
(Pro-Treaty faction)
2. W. T. Cosgrave 22 August 1922 6 December 1922
Position replaced by President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State in December 1922
Irish heads of government since 1919
Provisional Government of the Irish Free State
Taoisigh of Ireland
John A. Costello
Seán Lemass
Liam Cosgrave
Charles Haughey
Garret FitzGerald
Albert Reynolds
John Bruton
Previous offices under earlier constitutions
President of the Executive Council (1922–37)
W. T. Cosgrave
Chairman of the Provisional Government (1922)
President of Dáil Éireann or
President of the Irish Republic (1919–22)
Cathal Brugha
Arthur Griffith
Anglo-Irish Treaty
Constitution of the Irish Free State
Great Seal of the Irish Free State
President of the Executive Council
Vice-President of the Executive Council
Extern minister
Ministers and Secretaries Act
Oireachtas of the Irish Free State
Royal Assent
Governor-General's Address to Dáil Éireann
Courts of Justice Act 1924
1927 (Jun)
1927 (Sep)
Constitution (Amendment No. 27) Act 1936
External Relations Act 1936
Constitution of Ireland plebiscite
Executive Powers (Consequential Provisions) Act 1937
Chairman of the Provisional Government
This Ireland politics-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chairman_of_the_Provisional_Government_of_the_Irish_Free_State&oldid=911713240"
Heads of Irish provisional governments
Ireland politics stubs
Articles lacking sources from December 2009
All articles lacking sources
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Nintendo 64 programming characteristics
The Nintendo 64's programming characteristics describe the elements of writing software for the Nintendo 64 (N64) gaming system.
2.1 Texture cache
2.2 Fill rate
2.3 Microcode
3 Memory
The Nintendo 64 was released in 1996. At the time, The Economist described the system as "horrendously complex".[1] The difficulties were said to be a combination of oversight on the part of the hardware designers, limitations on 3D graphics, technology limits of that time, and manufacturing issues.[citation needed]
As the Nintendo 64 reached the end of its lifecycle, hardware development chief Genyo Takeda referred to its programming challenges using the word hansei (Japanese: 反省 "reflective regret"). Takeda said, "When we made Nintendo 64, we thought it was logical that if you want to make advanced games, it becomes technically more difficult. We were wrong. We now understand it's the cruising speed that matters, not the momentary flash of peak power."[2]
Characteristics[edit]
Texture cache[edit]
The texture cache was 4 KB in size. Its small size led developers to stretch small textures over a comparatively larger space. The console's bilinear filtering only blurs them. When mipmapping is used, texture width requirements and the extra storage for the mipmap levels limit the largest mipmap level to 2 KB. Toward the end of the Nintendo 64's market cycle, some developers precomputed their textures using multi-layered texturing and small texture pieces that were heavily clamped, to simulate larger textures. Examples of this workaround are found in Rare's Perfect Dark, Banjo-Tooie, Conker's Bad Fur Day[citation needed], and in Factor 5's Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.[3] Some games with non-realistic aesthetics use plain colored Gouraud shading instead of texturing on certain surfaces (e.g., Super Mario 64).[4]
The big strength was the N64 cartridge. We use the cartridge almost like normal RAM and are streaming all level data, textures, animations, music, sound and even program code while the game is running. With the final size of the levels and the amount of textures, the RAM of the N64 never would have been even remotely enough to fit any individual level. So the cartridge technology really saved the day.
— Factor 5, Bringing Indy to N64, IGN[3]
Fill rate[edit]
Many Nintendo 64 games are fill-rate limited, not geometry limited. Multiple techniques were designed to maximize the fill rate. The RDP's (Reality Display Processor) fill rate is significantly affected by microcode optimizations — often specifically with Z-buffering. Thus, for maximum performance,[5] the microcode supplied by Nintendo was replaced by each developer.[3] The Nintendo 64's polygon per second rating is about 160,000 with hardware features enabled.[6] Some of the more polygon-intense Nintendo 64 games include World Driver Championship, Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.[3]
Microcode[edit]
The graphics and audio co-processor is programmable through microcode.[7] By altering the microcode, a developer can access different operations, create new effects, and optimize for speed or quality. While promoting this feature of custom microcodes, Nintendo initially refused to share information on how to use the related microcode tools. This was due to the fear that it would be copied by their competitors. However during the console's last few years, Nintendo shared the microcode information with a few developers. Nintendo's official code tools are basic, with no debugger and poor documentation.
SGI's default microcode for Nintendo 64 is called "Fast3D", which some developers claimed was poorly profiled for use in games. Although it generates more than 100,000 high accuracy polygons per second, this microcode is optimized more for accuracy than for speed, and performance suffered. Nintendo's "Turbo3D" microcode allows 500,000–600,000 normal accuracy polygons per second. However, due to the graphical degradation, Nintendo officially discouraged its use. Companies such as Factor 5,[3] Boss Game Studios and Rare, were able to write custom microcode that reportedly runs their game engines better than SGI's standard microcode.
One of the best examples of custom microcode is Factor 5's N64 port of the Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine PC game. The Factor 5 team aimed for the high resolution mode of 640×480[8] because of its visual crispness. The machine was said to be operating at its limits while running at 640×480. The Z-buffer could not be used because it alone consumed the already constrained texture fill rate. To work around the 4 KB texture cache, programmers came up with custom texture formats and tools. Each texture was analyzed and fitted to best texture format for performance and quality. They took advantage of the cartridge as a texture streaming source to squeeze as much detail as possible into each environment and work around RAM limitations. They wrote microcode for real-time lighting, because the supplied microcode from SGI was not optimized for this task, and because they wanted to have more lighting than the PC version. Factor 5's microcode allows almost unlimited realtime lighting and significantly boosts the polygon count. In the end, the N64 version is said to be more feature-rich than the PC version, and is considered to be one of the unit's most advanced games.[3]
Factor 5 again used custom microcode with games such as Star Wars: Rogue Squadron and Star Wars: Episode I: Battle for Naboo. In Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, the team tweaked the microcode for a landscape engine to create the alien worlds. For Star Wars: Battle for Naboo, they used what they learned from Rogue Squadron and made the game run at 640×480, also implementing enhancements for particles and the landscape engine. Battle for Naboo has a long draw distance and large amounts of snow and rain, even in high resolution mode.[9]
Memory[edit]
Featuring a unified memory architecture, the console's RDRAM has very high access latency,[10] which is contrasted with its high bandwidth advantage. The R4300 CPU's ability to access RAM is constrained by its requirement to route all RAM accesses through the RCP, and by the fact that it can not use DMA.
Nintendo 64 technical specifications
^ "Nintendo Wakes Up." The Economist Aug 03 1996: 55-. ABI/INFORM Global; ProQuest Research Library. Web. 24 May 2012.
^ Croal, N'Gai; Kawaguchi, Masato; Saltzman, Marc. "It's Hip To Be Square." Newsweek 136.10 (2000): 53. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 23 July 2013.
^ a b c d e f "Bringing Indy to N64". IGN. 2000-11-09. Retrieved September 24, 2013.
^ "Super Mario Galaxy". Retrieved 2009-01-11.
^ "Hidden Surface Removal" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on March 4, 2009. Retrieved April 24, 2014.
^ Next Generation, issue 24 (December 1996), page 74
^ "Nintendo 64". Archived from the original on 2007-07-10. Retrieved 2009-01-14.
^ "Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine". IGN. December 12, 2000. Retrieved September 24, 2013.
^ "Interview: Battling the N64 (Naboo)". IGN64. 2000-11-10. Retrieved 2008-03-27.
^ "Difference Between RDRAM and DDR". Retrieved 2009-01-15.
Rumble Pak
DexDrive
Doctor V64
GameShark
Mr. Backup Z64
Tristar 64
Project Unreality
UltraHLE
Randnet (Japan)
SharkWire Online (United States)
chronology of releases
List of ROM file formats
Programming characteristics
Game Pak
iQue Player
Predecessor: Super Nintendo
Successor: Nintendo GameCube
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nintendo_64_programming_characteristics&oldid=905931477"
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James Van Nostrand | Friday, August 19, 2011
U.S DOE
Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Subcommittee Releases Shale Gas Recommendations
A diverse group of advisors to Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently released a series of consensus-based recommendations calling for increased measurement, public disclosure and a commitment to continuous improvement in the development and environmental management of shale gas. The report was prepared by the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Shale Gas Production Subcommittee. The Subcommittee, which was chaired by John Deutch, an MIT professor, was convened by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu at the direction of President Barack Obama who observed that “recent innovations have given us the opportunity to tap large reserves—perhaps a century’s worth” of shale gas. The subcommittee was asked to produce a report on the immediate steps that can be taken to improve the safety and environmental performance of shale gas development. The report reflects three months of deliberations among a diverse group of industry experts, environmental advocates, academics and former state regulators.
The report includes recommendations in four key areas:
Making information about shale gas production operations more accessible to the public;
Immediate and longer-term actions to reduce environmental and safety risks of shale gas operations, with a particular focus on protecting air and water quality;
Creation of a Shale Gas Industry Operation organization committed to continuous improvement of best operating practices; and
Research and development (R&D) to improve safety and environmental performance.
A full copy of the report is available at http://www.shalegas.energy.gov/index.html.
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How to find the value of gross output
How to find the volume of sales
How to calculate a comparable price
How to determine the value added
What is the added value
How to calculate value added
Gross output refers to the General indicators of the results of operations of the organization. He characterizes the volume of business in monetary terms. The value of gross output is calculated as follows.
How to translate in comparable prices
How to determine the added value
How to calculate the volume of production
These financial statements during the period under review (balance sheet, statement of profit and loss).
Determine the value of the products manufactured by all divisions of the company for the analyzed period (gross turnover). To calculate the data of financial statements. Find the cost of products produced and sold during the period on a line 020 "production Cost" of statement of profit and loss.
Find according to the financial statements cost balance of work in progress at the beginning and end of the analyzed period. In the balance sheet these figures are indicated in the rows 130 "construction in progress" and 213 "in progress Costs". Define the line 214 of the balance sheet as "Finished goods and goods for resale the" cost of finished goods at the beginning and end of the reporting period.
Calculate the gross turnover of products manufactured by all divisions for the period (VO). To the sum of residues of finished products and work in progress at the end of the period add cost of goods sold and subtract the amount of inventories of finished products and "unfinished" at the beginning of the period. The algorithm for computing the formulas for calculating remaining balance on active accounts on the end of the period: opening Balance + Ward for the period Consumption for the period = Balance at end of the period.
Determine according to accounting value of the products produced by departments for their own needs (sun). Review credit documents or certificates of works completed from the auxiliary sites during the reporting period. For own needs of the enterprise, for example, can make the container or to perform works on capital and current repairs of buildings.
Calculate the value of gross output of the enterprise for the period by the formula: VP = VO VS, where VP is the calculated value of gross output, THE gross turnover of all products of the enterprise for the period, VS - value of the products manufactured by the enterprise for own needs. Calculate the figure for the same period last year. A comparative analysis, draw conclusions on trends in production volume of the enterprise.
Most popular female names in Russia
When parents choose a name for their child, they consider it proiznosyat, euphony and harmony...
The differences of the Orthodox cross from the Catholic
Do I have to order prayers for the deceased in the seven temples
Is it possible to buy Orthodox crucifix in a jewelry store
Why beneath the cross of Jesus Christ is depicted as a skull and crossbones
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Referrals to Children’s Social Care departments have increased by 311 per cent since the introduction of the Children Act 1989, and assessments by 302 per cent – either because child abuse is suspected, or because children and their families are in need of support services.
Assessment can cause significant stress for affected families and difficulties for social workers, in cases of wrong decisions and failure to uncover serious child abuse. Policies have tended towards over-referral and assessment, in an attempt to reduce the number of cases that are missed.
However, despite this rise in referral and assessment there is no corresponding increase in the detection of child abuse, according to research by Lauren Devine and Stephen Parker at the University of the West of England, Bristol. They have examined referral and assessment data across England over the last 22 years. The data shows that the vast majority of families simply need support services - and many families do not even reach the support threshold.
There is increased pressure on agencies to refer children, but it’s not properly recognised by professionals working with families or by policymakers that the consequences for families of the referral can be negative. The trend towards increased assessments for early intervention needs to be balanced against the potentially adverse consequences. Few organisations working with children have adequate understanding of how referral and assessment affect families, and little support exists at this stressful period in their lives.
There has been a large increase in the number of children referred to Children’s Social Care departments over the last two decades.
The length and cost of assessment has increased.
The referrals have not led to a corresponding increase in detected child abuse.
There is increased pressure on agencies working with children to refer children, but little recognition of how this affects the families. The experience of referral and assessment is stressful and traumatic for many families, with long-term adverse consequences.
Many early intervention strategies could be made more widely available to avoid the need for over-assessment. More funding is needed to expand universal, non-assessed social services, to reduce the need for assessment in low-level support cases. This could be paid for by the reduction in cost of referral and assessment.
The assessment of need for early intervention should be a simplified, consensual and less intrusive process, unless there are clear grounds for suspecting child abuse.
The investigation of suspected child abuse should be redesigned as a separate, forensic process with robust safeguards and controls.
Family support and advocacy should be extended across the community for families involved in consensual needs-based assessment, together with improved online information.
Access to information and legal help should be made available at all stages of child abuse investigations, including during non-consensual assessments.
Brief description of the project
Dr Lauren Devine and Mr Stephen Parker’s ESRC-funded project Rethinking child protection strategy is evaluating child protection and family intervention processes together with their social, welfare and economic cost, to consider whether current intervention strategy is justified.
Dr Lauren Devine, University of the West of England
Email: lauren.devine@uwe.ac.uk
Stephen Parker, University of the West of England
Email: stephen3.parker@uwe.ac.uk
The views expressed in this evidence briefing are those of the author and not necessarily those of the ESRC.
Child protection and assessment (PDF, 481Kb)
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Lyft reportedly planning to pilot self-driving Chevy Bolt taxis ‘within a year’
- May. 5th 2016 3:56 pm ET
@hallstephenj
According to a report today from The Wall Street Journal, GM and Lyft are partnering to test a fleet of self-driving electric taxis sometime within the next year in an undisclosed city. The pilot will reportedly take advantage of GM’s Chevrolet Bolt, a speedy compact crossover all-electric that we took for a test drive earlier this year…
This move comes as Google’s self-driving car program expanded recently thanks to a partnership with Fiat Chrysler, and Tesla prepares to begin production of its all-electric Model 3 (which has surpassed 400,000 reservations). It’s particularly a bold move to stay in the game with Lyft’s most direct competitor, Uber, which reportedly placed an order for 100,000 autonomous Mercedes S-Class sedans valued at around $11 billion earlier this year.
General Motors Co. and Lyft Inc. within a year will begin testing a fleet of self-driving Chevrolet Bolt electric taxis on public roads, a move central to the companies’ joint efforts to challenge Silicon Valley giants in the battle to reshape the auto industry.
The plan is being hatched a few months after GM invested $500 million in Lyft, a ride-hailing company whose services rival Uber Technologies Inc. The program will rely on technology being acquired as part of GM’s separate $1 billion planned purchase of San Francisco-based Cruise Automation Inc., a developer of autonomous-driving technology.
Details of this plan are still “being worked out,” according to the report, but it is said to give customers “the opportunity to opt in or out of the pilot when hailing a Lyft car from the company’s mobile app.” There’s no word on where the program will take place, with WSJ saying it will be “in a yet-to-be disclosed city.” Lyft is said to be starting the program with drivers in the front seat, but that — assuming legal hurdles can be navigated — human drivers will eventually be out of a job.
As of now, WSJ says that Lyft has a prototype application in the works that gives customers the simple option of going with an autonomous car over a human-driven one. The report says that the app would offer a GM OnStar assistant “for questions or to aid the rider,” and also gives riders controls for complete human guidance over when the ride begins and ends. Hopefully we’ll get to see it for ourselves sometime within the year.
The Chevrolet Bolt EV
The Chevy Bolt EV is GM's first long-range all-electric vehicle. It's a compact utility vehicle with 238 miles of range and a starting price of $37,500 before incentives. Also it is 200hp quick!
GM designs and manufactures a few electric vehicles under its brands. Like the Volt and the Bolt with Chevrolet.
Cars Uber electric Lyft Chevrolet
Stephen is 9to5Google’s Managing Editor and host of the Alphabet Scoop podcast. Tips always welcome. Twitter DMs are open, and stephen@9to5mac.com is best for most feedback. You can send encrypted tips via ProtonMail at hallstephenj@protonmail.com.
Stephen Hall's favorite gear
Buy a Pixelbook
Google Pixelbook the company’s premium Chromebook.
Buy a Chromecast
Chromecast is a media streaming device from Google.
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Hem » Boyd Raeburn
Kategoriarkiv: Boyd Raeburn
Interpreting Ellington 2
mars 9, 2017 11:32 / Lämna en kommentar
From Calloway to Mulligan
Charlie Barnet Boyd Raeburn Gerry Mulligan
Count Basie Cab Calloway Jimmie Lunceford
https://ellingtonblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/05-black-beauty-charlie-barnet-1967.mp3
Nobody really knows how many songs Duke Ellington wrote during his long career as a song writer, and many of them were only performed by himself or his orchestra. Quite a few, however, became ever-greens and many others were appreciated as jazz standards which were favoured by other orchestras.
Charlie Barnet was probably the one band-leader that had the largest number of Ellington’s compositions in his book and he also was a good friend of Duke’s. He didn’t try to copy Duke’s arrangements, instead he made his own typical interpretation of his songs. Above, you can click to listen to his recording of Black Beauty, an early Ellington composition, played by one of Charlie Barnet’s last bands from 1967. In the Goodies Room you’ll find more music by other bands. (mer…)
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Elliot Chan
Writer and Marketer
May 9, 2014 / Elliot Chan
‘Game of Thrones’ actor Jack Gleeson’s retirement is a great loss
By Elliot Chan, Opinions Editor
Formerly published in The Other Press. May, 5, 2014
It’s customary to start a piece concerning Game of Thrones by stating that there will be spoilers in this article. You have been warned.
Now with that being said, as an avid fan of the show and the novels, the most stunning news for me to hear in the aftermath of the Purple Wedding was Jack Gleeson’s retirement from acting. Joffrey Baratheon, perhaps one of the most disdainful characters to ever transition from page to screen is finally dead, and that means that 21-year-old actor Gleeson will no longer be a part of the show as it heads into the latter-half of the fourth season and beyond.
While some actors have used Game of Thrones as a launch pad to fame after their characters’ unfortunate demise—for example: Richard Madden who played Robb Starkrecently starred as the lead in Discovery’s highly publicized mini-series Klondike, and Jason Momoa who played Khal Drogo currently has five new movies in the works in addition to his television series The Red Road—Gleeson is choosing to step away at perhaps the most marketable phase of his acting life.
For the past four years, Gleeson has allegedly been harassed in public and online due to the fact that he was playing such a despicable character on television. Whether that was a determining factor to his retirement is unclear, but a young man losing his passion for a career many would die for is something I can’t ignore.
Many actors have chosen to take breaks from their acting careers to pursue other activities. In an interview after Game of Thrones season four episode two, Gleeson told reporters that he will perhaps go back to school and get a “post-graduate of some kind.” But some actors have taken a break for a reason that many consider risky, since well-paying jobs are so rare.
Dismiss it however you like, but I believe that Gleeson’s retirement is connected to the fact that he does not want to be typecast. After he has played such a horrible character, it is hard for the public to see him as the hero or even a likeable supporting character. He is a talented actor, but sometimes the audience determines the performance simply by the actor’s appearance.
If you may recall in the late ‘90s, Leonardo DiCaprio went on a slight hiatus after Titanic so that he could diminish his “pretty boy” persona. Since then numerous other actors in their prime have followed that model of breaking their stereotype.
The ability to say no to big-name production companies gives power to the actors in the long run. I think we can all learn a lesson from what Gleeson is doing, even if it is an upsetting loss for the time being. Saying no is important—scary, but important. If an actor or any other professional wants a career with longevity, then they must not only understand how to do the job, but understand why they are doing it. The worst thing that can happen is to be living a role that doesn’t make us happy.
We must all look at what we do and ask ourselves why we are doing it: is it for the money, or for the art, or simply because we want recognition? You can be the villain or you can be the pretty boy, just as long as you are being yourself.
dead, Game of Thrones, Jack Gleeson, Joffery Baratheon, Red Wedding, retires
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A Tofu Review: The Eatery – Modern Sushi in Vancouver, B.C.
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Catherine O’Hara To Be Honoured By Canadian Performers With The 2020 ACTRA National Award Of Excellence
By Becca Longmire. 13 Jan 2020 11:10 AM
Photo by Matt Baron/Shutterstock
Catherine O’Hara is to be honoured by her fellow Canadian performers with the 2020 ACTRA National Award of Excellence.
O’Hara will receive the honour on April 18 at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles.
“Canadian actors are thrilled to honour our colleague, the multi-talented Catherine O’Hara, for her outstanding contribution to Canada’s entertainment industry,” said ACTRA national president David Sparrow.
“From our beloved Canadian comedy series ‘SCTV’ to ‘Best in Show’ to playing Moira on ‘Schitt’s Creek’ for six award-winning seasons, Catherine’s body of work is truly exceptional.”
RELATED: Catherine O’Hara Plans On Being Moira Rose In Her Everyday Life: ‘She’s Too Much Fun To Play’
O’Hara added, “As anyone who knows me will attest, I am forever boasting about all things Canadian.
“Thank you so much, fellow ACTRA members, if I wasn’t a good Canadian, I’d brag about this lovely honour, too.”
O’Hara has nabbed four consecutive Canadian Screen Awards for Best Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her work on “Schitt’s Creek”; she was honoured with the 2016 ACTRA Toronto Award for Outstanding Performance among numerous other accolades.
RELATED: ‘Ellen’ Guest Hosts Dan and Eugene Levy Pull Epic Prank On Their ‘Schitt’s Creek’ Co-Star Annie Murphy
The actress now joins fellow ACTRA National Award of Excellence winners, including Jay Baruchel (2019), Molly Parker (2018), Kim Coates (2017), Neve Campbell (2016) and Jason Priestley (2015).
ACTRA ACTRA Awards Awards Catherine O'Hara Schitt's Creek
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> Press > Following Panama Papers, the European Commission takes step forward on financial transparency, but loopholes remain
Following Panama Papers, the European Commission takes step forward on financial transparency, but loopholes remain
Tove Ryding
Julia Ravenscroft
topics: tax justice, capital flight, domestic resource mobilisation
Tuesday July 5 2016
Today the European Commission took a step towards financial transparency proposing public registers of the real owners of companies and ‘commercial trusts’ to be included in the EU’s anti-money laundering legislation.
However, information about ‘non-commercial trusts’ will remain largely behind closed doors as the proposed rules state that in order to access this data, members of the public must demonstrate a ‘legitimate interest’.
The Commission has reopened discussions about the Anti-Money Laundering Directive after the Panama Papers scandal revealed how wealthy people, including some criminals, were concealing their identities to hide billions of euros in tax havens.
Member States will now have to agree on the new changes for them to be passed into EU law.
Tove Maria Ryding, Tax Justice Coordinator at the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), said: “Today the European Commission has taken a step forward and has recognised that public access to information of this nature is crucial. However, more needs to be done to achieve true financial transparency, so we’re calling on the EU Member States to increase the level of ambition in the proposal. The Panama Papers revealed how structures set up to look like ‘family trusts’ have also been used to hide money. Until these structures are included in public registers, there will always be ways for money launderers and tax dodgers to conceal their wealth.”
Tax and transparency campaigners are also calling for changes to other clauses in the legislation that offer loopholes to potential tax dodgers and money launderers. For instance, the Directive currently includes a clause which states that if the beneficial owner cannot be identified then a member of senior management can be named instead.
Ryding said: “We believe that if a company cannot identify who the owner is, it should be closed down – not simply allowed to operate under a false name. The Panama Papers illustrated exactly how far the rich and powerful are willing to go to hide their money, so it’s important that all the loopholes are closed.”
For more information, or to request an interview, please contact Julia Ravenscroft, Communications Manager at the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) on +32 486 356 814 or jravenscroft@eurodad.org.
AMLD: This is the EU’s Anti-Money Laundering legislation. The latest version of the Directive, AMLD IV, was originally published on June 5 2015. It stated that EU Member States should have registers of beneficial owners of companies but that members of the public, journalists and other interested parties could only access this information if they demonstrated ‘a legitimate interest’. This rule was not extended to trusts and other legal structures. Since countries began transcribing the rules, some have made the registers open to the public anyway (in the UK this has taken place, for example, but only for companies). The definition of a ‘legitimate interest’ has been debated. Today’s decision would amend this legislation.
Panama Papers: In April this year, a massive leak of more than 11.5 million financial and legal records exposed the system which has enabled crime, corruption and wrongdoing to be hidden by secretive offshore companies. The papers came from just one Offshore law firm - Mossack Fonseca, based in Panama. The Papers’ database can be found here. They revealed:
o Mossack Fonseca used tax havens all around the world to hide the money of their customers, including inside the EU (especially Malta, Cyprus and the UK). Intermediaries based in EU countries were also among the most active users of Mossack Fonseca’s services (including several banks in Luxembourg). More info can be found here.
o British Prime Minister David Cameron had shares in his late father’s offshore trust fund Blair Holdings, and he faced questions over the issue in Parliament. This was particularly controversial as the UK government has always been against a public register for trusts.
o Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned from office amid public outrage that his family had sheltered money offshore. The scandal revealed that Gunnlaugsson once owned – and his wife still owns – an offshore investment company with multimillion-pound claims on Iceland’s failed banks.
o José Manuel Soria, the Spanish Minister of Industry, Energy and Tourism, resigned after the Panama Papers linked him to offshore investments in the Bahamas, and news reports linked him to a company in Jersey.
tags: Panama Papers, tax justice, AMLD
debt crisis EIP trade mispricing FfD tax inspectors without borders G20; G20 Finance Ministers; BEPS; OECD automatic information exchange illicit financial flows dams photo FIs World Bank falklands ebola event Economic growth Doing Business tax inspectors without borders FSB EIB
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International Curry Festival in Tampa
It was my first time to the International Curry Festival in Tampa and what a special treat it was! I enjoyed many tasty dishes and met so many wonderful people! There were cooking demonstrations, curry food from around the world, live music and much more.
I was lucky enough to be one of the judges for the Cook Off Competition, along with former NFL player Ian Beckles.
To get more info on the festival and future dates/locations go to http://internationalcurryfestival.com/tampabay/
1st place winner was Chef Paul Syms, 2nd place Tarik Farouk, 3rd place Katy
Paul Syms
Tarik Farouk
Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival
http://www.lafw.com/
Stars shine bright at the Fourth Annual Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival, presented by FOOD & WINE. Taking place August 21-24, 2014 in Downtown Los Angeles, the epicenter of Southern California’s most diverse culinary scenes, an unprecedented lineup of epicurean elite will come together for three nights and four days of revelry and epic culinary creations including newly announced events.
A Tribute to a Legend dinner series honoring culinary icon Nancy Silverton will take place on Friday, August 22. Recognized as one of the most influential chefs in Los Angeles history, this California bread master is one of only four women to have ever been honored by the James Beard Foundation taking home the “Outstanding Chef” award earlier this year (Alice Waters, Lidia Bastianich, Judy Rodgers won in previous years). Silverton will be joined by some of the city’s best chefs for an epic dinner including Jonathan Waxman, Michael Chiarello, Joachim Splichal, Michael Tusk, Hiro Sone and Lissa Doumani, and Suzanne Tracht. Guests will also enjoy an exclusive Dinner with the Michelin Stars in honor of Pierre Gagnaire, recognized as the world’s most inspiring chef, on Saturday, August 23. A Michelin-starred cast including Michael Cimarusti, Dominque Crenn, and David Kinch and Stephanie Prida of Manresa pay honor to this world-class French icon and three Michelin-starred great.
Guests will be taken on a unique culinary journey while attending the star-studded marquee events, including the Ultimate Bites of L.A. presented by Chase Sapphire Preferred® and the first-ever Chase Sapphire Preferred Chef Challenge, Asian Night Market, Lexus Grand Tasting, or Lexus Live on Grand. In addition, gourmands will have the chance to experience the ultimate Power Lunch with a series of unprecedented chef pairings such as Scott Conant and Graham Elliot, or Nancy Silverton and Jonathan Waxman. Good food, great wine, and stellar cocktails go hand-in-hand as the 2014 Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival curates a selection of some of the finest spirit savants and winemakers. Cocktail craftsmen recognized the world over for their imaginative concoctions at some of the most revered bars will showcase a lively liquid laboratory including the Cocktail Revolution seminar led by Julian Cox on Saturday, August, 24. The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas Chef Mixologist Mariena Mercer, known for her molecular mixology and whimsical approach to cocktails will join the scholar of spirits, Faith & Flower Bar Smith Michael Lay on August 22 for an afternoon of lunch and libations.
The Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival would not be complete without beats to go along with the tasty bites, spirits, and world-class wine. This year will unveil rock stars in the tasting tents, including Fergie of Black Eyed Peas who will be showcasing her namesake Ferguson Crest wines based out of the Santa Ynez Valley at the Lexus Grand Tasting, as well as exciting musical performances to be announced on main the center stage set against the magnificent skyline of Downtown Los Angeles.
“The whole weekend experience is as important to us as the food, and that includes the cocktails, wine, and music” said Coastal Luxury Management CEO David Bernahl. “It is essential that we deliver more than guests could ever expect, like once-in-a-lifetime tribute dinners, extraordinary music performances, and so much more.” A la carte tickets will start at $50 to $500, with full weekend experience packages available at www.lafw.com.
ABOUT LOS ANGELES FOOD & WINE:
Now in its fourth year, the Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival, presented with generous support from founding partners FOOD & WINE, Lexus, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, JENN-AIR, and Delta Airlines, is a four-day epicurean event showcasing the finest in food and drink culture throughout Los Angeles, and culinary personalities from throughout the country. Set amidst one of the country’s foremost cultural destinations along Grand Avenue, the event spans the city and offers guests the chance to sample the cuisines and products from some of the most prominent epicurean influencers, while enjoying the sights and sounds of the entertainment industry’s brightest talents. The star-studded lineup has included celebrated chefs such as Curtis Stone, Michael Chiarello, Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto, Thomas Keller, Guy Fieri, Robert Irvine, and local favorites such as Rory Herrmann, Michael Voltaggio, Matsuhisa Nobu, and Sang Yoon. For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit www.lafw.com or call 855.433.LAFW. The Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival supports Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign and other L.A. based charitable endeavors.
ABOUT COASTAL LUXURY MANAGEMENT, LLC:
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Coastal Luxury Management
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Climate Change Denial Is Murder
by Manuel Garcia Jr. / September 8th, 2017
Climate change denial by government is murder by weather
By now everyone everywhere knows that climate change is a reality, especially the deniers who are simply lying to cover up their real intent, which is to continue with their capitalist schemes of self-aggrandisement even to the point of knowingly letting people die as a consequence.
During the last two weeks, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Jose, in succession, have formed in the tropical Atlantic Ocean to sweep northwest through the Caribbean toward the southern coasts of North America. Harvey has flooded hundreds of thousands of dwellings in the Gulf Coast area of Texas around Houston. Irma, the “lawnmower from the sky,” and the strongest Category 5 (out of 5) hurricane ever recorded, is just making landfall in Florida after razing a number of the smaller Caribbean islands; and Hurricane José is now sweeping into the Caribbean Sea from the east. Climate change denier and right-wing propagandist Rush Limbaugh, lounging in his Florida Xanadu, had called the official weather forecasts of Hurricane Irma’s path “fake news,” but has just heeded those same forecasts by evacuating from the storm, as well as from personal responsibility.
Climate change (as global warming) doesn’t “cause” hurricanes, it makes them more powerful and more frequent. Warmer oceans more easily evaporate, increasing the atmospheric moisture available for rain, and increasing the atmospheric heat energy available for driving winds. It takes heat to evaporate liquid water into vapor. Such vapor rising from the ocean surface mixes with the atmosphere. At higher elevations where the air temperature is lower, or in the presence of cold air currents, water vapor can lose its heat energy to the air and condense into droplets of liquid water. The heat energy released by water vapor to condense back into liquid – the latent heat of vaporization – is sizable (per unit mass of H2O) and adds to the energy of motion of the air molecules and air currents: wind. So, global warming makes for more moisture in the air over tropical ocean waters, and more heat energy in that air to drive winds and storms.
The scientific facts about global warming have been known for a very long time, and were largely learned through government-funded research. US Government officials, as in the George W. Bush administration and now in the Donald Trump administration, who publicly deny these facts – excruciatingly documented and warehoused by the scientific, technical, military and commercial agencies of the US Government – are simply voicing bald-faced lies, and are thus betraying their official and constitutional responsibilities to the American public. Since this lying (and its enabling of continued greenhouse gas pollution) is done knowingly and for monetary gain, and the consequential more violent weather (droughts, hurricanes, floods) erupting from today’s global warming climate change always causes fatalities, then that climate change denial is at the very minimum an accessory to criminally negligent manslaughter, and without a reasonable doubt to pre-meditated murder.
Outline History of Awareness of Climate Change
What follows is a timeline, which I first made for myself in 2013, of the development of scientific knowledge about climate change. This summary outline includes some of the incidents of the intimately related “world energy crisis,” which I define as getting enough energy for a decent standard of living worldwide, coupled with the commercial competition between: fossil fuel energy versus nuclear energy versus solar/green energy.
Both fossil fuel energy and nuclear energy are intrinsically capitalist forms of resource hoarding and market exploitation, because they are extracted from the Earth at specific locations, burned to generate electricity at large and complex industrial plants, and distributed widely and distantly through a large electrical transmission line distribution grid.
On the other hand, solar/green energy is intrinsically a socialist or public commons type of energy resource because it is naturally abundant everywhere – like sunshine and wind – and is easily converted to electricity wherever it is collected. It is because of its intrinsic socialist (anti-capitalist) nature that solar and green energy are being legally attacked and restricted in US political jurisdictions controlled by rabidly capitalist special interests. The outline now follows.
The clock for a public policy response to the “energy crisis” (now enlarged to “Global Warming” and “Climate Change”) started ticking in October 1973 with the First Arab Oil Embargo (1973 Oil Crisis), and we’ve yet to get off our asses in response to the alarm (40+ years later).
Four years later, the energy problem was serious enough for President Jimmy Carter to address the nation about it on the 202nd anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride (18 April 1977).
Peak Oil was the fear in 1977, not Global Warming, even though science had been certain about Global Warming since 1955-1957.
What follows is a very brief synopsis of the scientific development of knowledge about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW, which is human-caused, CO2-driven Climate Change), along with incidents of the parallel World Energy Crisis.
Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide is a gaseous insulator and high capacity heat-storage medium. It can retain much more heat energy per unit mass than the two dominate atmospheric gases making up 99.03% of the atmosphere: diatomic nitrogen (N2, 78.08% of the air), and diatomic oxygen (O2, 20.95% of the air). The remaining 0.97% of the dry atmosphere is a mixture of rare gases (with low heat capacity) and organic vapors (with high heat capacity), which include the high heat capacity species: methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The water vapor (H2O) carried along by the otherwise dry air is also a high heat capacity medium.
Quotes below are noted as from one of the following: History of Climate Change Science (HCCS); Hans E. Suess (HS); and John E. Allen, Aerodynamics, Hutchinson & Co. LTD, London, 1963. (JEA):
In 1896 Svante Arrhenius calculated the effect of doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide to be an increase in surface temperatures of 5-6 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, another Swedish scientist, Arvid Högbom, had been attempting to quantify natural sources of emissions of CO2 for purposes of understanding the global carbon cycle. Högbom found that estimated carbon production from industrial sources in the 1890s (mainly coal burning) was comparable with the natural sources. (HCCS)
In 1938 a British engineer, Guy Stewart Callendar, attempted to revive Arrhenius’s greenhouse-effect theory. Callendar presented evidence that both temperature and the CO2 level in the atmosphere had been rising over the past half-century, and he argued that newer spectroscopic measurements showed that the gas was effective in absorbing infrared [heat radiation] in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, most scientific opinion continued to dispute or ignore the theory. (HCCS)
In 1955 Hans Suess’s carbon-14 isotope analysis showed that CO2 released from fossil fuels was not immediately absorbed by the ocean. (HCCS)
In 1957, better understanding of ocean chemistry led Roger Revelle to a realization that the ocean surface layer had limited ability to absorb carbon dioxide. (HCCS)
In a seminal paper published in 1957 [Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, “Carbon dioxide exchange between atmosphere and ocean and the question of an increase of atmospheric CO2 during the past decades.” Tellus 9, 18-27 (1957)], Roger Revelle and Hans Suess argued that humankind was performing “a great geophysical experiment,” [and called] on the scientific community to monitor changes in the carbon dioxide content of waters and the atmosphere, as well as production rates of plants and animals. (HS)
AGW became common knowledge among aerodynamicists and atmospheric scientists by the 1960s, as witnessed by the following passage from John E. Allen’s 1963 book surveying the field of aerodynamics “for the non-specialist, the young student, the scholar leaving school and seeking an interest for his life’s work, and for the intelligent member of the public.”
Scientists are interested in the long-term effects on our atmosphere from the combustion of coal, oil and petrol and the generation of carbon dioxide. It has been estimated that 360,000 million tons of CO2 have been added to the atmosphere by man’s burning of fossil fuels, increasing the concentration by 13%. This progressive rise in the CO2 content of the air has influenced the heat balance between the sun, air and oceans, thus leading to small but definite changes in surface temperature. At Uppsala in Sweden, for example, the mean temperature has risen 2° in 60 years. (JEA)
22 April 1970: On this first Earth Day, MG, Jr decides to aim for a career in energy research, for a brave new future.
October 1973 – March 1974: The first Arab Oil Embargo (formally known as the 1973 Oil Crisis) erupts in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War (1973 Arab-Israeli War, October 6–25, 1973).
Evidence for warming accumulated. By 1975, Manabe and Wetherald had developed a three-dimensional Global Climate Model that gave a roughly accurate representation of the current climate. Doubling CO2 in the model’s atmosphere gave a roughly 2°C rise in global temperature. Several other kinds of computer models gave similar results: it was impossible to make a model that gave something resembling the actual climate and not have the temperature rise when the CO2 concentration was increased. (HCCS)
18 April 1977: President Jimmy Carter’s Address to the Nation on Energy.
The 1979 World Climate Conference of the World Meteorological Organization concluded “it appears plausible that an increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can contribute to a gradual warming of the lower atmosphere, especially at higher latitudes….It is possible that some effects on a regional and global scale may be detectable before the end of this century and become significant before the middle of the next century. (HCCS)
1979-1980: The 1979 (or Second) Oil Crisis erupts from the turmoil of the Iranian Revolution, and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980.
March 28, 1979: A nuclear reactor meltdown occurs at the Three Mile Island power station in Pennsylvania.
July 15, 1979: President Jimmy Carter addresses the nation on its “crisis of confidence” during its 1979 energy crisis (oil and gasoline shortages and high prices). This address would become known as the “malaise speech,” though Carter never mentioned “malaise.” Have you seen as honest an American presidential speech since? “Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation.”
November 4, 1980: Ronald Reagan is elected president and the “big plunge” (the neoliberal shredding of the 1945 postwar social contract) begins. Poof went all my illusions about an American energy revolution.
April 26, 1986: A nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power station in the Ukraine explodes, spewing radioactivity far and wide, and the fuel core melts down. The Chernobyl disaster was the worst nuclear power plant accident until the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011.
1986: Ronald Reagan has the solar hot water system removed, which had been installed on the roof of the White House during the Carter Administration. The official US energy policy was obvious to me: solar energy and conservation were dead.
In June 1988, James E. Hansen [in Congressional testimony] made one of the first assessments that human-caused warming had already measurably affected global climate. Shortly after, a “World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security” gathered hundreds of scientists and others in Toronto. They concluded that the changes in the atmosphere due to human pollution “represent a major threat to international security and are already having harmful consequences over many parts of the globe,” and declared that by 2005 the world should push its emissions some 20% below the 1988 level. (HCCS)
All that AGW scientific research has done since 1988 has been to add more decimal places to the numbers characterizing the physical effects. That was over a quarter century ago. So, I take it as a given that the American and even World consensus [so far] is in favor of probable human extinction sooner (by waste heat triggered climate change) rather than later (by expansion of the Sun into a Red Giant star). And, yes, the course of the extinction will proceed inequitably. Not what I want, but what I see as the logical consequences of what is. (End of the outline.)
Global warming is Earth’s fever from its infection with capitalism
So, whenever some government, corporate or media potentate discharges another toxic cloud of climate change denialism, realize that what they are actually and dishonestly telling you is: “I am going to keep making my financial killing regardless, and I don’t care who has to die for it.”
Manuel Garcia, Jr. is an occasional writer who is always independent. His e-mail address is: mangogarcia@att.net. Read other articles by Manuel, or visit Manuel's website.
This article was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2017 at 10:33pm and is filed under Climate Change, Energy, United States.
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/ How Long Does it Take for Something to Become a Habit?
How Long Does it Take for Something to Become a Habit?
The amount of time it takes for something to become a habit will vary depending on your source of information. Depending on who you ask, you can get answers anywhere from a week to a year. But the most popular answer is 21 days—-postulated in the 1960s by Maxwell Maltz, a cosmetic surgeon. But that number was taken as scientific maxim without ever really being tested, until recently. Recent research led by a team at the University College London think they have uncovered just how long (on average) it takes for something to become habitual. They do not think it takes 21 days to form a habit. They believe it takes an average of 66 days to create a habit. This number trumps the conventional 21 days by more than 3 weeks—so the idea that it takes an average of 66 days may be a surprise to many. So how did researchers get to this magic number?
This number came from a 2009 study in which 96 participants reported to researchers how long it took them to develop a new habit to the point where it becomes automatic. The study looked at how long it took to automate a daily routine that involved eating, drinking, or exercise. An example of an activity reported in the study would be something along the lines of waking up at 6 daily for breakfast, drinking 2 cups of water after lunch, or doing 50 push-ups right after waking up.
Each participant was allowed to track only one routine during the study. The researchers did the math of all the reported numbers and found that the average was 66 day. But the study did acknowledge that the days it takes to truly establish a habit—a routine and habitual action without resistance or second-thought—varied greatly.
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For some, habits formed in as little as 18 days and for others it took as long as 254 days. There are of course obvious flaws in the study; the numbers are self-reported and it was only 96 participants in the study. Thus the numbers may be skewed by those who under-report or over-report and the results may not be representative of the general population. However, the researchers leading the study believe that the number is a close to a true representation of the general public.
The Foundation of Acquiring a Habit
At its very core, habits are routine, automatic, and sequential movements of our bodies. After all, all of our “habits” that we seek to create involve some form of movement of the body—whether it is writing, reading, eating, or exercising. The brain likes to take a sequence of actions and convert them into an automatic routine, where it goes into the unconscious portion of the brain. For instance, brushing your teeth is a sequence of complicated motor skills that you do everyday without consciously thinking about each step. The habit of brushing your teeth is a learned one, just like any other habit. The act of brushing your teeth every morning was made into a routine when you were a child. And as it was done repeatedly, it became automated.
This automation and the automation of many other habitual activities, is stored in the basal ganglia of your brain. The basal ganglia, located in the telencephalon region of the brain, plays an important role in the development of emotions, memories and pattern recognition. More than that, basal ganglia also play an important role in movement control, cognition, and reward-based learning.
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How easy or hard it is to form a habit really depends on the “achievability” of the habit and the person’s personality. For those who have great prospective memory (the ability to remember to do things in the future) or those who are able to establish routines easily, creating habits come easier. For those that are impulsive or are not used to having routines, establishing habits will be harder. In addition, those who will try to create one habit at a time will have an easier time. So if you are finding that it has been a few weeks and it is still extremely hard to create a habit, it is not because you have no will—it is because the habit has not had enough time to become ingrained in your brain yet. To most people, habits aren’t created in a month. In actuality, it takes a little over two months to create habit, according to the study referenced above. But once a habit is formed, the action will become automatic and second-nature. But until then, you will have to consciously try to repeat the action everyday.
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Working On Wish Fulfillment: How To Reach Your Goals
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Home › Faculty › Michael Platt
Michael Platt, PhD
Director, the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative; James S. Riepe University Professor, Marketing Department, the Wharton School; Department of Neuroscience, Perelman School of Medicine; Department of Psychology, School of Arts and Sciences; the University of Pennsylvania
About Michael:
Michael Platt is a neuroscientist known for asking some of the most challenging questions in 21st-century neuroscience — and conceiving innovative ways to find the answers. Principle questions focus on the biological mechanisms that underlie decision making in social environments, which has broad-scale implications for improving health and welfare in societies worldwide. Broad expertise in psychology, economics, evolutionary biology, and ethology — in addition to collaborations with colleagues in these fields — has enabled him to reach ever-deeper levels of understanding about the neural bases of cognitive behavior.
As a Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor, he has appointments in the Department of Neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine, the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Marketing in the Wharton School.
Michael received his BA at Yale and his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, both in anthropology, and did a post-doctoral fellowship in neuroscience at New York University. His work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Klingenstein Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the EJLB Foundation, Autism Speaks, the Broad Foundation, the Klarman Family Foundation, the Simons Foundation, and the Department of Defense, among others. He is the winner of a MERIT award from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Ruth and A. Morris Williams Faculty Research Prize in the Duke University School of Medicine, and was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow. He has given the SAGE Lecture at UC Santa Barbara and has received the Astor Visiting Professor award at Oxford University (deferred). Michael has authored over 90 peer-reviewed papers and over 40 review and opinion papers, and his work has been cited over 4,000 times. Michael is an editor of major textbooks in neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience, and he is a former president of the Society for Neuroeconomics.
A revered instructor and mentor, Michael won the Master Teacher/Clinician Award from the Duke University School of Medicine. He is the former director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, former director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, and founding co-director of the Duke Center for Neuroeconomic Studies. Michael’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the Guardian, and National Geographic, as well as on ABC’s Good Morning America, NPR, CBC, BBC, and MTV. He has also served as a consultant on several films, including The Fountain (Warner Bros., Darren Aronofsky, director); as a scientific advisor to NOVA; and on the Scientific Advisory Boards of several companies.
Global CEO Program: A Transformational Journey
This program meets in three non-consecutive weeks in three different countries – CEIBS in Shanghai, China; the Wharton School in Philadelphia; and IESE in Barcelona, Spain. Strengthen your knowledge of new markets, reflect on pressing issues, and broaden your skills as a senior leader.
Leveraging Neuroscience for Business Impact
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Learn how to apply neuroscience principles and technology to shape consumer behavior, improve your decisions, build better teams, strengthen client relationships, and hone marketing and communication strategies.
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Tenth Circuit Opinion on Mens Rea for Tax Obstruction - What Does Unlawful Mean? (7212(a)) (3/30/14)
In United States v. Williamson, 746 F.3d 987 (10th Cir. 2014), here, the Tenth Circuit rejected the taxpayer's argument that the jury should have been instructed on the meaning of "unlawful" meant in a standard form of tax obstruction definition of the "corruptly" element of the crime. See Section 7212(a), here. The defendant wanted an instruction that was or very close to the standard Cheek instruction -- intentional violation of a known legal duty -- for the willfulness element of most tax crimes, but not an express element of the crime of tax obstruction. I have argued that the tax obstruction crimes (principally Section 7212(a) and the defraud conspiracy, 18 USC Section 371, here) should be interpreted to have an element functionally equivalent to willfulness and hence that something like intentional violation of a known legal duty should apply. John A. Townsend, Tax Obstruction Crimes: Is Making the IRS's Job Harder Enough, 9 Hous. Bus. & Tax. L.J. 255 (2009), here and in an online appendix with examples, Tax Obstruction Crimes: Is Making the IRS's Job Harder Enough? Online Appendix, 9 Hous. Bus. & Tax L.J. A-1 (2009), here.
Let's see what happened in the case.
The defendant undertook more or less standard tax protester actions, making monetary claims against IRS personnel and filing a lien against the agents' real and personal property. He was indicted for tax obstruction and another crime, 18 USC § 1521, here, for filing a false lien.
At trial, the court gave a standard tax obstruction instructio, first listing the elements of the crime as follows:
First: The defendant in any way corruptly;
Second: Endeavored to;
Third: Obstruct or impede the due administration of the Internal Revenue Laws.
After listing the elements, the trial court defined some of the terms in the elements (emphasis supplied):
"Endeavor" means to knowingly and intentionally make any effort which has a reasonable tendency to bring about the desired result. It is not necessary for the Government to prove that the "endeavor" was successful.
To act "corruptly" is to act with the intent to gain an unlawful advantage or benefit either for oneself or for another.
To "obstruct or impede" is to hinder or prevent from progress; to slow or stop progress; or to make accomplishment difficult or slow.
The phrase "due administration of the Internal Revenue laws" means the Internal Revenue Service of the Department of the Treasury carrying out its lawful functions to calculate and collect income taxes.
The trial court did not define "unlawful" which is a term used in the definition of "corruptly." The defendant wanted it defined. The sets the stage, so now I include excerpts (in these excerpts except for the footnote number the excerpts are my to draw the readers' attention):
At trial, defense counsel did not challenge the accuracy of these instructions but argued that the court should add a definition of unlawful (which appears in the definition of corruptly). He stated that "the definition of unlawful in the Tenth Circuit is, 'with the specific intention to do something the law forbids'" and that "an alternative definition of unlawfully would be violation of a known legal right." Id., Vol. 3 pt. 3 at 359. Also, quoting United States v. Winchell, 129 F.3d 1093 (10th Cir. 1997), he said that he would accept as the definition: "'[a] voluntary, intentional violation of a known legal right.'" Id. at 360. When the government pointed out that Winchell was defining willful, not unlawful, defense counsel asserted that "unlawful and willfulness converge in this instance," but offered that he would be "happy to defer to any other definition of unlawfulness, which the Tenth Circuit set out in Winchell." Id. at 361. The court ended the discussion by saying, "I don't think we need a definition of unlawful." Id. On appeal Defendant argues that unlawful should have been defined and that he could be guilty of violating § 7212(a) only if his acts were an "intentional violation of a known legal duty." Aplt. Br. at 39 (italics omitted).
Insofar as Defendant is arguing that the word unlawful in the instructions should have been defined, we disagree. The meaning of unlawful is common knowledge and ordinarily does not need to be defined. See Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Ry. Co. v. Preston, 257 F.2d 933, 937 (10th Cir. 1958) ("[A] court is not required to define words and phrases which are familiar to one of ordinary intelligence."). We note that the Tenth Circuit Criminal Pattern Jury Instructions repeatedly use the word unlawful but never define it, and the Tenth Circuit case adopting the instruction used at Defendant's trial saw no need to define it. See Winchell, 129 F.3d at 1098. Defendant cites no authority requiring it to be defined or defining it as he proposes.
Perhaps Defendant is trying to argue something a bit different from the failure to define unlawful and is simply asserting that the instructions did not impose the proper mens rea requirement. This alternative argument is suggested by his reliance on Cheek v. United States, 498 U.S. 192 (1991). In Cheek the issue was the meaning of willfully as used in 26 U.S.C. § 7201 and 26 U.S.C. § 7203. Id. at 194. The Supreme Court concluded, using the language Defendant would have liked in his jury instruction, "that the standard for the statutory willfulness requirement is the voluntary, intentional violation of a known legal duty," id. at 201 (emphasis added) (internal quotation marks omitted), and that a defendant can overcome this requirement by showing that he acted in the good-faith belief that he was complying with the law, even if the belief was not objectively reasonable, see id. at 203-04.
The problem for Defendant is that § 7212(a) does not use the word willfully. Cheek was not a constitutional decision requiring a particular state of mind before one could be convicted of a tax offense. It was interpreting statutory language—language not present in § 7212(a). No decision of the Supreme Court, or of this court, has held that Defendant's suggested mens rea requirement is the mens rea required for violation of § 7212(a). Nor is there any compelling reason to believe that Congress wanted the Cheek standard to apply to § 7212(a). Rather than using the word willfully, it used corruptly to define the mens rea for § 7212(a). And the federal appellate courts have agreed (although with some insignificant variations in language) on the definition of corruptly that appears in the district court's instruction: "To act 'corruptly' is to act with the intent to gain an unlawful advantage or benefit either for oneself or for another." R., Vol. 1 at 222. See United States v. Floyd, 740 F.3d 22, 31 (1st Cir. 2014) (collecting cases); United States v. Crim, 451 F. App'x 196, 201 (3d Cir. 2011).
Moreover, the definition of willfully in Cheek and the definition of corruptly in the instructions in Defendant's trial have much in common. Indeed, the Second Circuit has suggested that an instruction like the one here "was as comprehensive and accurate as if the word 'willfully' was incorporated in the statute." United States v. Kelly, 147 F.3d 172, 177 (2d Cir. 1998). If there is something missing or ambiguous in the "corruptly" instructions that could be cured only by using the language taken from the definition of willfully, Defendant needed to point that out to the district court. On appeal, Defendant argues (at least indirectly) that what is missing from the instructions at his trial (and is conveyed in the language "intentionally violated a known legal duty," Aplt. Br. at 42) is that the jury, although instructed that he must have acted "with the intent to gain an unlawful advantage or benefit," was not told that it must find that he knew that the advantage or benefit was unlawful. Id. at 38. But that is not the argument made by Defendant at trial. Defense counsel's brief argument to the district court consistently framed his concern in terms of the need to define unlawful, ending with the statement, "So I'm happy to defer to any other definition of unlawfulness, which the Tenth Circuit set out in Winchell." R., Vol. 3 pt. 3 at 361. (The reference to Winchell is puzzling because that opinion defined corruptly in essentially the same language as the instructions at Defendant's trial and did not define unlawful. See 129 F.3d at 1098-99.) We can hardly expect a trial judge to infer that defense counsel is making a mens rea argument when counsel insists that he just wants the word unlawful to be defined in the instructions. The patient, experienced, and highly intelligent trial judge in this case certainly did not understand the argument as Defendant presents it on appeal, concluding the discussion with the ruling, "I don't think we need a definition of unlawful." R., Vol. 3 pt. 3 at 301.
Because Defendant's argument at trial did not alert the district court to the argument raised on appeal, we review the appellate argument under the plain-error standard. See United States v. Bedford, 536 F.3d 1148, 1153 (10th Cir. 2008). To establish plain error, Defendant must show "(1) there was error, (2) that is plain, (3) that affects substantial rights, and (4) that seriously affects the fairness, integrity or public reputation of judicial proceedings." Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). We need not resolve whether the "corruptly" instruction was flawed. We leave to another day whether a conviction under § 7212(a) requires that the defendant knew that the advantage or benefit he sought was unlawful and, if so, whether the instruction here would adequately inform a jury of that requirement. On this appeal it is enough that the second requirement of plain-error review (that the error be plain) is not satisfied. Although, as previously noted, the instructions used by the district court are in common use, Defendant has not cited any decision, much less a decision by this court or the United States Supreme Court, holding that they are improper in a § 7212(a) prosecution. See United States v. Fishman, 645 F.3d 1175, 1193 (10th Cir. 2011) ("In general, for an error to be contrary to well-settled law, either the Supreme Court or this court must have addressed the issue." (internal quotation marks omitted)).
Defendant argues that he has at least shown that the elements of § 7212(a) are doubtful and that therefore the rule of lenity requires that we interpret the statute in his favor. But that rule cannot overcome the requirements of plain-error review. The doubt required for the rule of lenity must be doubt raised by an adequately preserved argument. Otherwise, the second prong of plain-error review (that the appellant show that the alleged error was plain) would be eviscerated. See United States v. Ruiz-Gea, 340 F.3d 1181, 1188 (10th Cir. 2003) ("When the choice between two possible meanings of a statute is so open to debate that the rule of lenity comes into play, one can hardly say that either interpretation is plainly wrong.").
Finally, Defendant raises snippets of what may be arguments supporting his proposed instruction. But the arguments were not raised in district court and are not properly presented in his opening brief on appeal. We therefore reject them. See Bronson v. Swensen, 500 F.3d 1099, 1104 (10th Cir. 2007) ("[W]e routinely have declined to consider arguments that are not raised, or are inadequately presented, in an appellant's opening brief."); McDonald v. Kinder-Morgan, Inc., 287 F.3d 992, 999 (10th Cir. 2002) ("It is clear in this circuit that absent extraordinary circumstances, we will not consider arguments raised for the first time on appeal."). n1
n1 Defendant's counsel at oral argument said that he was also challenging the rejection of his proposed good-faith instruction on § 7212(a). But Defendant did not make that argument in his opening brief. On the contrary, he summed up his § 7212(a) argument by saying, "For the same reasons the evidence supported the giving of a good faith jury instruction with respect to the § 1521 charge, as discussed above, the evidence supported the district court instructing the jury that to convict Mr. Williamson of violating § 7212(a) it had to find he intentionally violated a known legal duty." Aplt. Br. at 42 (citation omitted). We do not address arguments that "are not raised, or are inadequately presented, in an appellant's opening brief." Bronson, 500 F.3d at 1104.
So, if I read the opinion correctly, the Court articulated the argument very well, but apparently rejected it because the error was not "plain." The defendant had not properly articulated the argument to the trial court. Perhaps, we trial lawyers can learn from the case and get a different -- better -- result in the next case where the opportunity arises.
Labels: 7212(a), Cheek Willfulness, Tax Obstruction, Willfulness
UStax April 1, 2014 at 11:27 AM
The sorry state of U.S. tax dodging multinationals...........
Two major reports are worth highlighting here. First, and most recently, from the U.S. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (via Senator Carl Levin), a report on tax avoidance by U.S. multinational Caterpillar:
“Caterpillar Inc., an American manufacturing icon, used a wholly owned Swiss affiliate to shift $8 billion in profits from the United States to Switzerland to take advantage of a special 4 to 6
percent corporate tax rate it negotiated with the Swiss government and defer or avoid paying $2.4 billion in U.S. taxes to date, a new report from Sen. Carl Levin, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations shows.”
http://www.levin.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/subcommittee-exposes-caterpillar-offshore-profit-shifting
As usual, the market-corrupting activities of accountancy firms were in full evidence:
http://levin.senate.gov/download/psi_caterpillar_033114
“Caterpillar paid over $55 million to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), one of the largest accounting firms in the world and Caterpillar’s longtime auditor, to develop and implement the
Swiss tax strategy, which was designed explicitly to reduce the company’s taxes.”
That is the deliberate corruption of markets by accountancy firms (and other enablers): it isn’t bribery or other forms of corruption, but I view the facilitation of tax abuses as corruption.
Second, and more broadly, a major report in February by Citizens for Tax Justice into corporate tax avoidance and tax evasion, entitled The Sorry State of Corporate Taxes: What Fortune 500 Firms Pay (or Don’t Pay) in the USA And What they Pay Abroad — 2008 to 2012. It’s another humdinger, if that’s the right word for it.
Among other things, it shows that the highly financialised U.S. multinational General Electric paid an effective tax rate of MINUS 45 %, on average, during the three (out of five) years where it had no net tax bill. Over the full five years, its average tax bill was minus 11 percent.
The point I like to make repeatedly is that under the pressure of Tax Wars (traditionally
known as tax competition), effective corporate tax rates do not stop once they reach zero: they keep on going downwards. The subsidy hogs get greedier and greedier.
The sad thing is: from the point of view of individual countries trying to engage in tax wars, it’s absolutely pointless. And that’s not to mention the even more pernicious global systemic effects.
UStax April 3, 2014 at 8:18 AM
Yes you are right ! Notwithstanding a critical Treasury watchdog report questioning the
readiness of the IRS, Commissioner Koskinen promised that his agency
would be ready. Now 9 days later and we are beginning to question just how
ready.
Recently the IRS issued the FATCA form for banks, Form 8966. Unfortunately, the form has no instructions. With less than 90 days before the new law kicks in, banks are getting restless. Banks must spend millions to upgrade their computer systems to handle the new FATCA data requirements. With less than 3 months to go, the IRS still hasn’t fully explained what information is needed and how it must be reported.
The FATCA Form 8966 isn’t the only banking form still not finalized. The W8-BEN-E form, which is the Certificate of Status of Beneficial Owner for United States Tax Withholding and Reporting, still doesn’t have instructions. The IRS website says they will be available “soon.” (lol...)
The W8-BEN-E form is quite complex and is 10 pages long. Banks are angry that by the time the IRS finally issues instructions there simply won’t be enough time to reprogram their computers and design effective compliance procedures.
To summ it up : no instructions, no guidance and very little time to comply with the law but a lot of frustration and uncertainty.
On a personal level this is what FATCA has wrought.
All my foreign accounts have been declared. I want to keep them because of family in Europe (including Switzerland.) I a a US citizen and resident.
After two dozen emails, a dozen phone calls, and four meetings at banks in Switzerland plus two othe EU countries I have found one bank that will take me ... for how long I don't know. Again the money is declared and account information will be reported through FATCA.
No Swiss bank I know of wants me. CS and UBS have told me they have a $1 million minimum, fees of over 1.5% (that's $15,000 per year) and I am limited in how much of my mney I can put into stocks or similar investments -- not too much since Uncle Sam doesn't want me to take too many risks with my money.
The first two things I say to any bank I cannis that I am a US citizen resident in the US.
Following is my experience in banks in two EU countries, after many many calls:
Bank 1 said that was ok, but when I showed up to the appointment they said the info they gave me was wrong.
Bank 2 told me that I could only open a Euro account and would find out whether I could hold stocks or mutual funds. A day later they said no, that even a Euro account was out of the question since they wrre considering closing all US citizen accounts.
Bank 3 wanted a ton of proof about source of funds, tax returns, etc. I would have had to go back to the US, gather the info, mail it to them, then if they decided to open the account I would have had to fly back to Europe to do so.
Bank 4 at first told me I could open an account. When I called back to schedule an appointment they said no, I had to be resident of that country.
I traveled several hours by train to Bank 5. They opened the account. However they are so scared of the US that they refuse to have any communication (mail, phone, fax, internet) with me to or from the US. Even though they will report info to the IRS through FATCA they will not send me that information to the US! I will have to travel to the bank every year to collect the information.
This bank is several hours away by train from Switzerland but hey beggars can't be choosers.
UStax April 14, 2014 at 7:19 AM
Interesting precedent out of the Netherlands where the Dutch Board for the Protection of Human Rights ruled AGAINST FATCAs nationality discrimination.
The American X has lived in the Netherlands since 1970 and also has US
citizenship in addition to Dutch. He had an investment account with
BinckBank (“Alex”). On December 1, 2013 BinckBank ended the relationship
because X had not shown that he is not liable for taxes in the United
States. X approached the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights to claim
that BinckBank engaged in unlawful discrimination due to citizenship.
BinckBank argued that it had terminated all 150 US customers who met the
definition of “US Person”, used by the US Internal Revenue Service
(IRS), because it refused to comply with requirements resulting from the
planned Dutch legislation in response to the US Foreign Account Tax
Compliance Act (FATCA) to provide all transactions and historical
transaction data by US Persons to the Dutch Tax Authorities. According
to BinckBank the discrimination was based on a generally binding
regulation, because the agreement on December 18, 2013 between the
Netherlands and the US Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) for the
implementation of FATCA forced it to do so . The Institute left open the
question whether the IGA was a generally binding regulation because the
IGA did not require BinckBank to close its customer accounts because of
their US citizenship The Board also rejected the appeal by BinckBank
for reasonableness and fairness, as the broad obligations required by
FATCA brought disproportionately heavy costs. The law, in the General
Equal Treatment Act (Equal Treatment Act), explicitly states that direct
discrimination on grounds of citizenship was not only prohibited,
except for exceptions included in the Equal Treatment Act itself.
Honoring the appeal made by BinckBank on reasonableness and fairness
would be contrary to the closed system of the Act. The Board concluded
that BinckBank had engaged in unlawful discrimination in the provision
of services on grounds of citizenship.”
http://www.futd.nl/fiscaal-nieuws/7286/door-fatca-weren-van-amerikaanse-klanten-verboden-onderscheid/
More on the ruling is available here:
http://www.mensenrechten.nl/publicaties/oordelen/2014-40
This story is obviously good news for people in the Netherlands. It is interesting to note that the account in question is described as an investment account that “engages in online buying and selling orders for investors,” since U.S. persons have been shut out of such accounts even in countries where savings, mortgage and checking account closures seem
to be less common..
The detailed arguments make clear that there are some exemptions in Dutch law for discrimination on the basis of national origin and that the bank was arguing its case on this basis:
Google translates the material as follows:.
Direct discrimination is prohibited, unless one of the exemptions listed in Article 2, paragraph Equal Treatment Act applies. This subsection provides that the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of nationality shall not apply if the discrimination is based on generally
binding regulations or on written or unwritten rules of international law. The prohibition of discrimination on grounds of nationality shall also not in cases where nationality is decisive.”
I suspect that the last sentence actually is something more along the lines of “Nor does the prohibition against discrimination based on nationality apply in cases in which nationality is determinative”
UStax April 22, 2014 at 12:58 PM
US Securities Industry complains that the July 1st FATCA deadline can’t be reasonably met. Will the US industry get what the US refuses to extend to those ‘foreign’ bodies?
‘SIFMA seeking relief from FATCA deadline; Looming July 1 implementation deadline raises concerns’
By James Langton | April 21, 2014 15:40
“The U.S. securities industry is requesting relief from the forthcoming FATCA deadline, citing the operational challenges facing the industry, and warning this could disrupt financial markets.
The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) said Monday that it has submitted a letter to officials at the U.S. Department of Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requesting targeted relief from the July 1 implementation deadline for the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).”………….
http://www.sifma.org/issues/item.aspx?id=8589948630
‘SIFMA Submits Comments to the US Treasury and the IRS Requesting FATCA Transitional Relief’
With regards to the title of this blog post I find it kind of scary that so far this so called "new international standard" has only the support of 24% of the world.
Besides the three large economies of Russia, China and India, the FATCA
compliant list comprises only 49 of the 198 officially recognised states
UStax April 27, 2014 at 10:44 AM
A blog site I hadn’t seen before (from Hong Kong): http://fatca-shame.com/
Great visuals and links to lots of articles/sites; not certain how up to date it is but sure is eye-catching.
Latest from Carl Levin on Russia and FATCA
FATCA causes foreign banks to discriminate against Americans. That has nothing to do with the tax system. Just for info... I spoke with someone last weekend about her situation.
She is a US Person and fully compliant. Not rich, not poor – just an average person. She got a note from her bank (Declaration to Certify Compliance with Tax Obligations) which I have copies of. They FROZE her accounts until she could provide a few year’s worth of FBARs and they were asking for proof that they had been submitted and received. To my knowledge it’s only in the past year that we got any proof of filing. What a mess. I could not believe it.
Moving to France, I’m hearing from duals (Franco-Americans). Lot of duals are sitting tight and not doing anything (not filing, not bringing any attention to themselves). One fellow I spoke to said, “I’m French and I’m only French in France” so he wasn’t worried at all. Others are concerned but have a lot of faith in the French Republic – France is known for protecting its citizens. A letter I was sent from one of my reader from his/her bank seems to indicate that some banks are indeed taking that path. The person asked the bank directly if he/she fell under FATCA and the bank answered, “This is only for Americans and French living in the US” and therefore none of this applies to you. This person is French/American.
I’m watching this very closely. The signs (the tea leaves I’m reading) seem to point toward dual nationality having a protective effect in some places. That would make sense. So does that mean that the best First Step for any American living abroad right now is to apply for citizenship ASAP in the host country? And then sit back and watch what happens. Is this already the strategy of choice for those who aren’t quite ready to renounce? Looks like it.
Many "experts" see FATCA solely as the battering ram that opened up the bank secrecy
jurisdictions, something the OECD had been trying to do for years. Like a lot of people, they hear FATCA and think FATCAT.
They are decent people, but I don’t think in their wildest dreams they could imagine how badly FATCA has been implemented. In the U.K., there is a crackdown on offshore accounts and the government has put out loads of ads raising public awareness that they need to come clean IAs for FATCA, I can’t ever remember seeing anything even in the international arrival halls from the IRS. My parents has never seen any ads in the Wall Street Journal.
If the equality experts understood that the U.S. tax law affects far more than the 1% and can take money from foreign benefits, scholarships,and savings plans for disabled people, they would be shocked. If they understood that middle class people without access to workplace pensions had lost their gains because of the treatment of PFICs, they would be appalled. Avoiding the ISA while working in London would be painful. Cutting one of your ways to save tax efficiently off.
They just don’t know FATCA’s full effects yet as well as we know FATCA. FATCA is a badly written law. It hasn’t really hit Britain yet (still running into people who don’t know what’s coming 1 July). I give it a year tops before attitudes change,…
So FATCA is exposed in that letter as what it is – extortion and a
weapon of economic destruction. Levin refers to FATCA’s “SANCTIONS”.
This is not a voluntary multilateral or bilateral mutual exchange of tax
related information as the US deliberately pretends. FATCA = SANCTIONS.
FATCA = an economic weapon. For Levin to deliberately and frankly mix
US extraterritorial tax policy with foreign affairs demonstrates that.
If it weren’t for the ‘quaint’ ‘peculiar’ institution of US CBT, FATCA
wouldn’t work at all, and they’d have to rig some other kind of
sanction.
How the rest of the globe doesn’t raise the issues of FATCA as a
deliberate way to tip the scales to giving US FIs and nonFI’s an
advantage while burdening everyone else, plus making all the worlds’
taxpayers pay the implementation and maintenance costs, and holding us
all for ransom is becoming increasingly absurd.
UStax May 2, 2014 at 4:42 AM
This is speculative, and “considering” can mean anything, but I am noting it here for the record :
‘IRS Has Received Many Requests to Delay FATCA; Prepares Technical Corrections to Regulations’
“The IRS is “considering” many requests to delay the July 1, 2014, effective
date of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) (P.L. 111-147), a
mid-level Service official said on April 30 during a webcast sponsored
by the American Bar Association, Section of Taxation..”………….
http://www.cchgroup.com/wordpress/index.php/tax-headlines/federal-tax-headlines/irs-has-received-many-requests-to-delay-fatca-prepares-technical-corrections-to-regulations/
House Finance Committee Q&A today on FATCA
As expected : IRS Announces That Tax Rules for Overseas Banks Will See Light Enforcement In the Next 2 Years!
IRS Notice 2014-33 announces that calendar years 2014 and 2015 will be regarded as a transition period for purposes of IRS enforcement and administration with respect to the implementation of FATCA by withholding agents, foreign financial institutions (FFIs), and other entities with chapter 4 responsibilities, and with respect to certain related due diligence and withholding provisions under chapters 3 and 61, and section 3406.
This notice also announces certain intended amendments to the regulations under sections 1441, 1442, 1471, and 1472, including amendments providing that a withholding agent or FFI may treat an obligation (which includes an account) held by an entity that is opened, executed, or issued on or after July 1, 2014, and before January 1, 2015, as a preexisting obligation for purposes of sections 1471 and 1472, subject to certain modifications set out in the notice.
Taxpayers may rely on Notice 2014-33 regarding these proposed amendments to the regulations prior to their issuance.
Notice 2014-33 will be published in Internal Revenue Bulletin 2014-21 on May 19, 2014.
In todays WSJ .... see below excerpts from “Banks Get Break on New Tax-Evasion Enforcement”.
1) “A former IRS adviser who helped write the Fatca legislation, J.
Richard Harvey, said the delayed enforcement ultimately could help the
regulatory effort, by helping to avoid a failed launch.
“If the first several months are a disaster, it could lead to calls
for its repeal,” said Mr. Harvey, now a Villanova University law
professor. “By signaling they will ease enforcement, they are hopefully
taking some of the pressure off the initial implementation.” ”
2) “Already, the law’s requirements have led some global banks to
drop U.S. customers. In a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal,
Deutsche Bank is asking U.S. clients of its operations in Belgium to
close their accounts with the German bank and transfer them to rivals in
a move to comply with the U.S. rules. The bank said it regrets having
to terminate client relationships in what it called a consequence of
Fatca implementation.
The bank said in its letter that because “it is no longer allowed to
use Internet, email, phone or fax to serve retail clients” who are U.S.
taxpayers with accounts in European branches, a business relationship is
untenable in countries where it has only a limited number of branches.
Deutsche Bank is organized in Belgium in a way that compels clients to
use online banking and call centers for their daily banking needs since
it has only 34 branches in the country, said a bank spokesman.
Treasury officials said Deutsche Bank is misinterpreting the rules,
adding that the law doesn’t prohibit banks from providing online banking
or phone services to customers.”
After Canada ,now Republicans Overseas Will Be Launching Legal Challenge to FATCA.....
The irony is that the greatest non-partisan effort being made by any group of Americans will be from abroad.
https://www.abolishfatca.com/live/NRSC_Portman_Letter.pdf
http://www.republicans-abroad.org/fatca/
“Michael George DeSombre was elected Chairman of Republicans Abroad Hong Kong in December 2012 after serving on the board as vice-Chairman since 2008. Mr. DeSombre is a partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, a global law firm headquartered in New York, and has been resident in Hong Kong since 1997.”
As much as I dislike FATCA, I don’t think it can be successfully challenged in court. The enforcement of IGAs by countries on their own residents might be unconstitutional in those countries, because it would be a recognition of US sovereignty over them and discrimination based on nationality, but I don’t think it’s unconstitutional from the US point of view. If it’s a violation of privacy, then so are the myriad of other reporting requirements. I don’t think a court would rule that FATCA is against the 4th amendment.
The FBAR penalties are another story. These are obviously unconstitutional under the 8th amendment, and there is already a clear judicial precedence (United States v. Bajakajian). The problem is that only someone who was actually charged the draconian penalties can
challenge them in court.
CBT is also different. I did some research and wrote my opinion that it is unconstitutional, and why it does not conflict with Cook v. Tait.
I praise Republicans Overseas for their initiative, but I think they are focusing on the wrong spot. I even wonder if they are just making a scene to get votes and donations from Americans abroad. Challenging FATCA in court won’t get anywhere, and even if it’s successful, it won’t really solve the problem. If they want to use the courts, I suggest they challenge CBT instead.
‘Superlawyer Jim Bopp takes on McCain-backed tax act that targets Americans overseas’
…..”…Mr. Bopp, as general counsel to Republicans Overseas, presented to its
board two other constitutional objections: violation of the Eighth
Amendment’s prohibition against unusual punishment in the form of
gargantuan monetary penalties and violation of the 14th Amendment’s ban
on unreasonable search and seizure of the financial assets of Americans
abroad…”..
Lots of interesting details (consitutional issues and FATCA, expatriations, etc.) in this story;
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/5/superlawyer-jim-bopp-takes-on-mccain-backed-tax-ac/
I keep reading that there are 50 IGAs in place..... that is not correct !
30 are deemed and VERY FEW have actually been approved by Parliaments
Here is the link to the Original BIG STORY as they characterize it.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-enterprise-us-unleash-irs-russian-banks
The tweet that was sent out by Michael DeSombre (“Republicans Overseas will be launching legal challenge to FATCA”) did not mention that funds need to be raised for the U.S. legal challenge. I expect that the Republicans will be successful in raising the monies. My understanding is that there will be a separate organization related to Republicans Overseas raising these funds – similar to the Canadian “ADCS/ADSC”.
Irrespective of whether you like Republicans, or worry about their motives, the world will better off if either Republicans Overseas or ADCS/ADSC is successful in killing the bad FATCA law.
Jim Bopp, the mean bulldog lawyer who would lead the charge mentions here some (but not necessarily all) of the U.S. laws that might be contradicted by FATCA:
Mr. Bopp told The Times that he plans to attack the act on three legal grounds: that it violates the Senate’s sole possession of foreign treaty power, the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel or unusual punishment and the 14th Amendment’s personal privacy guarantee.
Some research convinced Mr. Bopp that the act violates the treaty powers that the Constitution grants members of the U.S. Senate. The U.S.government has forged agreements with foreign governments to have their banks reveal all financial matters about their American customers or face huge penalties.
These country-to-country agreements are in effect treaties but ones that no U.S. department or agency bothered to seek the U.S. Senate’s advice on or approval for, he plans to argue.
Finding senators to serve as plaintiffs in a drive to get the Supreme Court to acknowledge the act’s unconstitutionality is task No. 1 for Mr. Bopp and the board of Republicans Overseas.
Republicans Overseas now wants a litigation vs. legislative approach:
“Seeking legal rather than legislative remedy on behalf of Americans living abroad before the scheduled July 1 full implementation of the law is the only available course for now,” said Solomon Yue, the Republicans Overseas chief operating officer and an Oregon RNC member.
The Republican Overseas position differs from that of Republican Senator McCain and Democrat Levin:
Mr. McCain and Mr. Levin see it differently. They not only want to sustain the law, but they also want to strengthen it.
In a joint report by their Senate permanent subcommittee on
investigations, the two lawmakers signed on to a call for “the U.S.
Treasury and the IRS [to] close gaping loopholes in FATCA that have no statutory basis.”
FATCA or how do you destroy a banking system.
Think about it like this: imagine that the King of Saudi Arabia decreed that NO grocery store chain in the United States was allowed to sell pork products to citizens of Saudi Arabia.
Crazy, right? Arrogant? Of course.
But that’s essentially what the US government has done.
The US government seems to be going OUT OF ITS WAY to destroy the advantages of the current system.
Uncle Sam is practically begging the rest of the world to create an alternative banking system that doesn’t depend on Wall Street or the US government.
And this alternative system is already forming. More and more nations are starting to engage in currency swap arrangements, and banks around the world are setting up their own network of interbank accounts.
If the US banking system loses its prominence, suddenly the dollar becomes less relevant. As the dollar becomes less relevant, then US Treasuries less relevant.
And if foreigners lose interest in US Treasuries, who will buy that slice of the US government’s debt ? Jack, keep watching my Avatar and the $/CHF
Another door closing for US persons… pretty soon… only place will be UBM… Under Bed Mattress.
http://www.investmentweek.co.uk/investment-week/news/2342915/redmayne-bentley-closes-door-on-us-clients-ahead-of-fatca-deadline
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-06/exactly-how-you-destroy-banking-system
Jack Townsend May 7, 2014 at 1:33 PM
UStax,
As is often the case, you make some good points but you shroud them in rhetoric about what you perceive as the injustice of the US initiatives. The basic shape of those initiatives is here to stay, however much you and others wish otherwise and proclaim otherwise loudly and regularly.
That is not a statement that I endorse these initiatives. That is simply a statement that they have traction.
At this point, I think the best those who do not like the initiatives is to try to offer comments that the policy makers who read the comments can fine-tune the initiatives. But the permanence of the initiatives, subject to fine-tuning, is a given. They are not going away.
gottaloveUStax May 7, 2014 at 1:58 PM
Jack, I think you make a good point and one that many individuals involved in the "offshore tax" debate would be well advised to consider. The reality is, as bad a law as FATCA may be, for most people, its repeal would have little effect, because it doesn't address the inherent biases in US tax law against anything offshore and the unwillingness of the IRS/policy makers to come up with a reasonable/non-punitive approach to bringing people into compliance.
UStax May 7, 2014 at 2:11 PM
....."you make some good points but you shroud them in rhetoric about what you perceive as the injustice of the US initiatives"......
Jack you are free to express your opinion about my posts and comments but unfortunately that is all that it is or ever will be - just YOUR opinion.
I wanted to call your attention to the proliferation of adherence to what I would call FATCA “lite”. A large proportion of FFIs, I believe, are seeking to become FATCA compliant by implementing the client onboarding procedures (which is comparatively inexpensive) but not implementing the reporting procedures (which is vastly more expensive). Of course, to pursue this strategy, they can’t have any US person customers.
I’ve been keeping score in the UK in relation to the availability of online investment account. Having read through the account terms and conditions of 30 some providers, 15 have outright bans on US person customers (including for accounts that are “exempt” under the UK/US IGA and therefore have no reporting like Individual Savings Accounts and Self Invested Pension Plans), 14 haven’t updated their terms and conditions to refer to things like US personhood or W-9s and precisely 1accepts US citizens.
One further provider has told me they will accept US persons but haven’t reflected it in their terms and conditions or account opening application. So, nearly 90% (15/17) of those that have clarified whether they will implement FATCA “lite” or FATCA (including reporting) have opted for FATCA “lite” and implemented US person bans.
Any US person discovered at those online investment account providers that have implemented US person bans will have their account frozen and possibly subject to forced liquidation.
UStax May 10, 2014 at 5:15 AM
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FEMA Emergency Alert System (EAS) Test - Aug. 7, 2019
Private Sector Advisory
FEMA and FCC Conduct Nationwide EAS Test
FEMA, and the Federal Communications Commission are going to be conducting a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019.
The nationwide test is going to be sent to radio and television stations starting at 2:20 p.m. EDT.
The test will be conducted through FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. This year, the test message is going to come from designated radio stations, referred to as Primary Entry Point stations, which participate in a component of IPAWS called the National Public Warning System.
All other radio and television stations, cable, wireline service providers, and direct broadcast satellite service providers are expected to receive and broadcast the test message.
This year’s test will test the capability of national alerting in the absence of internet connectivity. The test will be approximately one minute long, have a limited impact on the public with only minor interruption of radio and television programs, and will be similar to regular monthly EAS tests. Both the audio message and text crawl should be accessible to people with disabilities.
The test will not include a message on cell phones via Wireless Emergency Alerts.
See our recommended Survival & Emergency Gear Products below, or visit our Disaster Survival page.
72 Hours & Longer Emergency Disaster Preparedness Kits
Emergency Water Rations, Water Storage & Treatment
Emergency Survival Food, Self-Heating Meals, Long Self-Life Foods & More.
Emergency Heat & Lighting
Emergency Heat, Lighting & Warmth Supplies
Please help support FEMA’s mission of “Helping people before, during and after disasters.” The 2018-2022 Strategic Plan creates a shared vision for the field of emergency management and sets an ambitious, yet achievable, path forward to unify and further professionalize emergency management across the country. We invite all of our stakeholders and partners to also adopt these priorities and join us in building a stronger Agency and a more prepared and resilient Nation.
Download the FEMA App to locate and get directions to open shelters across the state, and receive weather alerts from the National Weather Service for up to five different locations anywhere in the United States. Follow FEMA online at www.fema.gov/blog, www.twitter.com/fema, www.facebook.com/fema and www.youtube.com/fema. Also, follow Acting Administrator Pete Gaynor's activities at https://twitter.com/fema_pete. The social media links provided are for reference only. FEMA does not endorse any non-government websites, companies or applications.
- Fall Weather Safety and Infographic
- Wireless Emergency Alerts: WEAs
- Did you get the Presidential Alert? If not this is why
- National Emergency Alert System Beginning at 2:18 p.m. EDT
- The IPAWS National Test October 3rd 2018
This entry was posted in Safety Tips and tagged FEMA, Wireless Emergency Alerts, WEA, IPAWS, National Test, Emergency Alert System, EAS, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Communications Commission, FCC, broadcasters, cell tower, cell phone on August 6, 2019 by First Aid Product Team.
Did you get the Presidential Alert? If not this is why.
While many cell phones were buzzing with test text alerts from the president of the United States, others sat in silence.
Several people used Twitter and other social media to note they failed to receive the test presidential alert sent by FEMA on Wednesday at 2:18 p.m. ET.
The warning system was originally put in place under former President George W. Bush for radio and TV and then later updated during the tenure of former President Barack Obama to include cellphones. It wasn't until Wednesday that it got its first test.
Alerts go out in the event of a national emergency, and unlike local weather or Amber alerts, users don't have the option to disable them.
In a statement, FEMA said cellphones compatible with the Wireless Emergency Alerts system that are turned on and within range of an active cell tower were capable of getting the message. Additionally, if a user is on a call, or with an active data session open on their phone, they might not have received the message.
FEMA is encouraging the public to send comments on the test to FEMA-National-Test@fema.dhs.gov. Among the details people who did not get the alert should send what device they use, their wireless provider, whether they were using their phone when the alert went out, and whether others nearby received the alert.
Today's National Emergency Alert System Beginning at 2:18 p.m. EDT
Stay Alert: Nationwide Emergency Test on October 3
Get Real-Time Emergency Alerts on Your Mobile Device
Wireless Emergency Alerts: WEAs
This entry was posted in Disaster, Survival, and Preparedness, Safety Tips and tagged FEMA, Wireless Emergency Alerts, WEA, IPAWS, National Test, Emergency Alert System, EAS, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Communications Commission, FCC, broadcasters, cell tower, cell phone on October 4, 2018 by First Aid Product Team.
IPAWS National Test of the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) and Emergency Alert System (EAS)
The National EAS and WEA test will be held today, beginning at 2:18 p.m. EDT.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), will conduct a nationwide test of the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) and Emergency Alert System (EAS) today. The WEA portion of the test commences at 2:18 p.m. EDT, and the EAS portion follows at 2:20 p.m. EDT. The test will assess the operational readiness of the infrastructure for distribution of a national message and determine whether improvements are needed.
The WEA test message will be sent to cell phones that are connected to wireless providers participating in WEA. This is the fourth EAS nationwide test and the first national WEA test. Previous EAS national tests were conducted in November 2011, September 2016, and September 2017 in collaboration with the FCC, broadcasters, and emergency management officials in recognition of FEMA’s National Preparedness Month.
Cell towers will broadcast the WEA test for approximately 30 minutes beginning at 2:18 p.m. EDT. During this time, WEA compatible cell phones that are switched on, within range of an active cell tower, and whose wireless provider participates in WEA should be capable of receiving the test message. Some cell phones will not receive the test message, and cell phones should only receive the message once. The WEA test message will have a header that reads "Presidential Alert" and text that says:
“THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.”
The WEA system is used to warn the public about dangerous weather, missing children, and other critical situations through alerts on cell phones. The national test will use the same special tone and vibration as with all WEA messages (i.e. Tornado Warning, AMBER Alert). Users cannot opt out of receiving the WEA test.
The EAS is a national public warning system that provides the President with the communications capability to address the nation during a national emergency. The test is made available to EAS participants (i.e., radio and television broadcasters, cable systems, satellite radio and television providers, and wireline video providers) and is scheduled to last approximately one minute. The test message will be similar to regular monthly EAS test messages with which the public is familiar. The EAS message will include a reference to the WEA test:
“THIS IS A TEST of the National Emergency Alert System. This system was developed by broadcast and cable operators in voluntary cooperation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, and local authorities to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency an official message would have followed the tone alert you heard at the start of this message. A similar wireless emergency alert test message has been sent to all cell phones nationwide. Some cell phones will receive the message; others will not. No action is required.”
Prepare for Floods Now
Prepare for More Hurricanes Now
This entry was posted in Disaster, Survival, and Preparedness and tagged FEMA, Wireless Emergency Alerts, WEA, IPAWS, National Test, Emergency Alert System, EAS, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Communications Commission, FCC, broadcasters, cell tower, cell phone on October 3, 2018 by First Aid Product Team.
The IPAWS National Test October 3rd 2018
IPAWS National Test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA)
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), will conduct a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) on October 3rd, 2018. The WEA portion of the test commences at 2:18 p.m. EDT, and the EAS portion follows at 2:20 p.m. EDT. The test will assess the operational readiness of the infrastructure for distribution of a national message and determine whether improvements are needed.
The WEA test message will be sent to cell phones that are connected to wireless providers participating in WEA. This is the fourth EAS nationwide test and the first national WEA test. Previous EAS national tests were conducted in September 2011, 2016 and 2017 in collaboration with the FCC, broadcasters, and emergency management officials in recognition of FEMA’s National Preparedness Month.
Cell towers will broadcast the WEA test for approximately 30 minutes beginning at 2:18 p.m. EDT. During this time, WEA compatible cell phones that are switched on, within range of an active cell tower, and whose wireless carrier participates in WEA should be capable of receiving the test message. Some cell phones will not receive the test message, and cell phones should only receive the message once.
Read about complete details at the FEMA website here: The IPAWS National Test
Read more about Emergency Alerts at the FEMA website here: Be Informed About Emergency Alerts
National Preparedness Month
This entry was posted in Disaster, Survival, and Preparedness, Safety Tips and tagged FEMA, Wireless Emergency Alerts, WEA, IPAWS, National Test, Emergency Alert System, EAS, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Communications Commission, FCC, broadcasters, cell tower, cell phone on September 27, 2018 by First Aid Product Team.
FEMA Funding Transferred to ICE
FEMA funding transferred to ICE for detention centers will not affect hurricane response
Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency have announced that the transfer of around $10 million of its budget to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement will not affect the agency's hurricane response and other disaster relief efforts. FEMA also says they stand fiscally and operationally ready to support current and future response and recovery needs. FEMA Administrator Brock Long also stated that the funding given to ICE did not come from the disaster relief fund.
This entry was posted in Disaster, Survival, and Preparedness and tagged FEMA, ice, hurricane, Federal Emergency Management Agency, budget, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement on September 14, 2018 by First Aid Product Team.
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Iranshenasi
Interviewees by Language
Interviewees by Occupational and Status
Major Areas of Concentration
Contributors to the Oral History Program
Stories and Songs
Resources for Young Adults
Concise Encyclopedia of Iran
Development Series
Chronology of the fifty-year Pahlavi Kingship
Iran Handbook
Pre-Revolution
Post-Revolution
Women's Organization of Iran
Laws on Status of Women
Noruz Lectures
Cooperative Activities
Connected to the oral history program is the Foundation's project to record and publish in monograph the experiences of the Iranians in public and private sectors who were directly involved in planning and administering Iran's socio-economic development before the Islamic revolution.
The series, edited by Gholam Reza Afkhami, is an outgrowth of the Foundation’s oral history program. Over the years, scholars at the Foundation concluded that the material contained in the FIS oral history archives— hundreds of hours of interviews with individual proponents and opponents directly involved in the private and public decision-making processes of Pahlavi Iran—did not support the conclusions derived from the bulk of the historiography of the period produced after the revolution by scholars, pamphleteers, reporters, and other writers in the Islamic Republic and the west. The archival material pointed to a different version of the “facts", which they thought should be made accessible for public perusal. Most of the material in the archives, however, was not focused on particular issues. The weight of the revolution colored many expressions, decreasing their clarity or precision, making it necessary for the statements in the interviews to be tested for validity and reliability, both internally and externally compared with other interviews. More focus was needed, but also more time to achieve emotional distance from the revolution—the most cataclysmic event in Iran’s recent history. Time, on the other hand, was to be considered critically, given the survivors’ average age and general physical and psychological condition. By a decade after the revolution the time had come to choose, based on the intelligence derived from the archival material, individuals and topics of particular interest for formal and focused interviews about specific issues, programs, or projects.
The idea was crystallized in 1991 during an oral history interview Afkhami conducted with Abdorreza Ansari, a former cabinet minister and general manager of a major development project. The idea was for the interviewer to work with the interviewee to develop together the framework of the interview, and for the interviewee to be actively involved in all levels of the project-- a partnership in development, in this case of a text. Naturally, Khuzistan’s development, as reflected in the politics and processes associated with planning, developing, and setting in motion the Khuzistan Water and Power Authority (KWPA) under its first managing director Ansari, became the Foundation’s first project. The book, published in 1994 based on interviews with Abdorreza Ansari and his two deputies at KWPA: Hassan Shahmirzadi and Ahmad Ali Ahmadi, launched the series.
Since then a series of books have been published, each concerned more with the issue at hand rather than the narrators' personal histories. The recollections of actual interactions by different personalities dealing with the same problem within a shared political context, enhanced and tested by the challenge posed by the questions and the precision demanded of the answers in the interview, has imbued the subject with a dynamic quality that transcends individual narratives unemcumbered by rigorous challenge. It is therefore important to read each interview critically in relation to others that touch on similar subjects.
The Foundation for Iranian Studies hopes to translate these and future publications in this category to English in the months and years ahead.
The volumes in the series are now available on this website. To access the volumes click Titles in the Series.
Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr
Bayat-e Kord
Shekh Fazlololah Nouri
Developed in Drupal
By Openconcept
© Foundation for Iranian Studies, 4343 Montgomery Avenue, Suite 200, Bethesda, Maryland 20814. Tel: 301.657.1990 | Fax: 301.657.1983
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Food, Art & Culture
A photo and video blog about my travel experiences with food mixed in with some art and culture. Eat, Drink & Be Merry!
When Grunge Broke into Phoenix
Posted on September 29, 2016 by ttimmons
“Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit!” – Mike Arm
Grunge (sometimes referred to as the Seattle sound) is a fusion genre of alternative rock, punk rock, and heavy metal and a subculture that emerged during the mid-1980s in the Pacific Northwest U.S. state of Washington, particularly in Seattle and nearby towns – wikipedia.
As a Generation Xer (the MTV generation), I grew up during in the grunge area. It never was my favorite term for this style of music, but it had a profound effect on my life in the early 90’s. In early 1991, I was really heavy into glam rock music (Def Leppard, Van Halen, Warrant, Poison, etc) and quite a concert junkie. I graduated from Tempe High school in May of 1991 and started dating a girl who change both my music and clothing taste. She introduced me to Alternative rock music (another term I’m not a fan of). At first I was resistant, but later would find myself listening to R.E.M., Depeche Mode, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Violent Femmes and U2. She helped me expand my music taste and it freed my mind to be more open to new things. My parents just divorced and I was officially on my own. I was an angry teenager as the result of the brokeness in my family and was suffering from a lack of self-worth. MTV, booze, girls and music were a big outlet for me. I was a frequent visitor to both Zia Records and Tower Records and built myself a huge collection of CD’s. The concert scene was big here in the Valley of the Sun, but people were unaware of what was going on with the music scene in Seattle. Even though a year earlier on February 19, 1990, an unknown band by the name of Nirvana opened for Tad in a small club in Phoenix, AZ (Nirvana’s first AZ show was actually at the Sun Club in Tempe in 1989 – video below of Cobain outside the club). The story goes that when Nirvana played this gig in Phoenix, the cheap-ass owner of the Mason Jar charged them a rental fee for some of the equipment that they used.
Music history would change forever on August 27, 1991 when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit the airwaves. I caught on when the video premiered on September 29, 1991 on one of my favorite shows – MTV’s “120 Minutes”. I remember watching that video over and over for days. Being a glam rock fan, there was nothing glamorous about this band Nirvana. They were just regular looking guys that wore regular clothes that just wanted to play rock ‘n’ roll. The video was very simple as well and didn’t look like it cost a lot to make. I was instantly hooked onto this type of music.
At the time I worked at a Rally’s Hamburgers. A co-worker of mine mentioned how the Red Hot Chili Peppers were coming in concert in Tempe. Their song “Give it Away” was another huge hit on the radio at that time. He told me how Nirvana and some band called Pearl Jam were the openers. I remember wanting to go but for some reason I didn’t make the effort and regret it today. But what a killer line-up! The show was on December 29. 1991 in Tempe and it was heavily promoted on the radio. I remember everyone raving about the show as grunge music was taking the Valley by storm. I remember going to a huge rave party in the desert and somebody was blasting Nirvana on the radio. We were all standing in the back of someone’s truck drinking from a keg and singing to “Teen Spirit”. The girl next to kept going on about how much she loved Nirvana. It was such a crazy movement at that time. Nirvana played Saturday Night Live (another show I always watched) on January 11, 1992 which really thrust them into the spotlight. By this time, hair bands were slowly phasing out.
On January 31, 1992, I went to a Guns N’ Roses “Use Your Illusion” concert tour with a bunch of friends at Compton Terrace. This was back when GNR were being assholes and making fans wait hours for them to come on stage. It was a memorable show for me because I made out with this smoking hot girl from Scottsdale named Wendy Luckett in the back lawn area. Every dude in my group wanted her and I had bragging rights for some time after that. Anyway, a band called Soundgarden opened for GNR and I knew nothing about them. It took me some time to get into them, but they were hard core. I was really into “Outshined” when they played it. I remember they ended the show with Kim Thayil leaving his guitar on stage making feedback noise. This was the next grunge band I would get into after Nirvana. Looking back. I always wondered why they opened for Guns ‘N’ Roses. Apparently GNR felt Soundgarden were too serious of a band and nicknamed them “Frowngarden”. Ben Shepherd’s response was that they weren’t rock stars and were there to play music. I guess in the 2nd show (the night after my show), GNR decided to crash Soundgarden’s set by walking out in the nude with blow-up dolls because it was the final night of the tour. The band members weren’t too amused by this which shows you the vast difference in these two type of bands at that time. One took their music serious while the other one was just there to party.
the source/ deanna
This entry was posted in Music and tagged Chandler, Compton Terrace, Franco Gagliano, Grunge, Julia Fahy, mason jar, Nirvana, Phoenix, Scottsdale, Seattle, Travis Timmons, Wendy Lea Luckett, Wendy Luckett by ttimmons. Bookmark the permalink.
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football nerd
Written by Football Nerd November 2, 2018
Football Nerd Weekly Ramblings – Meet the new guard, same as the old guard.
Start of the season thoughts- https://football-nerd.org/2018/08/10/football-nerd-weekly-ramblings-the-premier-league-is-back-will-anyone-be-able-to-stop-manchester-city/
As October reached its end, with each of the Premier League teams having now played a quarter of their matches, it feels like an appropriate time to take stock of how things are shaping up.
Going into the season considered opinion suggested that the push for the title was going to be a two horse race between Pep Guardiola’s reigning champions Manchester City and Jürgen Klopp’s vibrantly evolving Liverpool side. The form of both teams so far this season has done little to discount that prediction. Save for a goalless draw between the two at Anfield a couple of weeks back, the only other points dropped have been in draws away from home: City at Wolves in the third match of the season and Liverpool at Stamford Bridge at the end of September.
The battle between these two looks like being a war of attrition right the way through in which any dropped points whatsoever will be seen as an opportunity for the other. The two are set to go head to head at the Etihad on the 3rd of January in what will essentially be pretty much the midway point of the season and may go a long way to determining who will hold the advantage going into the second half of the race.
Before then though both teams face some intriguing challenges, Liverpool play Arsenal home and away, Everton and Manchester United at Anfield as well as facing a potentially tricky trip to Molineux to face Wolves on the weekend before Christmas. City for their part host cross-city rivals Manchester United next weekend and also travel to Chelsea before the notoriously busy Christmas period gets underway.
While it is far too early to suggest that the next time the two meet will determine the destination of the championship, it does feel that if both emerge largely unscathed through the fixtures before and through the festive period, it will be a pivotal game to say the least. We can only hope that this time a football match might be allowed to break out, rather than each side cancelling the other out as happened at Anfield.
If it was relatively straightforward to predict that City and Liverpool would be in the mix for the title, it is something of a surprise that just two points behind and also unbeaten are Chelsea. The protracted appointment of the latest incumbent in the Chelsea dugout, Maurizio Sarri, combined with the seeming decline of a squad that finished fifth and thirty points behind the champions just one season after winning the title probably meant that expectations were relatively low at the Bridge.
Yet such has been the start under the guidance of the former manager of Napoli and the imposition of his exciting ‘Sarri-ball’ style of play; that Chelsea must be considered as bona fide challengers. The Italian manager himself has suggested that it will take three months for the players to fully understand his philosophy, which is something of a daunting thought considering the Blues’ start to the season.
It is probably fair to say that Arsenal under new Head Coach Unai Emery have operated somewhat under the radar. After getting off to the worst possible start by losing their opening two fixtures to other members of the top six, the new man in charge has quietly gone about his work, instilling his philosophy and ideas into a squad that was in much need of rejuvenation, and overseeing a run of seven league victories in a row and a total of eight games without defeat, albeit against some of the league’s lesser lights.
The Gunners currently sit in fourth place, only four points behind the leaders, but tellingly their continually wide open defence has seem them concede ten more goals than City and nine more than Liverpool. If Arsenal are to stay in contention for a return to the top four Emery is going to have to find a way to tighten things up at the back.
Could it be that the lack of investment through the summer and the involvement of a significant chunk of their squad in the latter stages of the World Cup are starting to impact on Tottenham? While they sit just one point behind their North London rivals, it feels as though Mauricio Pochettino’s side haven’t lived up to their form of recent seasons so far this term. They would no doubt suggest that defeats to early season surprise package Watford, as well as Liverpool and Manchester City are not exactly disastrous, and would point to their 3-0 victory at Old Trafford as a sign of their continued potency; but it just doesn’t feel as if they have same impetus and momentum they have enjoyed over the last four years or so.
Once again the Premier League has borne witness to the great José Mourinho soap opera; the 2018 incarnation has probably even surpassed the 2007 and 2015 versions for increasingly bizarre behaviour and scarcely veiled criticism of those above him at the club and a significant proportion of the playing staff. Where once we used to accept this as the Portuguese’s Machiavellian modus operandi, increasingly this time around it feels as if he doesn’t know what to do to get his team back into the hunt after such a poor start to the season. If rumour is to be believed he was on his way out the door a couple of weeks ago, only saved by his team’s late rescue act at home to Newcastle United.
A draw at his old stomping ground of Stamford Bridge amidst yet more controversy and a home win over Everton last weekend may have steadied the ship in the league, but poor results in the Champions League and that ominous trip across the city on Remembrance Sunday looming on the horizon would seem to leave Mourinho with work to do to save his job. Then again would any of us really be that surprised if he found a way to get one over on his bitter managerial rival, Pep Guardiola, once again?
In terms of the best of the rest: Watford threatened briefly at the start of the season to break into the top four only for it to unravel somewhat with three defeats and a draw in the four games after the victory over Spurs. Everton have been way too inconsistent and in actual fact it is Eddie Howe’s Bournemouth who currently occupy sixth position in the table. While, Wolves have won admiring glances from many but they now enter a run of fixtures in which they face Spurs twice, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool before the year is out.
Even at this early stage it feels as if the top six is taking shape to be exactly as was predicted by many at the start of the season. Assuming Manchester United find the form that saw them finish second last time out and none of the others fall away drastically then the only real questions remain: whether Liverpool are strong enough to depose City and secure their first title in 29 years; and in which order the other four will finish behind those two? The more things change, the more they stay the same as the old proverb goes.
Posted in Football, Football Nerd Weekly Ramblings, Premier League.Tagged Arsenal, Chelsea, Jose Mourinho, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Maurizio Sarri, Premier League, Tottenham Hotspur, Unai Emery.
Football Nerd Weekly Ramblings: End this VARce now!
Football Nerd Weekly Ramblings: Liverpool pull even further ahead, while positivity seems to breaking out at the Emirates.
Football Nerd on Tour – A ‘cultural’ visit to the Basque Country.
Football Nerd Weekly Ramblings- Is it really too early to say the title race is over? Meanwhile Premier League greed shows no sign of abating.
Football Nerd Weekly Ramblings- North London clubs show different levels of ‘tolerance’ of under-performance.
Roget on Football Nerd Weekly Ramblings…
Football Nerd Weekly… on Football Nerd Weekly Ramblings…
Roger on Football Nerd Weekly Ramblings…
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Football Tourism
Previous Post Football Nerd Weekly Ramblings – Back into the swing of football-watching. Part 2: Arsenal continue to show signs of progress.
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Film Blitz
Just another WordPress film review site...
Black Death (2010)
April 1, 2011 Jim McLennan action, horror, reviews
Dir: Christopher Smith
Star: Eddie Redmayne, Sean Bean, Carice van Houten, Johnny Harris
With the bubonic plague sweeping England, the country is in complete turmoil, the church blaming the wrath of God for the epidemic. Osmund (Redmayne) is torn between his duties as a monk, and his love for a woman, who has left town to avoid the plague. When bishop’s emissary Ulric (Bean) needs a guide for a mission that could reunite him with his love, Osmund volunteers for the job. However, the job is not without its risks, and they’re not limited to the threat of disease. Ulric and his band of merry men psychopaths are in search of a village that rumour says is untouched by the Black Death, overseen by a necromancer who can raise its victims from the ground in which they have been buried. They find the place, and the first part of the reports appear to be true. So, what about the rumors of the resurrected dead? Are those equally accurate?
Monty Python have a lot to answer for. Particularly early on, this seems like a serious remake of Holy Grail, with dead being brought out, chanting monks and even a witch-burning scene. My, did the quotes fly… After they enter the marsh where the village is located, things improve, as the film finally locates its own direction. It’s probably closer to a medieval version of The Wicker Man, with hints of The Deer Hunter, as it pits the soliders’ hardcore Christian faith against something more earthy and pagan – and neither side exactly comes out smelling of roses, showing little tolerance for those whose religious views may differ. The main mis-step might be in focusing on Osmund (despite the poster), as Redmayne has perhaps one-tenth the cinematic weight of Bean, who basically grabs all the audience’s attention everytime he’s on screen. We just don’t care too much what happens to the supposed “hero,” as he’s too much of a wuss – and that’s where this fails to reach the heights of Wicker. Still, it’s a solid slab of medieval grime ‘n’ gloom, as long as you resist the urge to start banging coconuts together.
Johnny Harris
Battle of Los Angeles (2011)
The Fight (2018)
One Must Fall (2018)
Fleisch (1979)
Radius (2017)
Seoul Station (2016)
The VelociPastor (2018)
Top 10 Films: 2019
Ladyworld (2018)
Darker Than Night (2018)
Island Zero (2018)
Lifechanger (2018)
Jack vs. Lanterns (2017)
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139: How To Get A Named Actor In Your Film and How To Work With SAG (part 2)
By Scott McMahon | September 27, 2017 | 0
[Podcast] How To Get A Named Actor In Your Film and How To Work With SAG (part 2)
In this episode, we continue our series on how to get a named actor in your indie film and how to work with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Our two featured guests are New York's indie film director, John Gallagher, and Darrien Michele Gipson, National Director of SAG Indie.
What is the correct way to get a named actor in your film?
The history of independent filmmaking is riddled with a collection of crazy stories of how producers were able to land "named" talent.
In the end, it's no big secret. If you have money, you can get a quality named actor in your film.
If you only have a little bit of seed money, maybe the first thing to do is to hire a casting director.
In the second part of this podcast series on "How to get a name actor in your film and how to work with SAG", you'll hear from famed New York indie film director, John Gallagher, explain that working with a casting director is the first step in landing that named actor.
THE NETWORKER Teaser from Alexander Yew on Vimeo.
Making a career out of indie film ...
Many filmmakers want to know how to carve out a career where they get to make their movies. John Gallagher is someone who has done that.
Who is John Gallagher?
Taken from his bio section on his last film, "The Networker" ...
John Gallagher is a New York City-based filmmaker, a fixture on the New York scene for 30 years as a director, writer, producer, author, historian and educator, with a wide range of international filmmaking resources and relationships, and a highly regarded, encyclopedic knowledge of films and filmmaking. His track record is especially strong in discovering and mentoring new talent, both in front of and behind the camera. Among the actors John has worked with in debut or significant early roles are John Leguizamo, Amanda Peet, Zach Braff, Michael Imperioli, Gretchen Mol, Matthew Lillard, Vincent Pastore, Heather Matarazzo, and Denis Leary. In the past four years, ten features and eighteen shorts have been produced under his 305 Media Group banner.
Benefits of working with a casting director ...
As you'll hear in the podcast episode, John explains that a good casting director will have a good idea of which actors are "up and comers".
When you can get a quality actor on the rise of their career, your film may benefit later down the line. Audiences will seek out past work of an actor they admire.
In addition, you'll be able to claim that you cast them in your film before they were a star. You can use that leverage for future projects, especially when it comes time to talk with the money people.
To learn more about John Gallagher's impressive career, here are a few important links:
http://somedayprods.com/talking/interview-with-john-gallagher/
http://screenanarchy.com/2017/03/legendary-award-winning-director-john-gallagher-still-going-strong-after-30-years-contrib.html
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0302410/?ref_=fn_al_nm_2
http://www.thenetworkermovie.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/595e76bee4b085e766b51109
Bonus ...
There is more valuable information that John shares with us. Click here to listen to the FULL INTERVIEW.
Quality actors belong to SAG ...
If you plan on going down this route for your indie film, you'll no doubt be working with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG).
Many times when you have questions about how to work with SAG for your indie film, you'll be directed to SAG Indie.
Now, here's the kicker ...
SAG Indie is not officially affiliated with SAG/AFTRA. SAG Indie is actually a private organization formed to assist independent filmmakers to navigate the terrain of SAG/AFTRA.
You're in luck! Our bonus guest in this special episode is the National Director of SAG Indie, Darrien Michele Gipson.
How to work with SAG ...
Darrien breaks down how SAG Indie helps filmmakers prepare their projects to have the best experience when working with SAG/AFTRA.
There is a ton of useful and valuable information that Darrien shares in this episode.
She mentions that SAG Indie holds ongoing workshops, so be sure to check when the latest one is coming your way:
http://www.sagindie.org/resources/contract-workshops/
To contact Darrien for more questions, go to: http://www.sagindie.org/about/staff/
Enjoy the episode!
Posted in Podcast and tagged film, entrepreneur, film marketing, diy, film trooper, business, marketing, indie, hollywood, screenwriting, portland, oregon
← 138: How To Get A Named Actor In Your Film and How To Work With SAG (part 1)140: Filmmakers & Actors: Working a Full-Time Job While Pursuing Your Dream →
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↑ Return to Publications
The Infinite Air
Fiction – Vintage 2013
Synopsis: Aviator extraordinaire and international icon, Jean Batten was as elusive as she was glamorous. One of the world’s most courageous and daring aviators, she broke “men’s records” and became a legend. But who was Jean Batten and why did she die in obscurity in Majorca; lost to the world and buried in a pauper’s grave until a film crew came looking for her, some five years after her death?
The Infinite Air is an intriguing and evocative novel that delves into the life of one of New Zealand’s foremost heroines, uncovering long-held secrets and mysteries which Fiona Kidman only discovered during the reading and research she undertook in order to write the novel. Her meticulous approach rewards the reader with character insights and intrigues that would otherwise never have been brought to the page.
Jean Batten grew up and was educated in Auckland, the daughter of a dentist and thespian mother, and sister to two older brothers. She was a talented pianist and dancer, but a rare meeting with Charles Kingsford Smith and the pull of the ‘infinite air’ ultimately proved too strong, and aviation claimed the young woman. Jean’s passion for flying took her from Auckland to Sydney and then on to London, where she and her mother Nellie lived in impoverished circumstances, scrimping and saving for her flying lessons so that she might attain the ultimate prize – her pilot’s licence. Even before she became a pilot Jean had her sights set on a record-breaking solo flight from England to Australia. But flying is an expensive past-time and Jean had no plane and few resources. What she did have was charm, beauty and education, all of which brought her into the orbit of high society; people with money and influence. Before long, Jean had borrowed a Gipsy Moth biplane and planned her record-breaking route.
After an inauspicious start, in which she encountered bad weather and mechanical failure, Jean had to abandon her first solo attempt, and then her second. It only made her resolve stronger and in May 1934 she successfully flew solo from England to Australia in just 14 days and 22 hours; beating the existing record set by English aviator Amy Johnson by more than four days. The accolades flowed and Jean Batten became an international celebrity, often to be seen in public, shimmering in white silk – her signature attire – sipping champagne. But behind closed doors Jean Batten struggled with her celebrity and, as shown in this novel, sank into bouts of depression and loneliness, retreating from the public gaze whenever she could. When the outbreak of World War II put an end to her flying career and her fiancé tragically died in an airplane crash, Jean slipped from view altogether, living the life of a recluse in Europe with only her mother by her side. But her quiet life in a Caribbean villa was not without its dazzling moments. While there, she mingled with the rich and famous, including Noel Coward and the infamous Ian Fleming, with whom, Fiona suggests, she had an affair. Living out much of her life in Tenerife, with occasional forays into the world including a return trip to New Zealand, Jean eventually died in obscurity in Majorca.
The Infinite Air is an arresting novel by one of our best-loved writers. Kidman’s rich and textured palette readily evokes all the high-octane glamour, energy and dangers of early aviation, and the capriciousness of family, friends and lovers. Significantly, her novel captures the spirit of Jean Batten as she has never been seen before.
[Random House press release]
Available in good bookshops now.
Reviews and media:
The Express, UK Jean Batten: The lonely life of the ‘Garbo of the skies’ — Fiona Kidman, 07/03/16
The Independent, UK The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras, book of a lifetime: Sex and sensuality — Fiona Kidman, 25/03/16
Interview with Diana Dekker, Dominion Post 05/10/13
Interview with Chris Laidlaw, Radio New Zealand 06/10/13:
…the simple grace of Kidman’s adept prose perfectly captures the breathtaking thrill of early flight…the novel soars to moments of lyrical beauty and proves a memorable and rewarding journey. —NZ Listener.
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Encounters with a gay man in Spain, gay marriage in Spain
Spain is the country where homosexuals enjoy greater social acceptance of all people.
According to the latest study by the Pew Research Center, up to 88% of the Spanish population recognizes and defends the rights of homosexuals, compared to 11% who reject equality. These figures put Spain at the top of this particular world rankings, followed by Germany, with an acceptance of 87%, and in third place are at the same level Canada and the Czech Republic (both 80%).
The Spanish society in relation to the rights of homosexuals, manifested in an open respect, although there are still voices who oppose and physically attack gays, although the Constitution recognizes the right to freely live their sexual orientation.
Marriage between same sex is legal in Spain since July 3, 2005.
In 2004, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, was presented to the general election with a program that included a commitment to "allow marriage between same sex and the exercise of those rights entails. "After the socialist victory in the elections and forming the government, and after much debate, on June 30, 2005 law amending the civil Code was adopted and allowed marriage between same sex (and consequently this, other rights such as the joint adoption, inheritance and pension). The law was published on July 2, 2005, and marriage between same sex was officially legal in Spain on July 3, 2005.
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New ‘Days Gone’ Videos Look At The World, Developer Bend Studio, and More
By The Movie God | @ | April 24th, 2019 at 5:00 pm
With Days Gone getting ready to release this week, a steady stream of new videos have been released to showcase the game and continue building excitement for its arrival.
Recent videos released for the game include one which looks at the game’s world, a brief new gameplay trailer, another which offers an inside look at developer Bend Studio, and finally a video about the main character Deacon’s motorcycle.
You can find much more info on Days Gone and check out all of these videos below.
Topics: News, Video Games, Videos
Tags: Bend Studio, Days Gone, Playstation, PlayStation 4, PS4, Sony Computer Entertainment
New Story Trailer For Bend Studio’s Open-World Game ‘Days Gone’ Released
By The Movie God | @ | March 27th, 2019 at 10:00 pm
A new trailer has been released for Days Gone, the much-anticipated new game from developer Bend Studio.
This latest trailer focuses on the game’s story, which is set a couple of years after a global pandemic ravaged humanity, turning most into mindless creatures known in the game as “Freakers.”
You can find much more information on Days Gone and give the story trailer a watch below.
Topics: News, Trailers, Video Games
Tags: Bend Studio, Days Gone, Playstation, PlayStation 4, PS4
Latest ‘Days Gone’ World Series Video Is All About Fighting To Survive
By The Movie God | @ | February 6th, 2019 at 7:00 pm
The third video in a series dedicated to taking a closer look at developer Bend Studios’ Days Gone ha been released.
The new video is all about survival. It deals with enemies you’ll cross paths with, and the weapons and skills you’ll need to get past them with your life. You can find more info on the game and watch the latest video below.
Next Video In ‘Days Gone’ World Series Focuses On Riding The Broken Road
By The Movie God | @ | January 25th, 2019 at 10:00 am
Last week we saw the first in a three-part video series previewing the world of Days Gone. That first installment looked at the Farewell Wilderness, the game’s setting.
Now the second video in the series has been released. This time the focus is on the Broken Road, which you’ll rely on to travel to various locations on your bike. The video covers running out of fuel, repairing your bike, choosing whether to venture out after dark or not, and more.
You can find more info on the game and give the new video a watch below.
‘Days Gone’: First Video In New Series Looks At The Game’s Farewell Wilderness
By The Movie God | @ | January 17th, 2019 at 9:48 pm
The first video in a series looking at the upcoming game Days Gone has been released. The series will consist of three parts, with this first part taking a closer look at the setting of the game, a place known as the Farewell Wilderness.
On top of that details on some of the various pre-order bonuses have been announced along with a video, and info on what a pair of special edition offerings will include have also been shared.
You can find all of the info and the videos below.
Tags: Bend Studio, Days Gone, John Garvin, Playstation, PlayStation 4, PS4
E3 2018: New Peeks At ‘Days Gone’ Gameplay
By The Movie God | @ | June 14th, 2018 at 7:00 pm
Before E3 2018 we got a new trailer for Days Gone, the upcoming “zombie” game from developer Bend Studio. The word zombie is in quotes because they’re not technically zombies. They’re called Freakers, and as the developer has made clear, they are alive. They require food. They require sleep. They just happen to also been bloodthirsty creatures.
During E3 2018 some of the folks working on the game hung out with PlayStation to show off some gameplay. You can read much more about the game and watch a pair of videos sharing new peeks at gameplay below.
Topics: Conventions, E3, News, Video Games, Videos
Tags: Bend Studio, Days Gone, E3, E3 2018, Playstation, PlayStation 4, PS4
New ‘Days Gone’ Trailer “This World Comes For You” Confirms Release Date
By The Movie God | @ | June 7th, 2018 at 3:23 pm
We’ve seen a couple of exciting peeks at the upcoming game Days Gone, as well as the swarms of zombies—or “Freakers,” as they’re known in this world—that will be a threat those who play it.
Now a release date for the game has been set, and to reveal this release date a new trailer dubbed “This World Comes For You” has been released. You can read more on the game and find the trailer and release date below.
E3 2017: New Gameplay Demo For Zombie Game ‘Days Gone’
Last year we saw an impressive gameplay demo for a game called Days Gone. The game is an open-world action game, set years after a pandemic has ravaged the world.
This year a new gameplay demo was shared at E3 2017, and it too effectively hypes up what’s looking like a promising future title. You can read more about the game and watch the new gameplay demo below.
Tags: Bend Studio, Days Gone, E3, E3 2017
E3 2016: ‘Days Gone’ Has Lots Of Zombies Coming To Eat You
By The Movie God | @ | June 15th, 2016 at 10:00 am
A new third-person action-adventure game was unveiled during E3 2016 titled Days Gone. The game is an open world post-apocalyptic game set a couple of years after a disease turned most of humanity into vicious, bloodthirsty creatures. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Even though we’ve seen stuff like this many times before it really doesn’t get old so long as it’s done well, and this one looks to be done very well. Developer Bend Studio is smartly focusing the game on the characters and their story with the zombies being just part of the world they live in, similar to what we’ve seen in The Last of Us and The Walking Dead. But the real selling point for many could still be the zombies. A trailer and extended gameplay demo for Days Gone have been released, and as you’ll see below, they put A LOT of them on the screen at the same time, more than I’ve ever seen in a game. And they’re all coming to eat you.
Topics: Conventions, E3, News, Trailers, Video Games, Videos
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How the Harry Potter series changed the world
By Ethan Reiff - August 21, 2019
There probably isn’t a soul in the world that doesn’t know the name Harry Potter, whether you read the series, watched the movies, or even heard it whispered in passing. The Boy Who Lived enchanted countless children and rekindled the love of reading for many generations. But that is not the only mark that these wonderful books left upon the society.
Growing with the audience
Probably its biggest accomplishment is the shift in the pre-established notion that books about children are just for children. Harry Potter is the prime example of a hero who grew up with the audience. What started as a child lost in a new world became a tale of loyalty and sacrifice. Many readers grew up with the little wizard, which in turn impacted how the market sees the world of literature. The success of the series brought about an understanding that children’s literature, despite the old views, is marketable to all ages, as long as the story can interest them.
Furthermore, it cemented the fact that fantasy is not, in fact, a second-rate genre, but a way to lose yourself in a world so much different from your own. A large portion of the success of fantasy novels released in the recent decade probably owe it to the success of Harry Potter.
But the effect of the series did not end with a minor literary revolution. Harry Potter also changed the way we view immersion. The prime example of this is the theme park called The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. This theme park is dedicated entirely to the exploration of the wizarding world, and while there are similar attractions available, namely the Disneyland, this is the only park of such proportion and popularity that is dedicated to only one franchise.
The Harry Potter universe is also ever-expanding, with additional books, movies, and screenplays. How many literary works can boast about increasing the popularity of the printed word on top of enticing people of all ages to step into the theatre – all to see their beloved characters go experience even more adventures? As cliché as it may be, this franchise is simply too magical to fade into obscurity.
Building a world
The series also impacted certain aspects of everyday life for many. With words such as muggle or quidditch making their way into the language of children who grew up with Harry Potter, it’s no surprise that the so-called geek culture received a boost as well. What may have been frowned upon before the release of the series, is now met with thunderous applause.
But it wasn’t just fashion that saw the change. Quidditch – a fictional sport that was brought into the real world – has seen a boost in acceptable and popularity. Granted, it still is not recognized in the Olympics, but to those who want to stay fit and enjoy the spirit of Harry Potter, this is a perfect solution.
Overall, Harry Potter not only changed the way the world views children’s books, it also impacted the lives of generations to come. The magic of the series gripped society and will not let go, introducing a vivid universe that’s ever-expanding and a generous fanbase that is ever growing and shifting, inventing and transforming.
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Impact/ESG
© 2019 GEF Capital Partners, LLC. All rights reserved. Neither GEF Capital Partners, LLC nor its affiliates provide investment advisory services to the public. | Privacy Policy
SITE DEVELOPED BY TWIST
Headquarters: Nashik, Maharashtra, India
Initial Investment: June 2018
Industry Theme: Energy Efficiency
Investment Theme: Growth Equity
Company Overview – Founded in 2005, ESDS is one of the leading Indian providers of managed data centre and cloud hosting solutions. The Company has expertise in managed data centre (DC) services, patented auto-scalable cloud solutions and disaster recovery hosting across platforms and applications. The Company holds patent (both in US and UK) for its automated vertical scaling technology that allows significant increase in DC resource utilization with no down time. The Company has strong presence across industry verticals like banking & finance, IT&ITES, telecom, healthcare, education, energy & utilities, manufacturing, travel & tourism and others.
Environmental Impact – Data Centres today consume ~3% of global energy consumption. With over 50 billion devices to be connected by 2020 and 100 billion by 2025, Data centres are expected to become one of the biggest energy consumers. ESDS, through its patented automatic vertical scaling technology, helps reduce usage of compute resources (CPU, RAM) by 20-50% without impacting the consumer experience.
esds.co.in
Headquarters: Curitiba, Brazil
Initial Investment: December 2015
Industry Theme: Sustainable housing
Company Overview – Tecverde is an innovative homebuilder located in Curitiba, Brazil. The Company has developed a modular and industrialized construction system for the Brazilian market that can build 80% of a home in a factory setting. The modular wall panels are then sipped to the site for final assembly. The system allows Tecverde to build a home or apartment 3x faster and at a 5-10% lower cost. The units also deliver much better thermal and acoustic comfort.
Environmental Impact – Beyond time and cost, Tecverde’s innovative system delivers significant positive environmental impact through the reduction of waste generation (85%), carbon emissions (80%) and water consumption (90%) when compared with traditional construction. Further, as Tecverde’s main sector of focus in Brazil is low income housing, it also helps to reduce the country’s housing deficit.
tecverde.com.br
Headquarters: Jundiaí, Brazil
Initial Investment: March 2018
Industry Theme: Waste-to-energy
Company Overview – ENC Energy Brasil is a leading waste-to-energy solutions provider and owner/operator of landfill gas-to-energy (“LFGTE”) plants. The company’s headquarter is located in Jundiaí (SP). ENC is currently building 5 plants throughout Brazil, has a wholly owned operational plant in Minas Gerais and also provides Operations & Maintenance (O&M) to 3rd party owned plants. ENC is uniquely positioned in the nascent LFGTE sector, with a robust pipeline of new plants to be developed.
Environmental Impact – ENC Energy Brasil is focused on landfill gas-to-energy (“LFGTE”) generation, lowering greenhouse effect gases emissions and offering clean energy to consumers near high energy demand centers. ENC’s solution can obtain energy efficiency that is 2-3x higher than Solar PV, as well as reduce methane emissions from landfills, which is 25-30x more pollutant than CO2. Further, ENC is engaged in Distributed Generation projects which distribute electrical load more efficiently and reduce the need of new investments in transmission lines.
Headquarters: São Paulo, Brazil
Initial Investment: May 2017
Company Overview – Luminae is a leading efficient lighting solutions provider focused primarily on commercial and industrial (B2B) sectors in Brazil. The company is vertically integrated and delivers a one-stop shop solution: site audit, customized project design, assembly of LED lamps, manufacturing of luminaires, automation and installation services. Luminae has a strong track record and reputation in the supermarket (food retail) sector where it serves 70 of the top 100 food retails chains in Brazil, with projects delivered to over 3000 stores in more than 22 states in Brazil.
Environmental Impact – Luminae’s solutions can provide up to 80% reduction in energy consumption with up to 200% in lighting improvement, a combination can deliver up to 1000% efficiency gains to clients. Over the last 10 years Luminae has helped its clients to save more than 1,000,000 MWh of energy.
luminae.com.br
Headquarters: Cajamar, Brazil
Industry Theme: Logistics
Investment Theme: Buyout and Growth Equity
Company Overview – AGV FMCG is a market-leading, asset-light third party logistic (“3PL”) solution provider with integrated warehousing and transportation solutions, primarily for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industries. The company is located in Cajamar, Brazil (approximately 20 miles from Sao Paulo) and operates throughout Brazil with more than 1,100 employees, presence in 4000+ cities and more than 20.000 drop-off locations. The company has been officially spun-out from AGV Logística effective October 2017.
Environmental Impact – AGV FMCG delivery model is based on agility, flexibility and customization, and in addition to that, increases efficiency by reducing fuel consumption and therefore carbon emissions through its Full Truckload (FTL) freight model.
Headquarters: Phoenix, Arizona, United States
Industry Theme: Waste
Company Overview – Gro-Well is one of the largest green waste recycling companies in the Southwestern United States. The Company manufactures and sells soils, mulch, compost and other organic lawn and garden products to big box retailers as well as independent garden centers throughout the Western United States. From its eight plants strategically located throughout the Southwest, Gro-Well accepts sawmill waste and residue, as well as green waste and farm waste, to compost and manufacture its products. Gro-Well sells its products using a number of well-recognized brands including Nature’s Way, Arizona’s Best, Garden Time, Gro-Well and others.
Environmental Impact – By giving various waste streams a second life as consumer products, Gro-Well is able to divert approximately 320,000 tons of organic waste material out of landfills each year. This has direct climate benefits since not only a significant amount of methane and carbon emissions are avoided by keeping this material out of landfills, but Gro-Well products also promote plant growth and additional carbon sequestration. Gro-Well’s mulch products help retain rainwater in drought stricken areas of the Southwest, and more importantly lead to reduced usage of water resources by displacing more water-intensive garden landscapes such as grass lawns.
gro-well.com
Headquarters: Salt Lake City, Utah, United State
Initial Investment: August 2018
Industry Theme: Clean Energy
Company Overview – Bluesource is the leading developer and market maker of carbon credits in North America. Since its founding in 2001, Bluesource has been a pioneer and thought leader when it comes to carbon credit markets, providing advisory services to corporate, government and NGO clients. As an example, Bluesource would work with clients such as a forestry management company to develop and verify carbon credits associated with sustainable forestry practices and then market and sell those credits across a variety of regulatory and voluntary markets. Bluesource is one of the largest players in the California and Alberta regulatory compliance markets as well in the rapidly growing voluntary market as blue chip companies take an increasingly prominent role in helping prevent climate change. Other examples of projects that Bluesource develops for environmental attributes include landfill gas, biomass power, mine methane reduction and the destruction of ozone depleting substances.
Environmental Impact – By working with blue chip corporate customers throughout North America to develop, certify and monetize carbon credits, Bluesource plays a critical market role in helping develop and finance these environmentally sustainable practices. Bluesource also works with state and provincial governments as well as NGO’s to develop and fortify their carbon credit protocols and market regulations. As such, since its founding in 2001, Bluesource had a direct role in developing more than 150 million tons of carbon credits as well as many other environmental attributes including federal Renewable Identification Numbers (RIN’s) and California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) credits. Bluesource was an early pioneer in the environmental attribute markets dating back to its founding in 2001 and is consistently on the forefront of developing new industry practices and technologies.
Initial Investment: July 2019
Company Overview – Unicoba, is a leading energy storage solutions provider, primarily focused on Lead-Acid Batteries (Pb Batteries) and Lithium-Ion Batteries (Li Batteries). Currently with one of largest market share in the sector, Unicoba’s main strength and focus has been their distribution channels. Today, the company has substantial market share in stationary storage solutions for the telecom industry. In addition, it is uniquely positioned to take advantage of new and growing energy storage segment in Brazil, combining market experience and manufacturing expertise on a technology agnostic basis. The Company has 900 employees.
Environmental Impact – Unicoba, through its energy storage solutions, reduces hazardous waste disposal, as new batteries can last up to 10 years as opposed to current technology with average 3 years lifetime. It also improves the overall efficiency of the power grid, as storage accelerates the broader adoption of renewable energy. Additionally, it reduces the use of more polluting electricity generation for backups like diesel.
Headquarters: Vinhedo, Brazil
Company Overview – AGV Health & Nutrition is a market-leading, asset-light third-party logistic solution provider with integrated warehousing and transportation solutions, primarily for animal and human health. The company is located in Vinhedo, Brazil (approximately 50 miles from São Paulo) and operates throughout Brazil with more than 1,200 employees. AGV is uniquely positioned in the health logistics sector, with 90% market share in outbound logistics in animal health, and the third largest supply chain services provider in the human health segment. Its network density provides most efficient and cost-effective service for deliveries nationwide.
Environmental Impact – AGV Health & Nutrition supports a more efficient protein supply chain and contributes to healthier foods, by ensuring effective delivery of key vaccines and medicines to farmers in all regions of Brazil. The less than truckload (LTL) to full truckload (FTL) freight consolidation nationwide removes trucks from road and together with an efficient fleet management, which follows strict norms of temperature and safety, reduces CO2 emissions.
Robert Hurley is the Chief Financial Officer of GEF Capital Partners. He is based in Washington, D.C., and joined GEF Capital in 2019. Mr. Hurley is responsible for various tax, financial, organizational and regulatory matters for GEF Capital, and also oversees certain key vendors.
Prior to joining GEF Capital Partners in 2019, Mr. Hurley was the Chief Financial Officer of EJF Capital, an employee-owned alternative asset manager with approximately $10 billion of assets under management. At EJF Capital, Mr. Hurley was a partner, executive and valuation committee member. He organized and structured the company from start up to $10 billion ($7 billion of hedge and PE funds and approximately $3 billion of securitized assets) and played a key role in taking a company public on the Luxembourg exchange. He also oversaw the financial, regulatory and tax reporting at EJF. Prior to joining EJF Capital in 2005, Mr. Hurley was the Chief Financial Officer at a division of Citigroup which managed over $40 billion in assets. At Citigroup, Mr. Hurley oversaw the financial reporting and operations of 2,200 branches in North America. He drove key M&A and business integrations for the company as well, including the $4 billion purchase of Washington Mutual Finance Corporation and Integrated Associates Financial Corporation.
Mr. Hurley received a B.S. in Accounting from the University of Dayton, and an MBA in Finance from DePaul University.
Raakhee Kulkarni is a Vice President, Head of ESG at South Asia Advisors, a sub-advisor to GEF Capital Partners. She is based in Mumbai, India, and joined South Asia Advisors in 2018. At GEF, Ms. Kulkarni is responsible for steering the Fund’s ESG mandate to implement ESG systems and processes throughout the fund, the portfolio companies and at the GEF platform level. She closely interacts with the Limited Partners (LP’s) fulfill ESG requirements including Corporate Governance and Business Integrity. Her role involves right from undertaking ESG diligence at a pre-investment stage, identifying risks, and then hand holding the portfolio companies towards ESG transformation and value creation including incorporating Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) and using key indicators to create a step change. Ms. Kulkarni also supports the deal team in identifying potential investment opportunities.
Prior to joining South Asia Advisors, Ms. Kulkarni was working as a Principal Consultant with ERM India Pvt and led the Transaction Services practice. Ltd. Her core expertise was into conducting due diligence, navigating EHS/ ESG considerations during negotiations and transaction documents and supported client in closing pre transaction commitments. She built a robust Transaction Services practice through focused business development, strong client relationships across the transaction value chain, technical competence, innovation and people leadership. Her expertise range over a wide variety of sectors ranging from chemicals, manufacturing, real estate, waste management among others.
Ms. Kulkarni has received her Master in Urban Environmental Management from Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand and a further Post Graduate Diploma in Environmental Law from National Law School, Bangalore.
Mario Mafud is a Vice President at GEF Capital Partners. He is based in São Paulo, where he is responsible for sourcing and structuring investments in Latin America.
Prior to joining GEF Capital Partners, Mr. Mafud worked at Global Environment Fund, which he joined in 2014. While there, Mr. Mafud was responsible for overseeing a number of portfolio company investments, including AGV and Luminae.
Prior to joining Global Environment Fund, Mr. Mafud was part of the corporate finance team at Voga, a boutique M&A advisory firm which was acquired by Banco Indusval & Partners in 2013. Following its acquisition, Mr. Mafud worked on the team responsible for structuring the Investment Banking franchise at BI&P.
Mr. Mafud currently serves on the board of Luminae.
Mr. Mafud received a B.S. in Production Engineering from Universidade de São Paulo (São Carlos – SP) and also completed graduate coursework in finance at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain).
Alexandre Alvim is a Founding Partner of GEF Capital Partners and co-head of the Latin America investment practice. He is based in São Paulo, Brazil where he focuses on middle-market growth equity opportunities in South America.
Mr. Alvim joined Global Environment Fund in 2015 as a Managing Director before founding GEF Capital Partners in 2018. While at Global Environment Fund, Mr. Alvim led investments in Tecverde, Luminae and ENC Brasil.
Mr. Alvim has over 20 years of experience as an investor, board member and executive with various private equity-backed portfolio companies primarily in the renewable energy, environmental services and technology sectors. Prior to joining Global Environment Fund, Mr. Alvim was Executive Director of Energy and Business Development with Estre Ambiental (Nasdaq: ESTR), Brazil’s largest environmental services company, where he led its waste-to-energy and recycling businesses. Prior to Estre, he co-founded and served as Managing Partner of Greentech Capital, a venture capital firm in the clean tech and renewable energy sectors. Mr. Alvim has also served as the CEO of Inova International, a Darby Private Equity investment in the Internet sector and as Executive Vice President of Embratel, one of Brazil’s largest telecom operators. Mr. Alvim started his career as a consultant at Accenture.
Mr. Alvim currently serves on the board of ENC Brasil, Luminae and Tecverde.
Mr. Alvim received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He has also completed the CEAG course at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV-EAESP).
Paula Torre is an Office Manager at GEF Capital Partners. She is based in São Paulo.
Prior to joining GEF Capital Partners, Ms. Torre worked at Global Environment Fund, where she served in a similar role.
Prior to joining Global Environment Fund, Ms. Torre was part of an administrative team at Rioforte Investimentos, a non-financial holding of Espírito Santo Group, a Portuguese company with investments in throughout the world.
Ms. Torre received a B.A. in Business Administration from Universidade Ibero Americana in São Paulo and has a postgraduate degree in Business Management from FAAP – Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo.
Ricardo Cifu is an Analyst at GEF Capital Partners. He is based in São Paulo, where he is responsible for sourcing and structuring investments in Latin America.
Prior to joining GEF Capital Partners, Mr. Cifu worked at Global Environment Fund, which he joined in 2016. While there, he was responsible for assisting in the oversight of Tecverde, AGV and ENC Brasil.
Mr. Cifu received a B.A. in Business Administration, with honors, from Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV-EAESP), majoring in Corporate Finance.
David Hong is an Associate at GEF Capital Partners. He is based in Washington, D.C., and joined GEF Capital Partners in 2019. Mr. Hong is responsible for sourcing, and structuring investments in North America.
Prior to joining GEF Capital, Mr. Hong was part of the finance team at EIG Global Energy Partners (“EIG”), one of the leading providers of institutional capital to the global energy industry. At EIG, he oversaw the operations of some of EIG’s flagship funds as well as a European clean energy fund with $4bn+ assets under management. Prior to EIG, he worked as a fund accountant at ACON Investments and as a tax associate at KPMG, where he provided tax services for a private equity client with $1bn+ assets under management.
Mr. Hong received a BBA and Master’s in Accounting from the College of William and Mary as well as an MBA from Georgetown University.
Kshitij Sharma is an Associate at South Asia Advisors, a sub-advisor to GEF Capital Partners. He is based in Mumbai, India, and joined South Asia Advisors in 2018. Mr. Sharma is responsible for sourcing, executing, and assisting in the investment program in South Asia.
Prior to joining South Asia Advisors, Mr. Sharma was an Associate in the Investment Banking team at Kotak Mahindra Bank, where he worked on M&A, Fundraise transactions in the Technology space. Previously, Mr. Sharma worked with Honda Cars, India in their Parts Quality division.
Mr. Sharma holds an MBA degree from IIM Calcutta. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Production and Industrial Engineering from NIT Bhopal. He has also cleared two levels of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program offered by the CFA Institute, USA.
Krishnan Ganesan is a Senior Vice President at South Asia Advisors, a sub-advisor to GEF Capital Partners. He is based in Mumbai, India, and joined South Asia Advisors in 2019. Mr. Ganesan is responsible for sourcing, executing, and managing investments in South Asia. Additionally, he assists in various financial and administrative roles associated with the South Asia investment program.
Prior to joining South Asia Advisors, Mr. Ganesan was Director at Florintree Capital, an India focused alternate asset manager where he handled private equity investments across sectors and was also responsible for the finance function at the firm. Prior thereto, Mr. Ganesan was Vice President in the India investment team of Wayzata Investment Partners, a US headquartered PE fund and was earlier part of the private equity team at ICICI Venture, amongst India’s leading domestic PE funds. During his experience of around 13 years with these funds, Mr. Ganesan has full lifecycle investment experience and was involved in deals across several sectors covering growth equity, buyout and special situation investments. He has been a board member / observer on the boards and has been actively involved across several initiatives in the portfolio companies. Prior thereto, he has strategic consulting experience with Stern Stewart & Co and was part of the audit & assurance team at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Krishnan holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, where he was awarded the Gold Medal for graduating at the top of his class. He is a national rank holding Chartered Accountant and also a Company Secretary.
Estevan Taguchi is a Principal at GEF Capital Partners. He is based in São Paulo, and joined GEF Capital Partners in 2019. Mr. Taguchi is responsible for sourcing, structuring and managing investments in Latin America.
Prior to joining GEF Capital Partners, Mr. Taguchi was a partner responsible for sourcing and managing portfolio investments at Angra Partners. While at Angra, he led several M&A transactions and served on the board of directors of several of the firm’s portfolio companies, including Cattalini Terminais, LATTE and CBPB. Prior to joining Angra, Mr. Taguchi worked at Monsanto as product manager, at Value Partners as a management consultant and at Bank of America as a member of the Investment Banking team.
Mr. Taguchi currently serves on the board of directors of ENC Brasil.
Mr. Taguchi received a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Universidade de São Paulo (POLI-USP) and completed the Program for Leadership Development at Harvard Business School.
Alipt Sharma is a Principal at South Asia Advisors, a sub-advisor to GEF Capital Partners. He is based in Mumbai, India, and joined South Asia Advisors upon the inception of GEF Capital Partners in 2018. Mr. Sharma is responsible for sourcing, structuring and managing investments in South Asia.
Before joining South Asia Advisors, Mr. Sharma worked at Global Environment Fund, which he joined in 2010. While there, Mr. Sharma was responsible for assisting in the oversight of a number of portfolio company investments, including Rishabh Instruments, Concord Enviro and Kalkitech.
Prior to joining Global Environment Fund, Mr. Sharma was a member of the investment team at AMP Capital Investors (AMP) in India, where he was responsible for identifying, analyzing, and managing Indian infrastructure opportunities. Prior to joining AMP, Mr. Sharma was an Associate Vice President with Ambit Corporate Finance, a leading Indian investment bank, where he focused on acquisitions and private equity transactions while assisting in the expansion of its capital markets practice. Mr. Sharma also spent seven years with Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young, leading teams on consulting assignments for companies in the power and telecommunications sectors.
Mr. Sharma received a B.A. in Economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University, and an MBA from the Indian School of Business. He is also a Chartered Accountant. He is proficient in English and Hindi.
Aditya Arora is a Principal at South Asia Advisors, a sub-advisor to GEF Capital Partners. He is based in Mumbai, India, and joined South Asia Advisors upon the inception of GEF Capital Partners in 2018. Mr. Arora is responsible for sourcing, executing, and managing investments in South Asia.
Before joining South Asia Advisors, Mr. Arora worked at Global Environment Fund, which he joined in 2015. While there, he dedicated his time to a number of portfolio company investments, including Concord Enviro, Shakti Pumps and Kalkitech.
Prior to joining Global Environment Fund, Mr. Arora was an Investment Manager with Navis Capital, a South/Southeast Asia-focused private and public equity firm with $5.0 billion in assets under management. At Navis, Mr. Arora was responsible for sourcing, structuring, managing, and exiting investments. Prior to Navis, Mr. Arora was a member of the investment banking team of JM Financial, one of India’s leading investment banks, executing transactions in the consumer, healthcare and infrastructure sectors.
Mr. Arora received his Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Calcutta and an MBA from Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He is also a Chartered Accountant and is proficient in English, Hindi and Bengali.
Anibal Wadih is a Founding Partner of GEF Capital Partners and co-head of the Latin America investment practice. He is based in São Paulo, Brazil, where he focuses on middle-market growth equity opportunities in South America.
Mr. Wadih joined Global Environment Fund in 2014 as a Managing Director. While at Global Environment Fund, Mr. Wadih led an investment in AGV.
Prior to joining Global Environment Fund, Mr. Wadih worked at Canepa Management, where he was responsible for direct investments and business development throughout Latin America. Before joining Canepa Management, Mr. Wadih was a Managing Director with Macquarie Capital, where he led a private capital merchant banking team investing in Latin America with a focus on the infrastructure and agribusiness sectors. While at Macquarie, he participated in a wide range of private equity transactions as well as the development of private equity and mezzanine fund platforms for the region. Prior to joining Macquarie, Mr. Wadih served as a senior member of the M&A group with Deutsche Bank in Latin America, focusing on financial sponsors.
Mr. Wadih currently serves on the board of directors of AGV, Tecverde and Unicoba, and also serves on the board of directors of Neogás do Brasil, a Global Environment Fund portfolio company.
Mr. Wadih received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) from Universidad Simón Bolívar (Venezuela), a Master’s in Finance from IESA (Venezuela), and an MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University.
Daniel Prawda is a Founding Partner of GEF Capital Partners and co-head of the U.S. investment practice. He is based in Washington, D.C. where he focuses on lower middle-market growth equity opportunities in North America.
Mr. Prawda joined Global Environment Fund as a Managing Director in 2016 before founding GEF Capital Partners. While at Global Environment Fund, Mr. Prawda led an investment in Gro-Well Brands.
Prior to joining Global Environment Fund, Mr. Prawda served as an investment professional with ACON Investments, where he spent 14 years sourcing and executing private equity investments in the United States and Latin America. Transactions included Fairway Outdoor and Magic Media in the US media/advertising space, SAE Towers and idX Corporation in the global manufacturing space, ProEnergy Services and APR Energy in the global power services sector and Grupo Sala, one of the leading waste management companies in Colombia. Prior to joining ACON Investments, Mr. Prawda worked with the Latin America Corporate Finance Group at JP Morgan Chase, where he was responsible for various corporate debt offerings in Mexico and Brazil.
Mr. Prawda currently serves on the board of directors of Gro-Well Brands, Inc. and Bluesource, LLC.
Mr. Prawda received a B.A. in Economics and International Relations from Tufts University.
Raj Pai is a Founding Partner of GEF Capital Partners and co-head of the South Asia investment practice. He is based in Mumbai, India where he focuses on middle market growth equity opportunities in South Asia.
Mr. Pai joined Global Environment Fund as a Managing Director in 2008 before founding GEF Capital Partners in 2018. While at Global Environment Fund, Mr. Pai worked across multiple portfolios and was involved in the establishment of the South Asia investment program. In addition to overseeing guidance and operations of the South Asia program, including as ESG coordinator, Mr. Pai served as the nominee representative for several portfolio companies, including IEX (exited via IPO in 2017), iClean (sold to Takasago Thermal, Tokyo) and others. He participated in the exit of Reva Electric Car to Mahindra Electric.
Mr. Pai has over 23 years of professional experience spanning entrepreneurial, operational and venture investing activities in India and in the US. Prior to joining Global Environment Fund, Mr. Pai was a Managing Director at CID Capital, a 30-year old growth equity investment firm investing growth and expansion stage capital in the US. During this period, Mr. Pai oversaw and/or worked on a number of the firm’s investments, leading efforts in technology, life sciences and clean technology. Prior to CID, Mr. Pai worked in consulting and in operational capacities for various Fortune 1000 technology companies globally, including American Management Systems (AMS), British Telecom and AT&T.
Mr. Pai currently serves on the board of directors of ESDS, Inc. and is also the nominee representative for Global Environment Fund for Concord Enviro and Rishabh Instruments.
Mr. Pai received a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Bombay, a Master of Computer Science from Arizona State University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He is a dual US–India citizen and speaks three native Indian languages as well as English.
Sridhar Narayan is a Founding Partner of GEF Capital Partners and co-head of the South Asia investment practice. He is based in Mumbai, India where he focuses on middle market growth equity opportunities in South Asia.
Mr. Narayan joined Global Environment Fund as a Managing Director in 2012 before founding GEF Capital Partners in 2018. While at Global Environment Fund, Mr. Narayan was involved in investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency related businesses. He was also responsible for providing overall guidance to the South Asia investment program of Global Environment Fund. He served on the Board of ReNew Power Limited and Shakti Pumps Limited and was actively engaged in managing and exiting an investment in Greenko.
Mr. Narayan has over 23 years of experience investing in Indian public and private markets. Prior to joining Global Environment Fund, Mr. Narayan worked for JRE Partners in Mumbai, where he led minority, growth capital investments in a variety of rapidly advancing sectors within India. Prior to JRE Partners, he served as Vice President of Direct Investments (India) for American International Group (AIG). While there, he invested both the proprietary capital of AIG and third party private equity funds managed by AIG. He began his career with Zurich Asset Management India/ITC Threadneedle AMC India as the Head of Fixed Income, responsible for the portfolio management, trading, fixed income research, and the monthly communications to investors.
Mr. Narayan currently serves on the board of directors of Shakti Pumps Limited, a portfolio company of Global Environment Fund.
Mr. Narayan holds a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology BHU (IIT-BHU) and a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.
Stuart Barkoff is a Founding Partner of GEF Capital Partners and co-head of the U.S. investment practice. He is based in Washington, D.C. where he focuses on lower middle-market growth equity opportunities in North America.
Mr. Barkoff joined Global Environment Fund as a Managing Director in 2008 before founding GEF Capital Partners in 2018. While at Global Environment Fund, Mr. Barkoff assumed increasing duties and responsibilities, including serving as the General Counsel of Global Environment Fund beginning in 2011 and serving as Chief Operating Officer beginning in 2017. During this period, Mr. Barkoff oversaw a number of the firm’s investments, including most recently the sale of Aurora Flight Sciences to Boeing.
Prior to joining Global Environment Fund, Mr. Barkoff was an attorney with Arnold & Porter LLP, an international law firm based in Washington, D.C., where he worked principally with private equity and venture capital funds, and their portfolio companies, on a wide variety of acquisitions and investments. At Arnold & Porter, Mr. Barkoff advised Global Environment Fund as legal counsel on many of its U.S. investments.
Mr. Barkoff currently serves on the board of directors of Gro-Well Brands, Inc. and Bluesource, LLC. He also serves as the Chief Compliance Officer for GEF Capital Partners.
Mr. Barkoff received an A.B. in English from Vassar College as well as a JD and an MBA from Emory University.
Curitiba, Brazil
Tecverde is an innovative homebuilder located in Curitiba, Brazil that utilizes a construction system developed specifically for the Brazilian market. This unique system allows for approximately two-thirds of a home to be fabricated in an automated factory and completed with the installation of wall panels during final assembly at the home site. Tecverde’s wood-frame system delivers increased efficiency to the home construction industry by significantly reducing construction time, materials, carbon emissions and cost.
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Tag: Book of James
Sufficiency of the Scriptures (Part #2b)
Part 2b on my series on the sufficiency of the Scripture as the sole, infallible authority for Christian faith and life. Part #1 was an introduction to set the stage. Part #2a was the first part of what different books of the New Testament have to say on the matter.
Paul grounded the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the authority of the OT Scriptures. He tied the Gospel to that which God “promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures,” (Rom 1:2). The Book of Romans is literally saturated with references to OT Scriptures to make theological points,[1] far more so than a brief biblical theology here can hope to demonstrate. Once again, Paul does not base his arguments on philosophy or tradition – he bases them on Scripture.
It is not the hearers of the law who are justified, but the doers (Rom 2:12-29). None are righteous (Rom 3:9-18); “there is no fear of God before their eyes,” (Rom 3:18). Knowledge of the OT law brings about conviction and knowledge of sin (Rom 3:19-20; 4:15; 7:7-25). The Law and Prophets bore witness to Christ (Rom 3:21-22). Abraham was justified by faith (Rom 4). We are dead in Adam but alive in Christ (Rom 5:12-21). God’s sovereignty in election is grounded in His corporate election of Israel and the individual, single election of individuals (Rom 9).
Israel refuses to respond to the present provision of salvation through Jesus Christ (Rom 10), and Paul bolstered his argument by citing examples of Israel’s previous rebellion (Rom 10:18-21). Gentiles have been grafted into the promises given to Abraham (Rom 11), “so as to make Israel jealous,” (Rom 11:11). Her rejection is not final and her restoration is assured. Paul’s appeal for Christians to present themselves as living sacrifices (Rom 12:1) is rooted in the OT concept of a sacrifice to God. Christ came to the Jews in the form of a servant “in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs,” (Rom 15:8-9).
Paul presents the new doctrine he received from Christ (Gal 1:12) as explicitly progressive revelation. This gospel and preaching of Jesus Christ, in complete accord with all which has come before it, is a “revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages, but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God,” (Rom 16:25-26).
Peter writes his epistle to Jewish Christians (1 Pet 1:1 – “elect exiles of the Dispersion”), demonstrating a clear connection in his mind between the OT and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He stated that Christ fulfilled the OT prophesies.[2]
The prophets prophesized about the grace of God in salvation in Jesus Christ (1 Pet 1:10). These OT prophets sought to discern when the prophesy of Christ’s sufferings and subsequent glories would come to pass (1 Pet 1:11). It was revealed to these great men, presumably through the Spirit, that these prophesies were intended for a future time. Peter identified that time period as “now,” or the dispensation of grace in the church age.[3] The OT prophesies take on clearer, concrete and unmistakable meaning in light of the progressive revelation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (1 Pet 1:12).
It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look (1 Pet 1:12).
The context of 1 Pet 1 is that his readers could rejoice in their sufferings even though they could not see exactly how or when their present trials would end. Just as the OT prophets had limited understanding of their own prophesies, they trusted God to sovereignty work out all things according to good (Rom 8:28). God’s answer to Habakkuk’s plea for understanding of God’s ways was to live by faith (Hab 2:4). In the midst of suffering (1 Pet 1:6), it is very significant that Peter points his readers to Scriptures as the source of assurance. Several conclusions can be drawn:
God has spoken propositionally to His people in a concrete fashion.
Peter points to the Scriptures as the sole source of God’s revelation to men. He bases his subsequent call to be holy in a decidedly unholy world (1 Pet 1:13 – “therefore”) on the assurance of salvation and glorification in Christ, which was prophesied of in the OT and disclosed more completely by Peter and the other apostles.
Peter quotes the OT to make theological points, underscoring the authority of the OT.[4] He quoted from Isaiah 40:6, 8 (1 Pet 1:24-25) and stated “the word of the Lord remains forever.” He concluded by noting “and this word is the good news that was preached to you,” (1 Pet 1:25b). Peter describes the role of the Christian in terms of Israel’s covenant responsibility similar to Ex 19:5-6 (1 Pet 2:9).
James also writes his epistle to Jewish Christians (Jas 1:1). His theology is steeped in the OT Scriptures. Without his unwavering reliance upon them as an infallible revelation from God, James could not have written his epistle. His theology of God’s character is one of holiness (Jas 1:13), and perfectly in tune with the OT description of His character (Lev 11:45, 19:2; Ps 99:9).
Pure religion, or piety,[5] consists of proper conduct and character. James’ example of proper religious conduct is to “visit orphans and widows in their afflictions,” (Jas 1:27), an admonition which is soaked in the context of the OT law regarding social justice (Ex 22:22; Deut 14:29). His exhortation to proper character is to “keep oneself unstained from the world,” (Jas 1:27), which likewise has its roots in the OT command for Israelites to remain separate and uncontaminated by the pagans round about them (Lev 18:24-19:2).
James’ overarching point is to contrast mere ritualistic observances with actual reverence for God; to illustrate what “religion that is pure and undefiled before God” (Jas 1:27) really is. It is merely a stepping stone from here to a contrast between mere outward circumcision and a true circumcision of the heart (Deut 10:12-16).
James quoted repeatedly from Scripture to condemn the sin of partiality (Jas 2:8, 11). James used the example of both Abraham and Rahab to make the point that faith without works is dead (Jas 2:14-26). He quoted Proverbs 3:34 to emphasize the need for humility and separation from worldliness (Jas 4:1-6). He pointed to the example of Job and exhorts his readers to have patience in the midst of suffering and trials (Jas 5:10-11). James cited the fervent prayers of Elijah as he exhorted his readers to pray diligently for one another (Jas 5:16-18).
Like his brother James, Jude’s theology simply would not exist without the OT Scriptures. Jude wrote of “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints,” (v. 3). This faith Jude spoke of was the body of truth taught by the apostles.[6] This underscores the progressive nature of God’s revelation, and is perfectly harmonious with Peter’s (1 Pet 1:10-12), Paul’s (Eph 3:1-13) and the writer to the Hebrew’s (Heb 1:1) comments in their own epistles on this point.
Jude noted the presence of false teachers who “long ago were designated for this condemnation” (v. 4). This refers to previously written prophesies regarding the doom of apostates (e.g. Isa 8:19-22; Jer 5:13-14).[7]
Jude notes God’s righteous pattern of punishing those who apostatize from the true faith, such unbelieving Israelites, angels and the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities (v. 5-7). These “serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire,” (v. 7). Jude then moves to his present day and condemns contemporary false teachers of these very sins! (v. 8). He mentions the archangel Michael, compares the false teacher’s way to that of Cain and Balaam, and compares their eventual end to that of Korah (v. 11). Jude also accurately puts Enoch as the “seventh from Adam,” (v. 14).[8]
The next post will be a discussion of several critical passages that focus on the sufficiency and authority of the Scriptures for the Christian life.
[1] Rom (3:4, 10-18); (4:7-8, 17); (8:36); (9:25-29, 33); (10:5, 18-21); (11:8-10); (12:19); (13:8-9); (14:11); (15:3, 9-12); (16:21).
[2] 1 Peter (1:10-12); (2:6-8).
[3] See also 1 Pet 1:20 – “He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you.”
[4] 1 Peter (1:16, 24-25); (2:9); (3:5-6, 10-12); (4:18).
[5] William D. Mounce, Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan 2006), 1170. Θρησκεια, or “religion,” may better be termed “piety.”
[6] Edward C. Pentecost, “Jude,” in The Bible Knowledge Commentary, ed. John Walvoord and Roy Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor, 1983), 919.
[7] Edwin Blum, Jude, vol. 12, The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, ed. Frank Gaebelein (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1981), 389.
[8] See 1 Chr 1:1-3
By Tyler Robbinsin Apologetics, Scripture July 12, 2013 July 12, 2013 1,434 WordsLeave a comment
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Support GoI Monitor
Immune to accountability II
Manu Moudgil
CIC's decisions on serious issues including mercy petitions, phone tapping and bank details
Second part of the series done for The Hoot analyses CIC's decisions on serious issues including mercy petitions, phone tapping and bank details: Since the inception of the RTI Act in 2005, the role of Central Information Commission (CIC) has been exemplary. Barring some instances, the commission has been appreciated for ensuring that public authorities are accountable to the people. Along the way, it has dealt successfully with various serious issues like disclosure of information related to mercy petitions, phone tapping and bank details to name a few. However, since the commission has to function within the existing framework, it also faced dead ends related to certain policy matters, declassification of old documents being one of them.
Transparency sans declassification
While the RTI Act has ensured transparency in many areas of decision making, the Indian government and defence forces are still refusing to part with certain information related to past events even if the disclosure is in national interest. Law stipulates that all files older than 25 years should be declassified, but several ministries are not downgrading the status of such files to 'declassified'. Absence of a well-framed declassification policy is an impediment that has cropped up time and again when documents related to defence, intelligence or external affairs are sought.
One of these cases includes that of an RTI request filed by veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar with the Union Ministry of External Affairs seeking information on negotiating positions of India and Pakistan during 1963 talks. The said eight files of documents contained file notings, communications between various officials and dignitaries of both the countries over six rounds of talks, outcome of the dialogue between the two ministers during each round of talks, and position and viewpoint of each of the nations upon arriving at conclusions after each round of talks, with reference also to representatives of the British and US governments. The information was denied by the MEA claiming that these were classified documents. However, Nayar pointed out that MEA's Pakistani counterpart was willing to share the information on the same subject with the Pakistani nationals but not with Indians because of the absence of any such agreement between the two countries. On receiving the appeal against this decision, the CIC advised the MEA to revisit the declassification policy with respect to information, existing in the form of old documents, particularly those comprised of information relating to any occurrence, event or matter which has taken place, occurred or happened 20 years before the date of request.
The CIC advised the MEA to revisit the declassification policy with respect to information relating to any occurrence, event or matter which has taken place 20 years ago
In another case filed by journalist Sandeep Unnithan, seeking report and debrief of the survivors of INS Khukri which sank during 1971 Indo-Pak war, the CIC observed that armed forces of free, democratic nations should have a proper disclosure of vital information policy especially in respect of events connected with engagement of our armed forces with the forces of other countries in theatres of war. It also recommended that “the Indian Navy and, in fact the Indian Armed Forces build up their storehouse of information, as mandated u/s 4(1) of the RTI Act, 2005 for disclosure at the appropriate time for the benefit of the students of India’s defence and to enhance the people’s trust in the armed forces’ undoubted capacity to ensure national security.”
Anit Mukherjee, a research fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, also faced the hindrance when seeking information on defence ministry's organisational structure from 1940s to 1980s. The army denied declassification claiming the documents were still sensitive to national security. Even the appellant's request to excise details found to be sensitive and provide the rest of the information was denied. However, the CIC dismissed the appeal saying “I can't substitute my own judgment with that of the Army top brass”.
Details related to various inquiry commissions set up to probe into the mystery surrounding death of Netaji Subhash Chander Bose are other documents awaiting declassification. In 2006, RTI application seeking this information was stonewalled with excuses that the disclosure may affect national security, sovereignty and integrity. However, the Ministry of Home Affairs was unable to justify its stand before the CIC which asked it to re-examine the case and not to depend on facile hypothesis since the matter was of national importance and also related to larger public interest. The ministry was also asked to send these records to the National Archives as required under the Public Records Act, 1993. A year and a half later, the process of transferring the record was still in progress and the applicant again complained to the CIC which ordered that the declassification process could not go on indefinitely.
Details related to the mystery surrounding death of Netaji Subhash Chander Bose are still awaiting declassification. The CIC asked the Ministry of Home Affairs to send these records to the National Archives after an RTI application was filed.
Phone tapping and RTI
From deals between mafia dons and Bollywood stars to the most recent Radiatapes, eavesdropping through phone lines has been an important tool for intelligence gathering. Those under surveillance have always objected to such intrusion into their private lives. No wonder then that they have also used RTI Act to know the justification for such a measure. Under Section 5(2) of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, the messages can be intercepted “in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of an offence.” This is in consonance with exemptions under Section 8(1) (a) of the RTI Act which is why the RTI requests for information on the same have been flatly refused.
On June 6, 2006, S P Singh, a resident of Noida, sought a copy of the report on basis of which the orders to intercept his telephone were given by the Ministry of Home Affairs. The request was rejected under Sec 8(1)(a) and while hearing this case, the CIC also observed that “appeals such as this have been reaching the Commission in increasingly larger numbers. This is a category of appeals by Government employees facing investigations, enquiries and criminal proceedings for their acts of omission and commission. The reasons for the affinity of this category of employees for the Right to Information Act are not difficult to speculate.”
However, CIC has taken variant stands depending upon details of the case. For instance, one Dharambir Khattar filed an appeal for information on the proposal sent by the CBI to Ministry of Home Affairs seeking permission to tap his phone. On perusal of the documents the CIC found that the information contained in the proposal was in the nature of generic statements and without any specific and concrete allegations against the accused which would invite any of the exemptions and hence allowed the appeal. In another case involving Khattar, the CIC asked the Ministry of Home Affairs to disclose information related to review committee's meeting which decided on tapping of his phone. The CIC observed that the appellant had already come into possession of almost all the information connected with his phone-tapping case through a court case so a small part of the residual information can also be supplied after excising any part offensive to Sec 8(1).
Mercy petitions and RTI
The issue of mercy petitions has been generating a lot of heat for a while. As many as five applicants have approached the CIC after their requests for information on mercy petition of 2001 Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru were refused. However, it was the mercy petitions related to three convicts in Rajiv Gandhi's assassination case that laid the ground for definition of information which can be provided to the applicants. In an application made to the President's Secretariat, Mayilsamy K sought information on complete correspondence relating to mercy petitions of three convicts. The application, which was transferred to the Ministry of Home Affairs, was denied by the PIO claiming it could affect the security interests of the country, endanger physical safety of officials involved in the process and impede investigations.
However, after examining the documents, the CIC ruled that except the advice rendered by the Minister to the President of India which is protected from enquiry in any court under Section 74(2) of the Constitution of India, all other communication should be supplied after excising names of public officers involved in the process to ensure their physical safety.
Bank details in open
The immunity granted under economic interest of the state has been another widely used provision under Sec 8(1)(a). Of the 24 total appeals received by CIC challenging this exemption only one was dismissed, 45 per cent were allowed, five remitted to appellate authority for a relook and in four cases partial information was given. In three cases, the information had already been given before the hearing took place. Most of the time, CIC has cited public interest under Section 8(2) of the RTI Act as the reason for disclosure of information which lies with banks and financial organisations in a fiduciary capacity. The provision reads: “ Notwithstanding anything in the Official Secrets Act, 1923 nor any of the exemptions permissible in accordance with sub-section 8(1), a public authority may allow access to information, if public interest in disclosure outweighs the harm to the protected interests”.
In a case where NABARD refused to disclose information related to non-performing assets of the Mahahrashtra State Co-operative Bank Ltd., the CIC observed that “disclosure of the inspection reports and related correspondence of a co-operative bank such as MSCB must be shared with the public in a proactive manner. This kind of disclosure would certainly serve public interest, as mandated under Section 8(2) of the RTI Act.” However, the Delhi High court later stayed the order.
In another application filed by one Abhishek Chowdhury, he sought details from SEBI regarding annual net investments made by each foreign institutional investor in India. Besides the exemption under economic interests of the State, the information was also denied for being third party. However, the CIC asked the appellate authority to again go through the issue since there is larger public interest involved.
Information with Parliament, Cabinet
An allowance given to common citizens through the RTI Act is that any information given to the Parliament can't be denied under any exemption provisions. However, this handout also come with caveats which became clear with an application filed with the Lok Sabha Secretariat seeking copies of probe conducted by Parliamentary Committee on the Purulia arms drop case and stand taken by various concerned Ministries on the issue. The information was denied citing security reasons with the report being confidential and sensitive in nature. The CPIO contended that the information requested had not been placed in table of the House and hence can't be provided to the applicant. Also the information was disclosable only to the Special Select Committee constituted for the purpose and appointed by the House Speaker. CIC ruled that the information in this case is the information available to a Select Committee of the Parliament and its proceedings cannot be disclosed even in the House which is why the information should be denied to the applicant.
CIC ruled that the information available to a Select Committee of the Parliament whose proceedings cannot be disclosed even in the House should be denied to the applicant.
The CIC has also dealt with the issue of Cabinet papers in detail through separate orders. Cabinet papers are generally exempt from disclosure under Section 8(1)(i) of the RTI Act but the Act does not define what “Cabinet papers” are. Earlier, in 2008, the CIC asked the environment ministry to reveal all documents related to amendments in the Environment Impact Assessment notification that could end up before the Cabinet for finalisation. The appellant had stated that the process of finalising the draft was a one-way process in which the stakeholders were not kept informed at different stages of evolution of the draft whereas the ministry contended that the draft was prepared on the basis of inter-ministerial consultations and then put in public domain for 60 days soliciting comments and then finalised.
The CIC asked the ministry to disclose the papers even before the government finalises the draft. It also urged the ministry to consider making the whole notification amendment process more participatory by sharing all evolving drafts before they are finalised. In another case heard in 2010, the CIC ruled that exemption clauses of the RTI Act related to Cabinet documents will apply only when proposals formulated are "actually" taken up for consideration by the Cabinet. The information which went into preparation of a cabinet note "but is not a part of it" will qualify for disclosure.
In yet another case seeking information on appointment of former CVC P J Thomas, the CIC ruled that the government cannot deny information on framing of rules and its relaxation on the ground that these are Cabinet papers.
Read the first part of this series- Immune to accountability I
Teenager ensures fair price
GOI Monitor Desk
At first glance Bhadresh Wamja looks like any other college-going kid wearing bright T- shirts and zooming around on a bike. It's tough to believe that efforts by this 19-year-old forced all fair price shops in Gujarat come under the ambit of the RTI Act
Read more about Teenager ensures fair price
'Anonymity is the basic need of RTI users'
RTI users are increasingly being targeted for exposing wrongdoings in public offices. Through its website, RTI Anonymous group offers a service of filing RTI applications
Read more about 'Anonymity is the basic need of RTI users'
Five years of the sunshine Act
The Right to information movement we are currently witness to owes its existence to farmers and labourers in small villages of Rajasthan who in the late 90s demanded that official records regarding government funds be made public and the corrupt brought to book. Continued pressure by non-government groups and activists for transparency in governance led to enactment of the RTI Act in 2005. GOI Monitor accessed and assessed the data...
Read more about Five years of the sunshine Act
Getting informed and surviving the skirmish
In 2010, 28 attacks on RTI activists were reported from across the country which included 10 murders. And while all this goes on, authorities perform lip service promising strong action against the guilty and better security to whistle blowers. Needless to say the going is getting tougher for those fighting to make official information public.
The reactionary barrage
Many a times, even prior knowledge of a...
Read more about Getting informed and surviving the skirmish
How we fail our RTI heroes
Babu Ram Chauhan always knew what was coming but he could not afford drop what he was doing. Belonging to Ramgarh village located near to India’s border with Pakistan in west Rajasthan, Chauhan exposed encroachment on more than 17,000 hectares prime irrigated land in the area. On July 11, he was kidnapped while returning home after teaching at a school 30 km away from his village. The kidnappers beat him up badly, shaved his head and forced...
Read more about How we fail our RTI heroes
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OnePlus 6 to launch on May 17, ticket sales start from April 27
OnePlus 6, the updated flagship smartphone from the Chinese smartphone maker, could be launched on May 17. The smartphone was first reported to arrive on May 16, then some OnePlus owners reported that it will launch on May 21 citing company’s LAB program. However, OnePlus has put out official teaser for the OnePlus 6 launch event on its Chinese website, which suggests it will actually arrive on May 17.
The launch event is set for 10AM local time (or 7.30AM IST) at 751D-Park in China. The listing also shows OnePlus fans in China can buy tickers for the event starting April 27. The leaks so far indicate that OnePlus 6 China launch will be followed by an official launch for the product in India on May 18. This time around, OnePlus is expected to launch an Avengers-themed limited edition variant of the smartphone alongside the standard variant.
OnePlus has been building the hype for its flagship offering for the past few weeks, but the launch date has led to a lot of confusion. This official teaser puts all that confusion to rest, and reveals when the flagship device will actually be unveiled to the world. In the past, OnePlus has held multiple events for the launch of its flagship smartphones and this year should not be any different. Here is what we know so far about the OnePlus 6:
OnePlus 6 is expected to bring a major redesign to the OnePlus family this year with the smartphone dropping the all-metal design in favor of a glass back. The front of the smartphone will also see minor changes with OnePlus 6 adopting a notched display, and sporting a nearly edge-to-edge display panel. Interestingly, the notch won’t be as wide as the one seen on the Apple iPhone X. Moreover, OnePlus will also allow its users to disable the notch within the software.
In terms of specifications, the OnePlus 6 is expected to feature a 6.2-inch AMOLED display supporting a resolution of 2280×1080 pixels, and taller aspect ratio of 19:9. It will be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, the flagship mobile platform from the San Diego-based semiconductor company. OnePlus is expected to offer OnePlus 6 with either 6GB or 8GB of RAM and option for 64GB or 128GB or 256GB of internal storage. This is the first time, OnePlus will bumping up the storage on its smartphones to 256GB.
OnePlus 6, like its predecessor OnePlus 5T, will sport a dual rear camera system and the company is rumored to be working on improvements including new image sensors. With Xiaomi Mi MIX 2S, Huawei P20 and P20 Pro having scored 97, 102 and 109 respectively on DxOMark, we expect OnePlus to arrive on a big score as well. OnePlus 6 is also expected to support some form of dust and water resistance and since it is switching to glass back, there is also a chance of the smartphone getting wireless charging support. There is no clarity on its pricing just yet but leaks originating from China indicate it will be more expensive than previous flagships from the company.
Source by:- bgr
KYC norms: Aadhaar, PAN cards mandatory for opening bank accounts, says RBI
Have Aadhaar, passport? You will have to share details for NPR
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Read The Audacity of Hope Online
Authors: Barack Obama
Tags: #General, #United States, #Essays, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #American, #Political, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Philosophy, #Current Events, #International Relations, #Political Science, #Politics, #Legislators, #U.S. Senate, #African American Studies, #Ethnic Studies, #Cultural Heritage, #United States - Politics and government - 2001-2009, #Politics & Government, #National characteristics, #African American legislators, #United States - Politics and government - Philosophy, #Obama; Barack, #National characteristics; American, #U.S. - Political And Civil Rights Of Blacks, #Ideals (Philosophy), #Obama; Barack - Philosophy
BOOK: The Audacity of Hope
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IT’S BEEN ALMOST ten years since I first ran for political office. I was thirty-five at the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and generally impatient with life. A seat in the Illinois legislature had opened up, and several friends suggested that I run, thinking that my work as a civil rights lawyer, and contacts from my days as a community organizer, would make me a viable candidate. After discussing it with my wife, I entered the race and proceeded to do what every first-time candidate does: I talked to anyone who would listen. I went to block club meetings and church socials, beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I’d get some version of the same two questions.
“Where’d you get that funny name?”
And then: “You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?”
I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier, when I’d first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income neighborhoods. It signaled a cynicism not simply with politics but with the very notion of a public life, a cynicism that—at least in the South Side neighborhoods I sought to represent—had been nourished by a generation of broken promises. In response, I would usually smile and nod and say that I understood the skepticism, but that there was—and always had been—another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the country’s founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done.
It was a pretty convincing speech, I thought. And although I’m not sure that the people who heard me deliver it were similarly impressed, enough of them appreciated my earnestness and youthful swagger that I made it to the Illinois legislature.
SIX YEARS LATER, when I decided to run for the United States Senate, I wasn’t so sure of myself.
By all appearances, my choice of careers seemed to have worked out. After two terms during which I labored in the minority, Democrats had gained control of the state senate, and I had subsequently passed a slew of bills, from reforms of the Illinois death penalty system to an expansion of the state’s health program for kids. I had continued to teach at the University of Chicago Law School, a job I enjoyed, and was frequently invited to speak around town. I had preserved my independence, my good name, and
my marriage, all of which, statistically speaking, had been placed at risk the moment I set foot in the state capital.
But the years had also taken their toll. Some of it was just a function of my getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention, each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws—the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip. In me, one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me. It’s a flaw that is endemic to modern life, I think—endemic, too, in the American character—and one that is nowhere more evident than in the field of politics. Whether politics actually encourages the trait or simply attracts those who possess it is unclear. Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.
In any event, it was as a consequence of that restlessness that I decided to challenge a sitting Democratic incumbent for his congressional seat in the 2000 election cycle. It was an ill-considered race, and I lost badly—the sort of drubbing that awakens you to the fact that life is not obliged to work out as you’d planned. A year and a half later, the scars of that loss sufficiently healed, I had lunch with a media consultant who had been encouraging me for some time to run for statewide office. As it happened, the lunch was scheduled for late September 2001.
“You realize, don’t you, that the political dynamics have changed,” he said as he picked at his salad.
“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing full well what he meant. We both looked down at the newspaper beside him. There, on the front page, was Osama bin Laden.
“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head. “Really bad luck. You can’t change your name, of course. Voters are suspicious of that kind of thing. Maybe if you were at the start of your career, you know, you could use a nickname or something. But now…” His voice trailed off and he shrugged apologetically before signaling the waiter to bring us the check.
I suspected he was right, and that realization ate away at me. For the first time in my career, I began to experience the envy of seeing younger politicians succeed where I had failed, moving into higher offices, getting more things done. The pleasures of politics— the adrenaline of debate, the animal warmth of shaking hands and plunging into a crowd—began to pale against the meaner tasks of the job: the begging for money, the long drives home after the banquet had run two hours longer than scheduled, the bad food and stale air and clipped phone conversations with a wife who had stuck by me so far but was pretty fed up with raising our children alone and was beginning to question my priorities. Even the legislative work, the policy making that had gotten me to run in the first place, began to feel too incremental, too removed from the larger battles—over taxes, security, health care, and jobs—that were being waged on a national stage. I began to harbor doubts about the path I had chosen; I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream,
after years of waiting tables between auditions or scratching out hits in the minor leagues, he realizes that he’s gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.
DENIAL, ANGER, bargaining, despair—I’m not sure I went through all the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at acceptance—of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality. I refocused on my work in the state senate and took satisfaction from the reforms and initiatives that my position afforded. I spent more time at home, and watched my daughters grow, and properly cherished my wife, and thought about my long-term financial obligations. I exercised, and read novels, and came to appreciate how the earth rotated around the sun and the seasons came and went without any particular exertions on my part.
And it was this acceptance, I think, that allowed me to come up with the thoroughly cockeyed idea of running for the United States Senate. An up-or-out strategy was how I described it to my wife, one last shot to test out my ideas before I settled into a calmer, more stable, and better-paying existence. And she—perhaps more out of pity than conviction—agreed to this one last race, though she also suggested that given the orderly life she preferred for our family, I shouldn’t necessarily count on her vote.
I let her take comfort in the long odds against me. The Republican incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald, had spent $19 million of his personal wealth to unseat the previous senator, Carol Moseley Braun. He wasn’t widely popular; in fact he didn’t really seem to enjoy politics all that much. But he still had unlimited money in his family, as well as a genuine integrity that had earned him grudging respect from the voters.
For a time Carol Moseley Braun reappeared, back from an ambassadorship in New Zealand and with thoughts of trying to reclaim her old seat; her possible candidacy put my own plans on hold. When she decided to run for the presidency instead, everyone else started looking at the Senate race. By the time Fitzgerald announced he would not seek reelection, I was staring at six primary opponents, including the sitting state comptroller; a businessman worth hundreds of millions of dollars; Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s former chief of staff; and a black, female health-care professional who the smart money assumed would split the black vote and doom whatever slim chances I’d had in the first place.
I didn’t care. Freed from worry by low expectations, my credibility bolstered by several helpful endorsements, I threw myself into the race with an energy and joy that I’d thought I had lost. I hired four staffers, all of them smart, in their twenties or early thirties, and suitably cheap. We found a small office, printed letterhead, installed phone lines and several computers. Four or five hours a day, I called major Democratic donors and tried to get my calls returned. I held press conferences to which nobody came. We signed up for the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade and were assigned the parade’s very last slot, so my ten volunteers and I found ourselves marching just a few paces ahead of the city’s sanitation trucks, waving to the few stragglers who remained on the route while workers swept up garbage and peeled green shamrock stickers off the lampposts.
Mostly, though, I just traveled, often driving alone, first from ward to ward in Chicago, then from county to county and town to town, eventually up and down the state, past miles and miles of cornfields and beanfields and train tracks and silos. It wasn’t an efficient process. Without the machinery of the state’s Democratic Party organization, without any real mailing list or Internet operation, I had to rely on friends or acquaintances to open their houses to whoever might come, or to arrange for my visit to their church, union hall, bridge group, or Rotary Club. Sometimes, after several hours of driving, I would find just two or three people waiting for me around a kitchen table. I would have to assure the hosts that the turnout was fine and compliment them on the refreshments they’d prepared. Sometimes I would sit through a church service and the pastor would forget to recognize me, or the head of the union local would let me speak to his members just before announcing that the union had decided to endorse someone else.
But whether I was meeting with two people or fifty, whether I was in one of the well- shaded, stately homes of the North Shore, a walk-up apartment on the West Side, or a farmhouse outside Bloomington, whether people were friendly, indifferent, or occasionally hostile, I tried my best to keep my mouth shut and hear what they had to say. I listened to people talk about their jobs, their businesses, the local school; their anger at Bush and their anger at Democrats; their dogs, their back pain, their war service, and the things they remembered from childhood. Some had well-developed theories to explain the loss of manufacturing jobs or the high cost of health care. Some recited what they had heard on Rush Limbaugh or NPR. But most of them were too busy with work or their kids to pay much attention to politics, and they spoke instead of what they saw before them: a plant closed, a promotion, a high heating bill, a parent in a nursing home, a child’s first step.
No blinding insights emerged from these months of conversation. If anything, what struck me was just how modest people’s hopes were, and how much of what they believed seemed to hold constant across race, region, religion, and class. Most of them thought that anybody willing to work should be able to find a job that paid a living wage. They figured that people shouldn’t have to file for bankruptcy because they got sick. They believed that every child should have a genuinely good education—that it shouldn’t just be a bunch of talk—and that those same children should be able to go to college even if their parents weren’t rich. They wanted to be safe, from criminals and from terrorists; they wanted clean air, clean water, and time with their kids. And when they got old, they wanted to be able to retire with some dignity and respect.
That was about it. It wasn’t much. And although they understood that how they did in life depended mostly on their own efforts—although they didn’t expect government to solve all their problems, and certainly didn’t like seeing their tax dollars wasted—they figured that government should help.
I told them that they were right: government couldn’t solve all their problems. But with a slight change in priorities we could make sure every child had a decent shot at life and meet the challenges we faced as a nation. More often than not, folks would nod in agreement and ask how they could get involved. And by the time I was back on the road, with a map on the passenger’s seat, on my way to my next stop, I knew once again just why I’d gone into politics.
I felt like working harder than I’d ever worked in my life.
THIS BOOK GROWS directly out of those conversations on the campaign trail. Not only did my encounters with voters confirm the fundamental decency of the American people, they also reminded me that at the core of the American experience are a set of ideals that continue to stir our collective conscience; a common set of values that bind us together despite our differences; a running thread of hope that makes our improbable experiment in democracy work. These values and ideals find expression not just in the marble slabs of monuments or in the recitation of history books. They remain alive in the hearts and minds of most Americans—and can inspire us to pride, duty, and sacrifice.
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The Marriage Measures Guide of State-Level Statistics. Final Report.
Goesling, Brian.
Wood, Robert G.
Razafindrakoto, Carol.
Henderson, Jamila.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.
In the past decade, policymakers and researchers have become increasingly interested in social programs that promote and support healthy marriages. A growing body of research evidence suggests that marriage has benefits for families and children, including improved economic well-being and mental health, and that children raised in two-parent families perform better in school and have more positive developmental outcomes than children from single-parent families (Amato and Booth 1997; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994; Waite and Gallagher2000; Wood et al. 2007). Inspired in part by these potential benefits of marriage, a wide range of programs have been developed to encourage and support healthy marriages (Dion 2005). Reflecting this growing interest in healthy marriage programs, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has recently sponsored efforts to expand the understanding of the effectiveness of these programs and to support their expansion through funding and technical assistance, as part of the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI). For example, the HMI currently supports three large-scale, multi-state demonstration projects: (1) Building Strong Families, an evaluation of programs to help expectant unwed couples fulfill their aspirations for a healthy marriage and a stable family life; (2) Supporting Healthy Marriage, a project to develop and test healthy marriage programs for low-income married parents; and (3) the Community Healthy Marriage Initiative, an evaluation of community-level interventions to support healthy marriages. In addition, with funding from the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, DHHS has awarded grants to a diverse range of state and local agencies to increase access to healthy marriage programs and raise awareness of the potential benefits of marriage for families and children. As interest in healthy marriage programs continues to grow and new programs are developed, a key issue policymakers and program operators will face is deciding which populations to serve. Healthy marriage programs aim to serve a broad mix of target populations, including expectant unmarried parents, low-income married parents, high school students, engaged couples, single adults, and other groups. The design and content of the programs can vary substantially, depending on which of these populations are served. Policymakers will also need to make choices about whether to focus their programs on specific social or demographic groups, such as residents of certain cities or counties, individuals living in rural or urban areas, or members of certain racial/ethnic groups. The Marriage Measures Guide is designed to assist policymakers and marriage program operators with this decision making process. Drawing on data from several sources, the guide provides policymakers and program operators with a broad range of state-level statistical information they can use to better assess the characteristics and needs of their state populations, identify high-priority target populations, and make informed decisions about the design and implementation of their healthy marriage programs. The guide can also help policymakers decide which healthy marriage programs are best targeted to their statewide populations and which are more appropriate for local or targeted groups. In addition to these uses for the development and implementation of healthy marriage programs, the guide also serves as a general resource for anyone wanting to better understand current marriage patterns in their state. This chapter provides a general introduction to the guide and the best ways to use it. To make the most of the guide, users should read this chapter carefully before turning to the statistical tables. The chapter begins by describing the overall content and layout of the guide. It then describes in greater detail the content of the statistical tables and explains how to correctly interpret each statistic. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of additional resources. A more detailed discussion of the various data sources and methods used to construct the statistical tables appears at the end of the guide in the Technical Appendix. (Author abstract)
The Marriage Measures Guide of State-Level Statistics. Final Report. PDFView Full Resource
Healthy Marriage Curricula/Instruction
Economic Self-Sufficiency/Employment/Workforce Development
Health/Mental Health/Behavioral Health
Program Design, Implementation & Evaluation
Consequences of parental burnout: Its specific effect on child neglect and violence
The Ripple Effect: The Impact of the Opioid Epidemic on Children and Families.
Access to Home Visiting Can Save Families Affected by Opioid Crisis
Illicit Substance Use and Child Support: An Exploratory Study
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Sir Jock Delves Broughton
Sir Henry ‘Jock’ Delves Broughton (1883-1942) has the misfortune to be remembered as the prime suspect in the infamous, unsolved murder of Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll in Kenya in 1941. The Happy Valley Murder sent shockwaves through an Empire at war and has continued to fascinate following a best-selling 1982 book by James Fox entitled White Mischief and the subsequent 1988 film starring Charles Dance as Erroll, Greta Scaachi as Diana and Joss Ackland as Sir Jock Delves Broughton.
Delves Broughton was born at Doddington Hall in Cheshire and inherited the baronetcy in 1914 a year after his first marriage to Vera Griffith-Boscawen. As Captain of the 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards, Sir Jock did not see active service during World War I due to ill-health. A gambler and man of the turf who was part of the consortium that owned Ensbury Park race course in Dorset, Sir Jock sustained repeated losses and was forced to sell-off the lion’s share of the family estates to settle bad debts.
In 1939 Sir Jock was suspected of insurance fraud having reported the theft of Lady Vera’s pearls and several important paintings from Doddington Hall though he was never formally charged. Within months of the incident Sir Jock, who was fifty-six, divorced Lady Vera and married twenty-six-year-old platinum blonde beauty Diana Caldwell. White Mischief intimates that the newlyweds had an arrangement whereby if Diana fell in love with another man she would be released with a stipend paid by Sir Jock. The couple emigrated to Kenya in 1940 on the eve of World War Two and fell-in with the louche, aristocratic ex-pat community known as the Happy Valley Set.
The Earl of Erroll, whose charms were magnified because he was wearing the khaki uniform as Assistant Military Secretary of Kenya, was Nairobi’s most infamous swordsman. The Earl had bedded countless willing wives and daughters in the colony following the death of his first wife Lady Molly from an overdose of heroin and alcohol. By 1940 he was living alone in his villa the Djin Palace having divorced second wife Lady Idina. The scandalous Lady Idina was the ring master of the Happy Valley Set for whom sex, opiates and liquor dulled the boredom of colonial life.
Diana Delves-Broughton succumbed to the Earl’s charms on sight and, unusually for the amorous Erroll, he resolved to make her his third countess. Sir Jock gave his blessing to the union over dinner at the Muthaiga Club on the night before the Earl of Erroll’s murder. He and fellow guest June Carberry left the Earl and Diana at the Muthaiga Club on the condition that Erroll brought Diana home before 3am. This he did at 2.30am but the next morning was found on the road from Sir Jock’s estates in his car with a bullet to the temple miles from the nearest dwelling.
June Carberry’s daughter Juanita visited Sir Jock’s compound on the morning the body had been discovered. She told the police that she’d witnessed an inconsolable Diana arguing with her husband and a bonfire in the grounds with what looked like men’s clothing and a new pair of plimsoll shoes being consigned to the flames. She would later write in her memoir that Sir Jock had confessed to her that he had shot the Earl.
Though there was no shortage of suspects for the murder of the Earl of Erroll – jealous husbands, jilted former flames such as Alice de Janzé and Diana Delves-Broughton – it was Sir Jock who was arrested and tried. Giving evidence, Sir Jock told the court that a few nights before the Earl’s death a burglar had stolen a silver cigarette case, some money and two of his pistols from his home. The fundamental question was how the murderer had made his escape with the absence of tyre tracks anywhere near the Earl’s abandoned car. Also there were mysterious scuff marks on the back seat of the Earl’s car that appeared to have been made by white shoes.
Sir Jock was acquitted there being insufficient evidence for a conviction though he was ostracised by the ex-pat community and returned to England leaving Diana in the arms of her second husband the wealthy land owner Gilbert Colville. In December 1942 Sir Jock was found dying from a morphine overdose in the Britannia Adelphi hotel in Liverpool. The inquest recorded a verdict of suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.
The conspiracy theories persist but from Juanita Carberry’s evidence it appears that Sir Jock had secreted himself in the Earl of Erroll’s car when he dropped Diana off at 2.30am, shot Erroll in the head from the back seat of the car and organised his neighbour Dr Athan Philip to pick him up at a pre-ordained spot which is why he insisted Erroll bring Diana home by 3am sharp.
Diana Delves-Broughton was the only member of the Happy Valley Set to emerge relatively unscathed from the scandal. Colville was one of the wealthiest landowners in Kenya and, on his death, left her a not inconsiderable fortune. Her fourth and last marriage made Diana Lady Delamere and in the 60s and 70s she, her husband Tom and Lady Patricia Fairweather lived in a ménage-a-trois. She became known as ‘the White Queen of Africa’.
Louis Comfort Tiffany HM King Luis I of Portugal and the Algarves Ronald Firbank Andrew Carnegie
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Jyoti Kisanji Amge: Shortest woman living (mobile)
The Guinness World Records family embraces a multitude of extraordinary individuals, from highly trained athletes to people who have turned their private passion into a record-breaking achievement.
Certain records are iconic, of course – such as those for the tallest and shortest people in the world.
Speaking of which: step forward one of GWR’s most distinctive and best-loved record holders – Jyoti Amge.
Back to Hall of Fame
Born on 16 December 1993 in Nagpur, central India, Jyoti was of average stature until she reached the age of five, according to her mother, Ranjana. However, at that point it became evident that her growth was being hampered by some kind of disorder. It subsequently emerged that she has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, and will never grow beyond a certain height.
From the age of four, Jyoti attended school alongside regular-sized children, although she was provided with a desk and chair more appropriate for her diminutive size. She first came to the attention of the wider world back in 2009, when she appeared on Fuji TV’s Bikkuri Chojin 100 Special No.2. Measured by doctors on the show, she was found to be just 61.95 cm (2 ft) tall, confirming her as the Shortest living teenager (female). Remarkably, at just 5.4 kg (12 lb), she weighed only 4 kg (9 lb) more than her birth weight.
Jyoti was just 15 at the time, but even then her bubbly personality was clear for all to see. Like lots of teenage girls, she loved her fashion and make-up. And she harboured ambitions to become an actress. Indeed, her new-found celebrity was already helping to pave her way. Later in 2009, she appeared in a video for a song by Bhangra star Mika Singh, and was featured in the Channel 4 documentary Bodyshock, in an episode entitled ‘Two Foot Tall Teen’.
Of course, as gentle giants Robert Wadlow and Sultan Kösen also discovered, having a remarkable size can have plenty of drawbacks. Jyoti’s clothes, jewellery and even her plates and cutlery have to be specially made. But she is determined to make her unique stature work for her. And recognition from GWR has played a modest part in allaying any self-doubts that she has experienced along the way: “Getting this record has made me feel better about myself,” Jyoti has acknowledged. “I feel popular, special and important.”
In fact, Jyoti’s success story was only just beginning. On 16 December 2011, she turned 18 – at which point she took the title of Shortest living woman (mobile). She was measured by orthopaedic consultant Dr Manoj Pahukar at the Wockhardt Superspeciality Hospital in her home city of Nagpur, and GWR adjudicator Rob Molloy was on hand to oversee proceedings.
As with all record holders of extraordinary size, Jyoti’s height was taken at different times of the day, and an average reading then calculated; this is because spine compression causes the body’s height to fluctuate over the course of 24 hours. She was found to be 62.8 cm (2 ft 0.7 in) tall, making her slightly shorter than the previous record holder, 69-cm-tall (2-ft 3-in) Bridgette Jordan from the USA.
In the first flush of fame, Jyoti had talked about wanting to visit other countries. “I would love to travel to London and to see the different world there,” she revealed. America was on her wish list too. She also confirmed, “I would love to act in films.”
Happily, all of those aspirations have since been realised. Now a well-established member of the global GWR family, Jyoti has travelled abroad and been photographed on a number of occasions with other record holders – including (in 2012) Chandra Bahadur Dangi, the Shortest man ever. Indeed, she towered over the 54.6-cm-tall (1-ft 9.5-in) Chandra. The two were brought together to help celebrate the launch of Guinness World Records 2013, the 57th edition of our annual best-seller. The historic event marked the first time in history that the world’s shortest man and woman had met.
In 2013, Jyoti flew to New York City, where GWR’s Mike Janela had the honour of being her tour guide. “She may be the shortest living woman,” Mike stated, “but Jyoti Amge is one of the biggest personalities we have in the Guinness World Records universe.” True enough: although shorter than one of New York’s fire hydrants, Joyti drew the crowds wherever she went. “Now everything is in my reach,” she told the city’s Daily News. “I put myself into challenges and I just go for it.”
“I got excited, because when people see me and recognise me, they all want to take a photograph with me.”
In the meantime, Jyoti has already taken steps to fulfil her ambitions to become a movie star. Aside from appearing as herself as a guest on TV shows, in 2012 she was a guest on Bigg Boss – India’s take on hit reality show Big Brother. And in 2014, she signed up for the part of Ma Petite in the fourth season of the hit US TV series American Horror Story. “People like me might be small in stature, but they can also act,” Jyoti told ABC News that year. “Regular people should not underestimate people who are small.”
One thing’s for certain: with her can-do attitude, sunny optimism and quiet determination, no one should doubt the scale of Jyoti Amge’s ambitions – or her ability to achieve them.
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The brute-force account cracking tool of Sentry MBA has been used to compromise user accounts.
For nine months, an individual who was interested in a hack into the British National Lottery database and hijacking customer accounts was jailed.
Camelot, the UK national crime agency (NCA), said last week that Anwar Batson from Notting Hill, London, had helped and tuition to compromise the lotery operator.
The 29-year old, Idris Kayode Akinwunmi and Daniel Thompson and others, focused on fast cash from the auction, and Batson suggested the use of Sentry MBA to break and control user accounts.
“Even the most basic forms of cybercrime can have a substantial impact on victims,” said NCA senior investigating officer Andrew Shorrock. “No one should think cybercrime is victimless or that they can get away with it.”
Sentry MBA is a widely available digital cracking tool online. The software suite can be used when there are no anti-automation protections, taking into account the need for technical knowledge to smash a service online, with lists of weak passwords and device combos, and vulnerability account combinations exposed by data dumps and paste websites.
According to the 2019 survey of Verizon, 71% of data breaches currently are financially motivated, with about 70% containing defective and corrupted passwords.
The 29-year-old “told others that they could quickly make cash,” named Rosegold, with Sentry MBA, conversed “over hacking, purchasing and selling username and password lists, settings files and personally identifiable information,” UK prosecutions said.
Throughout 2016, the NCA was made aware that a cyber attack against the National Lottery has taken place. The company emphasized that the main drawing structures were not compromised, but the fire was on a site of millions of records.
The National Lotery reported then that around 27,000 player records could be compromised because of “suspicious activity,” and information could have been revealed including addresses, contact details, birth dates and restricted card data.
Batson used the tool to collect credentials, including those of one player from a lottery who had £ 13 stolen from Akinwunmi’s account, of which £ 5 had been shipped to Baston.
The payment was low, but still counted as theft and a crime under the Computer Misuse Act of Great Britain in 1990. Nevertheless, the National Lottery operator had to pay £ 230,000 for the attacks and 250 customers closed their accounts for the advertisement of the event, according to The Register.
Upon pleading guilty for four offences in the Southwark Crown Court and one charge of theft, Batson was sentenced to serve nine months behind bars. Initially, Batson refused to participate.
In 2018, Thompson and Akinwunmi were imprisoned for 8 months and four months respectively, after being charged with brute-force breaking efforts to attack the National Lottery Web site.
Over four years, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) jailed a US resident last week for large identity theft. Babatunde Olusegun Taiwo engaged in a scheme, which included the submission of false tax returns and compensation requests through the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the personal identification details of people exposed through a preliminary data breach.
In fact, Taiwo and co-defendants sought compensation for more than $12 million. The IRS paid $800,000 prior to the involvement of law enforcement.
Land Prison Penalty
Lottery Hacker
National Lottery Hacker
Windows 7 Support Ends Today - What should you do?
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Gangsta Boo Defines "Wigger," Discusses "Throw It Up" With Eminem and Yelawolf
by paul.arnold
It may be a couple weeks past Halloween, and a couple days after a frightening re-airing of the premiere episode of the Biography channel’s Celebrity Nightmares Decoded featuring Too Short, but “Boo” is back.
While not the surprising utterance intended to strike fear in its terrified targets, this “Boo” is equally effective at striking fear in the hearts of her competition for the crown as Hip Hop’s queen gangstress. Gangsta Boo, the down-ass chick that debuted back in 1995 as a potty-mouthed 15-year-old, was one of the first femcee’s from the south that managed to startle both her rapping peers (of both sexes) and less liberated listeners with frank talk of sex and violence from “the devil’s daughter.”
After spending seven years as the female face of Three 6 Mafia, (before breaking away from the Hypnotize Minds camp in 2001 due to reported monetary disputes with label heads Juicy J and DJ Paul, as well as a much-publicized conversion to Christianity), Boo has been frightening far fewer folks in the last decade. Some mixtapes and a few guest appearances on Gucci Mane tracks notwithstanding, Gangsta Boo has been largely M.I.A. from the music scene since her third solo album, 2003’s Enquiring Minds II: The Soap Opera, was released (and reinstated her pre-conversion raciness).
But trailing two mixtapes, and a new collaboration that currently has the Internet going nuts, Boo is poised for a long-overdue comeback as she eyes an upcoming EP release entitled what else? Foreva Gangsta.
Late yesterday (November 15th), Boo spoke to HipHopDX about her new eye-grabbing cameo (and why both Yelawolf and Eminem are geniuses for having her “Throw It Up” with them). The outspoken spitter also addressed her recent usage of a racial slur to describe a fellow female in the Rap game (and defined that slur at DX’s request), as well as explained her polarizing position on religion, in an interview not suitable for the fearful or faint of heart.
Gangsta Boo Explains Working With Eminem
HipHopDX: You’ve actually been getting dem dollars in the game a little longer than Eminem, but it still had to feel like an accomplishment to end up on a joint with Em and have him name-dropping Gangsta Boo.
Gangsta Boo: Yeah, right? I love Eminem. I’m a fan. I’m a huge Eminem fan, so … ya know, hard work pays off. And he recognized. He know the business, he followed my career just as much as I followed his, so … he’s a smart man. He did what was right. [Laughs]
DX: [Laughs] “Throw It Up” is arguably the second most notable guest appearance of your career, after Outkast’s classic “I’ll Call Before I Come.” Yelawolf has said he’s “a huge Gangsta Boo fan,” so did Yela just call you up and ask you to make some more guest appearance history and jump on a track with him and the biggest rapper in the world?
Gangsta Boo: I’m a fan of Yelawolf as well. I mean, Jesus Christ, “Pop The Trunk.” I mean, he’s from Alabama. Like, it just don’t get no better than our own country, down south, white boy rapper.
So, basically, he told me to come to the studio. And, we went through some beats, and we found that one, and we came up with the hook, and I dropped it, and Eminem jumped on it and bam, it’s a really huge song right now.
DX: Did you know in advance that Em was gonna jump on it?
Gangsta Boo: No, I didn’t … at all. Whatever made Wolf decide to use that one for the one that he wanted to use Eminem on – because of course, he could of got Eminem on anything that he wanted him on. I think Yelawolf is a genius. And I think Eminem is a genius. So they knew what they were doing to create shock value, and to create the buzz that it created like, “What the fuck? Boo and Eminem?” People can’t believe it, which is funny, ‘cause I did do a record with Outkast, and at the time they were the biggest duo in the world, so … this is what I do.
DX: Besides this big appearance, you also have your own self-titled single out there, and a new EP on the way, so is this officially a comeback for “the last of the real gangsta chicks”?
Gangsta Boo: It is. I loved when Drake said [on “Headlines” ], “You know they said I fell off, ooh I needed that ….” I sat down, I watched people, I observed. I A&R’d, so I did a lot of open mics. Like, looking at different artists [and] trying to help people. So [then] I just decided like, “Okay, there is a gangsta lane, there are girls like me. Everybody is not afraid to wear tennis shoes. Some chicks, they in heels 24/7.” I love those girls, ‘cause I love heels – heels make you look sexy. But, they’re not the only ones that exist. So, I just decided that it’s a wide open lane, nobody does it like me, ever – never ever, ever, ever, ever will. So I just decided to hop back in, ride the fuck out my lane, stroll on cruise control, until I get ready to mash the gas on they ass with this EP.
The self-titled single is featuring Shawty Lo. It’s produced by Lex Luger. I was working at Tree Sound [Studios] last night and I recorded over a Drumma Boy track called “Laughing At My Haters.” So, I’ma drop a mixtape, Foreva Gangsta II – another Trap-A-Holics [hosted tape] – in about a couple weeks, and gear myself up for the EP … which will have a couple songs featured on there that was previously featured on my mixtapes. But for the most part, every song is gonna be new. And there’s gonna be dope producers, dope features – I’ma be working with Kreayshawn hopefully in the future. We squashed our little media situation, which was pretty dope because I shouldn’t have said a lot of stuff that I did say. And, she’s a cute little White girl. She’s doing her thing, she reppin’ for her area and she’s staying out of trouble, so that’s all that matters. So, looking forward to working with Kreayshawn on some shit. You know, just keeping it positive and keeping it moving so I can feed my family.
Gangsta Boo Reflects On Relationship With Three 6 Mafia
DX: Now, I know it’s been more than a minute, but I gotta ask, will this career revival include a reunion of any kind with Juicy J and DJ Paul?
Gangsta Boo: To be honest with you, I don’t even listen to their music. So, if they still bumpin’, I would love to work with ‘em. But, the only person I really hear about over there out of that camp is Juicy J. And he got so many features, like, I don’t know if he writing his own shit or not. So, if they jammin’ and they wanna work with me, I’ll jam wit’ ‘em. But, if they ain’t rockin’, I can’t fuck wit’ ‘em.
DX: Almost exactly a decade ago you left Three 6 Mafia due in part to a religious conversion. But you obviously didn’t leave the secular stuff behind for very long. So I was just curious where your relationship with religion is as of 2011?
Gangsta Boo: I’m in love with the Lord. I’m a true believer in karma, and God, and Jesus Christ, but I just consider myself more spiritual than religious. And that’s a personal preference. It’s nothing against anybody that’s over-religious and very extreme. I pray, I worship, I believe in God, I’m a great person, and I’m just more spiritual. I’m in tune with my spirit. I’m in tune with the spirit side of myself, so… I don’t necessarily have to go and just be holier-than-thou or a saint when behind closed doors I’m doing unholy things.
DX: So you feel like your content can exist with a spiritual life?
Gangsta Boo: My content? What do you mean?
DX: The content of your music, the racier content, that you can still have –
Gangsta Boo: That’s like asking an R&B singer that sings about making love – not necessarily singing to her husband or to his wife, they’re just singing about making love. That’s like asking them [that question] and they in church every day, they even sing sometimes in church. Just because you do secular music, that has nothing to do with your spirit side.
Gangsta Boo Goes From Beef With Kreayshawn To Collaborating Together
DX: My final question for you in this quick Q&A is also a heavy one, but I feel like it’s something I need to ask you. I know your harsh words for Kreayshawn were rescinded – like you just explained – after y’all spoke, but I do still have a question about the “wigger” comment: How do you define “wigger?” What or whom is a wigger to you?
Gangsta Boo: Sometimes people say things and don’t realize how stupid it sounds. And after I said that, I asked myself that. I will just say to me a wigger is someone that – well, I don’t even know. I don’t even really know what that word means. I mean, the word, who hasn’t picked up on it? And we were taught that it means a white person trying to be Black. But I would just say this: I just don’t like white people that talk white around their white friends but get around black people and pick up an African-American accent. To me, I would say that’s a wigger.
And, I was wrong for calling her a wigger, because I’ve never been around her in my life to even say that’s how she acts. So to me, a wigger is someone who’s 100% “white power” with their white friends and when they get around their Black friends they’re Yo! MTV Raps type-shit. Like, super urban, talking with hella slang, and that’s really not them.
Just like a black person could be an oreo, like how Carlton was on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, you got some Black people that’s super, super hood but they wanna get around White people and get all stiff-backed and talk all corporate and… you know… you know what it is.
DX: Yeah, I understand what you’re trying to say. I guess I’ll just personally never really understand hurling that word at a White person as an insult. It’s kinda like calling a white person a “cracker.” When you call a white person a cracker, you’re calling that person your master.
Gangsta Boo: Why you say that?
DX: Cracker is short for whip-cracker. It was shorthand that slaves used to warn that the overseer was coming. So when you call someone a cracker, you’re calling that person your master.
Gangsta Boo: See, there’s a lot of history in the words we say and we don’t even know it. I guess we should have to research some of the shit we say before we say it, especially a person like me – [whose] words get critiqued and I’m watched. So I just have to watch what I say.
Purchase Music by Gangsta Boo
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Assistant Secretaries of State for Politico-Military Affairs - Principal Officers - People - Department History
Assistant Secretaries of State for Politico-Military Affairs
The Department of State established the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs by administrative order on Sep 18, 1969, to enhance the Department’s role in the formulation of international security policy, to supervise security assistance and foreign military sales programs, and to direct the issuance of arms export licenses. The bureau replaced a special component for politico-military affairs that had served under the Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs since 1960. The Director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, who was designated by the Secretary of State, had rank equivalent to an Assistant Secretary of State. The Director became a Presidential appointee, subject to the advice and consent of the Senate, and an Assistant Secretary on Apr 14, 1986.
Ronald Ian Spiers (1969–1973)
Seymour Weiss (1973–1974)
George Southall Vest (1974–1977)
Leslie Howard Gelb (1977–1979)
Reginald Bartholomew (1979–1981)
Richard R. Burt (1981–1982)
Jonathan Trumbull Howe (1982–1984)
John Thomas Chain Jr. (1984–1985)
Henry Allen Holmes Jr. (1986–1989)
Richard A. Clarke (1989–1992)
Robert L. Gallucci (1992–1994)
Thomas Edmund McNamara (1994–1998)
Eric David Newsom (1998–2000)
Lincoln P. Bloomfield (2001–2005)
John Hillen (2005–2008)
Mark Kimmitt (2008–2009)
Andrew J. Shapiro (2009–2013)
Puneet Talwar (2014–2017)
R. Clarke Cooper (2019)
Tina S. Kaidanow ()
Administrative Timeline of the Department of State
Buildings of the Department
Travels of the Secretary
Visits by Foreign Leaders
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Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume IV, Foreign Assistance, International Development, Trade Policies, 1969–1972
147. Draft Memorandum From Secretary of State Rogers to the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs (De Palma)1
PADM 56
Washington, undated.
PARA Review on UN Prospects, Opportunities and Problems Over the Next Five Years
The following is a summary of the conclusions reached at the review on the five-year prospects of the UN system chaired by the Deputy Secretary on September 8, 1972.2 It is intended to serve as basic policy guidance to the Bureau of International Organizations and the United States Mission to the United Nations.
Part I—Guidance
The UN five years hence probably will not be substantially different from the UN of today.
—Much of what the UN does is not directly relevant to the primary interests of the United States. Nevertheless, the facilitative and supportive functions of the UN system have become part of the essential infrastructure of the international community, including the United States. The importance of the UN as international manager of a multiplicity of social, economic and technical services will grow over the next five years.
—The political-security dimension of the UN will remain distinctly secondary to the economic-social-technical work of the UN. Although there may be improvement in the Security Council’s peacekeeping and peacemaking ability, this will be slow in coming.
—The confrontation will sharpen between the undeveloped majority, who see the UN primarily as a means of obtaining developmental and trade advantages, and the affluent minority. African “liberation”, [Page 378]colonialism and apartheid will be an increasing focus of General Assembly attention.
—UN budgets in the Ô70s will continue to rise, but at a slower rate than in the Ô60s.
Given this forecast, our basic policy toward the UN should be oriented along the following lines:
We should concentrate our efforts on the technical, scientific and social areas, working to establish international regimes on matters such as seabeds, drug control, hijacking, environmental pollution, etc. This is the area in which the UN has been most successful to date, and in which we can further real interests of our own.
While maintaining bilateral aid programs, we should contribute our fair share to UNDP and allied programs. For dollar inputs that are small in comparison with our bilateral aid total, we reap a significant political payoff. We must be careful, however, to keep the international financial institutions well insulated from third world political pressures.
[Omitted here are 3 paragraphs unrelated to development issues.]
Part II—Discussion
We and our European allies who founded the United Nations in 1945 saw it preeminently as an organization to provide political security. Although the UN did have an economic and social dimension from the outset, our principal concern was the creation of an organization which would prevent the rise of a state bent on international hegemony, la Nazi Germany. Additionally, we expected the five major powers who formed the permanent membership of the Security Council to cooperate in settling disputes among lesser powers so that such disputes would not reach the point of open warfare.
During the Cold War years, we found the UN useful as a forum in which to denounce Soviet ambitions and actions. But the massive influx of newly independent states in the 1960s ended the almost automatic pro-US majority in the General Assembly and a more moderate Soviet stance enabled them to work successfully with the new majority on many political issues.
The “third world” countries which now form the overwhelming majority in the Assembly see the UN primarily as a means to obtain a transfer of skills and resources from the developed world. And the political issues debated in the Assembly are those which seize the attention of undeveloped Asia and Africa: colonialism, white minority rule and apartheid. With political and security functions dependent upon cooperation among the five permanent members—and therefore spasmodic [Page 379]and uncertain—the economic and social dimension has become predominant. In 1971, about 94% of UN expenditures went for economic, social and human rights activities; only 6% went for political and security functions.
We are substantially wealthier and militarily stronger than the bulk of the UN membership, and therefore our concerns and needs are quite different from those countries. Because we are so different, and because we have only one vote in the Assembly, we find our concerns often untreated and our views frequently ignored. And because we pay so substantial a proportion of the UN’s bills, we instinctively find this situation anomalous. We have thus come to see the UN system as a whole as a rather uncomfortable environment for the US. However, this is because we fail to perceive that the world itself has changed. In its priorities, the UN does reflect the concerns of a majority of the world community.
Looking ahead five years, we have little reason to expect any basic change in UN orientation. As long as the interests of the Big Five remain divergent, peacekeeping will remain uncertain, though it is possible that more can be done through good offices and fact-finding missions to prevent disputes among minor powers from reaching the boiling point. The confrontation between the undeveloped majority and the affluent minority over economic and trade questions will, if anything, sharpen. And the demand will grow for action against South Africa, Portugal and Rhodesia, and for UN assistance to African “liberation groups.” On these latter issues, the prospects are that by 1977, the UN will be voting substantial sums to assist “liberation groups” and that, as the UK integrates her foreign policies more closely with her EC partners, the US will increasingly find itself isolated on African issues.
Given this prospect, what orientation should the US adopt toward the UN?
We begin with the assumption that despite petty annoyances, we will continue to be able to prevent the UN from taking actions which would go directly against vital US interests; that while many UN actions and programs will not be directly relevant to our primary concerns, we have a real interest in the success of most of the economic, social and technical work of the UN system. The facilitative and supportive functions of the UN and its specialized agencies have become part of the essential infrastructure of the international community, including the US. The UN will thus have usefulness for us as it manages a multiplicity of social, economic and technical services.
This combination of no threat, a lack of relevance in certain areas but also growing and essential benefits for us in others, dictates that we remain engaged in the UN system. We also have an interest in preserving and fostering the UN’s potential for action in the political-security [Page 380]area. Indeed, if we believed the UN to be useful or necessary at the peak of our relative power and influence, it would be strange to find the UN unnecessary at a time when our ability to control international military and economic situations unilaterally has diminished.
Given present realities and our forecasts for the next five years, however, we should take a fresh look at the role we will wish to play in the UN system.
—We should concentrate efforts on using the UN system to establish international regimes on matters such as law of the sea and seabeds, drug control, hijacking, environmental protection, telecommunications, epidemic control, etc. That is, we should recognize that it is the scientific, technical and social areas in which the UN has been most successful to date, and that we can use this area to further real interests of our own. The LDCs will cooperate, but their major interest in programs affecting their economic development will have to be taken into account.
—The UN Development Program (UNDP) is and will remain the UN activity most important to the majority of the UN membership. Its performance has improved recently, and though high quality is hardly uniform, the same may be said of our own aid programs. For political reasons, we certainly will wish to maintain our bilateral aid operations. Moreover, we will always find some UNDP projects far from our liking in conception or administration. Nevertheless, we should recognize that (1) UNDP and allied programs play an essential role in convincing the undeveloped majority of our willingness to provide the UN with at least the minimum resources needed to deal with economic and technical needs; and (2) our dollar inputs amount to little more than 5% of our (now reduced) bilateral aid total. In short, with relatively modest inputs we derive certain political and public relations benefits stemming from the fact that UNDP is the most important UN activity to most of the membership.
We must be careful, however, to keep the international financial institutions well insulated from third world political pressures.
—We must recognize that UNDP and allied programs, even though inexpensive in terms of our total aid commitment still involve appropriation of substantial funds. It will be necessary to educate the Congress and the public on the point that our own interest dictates such programs be adequately funded, requiring an increase in the level of our contribution if we are to pay our fair share.
—We should substantially lower our profile in the General Assembly on matters which do not affect our vital interests, particularly on African issues. Resolutions that we would consider unwise or extreme will continue to be offered in the Assembly and will continue to pass by large majorities. Our general approach should be that, rather [Page 381]than attempting to improve bad resolutions—for example on African issues—we either abstain or vote against as interests and circumstances dictate. As a rule, however, we should avoid a vote against such resolutions if in doing so we would find ourselves in the company of only South Africa and Portugal. If some matter of principle is involved, our position should be succinctly explained for the record. Certainly we should attempt to end the US public impression and concern that in the General Assembly we are constantly arrayed against the rest of the world.
[Omitted here is a paragraph on UN peacekeeping.]
William P. Rogers 3
Source: National Archives, RG 59, S/S Files: Lot 82 D 126, PADM 56. Secret. Attached to an October 5 memorandum from Claus Ruser (S/PC) to the Deputy Secretary advising him that the Policy Analysis Decision Memorandum (PADM) stemmed from a PARA review that Ruser chaired on September 8. Ruser recommended that the draft memorandum be sent to the Secretary for his review and approval considering his “deep interest and involvement in UN matters.” There is no indication that the memorandum was sent to Secretary Rogers. The Policy Analysis and Resource Allocation (PARA) process was internal to the Department of State and did not include clearances from other agencies.↩
A 25-page paper entitled “PARA on the United Nations,” dated August 28, is attached but not printed.↩
Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.↩
Foreign Assistance, International Development, Trade Policies, 1969–1972
Foreign Assistance, International Development, Trade Policies, 1969-1972 (Documents 1-446)
International Development Policy, 1969-1972 (Documents 106-147)
Rogers, William P.
ECLDCPADMPARARGS/SUNUNDP
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Zika Virus: Expert Discussion by Scott Weaver, PhD
We know so little about Zika virus that we can’t even spell it correctly. Scott C. Weaver, MS, PhD, visiting Philadelphia from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, noted that the forest where Zika virus was discovered in the 1940s is actually spelled Ziika.
Weaver brought years of research experience to his talk Monday, May 16, at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. He is an arbovirus specialist and has worked extensively on Chikungunya virus, and, even before the current Western Hemisphere Zika virus epidemic, on Zika virus itself.
Given that human cases of Zika virus disease were not known until the 1950s and that 80% of Zika cases present with no symptoms, it’s not surprising that we don’t know more about the virus and how it works. Before 2007, only 14 human cases had been diagnosed.
Weaver traced the spread of Zika virus across the globe, showing a CDC map representing incidence of Zika virus antibodies and infection in local populations throughout many African and Asian countries. The virus almost certainly originated in Africa at least a millennium ago; about 50-100 years ago it spread to Asia. In 2007 the virus jumped to Yap Island from Asia, with a population of about 7,000 people, most of whom became infected. Then, in 2013, it moved to French Polynesia, with more than 100,000 people to potentially infect. French Polynesians then started to transport the virus around the world, probably to Brazil in late 2013. With this move to South America, hundreds of millions of people are now susceptible to infection.
Now, 38 countries in the West have documented local Zika virus transmission. Brazil has had an estimated 1.5 million cases. In the United States, 472 imported cases have been documented, 44 of them in pregnant women. Zika virus is the first mosquito-borne virus shown to be transmitted sexually, and about 10 cases of sexual transmission have occurred in the United States.
Though the harmful effects of Zika virus infection on the fetus have been known only since the disease began to be observed in Brazil in 2015, Weaver is of the mind that the virus has not changed to become more neurotropic. Rather, he thinks that the crucial difference between Zika in Brazil versus French Polynesia or Yap Island is that it finally infected enough people so that rare complications could be detected.
Weaver outlined some interesting and worrying characteristics of Zika virus infection in pregnant women. Despite one study showing that harm to the fetus was rare and that the risk window was mainly in the first trimester of pregnancy, another, larger study demonstrated that damage to the fetus is possible even through late pregnancy, and that the rate of complications is higher than previously thought. What’s more, pregnant women infected with Zika virus have a prolonged viremic period as compared with non-pregnant individuals. They are, therefore, potentially capable of transmitting the disease to mosquitoes for a longer time than other individuals. It’s even possible that this characteristic of infection has fueled the current Western epidemic.
Weaver thinks that the spread of Chikungunya virus is the best model for what’s going to happen with Zika virus in the United States. Chikungunya cases were reported in the Western Hemisphere a few years before reported Zika cases in 2013, and in 2014, 2,811 imported cases of Chikungunya virus disease were reported in the United States. Twelve locally acquired cases were reported in Florida beginning in May of that year. However, U.S. transmission has since ceased, probably because of effective mosquito control measures. Weaver thinks that we may soon be getting to the point where we have enough imported U.S. Zika cases that local transmission might be possible.
Transmission is most likely to occur, Weaver suggested, in low-income areas where people are at risk from daytime-biting mosquitoes and where there are likely to be viremic travelers returning from Zika-endemic areas. South Texas, which has an abundant population of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that can spread Zika, is a likely candidate.
The Rio Olympics approach, but Weaver isn’t especially worried about a huge outbreak stemming from that event. He is certainly not concerned enough to advocate cancelling the Olympics, as Amir Attaran recently advocated in the Harvard Public Health Review. So many people have already been infected in Brazil that there may not be enough immunologically naive people to fuel widespread disease.
In the short term, Weaver says that our most effective preventive measure could simply be educating people about avoiding Zika virus infection and preventing Zika virus transmission in the United States. In particular, he thinks pregnant women shouldn’t travel to endemic areas. Moreover, travelers returning from a Zika endemic area should protect themselves from mosquito bites on their return so as to prevent local mosquitoes from acquiring the virus (Weaver notes that even individuals with no apparent illness should consider this measure, as about 80% of Zika virus disease cases are asymptomatic).
In the long term, Weaver thinks we will have a vaccine to prevent Zika virus disease as well as monoclonal antibodies to treat individuals at high risk of harmful side effects. A recombinant or DNA vaccine may be the first vaccine tested and used (see my blog post on this), but ultimately, as with yellow fever vaccine, a live, attenuated vaccine given to young children may be the most effective route to suppressing Zika epidemics.
Posted in BlogTagged Africa, Arbovirus, Mosquitoes, Philadelphia, Zika
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A2A adenosine receptor upregulation correlates with disease activity in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus
BACKGROUND: Adenosine is a purine nucleoside implicated in the regulation of the innate and adaptive immune systems, acting through its interaction with four cell surface receptors: A1, A2A, A2B, and A3. There is intense interest in understanding how adenosine functions in health and during disease, but surprisingly little is known about the actual role of adenosine-mediated mechanisms in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). With this background, the aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis that dysregulation of A1, A2A, A2B, and A3 adenosine receptors (ARs) in lymphocytes of patients with SLE may be involved in the pathogenesis of the disease and to examine the correlations between the status of the ARs and the clinical parameters of SLE. METHODS: ARs were analyzed by performing saturation-binding assays, as well as messenger RNA and Western blot analysis, with lymphocytes of patients with SLE in comparison with healthy subjects. We tested the effect of A2AAR agonists in the nuclear factor kB (NF-kB) pathway and on the release of interferon (IFN)-α; tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α; and interleukin (IL)-2, IL-6, IL-1β, and IL-10. RESULTS: In lymphocytes obtained from 80 patients with SLE, A2AARs were upregulated compared with those of 80 age-matched healthy control subjects, while A1, A2B, and A3 ARs were unchanged. A2AAR density was inversely correlated with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Disease Activity Index 2000 score disease activity through time evaluated according to disease course patterns, serositis, hypocomplementemia, and anti-double-stranded DNA positivity. A2AAR activation inhibited the NF-kB activation pathway and diminished inflammatory cytokines (IFN-α, TNF-α, IL-2, IL-6, IL-1β), but it potentiated the release of anti-inflammatory IL-10. CONCLUSIONS: These data suggest the involvement of A2AARs in the complex pathogenetic network of SLE, acting as a modulator of the inflammatory process. It could represent a compensatory pathway to better counteract disease activity. A2AAR activation significantly reduced the release of proinflammatory cytokines while enhancing those with anti-inflammatory activity, suggesting a potential translational use of A2AAR agonists in SLE pharmacological treatment.
Titolo: A2A adenosine receptor upregulation correlates with disease activity in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus
BORTOLUZZI, Alessandra
VINCENZI, Fabrizio
GOVONI, Marcello
PADOVAN, Melissa
RAVANI, Annalisa
ARTHRITIS RESEARCH & THERAPY
Abstract: BACKGROUND: Adenosine is a purine nucleoside implicated in the regulation of the innate and adaptive immune systems, acting through its interaction with four cell surface receptors: A1, A2A, A2B, and A3. There is intense interest in understanding how adenosine functions in health and during disease, but surprisingly little is known about the actual role of adenosine-mediated mechanisms in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). With this background, the aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis that dysregulation of A1, A2A, A2B, and A3 adenosine receptors (ARs) in lymphocytes of patients with SLE may be involved in the pathogenesis of the disease and to examine the correlations between the status of the ARs and the clinical parameters of SLE. METHODS: ARs were analyzed by performing saturation-binding assays, as well as messenger RNA and Western blot analysis, with lymphocytes of patients with SLE in comparison with healthy subjects. We tested the effect of A2AAR agonists in the nuclear factor kB (NF-kB) pathway and on the release of interferon (IFN)-α; tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α; and interleukin (IL)-2, IL-6, IL-1β, and IL-10. RESULTS: In lymphocytes obtained from 80 patients with SLE, A2AARs were upregulated compared with those of 80 age-matched healthy control subjects, while A1, A2B, and A3 ARs were unchanged. A2AAR density was inversely correlated with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Disease Activity Index 2000 score disease activity through time evaluated according to disease course patterns, serositis, hypocomplementemia, and anti-double-stranded DNA positivity. A2AAR activation inhibited the NF-kB activation pathway and diminished inflammatory cytokines (IFN-α, TNF-α, IL-2, IL-6, IL-1β), but it potentiated the release of anti-inflammatory IL-10. CONCLUSIONS: These data suggest the involvement of A2AARs in the complex pathogenetic network of SLE, acting as a modulator of the inflammatory process. It could represent a compensatory pathway to better counteract disease activity. A2AAR activation significantly reduced the release of proinflammatory cytokines while enhancing those with anti-inflammatory activity, suggesting a potential translational use of A2AAR agonists in SLE pharmacological treatment.
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Posts Tagged ‘ Samir Nasri ’
Is Van Persie Made Of Manchester United ‘Stuff’?
Recent transfer speculation has placed Arsenal star Robin Van Persie in the sights of several of Europe’s top clubs; Manchester United, Manchester City and Juventus being chief among his potential suitors. It’s not exactly difficult to imagine why he would want to leave. After all, he boasts only two trophies from his days at Arsenal; an FA Cup medal from 2005 and one slightly less momentous Community Shield from 2004. Arsenal, whose financial model makes sense yet is so far removed from the outrageous wages and expenditure so favoured by world football and the Premier League and thus is failing, are looking more and more like a feeder club to those at the top, rather than one looking to seriously challenge for domestic and European honours.
This speculation has favoured Manchester United to capture the Dutch forward and one of the most recent revelations declares that Van Persie is seeking wages similar to those of Wayne Rooney, if he is to join the Red Devils. While United do have the financial clout to meet his demands, the questions is not can they, but should they.
The thing is, Rooney is 26 and van Persie has three years on him. And while the Dutchman may have a similar amount of playing time, due to several bouts of injuries, the fact remains that the clock is beginning to tick. 28, going on 29 may not be exactly old, but paying such a large transfer fee for an older player can be somewhat of a risk. Take Berbatov, for example, whose £30 million transfer to United from Spurs hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses. It all hinges on whether Van Persie is only getting going, or if this is his peak. There’s no denying that he is an extremely talented footballer. But there are still a number of things that go against him. His injury record, for example, which may or may not be a worry to the manager, who would doubtfully want another Owen Hargreaves. His record too is a little short. He has had really only one great season at Arsenal, though it has to be said, what a season it was. Talisman is a word used often and certainly not sparingly by the press, yet a talisman for Arsenal he was, joining the ranks of a handful of players who managed to score 30 goals in a solitary league season. But he’s only done it the once. Can he do it again? Or has he reached the peak, the summit of his skill and is it simply downhill from here? Nobody can really predict what’s going to happen. Who could have foreseen, for example, Fernando Torres’ remarkable slump into mediocrity?
Then of course there is the wage demand. Sir Alex seems to prefer the type of footballer who comes to Old Trafford seeking to play with and for the best, whose passion lies out on the pitch rather than with a pay cheque. With his rather exorbitant wage demands, Van Persie comes across like a footballing mercenary, (Samir Nasri springs to mind) looking for money rather than a club to be passionate about. Sure, footballers should be able to demand what they feel they are worth, though that opens up yet another can of worms regarding how much the profession is paid these days. United don’t need another like Tevez. Sure, mercenaries are part and parcel of our game, just like diving and whinging is, but United are one of those clubs, like Barcelona and a handful of others, who are able to attract a certain type of player which exhibits a quality possessed by the rarest of footballers – loyalty. Really, he should stay another year and prove himself worthy of the recognition he’s getting. Then again, if Arsenal have any sense, they’ll offload him now rather than have him see out his contract then leave at the end of next season on a free transfer.
United have plenty of talent up front, in the form of Rooney, Chicharito, Macheda, Welbeck, even the much maligned Dimitar Berbatov, who may or may not be on the way out this summer. Should van Persie join then he is just another name taking away valuable playing time from those younger potential stars who need regular games not just to ensure fitness, but one of the most important things a footballer can possess – confidence. Not to mention the small prospect of the financial aspect to this transfer. For wages alone, on a three-year deal, should United offer Van Persie the same £220,000 a week Rooney is on, it would cost the club a little over £34 million. That’s not even including the £30 million transfer fee Wenger is reportedly looking for. And of course the figure rises should the contract extend any further. £64 million is quite a huge investment in a player who will turn 29 by the time the Premier League starts again, who has had quite a number of injury concerns over his career and who has had only one really great season for Arsenal.
No, midfield is where they should concentrate on; a long-term replacement for Paul Scholes, and one or two other potentials besides. Lucas Moura or Modric would be nice names to feature on the United team sheet but there are many other young players like young Nick Powell out there, because big transfer fees and solid reputations don’t always ensure value on the pitch. So on the surface, a move for one of football’s hottest talents might be the right one but under that surface it doesn’t seem quite so attractive.
Federico Macheda
Owen Hargreaves
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Twins take action: diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, sisters raise awareness to find treatment and a cure
Allie and Katie Buryk
Many people have moments when they are clumsy – accidentally spilling things or stumbling when they walk. In hindsight, these events were early signs that twins Katie and Allie Buryk had late onset Tay-Sachs disease, a rare genetic disorder.
But it wasn’t until one day when the two sisters were home from college that their mother, Alexis, noticed that something was wrong. Neither Katie nor Allie had the strength in their legs to easily stand – both needed their hands for support.
What followed was a long search for a diagnosis, and then a call to action. Mayo Clinic physicians have been alongside the twins during their journey.
Finally – a diagnosis
After years of doctor’s appointments and tests, Katie and Allie finally got an answer to explain their symptoms. In 2014, genomic testing revealed the twins’ had late onset Tay-Sachs disease, a rare inherited disorder that causes progressive neurological damage.
Mayo physicians collaborated with the twins’ physicians to confirm the diagnosis. Marc Patterson, M.D., a Mayo Clinic neurologist, and his colleagues reviewed the sisters’ genetic test results and clinical information and suggested strategies to manage the twins’ symptoms.
“I was glad to have a diagnosis because in my mind I knew something was wrong. I don’t want doctors to write patients off just because we are a medical mystery, a challenge.” - Katie Buryk
“I was glad to have a diagnosis because in my mind I knew something was wrong,” says Kate. “I don’t want doctors to write patients off just because we are a medical mystery, a challenge.”
So what is Tay-Sachs and how rare is it?
Tay-Sachs is one of approximately 50 inherited lysosomal storage disorders. Patients with these diseases are missing certain enzymes, which cause build-up of toxic materials in their body’s cells. Tay-Sachs patients are missing an enzyme that helps break down fatty substances. As these substances build up in nerve cells, they cause progressive neurological damage.
Marc Patterson, M.D.
People with ancestors from eastern and central European Jewish communities, certain French Canadian communities and the Cajun community in Louisiana are at increased risk for the disease. Fewer than 100 cases of Tay-Sachs are diagnosed each year, most commonly in infants and children. There is no cure or approved treatment for the disorder.
Dr. Patterson explains why Tay-Sachs and other rare diseases can be difficult to identify.
“There are more than 5,000 rare diseases that affect 25 million people in the U.S. Because disorders like Tay-Sachs are so rare, symptoms are often missed,” says Dr. Patterson. “Mayo Clinic researchers are working every day to find therapies for diseases for which there are no treatments, aiming to be the bridge from hope to healing.”
Despite challenges, motivated to raise awareness
Each day, Katie and Allie manage their symptoms as they carry on with their respective careers.
Katie’s disease has progressed more rapidly. She has more difficulty walking long distances and climbing stairs. As a result, she has relocated from New York to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where she works remotely as an assistant planner for a large retailer.
Allie works as a nurse, caring for stroke patients and others with severe neurological problems, and is also pursuing a master’s degree. While she has fewer mobility problems than Katie, Allie has experienced changes to her speech, making it hard for people to understand her when she speaks quickly.
Despite their challenges, the Buryk family is committed to building awareness about Tay-Sachs disease. They have created a fund to help support Tay-Sachs research through the National Tay-Sachs & Allied Diseases Association.
This past fall, Katie and Allie shared their story at Individualizing Medicine Conference 2017: Advancing Care Through Genomics, hosted by Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine. They had the chance to learn firsthand how researchers from Mayo Clinic and around the world were coming together to find treatments for rare diseases like Tay-Sachs.
“It’s exciting to see the research underway. I hope that our efforts to build awareness will someday lead to finding a treatment and cure,” says Katie.
During the last two decades, great strides have been made in understanding the genomic mechanisms behind Tay-Sachs. This knowledge also sheds light on the underlying causes of more common neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
“We now have a genetic test to diagnose Tay-Sachs that we hope will someday be used for newborn screening. This test can also identify whether prospective parents are carriers, which is important information for family planning.” - Marc Patterson, M.D.
“We now have a genetic test to diagnose Tay-Sachs that we hope will someday be used for newborn screening. This test can also identify whether prospective parents are carriers, which is important information for family planning,” says Dr. Patterson
Allie echoed Dr. Patterson’s enthusiasm for genetic testing.
“If everyone had the chance to have genetic testing, they would learn a lot about themselves. Knowledge is power,” she says.
Watch a video: Katie and Allie Buryk’s Story: Research for Individually Rare, but Collectively Common Diseases.
See highlights from our recent Individualizing Medicine Conference 2017: Advancing Care Through Genomics:
Tags: #Allie Buryk, #Dr. Marc Patterson, #Katie Buryk, #Mayo Clinic Individualized Medicine Clinic, #National Tay-Sachs & Allied Diseases Association, #rare diseases, #rare genetic disorders, #Tay-Sachs disease, center for individualized medicine, Genetic Testing, mayo clinic, medical research, Precision Medicine
@chrystal
Posts: 1 Joined: Jan 10, 2018
Posted by chrystal @chrystal, Jan 10, 2018
So proud of Katie and Allie for spreading awareness of LOTS and reaching out to others. Their courage is inspiring.
researchorg
@researchorg
Posts: 1 Joined: Jul 11, 2018
Posted by researchorg @researchorg, Jul 11, 2018
Katie and Allie you both are doing a great job hope every body get tested before. so many organizations are working on it like Dor Yeshorim / doryeshorim, JGDC, etc.
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Cinematographer Robert Reed Altman Talks ‘Bones’, ‘Good Girls’ & His Career
A couple of months ago, we got the opportunity to sit down with Director of Photography, Robert Reed Altman. If that name sound familiar, it’s possibly due to him being the son of five-time Oscar-nominated Director Robert Altman.
However, Robert has served on an impressive number of award-winning feature films and television series himself, ever since the maverick days of American filmmaking in the 1970s. In the 90’s, Robert shifted gears and began working on acclaimed TV series like ‘Alien Nation’, Armistead Maupin’s ‘Tales of the City’, ‘The Wonder Years’, and a host of his father’s films. That continued in the 00’s and beyond with work on ‘The OC’, ‘Bones’, ‘Chuck’, ‘Lost’ and the movie ‘Cloverfield’. Most recently, he shot breakout comedy-drama 'Good Girls', which can currently be found on Netflix in the UK.
GT: So, I usually start off the interview by asking a bit of background and how you got into the industry, but I’m guessing with your father, that explains how you got in the first place.
Yeah, I was pretty much born into the whole thing. I was supposed to go to summer camp when I was 14 and I had been going there every summer for a few years before that, so I was really excited to go there, I had a girlfriend, my whole life was focused on that throughout the school year and then my dad says, “Bobby, I never get to see you”, and I’m like, “Well, that’s your fault, not mine. You’re always working,” and he goes, “Well, I want you to come to Nashville”, and I said “What’s Nashville?”
[‘Nashville’ was a Robert Altman’s 1975 satirical musical comedy-drama starring David Arkin and Barbara Baxley]
And then, he goes, “Well, I want you to come there”, and I told him I couldn’t do it. Everything was planned to go to this camp and there’s no way, and then I saw a tear from his eye drop and he goes, “Okay. Well look, I’ll make you a deal, if you come out for two weeks, if you don’t like it then you can go back,” and I said, “Okay. Deal,” and we shook on it.
When I get to ‘Nashville’ it’s a complete zoo, I mean it’s crazy, people running all over, my dad, I could barely even see him he was moving around so fast. Two weeks went by really quick and I’m on the set with some of the other kids. I think the caterer had his kids there, Mickey Chonos, and there’s electricians with lights and cables screaming, “Get out of the way, kid! Are you a door or a window,” or whatever.
So, two weeks went by really fast and I was like, “This isn’t working.” Being the director’s kid, it just was weird, you know? So, I tried to find the right timing to get his attention, to talk to him about going back, or getting me a job there, or something. I couldn’t just be floating around and so I couldn’t get that timing down, I mean I tried for another week to try to find the right place, the right time.
Finally, I was like that’s it. So, we’re at the Nashville airport for that opening scene, and my dad comes around the corner with thirty people following him, and he’s pouring at this, and that, this, and that, and they’re kind of heading around to go out the security doors down onto the runway where they’re all setting up for the first big first shot, when Barbara Jean comes in.
I jump out in front of them, from behind a wall, and I’m like, “Dad! Dad! It’s an emergency! I have to talk to you right now,” and he’s like, “What! What is it?” And I say, “I can’t tell you in front of all these people,” and I look to my right and there’s a little video game room. I said, “Come here, follow me,” and we go in there, we’re alone, and that little ping-pong thing’s going beep, beep, you know, the old game machines.
He goes, “Well, what is it, what is it,” and I go, “Okay,” and then, I pause for like two beats to build the tension up a little more, and then I said, “I can’t just be here as the director’s kid getting in the way. Don’t you remember our deal? It’s been two weeks, so I can either go back or maybe you can help find me a job or something to do, so I don’t feel so useless around here?” And he’s like, “Oh, is that all? Is that all this is?” And I went, “Is that all? This is me and my whole life. That’s me!” Then, his eyes lifted up and then, I saw this light bulb pop over his head and his eyes popped out, and he was like, “I’ve got an idea, follow me.”
He goes out the door. Now, I’m in with the thirty people following him and we’re going straight out that door, down the stairs, down through where all the high school band kids were learning the whole thing for this big scene, and he keeps walking down to the right and off the set, towards the back. I see a pop-up tent or something and there’s some guy behind a bunch of cables, boxes, and wires in it. He could sense Bob [Robert Altman Snr] was coming, and halfway there he pops up and he, “Oh Bob, hi, how’s it going,”, totally sucking up, and I’m like, “Oh boy,” and so, we get over there and he’s like, “This is my other son Bobby. Do you have a job for him?” “Oh. Yes. Of course, Bob, anything you want. Great,” and then, literally the walkie-talkie goes off, and Tony [Lombardo – assistant editor] comes up, and he’s like, “Okay, we’re out of here. Bob, we’ve got to go. We’re ready to roll,” and I couldn’t even see them walking away. They were gone.
Now, I’m standing there alone with this guy and he dropped immediately back behind his stuff when Dad’s gone and he doesn’t even notice I’m there, and so, I’m like, okay I’ll just wait here because I know timing is everything, and so, ten minutes, a certain long amount of time goes by and I go, “Well, what do you want me.” I mean, I’m like saying, “what should I ask him?”, to myself. “Hey Jim, can I get you a Coca-Cola,” and he jumps up, “No, I’m diabetic,” and he goes back down. “Okay…” and he’s stressed out too, I guess. Well, he was doing that multi-track, track sound thing and he had two giant one-inch decks and 16 radio mics and back then, they were huge, and millions of wires coming out the back.
So, anyway I just stood there and waited, and then I thought, well I’ll just take a break and see what happens. And then, I think, well, maybe if I ask him a technical question… but I don’t know any technical questions to ask. So, I look at the back of the panels and all the wires coming out, and one of them was red, so I ask him what that one is. I go up and I point towards to it, my fingers coming closer and closer to the back of this deck and he shouts, “Don’t touch that!” He jumps up, “Don’t touch that,” and I could feel everyone on the set looking at me like I did something wrong.
I go back to my mark, I throw my look off to the left, I focus to infinity, and there’s this big white truck, and coming out of the back are all these white cases, people carrying white cases. It looked like spaceships stuff going around behind the truck. Next thing I knew, I was over there. I had to see what that stuff was and I don’t even remember walking over there, but I was there and these guys were pulling all these cameras out of these cases and I could tell there were different kinds of cameras. And so, I said, “So, can these lenses go on any of these different kinds of cameras,” and they go, “Good question, kid!”
Robert Reed Altman with father, Robert Altman
So, I kept asking these questions and because it interested me. I always loved my dad’s Nikons when I was little, all the buttons, and dials, and stuff. Here I was with these guys and I’m like, “Well, what are these?” They say, “Camera reports.” I go, “Why don’t I fill out the name of the movie, the director, all the things I know, and I’ll just fill out as many as I can just so you don’t have to fill them out later, that part of them?” And they’re like, “Great!” I probably filled a thousand of them. Then, I went home that night and I told my dad that I was really excited and wanted to work with these camera people, and he says “Perfect.”
Then, I come in the next day to the back of that camera truck, ready to go, and they’re all standing there where they’re staring at me like “what the hells?”… So I’m thinking, what happened? I ask “What’s wrong with you guys? You told me yesterday the first thing we do when we come in is we take the filters, and the batteries, and put one by each camera position, and you’re not moving,” and they’re like, “well, uh, uh, well, uh,” and I’m like, “Well, uh, what?” They’re like “Well uh,” I’m like, “Come on, spit it out! What’s wrong?” And they say, “Well, we didn’t know. We thought you were a kid just from the neighbourhood, we didn’t know you were Robert Altman’s son.” “Oh. Well, that’s your problem, not mine,” and I grab the filters and I ran out the door. From then on, I worked with them.
Through most of my life, every summer vacation lined up on a different Altman film for me until I got out of school. I went to boarding school up in Vancouver Island at Brentwood College, and I get out of school. I had all English teachers. I loved that place, though. It was great. I played rugby and all that, but I always had to work twice as hard maybe or a lot harder than I would’ve if I didn’t have to protect my dad. I didn’t want to take any focus … I didn’t want to have him to have to do more production than he had to. Everyone looked at me like, “We know how you got in there because of your dad. Nepotism.” So I felt I could prove myself, so I didn’t have to deal with that shit.
GT: Yeah, yeah, I mean, that Nashville, which is I mean to look at your IMDb page, it’s what? 1975, so you were 14 back then?
GT: Each movie is pretty much every year after that.
Right. Yeah. I think it was a ‘Nashville’, ‘A Wedding’, ‘Buffalo Bill’ and ‘The Indians’, and ‘Quintet’. Yeah. Grade 11, I only worked in the art department, and I wanted to quit school and work on that in Montreal, but I couldn’t do that, but I did help design. I pretty much designed those ‘Quintet’, those three game pieces that each character had?
GT: Right.
Anyway. So and then, what, ‘3 Women’ in Palm Springs. We did all the painting and the pools, we painted the back of those pools in 120-degree weather and stuff. It’s been amazing.
GT: Yeah, yeah, you did ‘Popeye’, and you eventually moved from doing film stuff into doing TV.
Yeah, so I’d do a movie with my dad, and then, I would jump back over through the union and my contacts, and work TV shows. Yeah, I would always clear everything to do my dad’s films, but I’d have my own TV thing going here.
GT: So you did things like ‘Alien Nation’, the TV series. You did ‘The Wonder Years’, as well which, it was a great show.
‘The Wonder Years’, where Ken Topolsky, the line producer, came up to me, and he goes, “You’ve been doing this focus stuff a long time. You’re ready to move up, right?” I go, “Yes,” because it’s really hard to move up, and he says, “Okay, I’m moving you up,” and I go, “Okay!” He was bringing in feature DPs, and when they got another movie, then, he’d let them go and bring another one. People like, Russ Carpenter, Tim Sirsta, Rene Ohashi… Rene Ohashi was the DP when Ken said I’m moving you up, and he was like, “Okay. Jump on the dolly. There’s the wheels. I want you to start here and do a 180. Bring that guy around,” and I went for it. I guess I did okay with it. We got through it, so that was cool. Then, from ‘The Wonder Years’, I drop back down to focus puller for ‘The Player’ because I wasn’t ready to operate for him on that and also that was the only way I could work on it.
Now, he’s moved John Lappin up to DP, because Pierre Mignon’s back went out with that jib arm thing that my dad loved. John’s the operating DP. He was one of the best focus puller’s I’d ever known, and we’re on ten to one, and the opening shot of ‘The Player’ was probably the easiest shot I ever pulled focus on because everything was marked. The Titan crane would roll in, hit a mark, the grips would drop right over a mark, we’d be zooming into 250 through a window. Then, we’d zoom back out, and it’d come around and hit another mark, and then we’d zoom into the postcard. So, you didn’t have monitors to look at it, so it was really me pulling focus, and the operator DP telling me if I was off a little. He would just slide the wheel a little as he went in, but that was pretty amazing. Then, the rest of that movie, whenever we were on that jib arm thing that my dad loved because it gave him that floating feeling with the zoom. It was just going crazy. At one point I’m like, “I’m done, I can’t do this”, and John said, “You American’s are lazy, you put a mark here, and then, you put a mark there. You don’t even know how far those marks really are. You need to learn the barrel size of the lens, and you need to, just think plywood, you know what those are right? Four by eight feet, just think plywood.” So, I did and a couple of days, it looked in and I was on it.
GT: Following on from doing TV shows you say you jumped backwards and forwards between TV and movies. You worked with Kevin Smith on ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back’. That must have been such a fun film to do.
Well, I came in to do added scenes for about three weeks, and we showed all kinds of stuff, and it was really interesting. We had that Scooby animatron dog in the van and all that stuff. Yeah, it was hilarious.
GT: I’m a huge Kevin Smith fan, so I love things like that. ‘Boston Legal’ you worked on.
Yeah, I worked a little bit on Boston Legal and that’s when I was on the lockdown in Redondo Beach at Manhattan Beach Studios. That’s where my friend Buzz was over there on ‘The OC’, so I went over and said, “Hey, what’s up?” Buzzy and I, he’s a DP, Buzz Feitshans, and he bought a house right by Universal and I rented a room from that house. I met him on the set of ‘Knight Rider’, I came in at [inaudible 00:15:54], and we had 13 Arri 3 cameras and all 400-foot mags.
We’re setting up and there’s all these people, operators and cam, and they were getting their cameras and their assignments, and then, I’m like, “Buzz, there’s no film in this truck. Just the mags.” He’s like, “Oh, fuck,” so he said. He calls and he goes, “Just wait. As soon as it comes in, load 13 mags as fast as you can and run under these cameras because we’re going to get all setup, and hopefully, we don’t have to wait.”
Comes in, pop out the 13 and I run to each camera and nobody knows. I worked with him for years and then, we worked together. We worked for a guy named Frank Lynn, not the other Frank Lynn, but this Frank Lynn was second unit DP. We did a lot of stuff with all the stunt people. They were tied together and that’s how I met Buzz. I go over to ‘The OC’ and I see Buzz again and he’s like, “Well, hey. Do you want to come and do B camera on ‘The OC’ because there’s a spot opening up,” and I’m like, “Yeah, that would be great.” I think I did three seasons of that or two and a half. That’s where I really started shooting, learning lighting, and learning his lighting, and being able to put it all … starting to put it all together.
GT: Yeah, so from there, you move on to ‘Lost’.
Right. ‘The OC’ came to an end, I get a phone call on that last day, “Hey! Can you come and do ‘Lost’, Season 3?” and I go, “Yeah!” My niece’s husband is Tommy Lohmann, steady cam operator, he was the A camera operator on ‘Lost’ at that time. Paul Lohmann [Tommy’s father] shot ‘Nashville’, ‘Buffalo Bill’, ‘The Indians’ and ‘California Splits’. They were little kids when I was a little kid. They were half as old as I was. Then, when I did ‘Kansas City’, I was the operator. That was my first big movie as an operator and with Oliver Stapleton and my dad, and then, I had hired Thomas as my assistant on that. Anyway, he ended up marrying my niece and they have a daughter together. They live in Venice and they’re great.
Now, he calls me to go to ‘Lost’, so I ended up doing two seasons of that as an operator. Then, when that ended, I came back and shot a web series for Josh Schwartz, the producer of ‘The OC’. I shot that on HBX 200s. We only had enough lights for the actors to go to three different marks or something like that. We pulled it off. We made a real production out of something where there was really no money to do it.
GT: The next big TV show you come to is one of my favourite TV shows of all time. ‘Chuck’.
Yeah. ‘Chuck’ was great. That was Buzzy again, so we get all shot in Super 16 and that was a very ambitious show, but what a great family, what a great group of people. That was really crazy, but when you’d think you’d be going home at around 13 hours in, that’s when you do the giant stunt scene with five cameras, an explosion, and 16 guys dropping out of helicopters!
After three years on that, when I went to any other show, I’m like, “These are really short hours!” 12 hours seem short compared to that, but we had to jump in and really put our heads together to get it done and do it because we were always on the bubble of being cancelled. We didn’t know if we were going to come back the next season. But Zac, Yvonne, and the whole group of people was amazing. There, I did all the double up days and shot all the second units. The same thing as with ‘The OC’ and that really got me started. That experience was what set me up for when I moved up on ‘Bones’.
GT: Yeah, ‘Chuck’ is the first place you officially get a series with a director of photography credit, rather than the camera credit.
Right because then, Buzz directed an episode and I got to shoot the one when he was prepping in his, and a couple more we split, and then he took some time off and I’d do another one, that kind of thing, so it was great. It was great.
GT: Yeah, and then, you do ‘Heart of Dixie’, then, you come on to ‘Bones’ which is another amazing show.
Yeah, I went on, with Buzz to ‘Heart of Dixie’ and the producers were a little like, “You have to shoot everything really long lens and you have to be wide open with foreground and we don’t want to know that we’re shooting on the backlot.” We never left Warner Brothers Studio. They were all worried about that and they really were testing Buzz in the beginning. To be on a peewee dolly, zoomed in to 290 and trying to keep it steady was ridiculous. They wouldn’t bump for the bigger dollies.
People think that’s digital. Everything’s getting smaller and easier, we don’t need any lights. Well, that’s not so true is it, but anyway. Yeah, I was pretty depressed. I was getting depressed there because I wasn’t shooting much, and it was like, okay… Then, after one season of that, I know I’m going back for two if I wanted, but the phone rings on hiatus and they ask me to come in to do ‘Bones’.
That was through Ian Toynton, who was the showrunner on ‘The OC’ and a great director from England who started in the BBC. Great guy, and he called me. During hiatus, I guess I went on day, played as an operator a little bit on ‘Bones’ and then, they called me to come in and operate A camera and shoot the double ups. I bumped right over there and that was amazing. That’s where a lot of great things started to happen for me.
GT: Yeah, you’re down as camera operator, director of photography. Did you direct an episode as well?
Yeah, I directed an episode as well. I went in. I get in there, it’s a really tense set. I’m the A operator. New season. The operator, Gordon Longsdale, left to go do ‘CSI: Miami’ or something, and then Greg Collier moved up to DP. They hired me to come in as the A operator. It was a very tense set. I mean there was a lot of pressure and stuff.
I came in, my personality, and I tried to lighten everything up a little bit, but still keep it serious and they eased everyone into a different energy field and we had a really good time. Then, Jan DeWitt, the line producer, says, “Hey Bobby. We need to do this cliff thing, so I’m going to have you come out.” Next thing I know, I’m shooting, set prepping, doing way more DP stuff throughout that season and the next one.
When I would shoot my second units, I would use the multiple cameras. If I could get three, I would always get three, especially if we had to get David [Boreanaz] out or we had to get a big scene done in a short amount of time. That’s my favourite part of this whole thing, is being creative, thinking outside of the box, trying to find ways to hide the cameras, use them together, get different angles and coverage. And if it’s the camera, the second camera, or third camera is not doing anything, I’ll always find some extra angle or off angle, single, something to give the director and editor more ways to cut around stuff.
David, I could tell, liked me. Emily was great, all the cast was amazing, so I started to fit right in. We did a western episode in season 11 and Chad Lowe was the director and it was really intense. We only had six hours with David for three days, at this western town up here, and it was very short hours, it was in the winter time.
I got them to give me four cameras and then, Jan’s like, “Why don’t you get a tightened crank,” because I told the reps and everybody we’re going to embrace this like it’s a western, we’re going to shoot it like it’s a western. We’re not going to cover the actors, we’re not going to do all the normal stuff we do. We’re going to let the sun blast down, I’ll talk to David and Emily, and let them know because they’re going to have their cowboy hats on when they’re outside anyway, and make sure they’re cool with it.
Then, we’ll bounce light in, we’ll get a bunch of 18k’s and do the western thing, which when that became the thing when we were doing that, it took so much pressure off me because I was like, “All right. This is fun.” Well, get a tightened crank because that’s what they used on westerns. I go, “Yeah!” So, we had the tightened crane for the master and then, I’d put a long lens underneath it.
Then, I’d have 250 foot dolly trucks on each side to get the cross angles, and I’d set each scene into the backlight at the right time of day, so we planned it all out. We go this scene, we do three a day, three giant scenes, that had about four scenes inside of them. Chad’s like, “Well, what are you doing,” and I go, “I’m setting up for this whole thing.” He goes, “No. No. Let’s just do the beginning first, then we’ll do …” and I go, “Well, okay…”
I’d still set it up for the whole thing and he goes, “What are you doing,” and I go, “Yeah. Well, we’re ready to do the beginning first,” but then, they can walk into the next thing and we can continue or we can stop and then, we can restart, but I’ll be ready. We bam, bam, bam, bam, did all that stuff. Then Randy Zisk came, the showrunner after Ian, and he started shooting all the pieces and little inserts and stuff that we needed to pull it all together, and we were out of there.
I think we did 10 hour days. We got everything and more. At that point, I’m like if I don’t let them know I want to direct, they’re not going to ask me, and I did. One of the writers, a friend of mine, I’m telling her that story, she goes, “You got to ask Michael Peterson [Producer]. You just gotta ask,” and she mentioned it to him. She goes, “I mentioned it to him. He’s excited, but you need to ask him,” so, I shot an email over, and he replied, “After what you’ve done on this show for us, you can have anything you want.” I’m like, “Right on!” We finish Season 11 and then I was booked directing an episode on Season 12.
GT: How was it making that transition from being the camera operator into the directing chair?
Well, it was very seamless for me. Subconsciously, I know way more than I even realise. I sat in that war room/prep room, and I was there 12/14 hours a day where normally, you’d be in and out of there pretty quick during prep time. But I had pictures of all the cast, I had pictures of all the derby cars, and I ended up getting ‘The Steel In The Wheels’, which was about a bank robber and a murderer, and then, Booth and Brennan go undercover as demolition derby drivers in a derby.
I remember that episode! Yeah.
So, months before, I said, “Jan, there’s a derby.” He said, “The guys that are going to do our demolition derby, the guy’s name is this and they’re having a thing up in Mariposa, California. So I said, “I’m going over the weekend,’ and I flew up there, took my camera 87, and I shot all this footage and I interviewed them and I took my wife and daughter, and we tried to learn as much as we could about the whole crazy thing, because I had no idea. That really helped a lot. Yeah, it was amazing.
So, that war room, I had pictures of all the cars and I’d go to David and Emily and I’d say, “So what do you want your cars like? How’s this name? What colours do you like?” Well, David’s like, “Philly colours.” Emily’s like, “Vegan Green.” I made sure they were happy and they got to put their thing in with their characters. They’re great if you let them do what they do and be the characters they want to be, who they create, especially when they’re creating another character undercover. Everyone had so much fun.
Then, David had a scene. He got his wife, Jamie, in to play Delta Dawn, one of the derby drivers who is this beautiful model. So, there’s a scene where David’s son comes up to get an autograph. Hilary Graham, one of the co-writers, and the other writer was Michael’s brother, Ted Peterson, they came up to me and they’re like, “It’s a little weird that the 13-year-old boy’s going up to this model to get an autograph. If you had a little sister with him, that’ll balance out.” I’m like, “Great. My daughter, Cora, will be perfect.” They’re going, “Awesome!” Then, I’m thinking, “Aw man, she’s just going to be standing there without a line,” so I called Michael, “Can you give Cora a couple lines,” and he’s like, “Sure!” She got her couple of lines, so now, she’s got her SAG card up in there.
GT: [Laughs] That’s brilliant!
It was so much fun. I’ve never had more fun in my life. I was very planned, organised, I knew where the crane shots were going. In my head and on paper, I blocked every scene out, so I’d have somewhere to start, and no actor bumped on any of it. Everything happened the way I planned it. The only reason I like to plan it and have it all locked down in my head is it’s a place to start, but it’s also it’s extremely efficient because then, we can really fly through and do more takes if we need to or whatever.
GT: So you recently came off shooting ‘Valor’. That’s the thing you’ve been shooting recently for him.
Yeah. Randy Zisk, showrunner of ‘Bones’, says to Steve Robins, whose brother shot the pilot of ‘Valor’, “You got to hire Bobby as the DP.” I get the call, I go in and there’s two DPs. This is the first time I’ve alternated, so the other DP is Yaron Levy. He came in first and he set up everything. He was setting up the stages for the lighting and everything. Both of us said, in our interviews to the showrunners, to Kyle and Anna, was we watched the pilot “I watched the pilot and I think it’s a military thing. I feel like it needs to be more gritty,” and she goes, “That’s the keyword! We’ve been using that word! That’s what we all are thinking.”
To me, gritty is gritted, but still, the actors on a CW show are like the Barbie doll actors. They’re beautiful and young. Well, they love that. You got to have a key light and you got to give them some of that spunky lighting. Ron came in and he was going to go more rogue with it and go natural and let it fall off, dark, this and that.
What was great is Steve Robins comes to me. He goes, “You just do what you do. Don’t try to follow what he’s doing,” because he was different than me. He was playing with the colour temperatures, and doing all these things, and tricks, and games, but I came in and fell back on. That made me feel able. When Steve Robins told me that I could do what I do, it worked out great. It worked out.
Then you moved onto ‘Good Girls’?
‘Valor’ ended at Thanksgiving and the gaffer’s best boy went over to ‘Good Girls’ to gaff that. He’s over on ‘Good Girls’ and they were having an issue with their alternate DP that they hired, and so they asked me to shoot a scene on a Sunday because they were falling behind. I did that and then, I got called in to shoot episode seven and nine. Right before Christmas, I started prepping and I ended up doing two episodes.
That was a big gear shifting things because it went from ‘Valor’, military, seven-day episodes where we really have to do the chuck thing on that. “Give me three cameras, we can get it done,” and it’s go, go, go, go. I jump over there and it’s like, “Okay. We’re going to slow down. This is more like a feature.” We got big actors. The time we’re waiting is going to be because we’re waiting to get all three girls on the set at the same time. There’s all this politics going and the energy of the producers is completely different. It took me a minute to shift into it. But when I jump in, Jerzy Zielinski shot the pilot with Dean [Parisot], the director. They both do features together. They came in, and when the pilot got picked up, they shot that in LA. They recast one of the main roles and put in Christina [Hendricks], then they reshot all that pilot stuff, almost 90% of the pilot, in Atlanta, and then went into the episodes.
Jerzy loves Panavision Primos, he loves more natural lightning and stuff, so I’m like, “If they like what he’s doing, I’m going to follow them,” which is what I did. The only difference is, I used two cameras more and I have more of a TV sense of getting things done faster and as good as you can, which is always as good as a feature, but people don’t look at it that way.
I’m always into two cameras and then, when I finally felt at home enough, I crossed … There was a scene with Mae and her husband and it was a pretty intense scene where they’re drunk, and they have sex when they’re already divorced. Anyway, I cross covered them with the two cameras and got both their angles at the same time, wider, tighter, tight. She was so happy because they loved that and the editors love it. It’s easy to do if you keep all the light on the backside, so I hang a lot of lights, but I pulled that off and used multiple cameras. Then, they’re like, “Can you stay until the very end while we do episode 10. We need you to stay on because we have all this stuff for you to shoot that we haven’t got yet.” They love me and I had a great time.
My first director was Sharat Raju, he was a great guy. We had a great time. Then, my next director was Michael Weaver, who was the director of photography for years, and now is on the directing thing. So, he’s like, “You remind me of me when I was Dping,” but together, we had a really big episode where the three girls drive these three box trucks and do this shuffle thing on the freeway. We had a drone, we had a Russian arm, we had all kinds of stuff going on, and a lot of limitations, but we did it, so that was awesome.
My first director on ‘Valor’ was Mikael Salomon [DP turned Director of ‘Band Of Brothers’, ‘Rome’], and I’m like, “Oh my God. What a DP, the best!” He’s really intense and he’s really invested into the art of what he is doing, and I knew that I had to fall into his energy field and do it his way, what he wanted, because he was pretty much setting everything up into the best sunlight. I mean, I could never have been luckier because my first episode looked amazing because he was directing it. I didn’t have to say, “Can we just flip this scene around into that backlight?” “Oh, no. We can’t. The door is over there.” Whatever. It was cool. I got to working with the other DPs, when they’re directing, was really a great experience too.
GT: That’s awesome. Now for the last two questions which is we always ask everybody. The first question is, what TV shows are you watching at the moment?
Well, I’ll have to say ‘Stranger Things’, I loved the ‘Man in the High Castle’, and I try to look at a lot of the newer shows as they’re popping up to look at the lighting and stuff. Like my dad used to say, “See, I don’t really watch other’s people’s movies too much unless I’m on an aeroplane because I don’t want them to influence me.” Well, that’s a great thing to say. I don’t watch as much as I probably should. There are so many shows right now. I don’t think it’d be physically possible to work, have a family, my wife Barbara who’s amazing and my beautiful 11-year-old daughter Cora who’s now taking acting class.
I watch as much as I can, but some stick. One of them was the Donald Sutherland show, ‘Trust’. Dude, I did a pilot with him with Larry Sure as the DP a few years ago, and it was intense Donald Sutherland. The producers, they were all so worried if he got upset or this or that, but I watched that ‘Trust’. He’s an amazing actor and I think that’s quite a show, also.
GT: Finally, if you had the opportunity to work on any show, past, present, or future, not one that you’ve worked on, which show would it be?
I would say past, I’m happy with all the shows I did because look, I got to do all these Altman movies and I would never trade that for anything, so that’s hard for me to answer. I loved ‘Brazil’, that movie from years ago, those science fiction things. That would have been cool to do, so that would be past. Present, what I’m doing right now is perfect.
The future for me, right now, while I’m on this hiatus, I am writing a script with a younger person, a millennial [laughs]. I’m writing this film to direct it and my writer that I’m collaborating with Gabriela Costa de Nova. She’s an actress, director, choreographer, and a motivated person that’s really good at everything. That’s the person I need because I’m not a scriptwriter. I haven’t written scripts before, but I have this movie. It has about 20 characters, so it’s an ensemble cast, it’s “Altman-esque”, and it’s about the human condition and how people react under duress and pressure, watching what they do in a grid. I can’t really say what it is at this point, but for my future, I can’t wait to do that. That’s another thing, but I still will always DP. I love my job as a cinematographer, and I’m excited for whatever those next shows are going to be.
https://www.geektown.co.uk/2018/07/26/interview-cinematographer-director-robert-reed-altman-talks-bones-good-girls-his-career/
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Frank Olson Project
Olson Family
Collage Method
Credit: The elegance, richness, and ease of navigation of this website owe to the labor, talent, and ingenuity of Dylan Simpson who worked unstintingly on a brilliant re-design of the original site. He has created a resource which will be of lasting value to students, scholars, journalists, and the general public for years to come. My deepest thanks to him. — Eric Olson
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Murray, the Zelig
Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist
(CHAPTER 18)
by Alston Chase.
Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Henry Murray, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, played a key role in CIA psychological experimentation going back to his involvement with the OSS during World War II, as this chapter explains.
By a great biographical irony, I had already come to know Henry Murray quite well at Harvard in the early 1970’s, before I knew anything about the role of the CIA—or the alleged role of LSD—in my father’s death. My own critical response to Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test was one of the factors that led to my work on the collage method.
— Eric Olson
In giving the six unwitting Harvard seniors LSD that spring of 1954, Dr. Hyde was motivated by the highest ideals. He and his colleagues believed that by studying the effects of this drug on the brain, they might find a cure for mental illness. But the CIA was paying his bills, and it had a different agenda in mind. The agency wanted a drug, as LSD historians Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain put it, that would “blow minds and make people crazy.”
University researchers would soon discover that, like Dr. Faustus, the legendary Renaissance magician who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power, they had signed a contract before reading the fine print. And the fine print contained an ethical trap: Saving the world required the sacrifice—of others. In the name of the highest ideals, some would commit the lowest of crimes. Others, while not quite doing evil, simply lost their ethical direction. For both, this journey from high to low was such a gradual descent that many did not notice.
And among these fellow travelers would be Professor Murray
himself.
The agency’s interest began with its precursor, the OSS, in 1942, when General Donovan, anxious to perfect interrogation techniques for captured spies, established a “truth drug” committee of prominent psychologists, including Dr. Winfred Overholser, superintendent of St. Elizabethís hospital in Washington, D.C., and Dr. Edward Strecker, president of the American Psychiatric Association. The committee began testing a wide variety of chemicals on test subjects, from peyote and marijuana to “goofball” concoctions of sedatives and stimulants.
The following year, an obscure Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffmann, working for the Sandoz pharmaceutical company, accidentally imbibed a concoction he had created while looking for a circulation stimulant. The chemical was D-lysergic acid diethylamide, better known today as LSD. Without warning, Hoffmann found himself experiencing what was the world’s first acid trip. Coincidentally, at the same time, across the Rhine River in Germany, Nazi doctors were testing another hallucinogenic drug, mescaline, on inmates at the Dachau concentration camp.
The discovery of the Nazis’ Dachau notes after the war by U.S. Navy investigators triggered intense interest in mescaline in American intelligence circles. But it also generated alarm. The field of psychoactive drugs, it seemed, was yet another defense-related area in which the Nazis had been ahead of the Allies. To snatch up these Nazi experts in the dark sciences before the Soviets got them, the Pentagon launched ‘Operation Paperclip,’ a highly secret program to bring some of these German scientists into America. As most had been Nazis, their entry into the United States was prohibited by law. So Paperclip officials smuggled them in, forging, deleting, and doctoring documents to erase evidence of their Nazi past.
Some Paperclip scientists, such as the famous rocket specialist and Nazi Party member Werner von Braun, went to work in the U.S. space program. Others were chemical warfare specialists, experts on everything from sterilization to mass extermination. Among these were members of the former team of doctors already wanted by the U.S. Army war crimes unit for having conducted the ghoulish “high-altitude” (oxygen and pressure deprivation) experiments on Dachau inmates that killed at least seventy. These men would carry on similar research for the U.S. Air Force. Still other Paperclip scientists were sent to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, where they were put on the CIA payroll and began testing Nazi nerve and mustard gases on unwitting American GIs, seriously injuring several.
Soon, the very same Nazis who had helped to develop nerve gas and “Zyklon B”—tthe gas used to exterminate Jews at Auschwitzówere helping to perfect America’s own “Psychochemical Warfare” program, testing everything from alcohol to LSD on unsuspecting American soldiers. At Edgewood and Fort Holabird, Maryland (where I was stationed as a young second lieutenant in intelligence in 1957-58) at least one thousand soldiers were given up to twenty doses of LSD. Some, locked in boxes and then given LSD, went temporarily insane. Others had epileptic seizures.
In 1949, a Viennese chemist named Otto Kauders gave a lecture on LSD at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, claiming that this newly discovered drug artificially and temporarily induced psychosis. This claim would later be found false — acid trips are not at all like psychosis — but Kaudersís account impressed the hospital staff. If LSD reproduced the symptoms of psychosis, they reasoned, this proved that the disease had a chemical base. So studying LSD’s effects might lead them to drugs for treating mental illness.
Shortly after Kaudersís talk, one hospital staffer, Max Rinkel, ordered a supply of LSD from Sandoz and then persuaded his colleague Robert Hyde to test it on himself. Hyde’s ensuing trip—the first by an American—fired his enthusiasm for further experimentation. Research on one hundred subjects began at Harvard’s Boston Psychopathic under Hyde’s direction in 1950
Meanwhile, the CIA was in hot pursuit of the elusive truth drug. After the Soviets’ 1949 show trial of the Hungarian prelate Cardinal JÛzsef Mindszenty, this pursuit turned into a race. At the trial, the cardinal confessed to crimes he clearly didn’t commit, and acted as though he were sleepwalking. Other Soviet show trials demonstrated the same apparent “brainwashing” of prisoners. Later, it would be learned that the Soviets didn’t use drugs at all to accomplish this. Their major weapon was psychology and sleep deprivation. But at the time, the CIA suspected the Soviets had some super-mind-control drug. And they had to have it too.
In 1949, according to John Marks, who first broke the story of CIA experimentation with LSD, the agency’s head of Scientific Intelligence went to Western Europe to learn more about Soviet techniques and to supervise experiments of his own, in order, this official explained, to “apply special methods of interrogation for the purpose of evaluation of Russian practices.” By the spring of 1950, the agency established a special program under its security division named “Operation Bluebird” to test behavior-control methods, and started recruiting university scholars to work for the program. Bluebird scientists began experimenting on North Korean prisoners of war and others. They tried “ice-pick lobotomies,” electroshock, and other “neural-surgical techniques,” as well as a host of drugs including cocaine, heroin, and even something called a “stupid bush,” whose effects remain classified to this day.
To pursue these shadowy endeavors, the government enlisted the elite of the American psychological establishment, either as conduits, consultants, or researchers. According to a later agency review, these helpers included at least ninety-three universities and other governmental or nonprofit organizations, including Harvard, Cornell, the University of Minnesota, the Stanford University School of Medicine, the Lexington, Kentucky, Narcotics Farm, several prisons and penitentiaries, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Institutes of Health.
Project Bluebird was renamed “Project Artichoke” in 1951, and in that same year the CIA discovered LSD. When the Korean War drew to a close the following spring, the CIA’s interest in the drug became an obsession.
As American prisoners of the Chinese were repatriated, authorities discovered to their horror that 70 percent had either made confessions of “guilt” for participating in the war or had signed petitions calling for an end to the U.S. war effort in Asia. Fifteen percent collaborated fully with the Chinese, and only 5 percent refused to cooperate with them at all. Clearly, the Chinese had found new and formidable brainwashing techniques that could transform American servicemen into “Manchurian candidates” programmed to do Communist bidding. America faced a brainwash gap!
Pushing the panic button, in April 1953 the CIA replaced Project Artichoke with a more ambitious effort called MKULTRA, under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, a brilliant chemist with a degree from CalTech. Gottlieb was the ultimate dirty trickster, having personally participated in attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. And he immediately put his talents to work, this time against Americans.
Once MKULTRA was established, say Lee and Shlain, “almost overnight a whole new market for grants in LSD research sprang into existence as money started pouring through CIA-linked conduits.” Among these conduits was the Josiah J. Macy Foundation, whose director was an ex-OSS officer named Frank Fremont-Smith. And among the beneficiaries of this covert funding would be Harold Abramson, an acquaintance of Gregory Bateson’s, who was an allergist at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital and a CIA consultant to Edgewood Arsenal’s Paperclip scientists. Another was Hydeís group at Boston Psychopathic.
The aim, Gottlieb explained, was “to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behavior by covert means.” LSD, he hoped, would turn out to be the Swiss Army knife of mind control—an all-purpose drug that could ruin a man’s marriage, change his sexual behavior, make him lie or tell the truth, destroy his memory or help him recover it, induce him to betray his country or program him to obey orders or disobey them.
Soon, MKULTRA was testing all conceivable drugs on every kind of victim, including prison inmates, mental patients, foreigners, the terminally ill, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities. Altogether, it conducted tests at fifteen penal and mental institutions, concealing its role by using the U.S. Navy, the Public Health Service, and the National Institute of Mental Health as funding conduits. During the ten years of MKULTRA’s existence, the agency’s inspector general reported after its termination in 1963, the program experimented with “electro-shock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials.”
Its brainwashing research also took the CIA to Canada, where the agency hired an eminently prestigious psychologist, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, president of the Canadian, American, and World Psychiatric associations and head of the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University (which had been founded with money from the Rockefeller Foundation). Cameron’s studies centered on what he called “depatterning” and what one CIA operative described as the “creation of a vegetable.” This entailed giving unwitting test subjects bevies of drugs that caused them to sleep for several weeks, virtually straight, with only brief waking intervals. This was followed by up to sixty-five days of powerful electroshock “therapy,” where each jolt was twenty to forty times more intense than standard electroshock treatment. After this program, some were given LSD and put in sensory deprivation boxes for another sixty-five days.
By the late 1950s, the CIA and LSD had become virtually inseparable. The advent of LSD, Timothy Leary would declare later, “was no accident. It was all planned and scripted by the Central Intelligence.”
Indeed, it was. As Lee and Shlain explain:
Nearly every drug that appeared on the black market during the 1960s — marijuana, cocaine, heroin, PCP, amyl nitrite, mushrooms, DMT, barbiturates, laughing gas, speed and many others — had previously been scrutinized, tested, and in some cases refined by CIA and army scientists. But of all the techniques explored by the Agency in its multimillion-dollar twenty-five-year quest to conquer the human mind, none received as much attention or was embraced with such enthusiasm as LSD-25. For a time CIA personnel were completely infatuated with the hallucinogen. Those who first tested LSD in the early 1950s were convinced that it would revolutionize the cloak-and-dagger trade.
To push its drugs, the CIA sought help from the university elite. In 1969, John Marks reports,
the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs published a fascinating little study designed to curb illegal LSD use. The authors wrote that the drug’s “early use was among small groups of intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast universities. It spread to undergraduate students, then to other campuses. Most often, users have been introduced to the drug by persons of high status. Teachers have influenced students; upperclassmen have influenced lower classmen.” Calling this a “trickle-down phenomenon,” the authors seem to have correctly analyzed how LSD got around the country. They left out only one vital element, which they had no way of knowing: That somebody had to influence the teachers and that up there at the top of the LSD distribution system could be found the men of MKULTRA.
Fremont-Smith and Abramson were the links between the universities and MKULTRA.
Fremont-Smith organized the conferences that spread the word about LSD to the academic hinterlands. Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead’s former husband, his first LSD. In 1959 Bateson, in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet friend of his named Allen Ginsberg to take the drug at a research program located off the Stanford campus.
And Murray was part of this drug-testing pyramid. During this time, according to Frank Barron, he had supervised experiments “on the subjective effects of psycho-active drugs, injecting adrenaline . . . into naive subjects to study changes in their subjectivity.” And in 1960, even as the “Multiform Assessments” on Kaczynski and his classmates were underway, Murray had, according to Leary, given his blessing to the latter’s testing psilocybin, an hallucinogen derived from mushrooms, on undergraduates.
In his autobiography, Flashbacks, Leary, who would dedicate the rest of his life to “turning on and tuning out,” described Murray as “the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation. Murray expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support.”
Leary had taken LSD for the first time at Harvard in 1959, where, traveling in Abramson’s orbit, he had attended Fremont-Smithís Macy Foundation conferences on the drug. And Murray, write Lee and Shlain, “took a keen interest in Leary’s work. He volunteered for a psilocybin session, becoming one of the first of many faculty and graduate students to sample the mushroom pill under Learyís guidance.”
By that time, Gregory Bateson was working at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California. While he was introducing Allen Ginsberg to the drug, a colleague began testing it on Stanford undergraduates. One of these students was Ken Kesey, who would later write One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and was soon to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe as a “Merry Prankster” and LSD missionary in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Meanwhile, Murray, already addicted to amphetamines, continued to flirt with hallucinogens. At Leary’s suggestion, according to a former colleague, he took psilocybin again, this time with Aldous Huxley and Ginsberg. He introduced Morgan to LSD. And in 1961 he spoke at the International Congress of Applied Psychology in Copenhagen, which, thanks to Leary and Huxley’s presence, turned into a virtual psychoactive circus. His talk there, wrote Forrest Robinson, featured “a highly literary rendering of a psilocybin ‘trip’ that he took with Timothy Leary a year earlier. . . . ‘The newspapers described it as the report of a drug-induced vision,’ he wrote [Lewis] Mumford, with obvious delight.”
Not all scientists worked for the CIA. And many did so unwittingly. Nor was this agency the only covert intelligence bureaucracy sponsoring Cold War studies. The U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and other defense agencies financed their own experiments as well, often duplicating each otherís efforts, sometimes at the same institutions. (The Harvard Medical School, for example, conducted LSD research on unwitting subjects for the Department of the Army in 1952-54, even as Hyde continued with similar work at Boston Psychopathic for the CIA.)
And although LSD may have been the most sensational subject, Lee and Shlain make clear that it was far from the only field in which the government was prime mover. Cold War research ran the gamut, from investigations of sleep deprivation to perfecting anthrax delivery systems. It co-opted nearly an entire generation of scholars in the physical, social, and health sciences. This work was so various, so widespread, and so secret that even today it is impossible to grasp its full dimensions.
Among MKULTRA papers that later came to light, Lee and Shlain write, were
CIA documents describing experiments in sensory deprivation, sleep teaching, ESP, subliminal projection, electronic brain stimulation, and many other methods that might have applications for behavior modification. One project was designed to turn people into programmed assassins who would kill on automatic command. Another document mentioned “hypnotically-induced anxieties” and “induced pain as a form of physical and psychological control.” There were repeated references to exotic drugs and biological agents that caused “headache clusters,” uncontrollable twitching or drooling, or a lobotomy-like stupor. Deadly chemicals were concocted for the sole purpose of inducing a heart attack or cancer without leaving a clue as to the actual source of the disease. CIA specialists also studied the effects of magnetic fields, ultrasonic vibration, and other forms of radiant energy on the brain. As one CIA doctor put it, “We lived in a never-never land of ‘eyes only’ memos and unceasing experimentation.”
As university professors and hospital researchers pursued their devil’s bargain with the intelligence community, victims accumulated.
On January 8, 1953, Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player, reportedly died from a massive overdose of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The drug, say the investigative journalists H. P. Albarelli, Jr., and John Kelly, was administered “as part of a top-secret Army-funded experimental program . . . code named Project Pelican, in which Blauer was used as a guinea pig.” The supervisor of the project was Dr. Paul H. Hoch, director of experimental psychiatry and, according to Albarelli and Kelly, an associate of Harold Abramson’s.
Project Pelican, write Albarelli and Kelly, was part of a larger cooperative venture between the CIA and the army’s Chemical Corps Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, called MK-NAOMI — reputedly named after Abramsonís assistant, Naomi Busner. The project’s purpose, according to CIA documents, was to develop biological weapons that could be used on “individuals for the purposes of affecting human behavior with the objectives ranging from very temporary minor disablement to more serious and longer incapacitation to death.” At the behest of the Chemical Corps, the New York medical examiner conducted no autopsy of Blauer, kept the army’s name out of its report, and described the death as an accidental overdose.
Eleven months later, the CIA claimed another victim. On November 28, 1953, a Fort Detrick biochemist fell — or was pushedófrom a thirteenth-floor window of New York’s Statler Hotel on Seventh Avenue, falling 170 feet to the sidewalk. He was still alive and trying to talk when the night manager, Armond Pastore, reached him, but died a few minutes later.
Frank Olson, a chemist and joint employee of the CIA and Army Chemical Corps, had worked his entire professional life at Fort Detrick. An expert in germ warfare, during World War II he had designed clothing intended to protect Allied soldiers from possible German biological attacks during the Normandy invasion. In 1949 and 1950, he worked briefly on “Operation Harness,” a joint US-British effort to spray virulent organisms — so-called BW antipersonnel agents — around the Caribbean, decimating untold thousands of plants and animals. At the time of his death, Olson was developing a new, portable, and more lethal form of anthrax that could be put into a small spray can.
By 1953, Olson was acting chief of Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, which, according to a Michael Ignatieff article in the New York Times Magazine, had become “the center for the development of drugs for use in brainwashing and interrogation.” But he was becoming increasingly disillusioned.
The turning point came during the summer of 1953. Olson had traveled to England and Germany to observe the use of mind-control drugs on collaborators and German SS prisoners considered “expendable.” Some died. While in Europe, according to his son, Eric, Frank Olson also learned that the Americans were deploying Anthrax against enemy troops in Korea. When returning American POWs reported this — the first use of bacterial weapons by the United States in war — authorities in Washington dismissed their claims as products of brainwashing. Returning to America shaken, Olson resolved to quit.
On November 19, Gottlieb met with six MKULTRA personnel, including Olson, at Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland. The CIA would claim twenty-two years later that during the retreat, on Gottlieb’s order, his deputy, Robert Lashbrook, spiked the after-dinner Cointreau with LSD. Olson and all but two of the others (one a teetotaler, the other abstaining because of a headcold) drank it. In fact, Eric Olson believes that only his father’s drink was spiked, and that the substance he imbibed was probably not LSD but something stronger. In any case, soon, Olson was experiencing disorientation.
When he came home, his wife, Alice, found him withdrawn, saying repeatedly that he “had made a terrible mistake.” The next day he told his supervisor, Vincent Ruwet, that he wanted to resign from the agency. But officials couldn’t afford to let him leave. He knew too much. Once outside, he could be an acute embarrassment. So Ruwet and Lashbrook took Olson to New York, supposedly to see a psychiatrist. In fact, they brought him to Harold Abramson, who prescribed nembutal and bourbon.
According to the CIA, Ruwet and Lashbrook had earlier taken Olson to see John Mulholland, a magician hired by the CIA to advise on “the delivery of various materials to unwitting subjects” — i.e., on how to spike drinks with drugs or poisons. Olson was suspicious of Mulholland and asked Ruwet, “Whatís behind this? Give me the lowdown. What are they trying to do with me? . . . Just let me disappear.”
That evening, Olson wandered the streets of New York, discarding his wallet and identification cards before returning to the Statler. And the next day, the CIA claims its experts decided Olson must be institutionalized. Yet he seemed to be feeling better. After he and Lashbrook ate a dreary Thanksgiving meal at a Horn & Hardart restaurant, the two men returned to their room at the Statler, which they shared, and Olson called Alice to say he “looked forward to seeing her the next day.”
Around 2:00 a.m. the next morning, Pastore found Olson on the sidewalk. Olson tried to tell Pastore something, but his words were too faint and garbled to be understood. He died before the ambulance arrived. Immediately afterward, Pastore asked the hotel operator if she’d overheard any calls from Room 1081A. Yes, she said, two. In one, someone from the room said, “He’s gone,” and the voice at the other end of the line said, “That’s too bad.”
The CIA hushed up Olson’s death. The medical examiner made no mention of the CIA, did not do an autopsy, and ruled the death a suicide due to depression. The family didn’t believe this story, as Olson had never seemed depressed until after the retreat at Deep Creek Lodge. Yet it would not be until 1975 that they would learn some of the circumstances of his death, and even then not apparently the whole story.
At the request of Frank Olson’s son, Eric, an autopsy was performed in 1994, revealing that Olson had apparently been struck on the left side of the temple and knocked unconscious before going through the window. In 1998, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office reclassified Olson’s death “cause unknown.”
With Olson’s death, the culture of despair had come full circle. Having experienced what Ellen Herman called “a collapse of faith in the rational appeal and workability of democratic ideology and behavior,” the generation of scholars that emerged from World War II had sought to perfect the tools of social control by which the elite would save democracy. Following the rubrics of positivism, they believed that good and evil are fictions. People aren’t bad, merely sick. By curing them, psychologists can prevent war. All problems can be fixed by the alchemy of the mind sciences.
But a world in which morality has no meaning is one in which eventually everything is permitted. The same narrow focus on value-free science that led Nazi concentration camp doctors to commit atrocities encouraged many of these well-meaning scholars to cross ethical lines. By following a path of moral agnosticism, they reached a dead end. Rather than saving democracy, they created tools for coercion, and many people were hurt.
Murray was a product of these times, a man whose career and ideas embodied the development of his discipline and its role in American culture. Like other leading psychologists of his generation, he was a beneficiary of the Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts to promote psychology in public policy. He was intensely patriotic and served on the Committee for National Morale. He flourished during World War II and he was a star in the OSS.
After the war, Murray’s contributions to personality theory, including the TAT, personnel assessment, and techniques for analyzing foreign leaders and countries, became virtual Cold War institutions. Throughout this undeclared conflict he continued to serve, albeit quietly, America’s defense efforts. And among the services he performed would be the experiments on Kaczynski and his cohort.
Even today, however, neither Murray’s friends, his widow, nor even some historians believe this. Murray, they argue, was a world federalist who, in Herman’s words, was “transformed into a militant pacifist and peace activist after the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Their skepticism is understandable. It is rare when even spouses know of these connections. The CIA never reveals the identity of its “assets.” Often the professor himself doesn’t know the originating source of research monies he receives. And Murray made much of his supposed transformation into ‘peace activist’ following Hiroshima.
Nevertheless, they are mistaken. Hiroshima did not convert Murray to world federalism. Even in 1943, during the same period when he was seeking combat duty in Europe, he wrote in his analysis of Hitler that “there is a great need now rather than later, for some form of World Federation” (Murray’s italics).
Rather, like so many “nervous liberals” of his generation, Murray was both hawk and dove. He resembled his contemporary, Cord Meyer, the war hero and onetime president of United World Federalists, who eventually became a top officer in the CIA. Such ambivalence characterized virtually the entire elite clique of East Coast professionals to which he belonged. Theirs was a world in which everyone knew each other, and many worked for the CIA. Murray was so surrounded by agency people he couldn’t have moved without bumping into one.
In fact, as we have seen, Murray was indeed a Cold War warrior—not, perhaps, as prominent a player as some, but a player nonetheless. He received steady funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which had served as cover for his trip with Cantril to the Soviet Union for the CIA in 1958, and from the National Institute of Mental Health, also known to be a covert funding conduit. He apparently worked for HumRRo. He served as an adviser on army-sponsored steroid experiments. He helped found Harvard’s Social Relations Department, which had been generously funded by covert intelligence agencies. He served the U.S. Army Surgeon General’s Clinical Psychology Advisory Board and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene with the CIA’s propagator of LSD, Frank Fremont-Smith. Along with Fremont-Smith, Abramson, and Leary, he occupied a spot on the agency’s LSD pyramid.
And in 1959, Murray would cap off a long and distinguished career with the last of a series of studies inspired by his OSS assessments and originally undertaken for the U.S. Navy Department. And Ted Kaczynski would participate.
Finding the cabin at Deep Creek Lake
Eric Olson
Deep Creek Lake, Maryland
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)”
— T.S. Eliot
“Little Gidding,” (1943) Four Quartets
I drove west from Frederick on Route 70 in a pouring rain, and continued in slightly better weather on Route 68 through Cumberland, a dilapidated town I hadn’t seen in 37 years, since Nils and I collapsed in exhaustion there on the first day of our bicycle trip to California in the summer of 1961. I kept thinking “Harolds Club or Bust.” Just west of Frostberg I turned south on Route 219.
When I reached the town of “Accident” Maryland I figured I must be getting close. (That town was named for two nineteenth century survey parties who happened—accidentally—to meet up there.) Sure enough, the Deep Creek Bridge, a key landmark for finding the old cabin, was just a few miles beyond.
I stopped at a restaurant a half mile or so from the bridge, and asked where I would find the “Bailey Cabin.” Nobody knew. But then came the suggestion that perhaps I meant the “Railey Cabin.” I had gotten the name from the old typewritten 1953 “Deep Creek Rendezvous” invitation. I checked the name more closely and discovered that the “B” was in fact an “R.” I was crushed to hear someone say “The old Railey cabin was torn down ten years ago,” but I revived fast when the next sentence came. “Go over and meet Mr. Railey, He’s next door drinking at the bar.”
Jim Railey is a small man in his late 70’s who still operates what appears to be a substantial a real estate business. I found him sitting at the bar nursing a Coca Cola. I explained why I was there, and Railey immediately knew the story. “No,” he said, “the old cottage is still there. It’s been added onto quite a bit, but it’s still there. The Stone Tavern that used to stand by the bridge is gone. But the cottage those guys from the CIA used—that’s still there.”
Railey had had only a dim memory of the guys from Washington who had rented the cottage forty-five years earlier. He and his father and brother had laid out the foundation for the place in the early 1940’s, and had finished building it in 1946 when the two brothers got home from the war.
Railey couldn’t say just when he had figured out that the guy who had gone out the window in New York was one of the men who had stayed in his cottage a few days earlier. But at some point he had remembered that a group of government guys had been in his place, and that Olson had been one of them. The cottage itself was only a quarter of mile from where we were sitting and Railey told me how to find it.
The mythical Deep Creek cabin: why had it taken me forty five years to go looking for it? And why had I had to wait until another investigator implied that maybe the place hadn’t been used for the experiment at all? By comparison it had only taken 31 years to find room 1018A in what had been the Statler Hotel. Then another 10 years to exhume the body. Finally I found myself driving toward the place where something had happened on a chilly November night 45 years ago, something that had set a bizarre chain of events in motion.
The stone house is just above the lake at the end of a small dirt road. It is built on a steep slope, and appears considerably larger from the lake side than from the approach. Nobody was home, so I spent half an hour looking in the windows, taking pictures, trying to imagine what might have occurred there those many years ago. I could see a big stone fireplace in the living room of a wing of the house that hadn’t been there in 1953. Just outside was a broad terrace with old lawn chairs facing the lake, and a set of wooden stairs going down 50 feet to the water. The old part of the house was all there was in ’53. In agreement with the 1953 invitation, Railey said the the cottage had had four only bedrooms, each with a double bed. It must have been tight, I thought, when the CIA group of four and the SOD group of five occupied it.
Point View Inn
I spent the night at the Point View Inn next to the bar where I had met Jim Railey. I was eating breakfast in the dining room overlooking the lake when Railey appeared again with pictures of the Stone Tavern and some of the smaller cottages. He hadn’t found a picture of the old Railey cabin as it looked in 1953, but as we sat drinking coffee he called his brother on his cell phone and Bud Railey promised to send me one.
As we talked about the old cabin Railey looked sad. Meeting me must have been strange for him, but I imagined there was more. It seemed as if, irrationally, a part of Jim Railey believed that what had happened in his cottage, and what it had led to, had been in some way his fault. This bizarre story has the power to make a lot of different people feel that way. I thought for example of Armand Pastore, who is Jim Railey’s contemporary and is clearly pained when he remembers the aspects he witnessed. The only people who seem to be immune to feelings like that are the ones who were actually involved in making it happen.
“Why Our Town is Called ‘Accident’?
About the year, 1751, a grant of land was given to Mr. George Deakins by King George II, of England, in payment of a debt. According to the terms, Mr. Deakins was to receive 600 acres of land anywhere in Western Maryland he chose. Mr. Deakins sent out two corps of engineers, each without knowledge of the other grroup, to survey the best land in this section that contained 600 acres.
After the survey, the Engineers returned with their maps of the plots they had surveyed. To their surprise, they discovered that they had surveyed a tract of land starting at the same tall oak tree and returning to the starting point. Mr. Deakins chose this plot of ground and had it patented ‘The Accident Tract’ — Hence, the name of the town.”
History from the back of the business card for:
Accident Garage, Main Street
Accident, Maryland
Allen Fratz, owner
1. Wormwood
Errol Morris’s Wormwood is a groundbreaking hybrid of non-fictional and fictional storytelling modes—although no matter how you classify it, it’s the year’s towering cinematic achievement. The filmmaker’s second release of the year (after the charming The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography) recounts the tangled saga of Frank Olson, a government biochemist whose mysterious 1953 death out a New York City hotel room window was first deemed a suicide, then the byproduct of a CIA mind-control program, and then something more sinister still. With Olson’s sleuthing son Eric as his guide, Morris immerses himself in this thorny true-crime case, using dramatized sequences—starring a phenomenal Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, Tim Blake Nelson, and Bob Balaban—for his 1953-set sequences, and documentary interviews and material for the rest. Wormwood is assembled as a hallucinatory, psychologically penetrating collage and plays like a pulse-pounding thriller, a damning indictment of institutional malfeasance, and a chilling portrait of both self-destructive obsession and the elusiveness of truth. Simultaneously released as both a 241-minute theatrical movie and a six-part Netflix mini-series, it’s a masterpiece that breathes new life into the documentary form, and further confirms Morris’ peerless greatness. Consequently, it’s our pick for the best film of 2017. Available to stream on Netflix.
PAUL ROBESON JR.
The Paul Robeson Files
The PBS American Masters documentary on Paul Robeson titled “Here I Stand” surveys the life and work of this great American artist, scholar, and activist. The documentary also examines the question of Robeson’ 1961 suicide attempt.
In the morning of March 27, 196 1, Paul Robeson was found in the bathroom of his Moscow hotel suite after having slashed his wrists with a razor blade following a wild party that had raged there the preceding night. His blood loss was not yet severe, and he recovered rapidly. However, both the raucous party and his “suicide attempt” remain unexplained, and for the past twenty years the US government has withheld documents that I believe hold the answer to the question: Was this a drug induced suicide attempt?
Heavily censored documents I have already received under the Freedom of Information Act confirm that my father was under intense surveillance by the FBI and the CIA in 1960 and 1961, because he was planning to visit China and Cuba, in violation of US passport restrictions. The FBI files also reveal a suspicious concern over my father’s health, beginning in 1955.
A meeting I had in 1998 adds further grounds for suspicion. In June of that year I met Dr. Eric Olson in New York, and we were both struck by the similarities between the cases of our respective fathers. On November 28, 1953, Olson’s father, Dr. Frank Olson, a scientist working with the CIA’s top-secret MK-ULTRA “mind control” program, allegedly “jumped” through the glass of a thirteenth-floor hotel window and fell to his death. CIA documents have confirmed that a week earlier Olson had been surreptitiously drugged with LSD at a high-level CIA meeting. It is expected that a New York grand jury will soon reveal whether it believes Olson was murdered by the CIA because of his qualms about the work he was doing. MK-ULTRA poisoned foreign and domestic “enemies” with LSD to induce mental breakdown and/ or suicide. Olson’s drugging suggested a CIA motive similar to the possible one in my father’s case—concern about the target’s planned course of action.
In this context, the fact that Richard Helms was CIA chief of operations at the time of my father’s 1961 “suicide attempt” has sinister implications. Helms was also responsible for the MK-ULTRA program. In 1967 a former CIA agent to whom I promised anonymity told me in a private conversation that my father was the subject of high-level concern and that Helms and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles discussed him in a meeting in 1955.
The events leading to my father’s “suicide attempt” began when, alarmed by intense surveillance in London, he departed abruptly for Moscow alone. His intention was to visit Havana at Fidel Castro’s personal invitation and return home to join the civil rights movement. Since the date set by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion fell only four weeks after his arrival in Moscow, the CIA had a strong motive for preventing his travel to Havana.
My father manifested no depressive symptoms at the time, and when my mother and I spoke to him in the hospital soon after his “suicide” attempt, he was lucid and able to recount his experience clearly. The party in his suite had been imposed on him under false pretenses, by people he knew but without the knowledge of his official hosts. By the time he realized this, his suite had been invaded by a variety of anti-Soviet people whose behavior had become so raucous that he locked himself in his bedroom. His description of that setting, I later came to learn, matched the conditions prescribed by the CIA for drugging an unsuspecting victim, and the physical psychological symptoms he experienced matched those of an LSD trip.
My Russian being fluent, I confirmed my father’s story by interviewing his official hosts, his doctors, the organizers of the party, several attendees and a top Soviet official. However, I could not determine whether my father’s blood tests had shown any trace of drugs, whether an official investigation was in progress or why his hosts were unaware of the party. The Soviet official confirmed that known “anti-Soviet people” had attended the party.
By the time I returned to New York in early June, my father appeared to me to be fully recovered. However, when my parents returned to London several weeks later, my father became anxious, and he and my mother returned to Moscow. There his wellbeing was again restored, and in September they once more went back to London, where my father almost immediately suffered a relapse. My mother, acting on the ill-considered advice of a close family friend, allowed a hastily recommended English physician to sign my father into the Priory psychiatric hospital near London.
My father’s records from the Priory, which I obtained only recently, raise the suspicion that he may have been subjected to the CIA’s MK-ULTRA “mind depatterning” technique, which combined massive electroconvulsive therapy with drug therapy. On the day of his admission, my mother was pressured into consenting to ECT, and the treatment began just thirty-six hours later. In May 1963 1 learned that my father had received fifty four ECT treatments, and I arranged his transfer to a clinic in East Berlin.
Certain key CIA documents that have been withheld, in whole or in part, would probably shed additional light on these events. Among the questions to be answered are:
Why was Robeson’s health such a concern to the government, and why is the FBI’s information on it still being withheld?
Was the CIA implicated in my father’s 1961 “suicide attempt”?
Did the CIA, in collusion with the British intelligence service, orchestrate his subjection to “mind depatterning”?
The idea that thirty-eight years after the original events occurred, the release of these documents could endanger national security should be rejected. On the contrary, the release of the information will improve national security by helping to protect the American people from criminal abuse by the intelligence agencies that are supposed to defend them.
In reburial, Olsons hope to lay saga of father to rest
Family has disputed government claims he committed suicide in ’53; Ceremony planned for today
By Stephanie Desmon
Baltimore Sun Staff
Originally published August 9, 2002
FREDERICK — It was here in the Olson family back yard in 1975 that the world first learned the name of a man who, the story went, had been unwittingly drugged with LSD by the Central Intelligence Agency 22 years earlier and then jumped to his death from a 10th-floor hotel room.
The Olsons – among them Eric, the oldest child – called a news conference. Reporters from throughout the country came to the house that Frank Olson had built and gathered around the picnic table to listen.
Reporters heard that family patriarch Frank Olson, ostensibly an Army scientist, had committed suicide in 1953. But that explanation left the family – Eric Olson in particular – with many questions about Frank Olson’s life and death.
Eight years ago, questions unanswered, Frank Olson’s body was exhumed from the Frederick cemetery where it had lain for more than 40 years. Forensic experts are hesitant to assert anything with complete certainty, but they said the death was not a suicide.
Today, Eric Olson and his family will try to put their questions, theories and suspicions to rest as they rebury what is left of Frank Olson in the cemetery plot he shared with his wife. Yesterday, from the same picnic table, Eric Olson, now 57, spoke again to reporters, this time saying he knows how his father was killed, and why – enough answers to allow him to move on.
“I feel satisfied,” said Olson, a Harvard-educated clinical psychologist. “We’re where we want to be – we know what happened.”
What Olson says he knows is this: His father was not a civilian scientist at nearby Fort Detrick, as the family had been told. Instead, he worked for the CIA, running the Special Operations Division at Detrick, which Olson says was the government’s “most secret biological weapons laboratory,” working with materials such as anthrax.
He says the evidence he has gathered over the years shows that Frank Olson didn’t suffer a nervous breakdown, as the family initially was told, and didn’t commit suicide because he had had a negative drug experience, as they learned in the 1970s. Instead, the son says, his father was killed by the CIA because officials there feared he would divulge classified information concerning the United States’ use of biological weapons in Korea.
“It didn’t happen,” CIA spokesman Paul F. Novack said yesterday. “We categorically deny that.”
Two weeks after that news conference in 1975, the Olson family was invited to the White House for a formal apology from President Gerald R. Ford. “Actually, it was not at all clear exactly what it was that the president and the CIA director were apologizing for,” Olson recalled yesterday. After the family agreed not to sue the CIA, it was awarded a $750,000 settlement. They had been told theirs was a case they could not win.
Now the family has learned that the Ford administration was keeping information from the family, concerned that family members would ask questions about the scientist’s work that the government was unprepared to answer. Among those who advocated keeping quiet were Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the vice president and defense secretary, the Olsons learned from memos and other papers received last year from the Gerald R. Ford Library.
“Most of it is documented now,” said Philadelphia lawyer David Rudovsky, who was a roommate of Eric Olson’s in the 1970s and has assisted him with the case over the years. “It’s more than just some crazy paranoid speculation.”
“It’s not an easy theory to wrap your mind around,” concedes Nils Olson, 53, Eric Olson’s brother.
Little is left of the body the Olsons exhumed in 1994. When the casket was opened that day – it had been closed during the funeral years before because the family had been told Frank Olson’s body was too disfigured from his fall – Eric Olson recognized his father. His face was largely intact, lacking the cuts that would have resulted if he had broken through a plate-glass window to jump.
Something else they say they have learned: Information about the murder of Frank Olson, as the family calls it, is included in the assassination curriculum of the Israeli Mossad – Israel’s intelligence agency – because it is considered a successful instance of disguising a murder as a suicide.
When Frank Olson is buried again today, only bones will be returned to the ground – the tissue has been removed for study. The bones have been sitting for years in a locked file cabinet in the George Washington University office of James E. Starrs, the professor of law and forensic sciences who determined that the death was not a suicide.
Yesterday’s news conference lasted nearly two hours as members of Eric Olson’s family, including his brother, son and nieces, read through a statement, more than 20 pages long, before answering questions. Eric Olson lives in his childhood home, the place he lived when he was 9 years old and learned of his father’s death.
Yesterday, Eric Olson thanked people who have long listened to his story and helped him work through the details: the filmmaker who made a German documentary on the subject, the mechanic who has kept his Volvo running, the friend who catered lunch.
Starrs listened to Eric Olson talk yesterday about putting his father’s death in the past. Starrs is not sure that Olson will be able to do so.
“I think people say these things in the hope they’ll have sleep-filled nights again,” Starrs said.
“What I really respect about Eric is the purity of his pursuit,” brother Nils Olson, a dentist who lives in Frederick, said afterward. “It hasn’t been to pursue a fixed agenda. It’s really been the pursuit of truth.” Nils Olson sometimes worried that they might learn something ugly about their father – for example, that he had been a traitor to his government. Eric, though, was undeterred, whatever the outcome.
“Eric has given over a large bulk of his life to this,” Nils Olson said. “To be able to now invest energy back into his professional career – hopefully, it’s not too late; he is in his late 50s. He is extremely bright, and he has a lot to offer the field of psychology.
“I believe he can put it to rest.”
Unpublished letter to the editor, The New Yorker, in response to Louis Menand’s “Brainwashed: Where the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ came from.”
To the editor, The New Yorker
In his essay “Brainwashed: Where the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ came from” Louis Menand suggests that the charge made by brainwashed American pilots that the US had engaged in germ warfare during the Korean War was “untrue but widely believed in many countries.” Menand implies that this controversial issue is far more settled than is in fact the case.
A new documentary film, “Code Name Artichoke” (produced this year by German public television and widely shown internationally and in the US on WorldLink TV) on the death of my father, Dr. Frank Olson, revisits this question and presents new evidence.
In the year before his death in 1953 my father, a biochemist, was acting chief of the Special Operations Division (essentially an off-campus CIA BW lab) at the Army’s center for biological warfare at Camp Detrick, Maryland. This position put him on the boundary between biological warfare and interrogation research, precisely the strange boundary zone evoked in the term “germ warfare confessions.” The conventional wisdom alleges that in November 1953 he threw himself out of a 13th floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) after having himself been drugged with LSD by the CIA in a mind control experiment. This version of events comprises the core chapter of John Marks’ 1979 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. (Times Books)
“Code Name Artichoke” shows that my father became convinced that the US was using biological weapons in Korea, at least on an experimental basis. The film juxtaposes footage of an American pilot making these claims with footage in which this same serviceman subsequently recants his “germ warfare confession.” The question as to which of these statements is the product of indoctrination is thereby starkly posed, with the implication that the notion of brainwashing was, among other things, a powerful tool for psychological discrediting.
Eric Olson, PhD
Family Statement on the Murder of Frank Olson
Eric Olson, PhD – Stephan Kimbel Olson – Nils Olson, DDS – Lauren Olson – Kristin Olson
We welcome you and thank you for coming.
Forty-one years ago—on June 26, 1961—Nils (then twelve years old) and Eric (then sixteen) set out on our bicycles from this house and began cycling to California.
A bit like Lewis and Clark, we had very little idea what we would encounter during our trip West. During the six and a half weeks of our journey we were propelled by a powerful and simple idea, which boiled down to the notion “just keep peddling.” We knew that Route 40, the old National Pike just a few hundred yards from here at the end of the lane, went all the way to the West Coast. Our motto was “Harolds Club or Bust.” All you had to do was just keep going and follow the road. Eventually you would come to San Francisco.
Eight years earlier our father had died—vanished really—and it has taken all the years since then to figure out what happened to him. Our search for the truth about what happened to our father has been a lot like that bike trip to California. All one had to do was to keep following the thread represented by his disappearance. Eventually one would come to the answer.
In both cases one reached the goal by small continuous increments of motion along a single strand. Nevertheless, the final destination did not look anything like the place from which one started out. Little by little one entered unknown terrain. But the destination, whether it was San Francisco or the truth about what happened to Frank Olson, was still on the same map. Incredible as it sometimes seemed, in both cases, the place one finally got to was still part of America.
Today we want want to try to give you some idea of what this journey has been like, and tell you something about the unfamiliar American territory we have discovered.
Our purpose in inviting you here today is to explain why—49 years after his death, 27 years after the government claimed to have told us the truth about his death, and 8 years after we had his body exhumed and a forensic investigation performed—we are going to rebury our father’s remains tomorrow.
The reason we have waited so long to do this is that we wanted to be certain that when we reburied our father’s remains we would not be reburying the truth at the same time.
The gist of what we want to say can be compressed into three headlines:
1. The death of Frank Olson on November 28, 1953 was a murder, not a suicide.
2. This is not an LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in 1975. This is a biological warfare story. Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a “bad trip.” He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program called “ARTICHOKE” in the early 1950’s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.
3. The truth concerning the death of Frank Olson was concealed from the Olson family as well as from the public in 1953. In 1975 a cover story regarding Frank Olson’s death was disseminated. At the same time a renewed coverup of the truth concerning this story was being carried out at the highest levels of government, including the White House. The new coverup involved the participation of persons serving in the current Administration.
We will make available materials to amplify all these points, and provide copies of a definitive new one-hour documentary film on the Frank Olson case called “Code Name ARTICHOKE” that will air on public TV in Germany (the ARD network) next week, on Monday, August 12.
I. “Return to the beginning”
Now, to back up and approach all this a bit more slowly:
There is a passage in “The Four Quartets” where the poet T.S. Eliot writes:
… the end of all our exploring
This is a moment like that, a moment when the circle closes. A moment of returning—this time with knowledge—to the beginning.
Twenty-seven years ago, on July 10, 1975, our family sat at this same picnic table in this same backyard, to hold a press conference. At that time the family consisted of our mother Alice, then 59 years old, Eric, 30, our sister Lisa, 29, and Nils, 26.
Today Eric is 57. Nils is 53. Eric’s son Stephan is 12. Nils’ daughter Lauren is 19. His daughter Kristin is 17. Lisa died in an airplane crash in 1978. Our mother passed away in 1993.
That day in July 1975 we sat at this table and read a family statement. This was how it looked that day.(“Backyard press conference,” poster 3).
A month earlier, on June 11, 1975, an article had appeared on the front page of the Washington Post. The article contained stunning news about our father, but it did not mention his name. The purpose of our press conference in 1975 was to say that the unidentified man referred to in that article was Frank Olson.
Twenty-two years earlier, in the early morning of November 28, 1953, our father died in what we were told was an “accident.” For those twenty-two years between 1953 and 1975 we knew nothing about how he died or why. In 1953 we had been told only that he had had “an accident” in a New York hotel room and had “fallen or jumped” out the window.
Then followed 22 years of inky darkness.
II. “Suicide Revealed”
Ours was a family that tried its best to be normal in the 1950’s way. But in fact this was a family haunted by fear, shame, uncertainty, and insecurity. It was a family that had, in effect, been terrorized. Two decades passed.
Then on June 11, 1975, out of nowhere, like a message in a bottle suddenly washed ashore by distant storms (in this instance the storms were Vietnam and Watergate), came a cryptic bit of news.
Under the headline “Suicide Revealed” on the front page of the Washington Post we read the following paragraphs:
A civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test, then jumped 10 floors to his death less than a week later, according to the Rockefeller commission report released yesterday.
The man was given the drug while attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on a test project that involved the administration of mind-bending drugs to unsuspecting Americans and the testing of new listening devices by eavesdropping on citizens who were unaware they were being overheard.
“This individual was not made aware he had been given LSD until about 20 minutes after it had been administered,” the commission said. “He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment. Several days later, he jumped from a tenth-floor window of his room and died as a result.”
The CIA’s general counsel ruled that the death resulted from “circumstances arising out of an experiment undertaken in the course of his official duties for the United States government.” His family, thus, was eligible for death benefits. And two CIA employees were “reprimanded” by the director.
The man identified as an “army scientist” turned out to be Frank Olson. But nobody bothered to notify our family that this story was being released. Not the Rockefeller Commission, not the CIA, not the White House.
It was as if a long-lost MIA had at last been found and identified, but his family were not notified.
This horrendous omission turns out to be a key to the whole story. It indicates that the “truth” was being suppressed even as it was coming to light. In fact the headline “Suicide Revealed” was triply ironic. First the death was not a suicide. Second it was not “revealed”: the name was not given. Third, we would later learn that the subject of the experiment was not an “Army scientist.”
We recognized our father in this story only by the fit of the details: the man was a “scientist,” the year was “1953,” the fall was from a “tenth floor window.”
A month later (July 10) we held a press conference, right here, to provide the name—“Frank Olson”—that the story had lacked up to then.
At that point the government wasted no time in getting in touch.
Less than two weeks later (July 23) we were sitting in the Oval Office receiving an official apology from Gerald Ford. And five days after that (July 28) we were having lunch with CIA Director William Colby in the Director’s 7th floor office at Langley, receiving an apology from the CIA, along with what we were told was the complete CIA file on our father’s death.
The contrast between the failure of the government to notify us when the anonymous story about our father was being released, and the scurrying around at the highest levels to apologize to us once we identified ourselves, could not have been more stark.
This was another sign that something was still amiss. Ask yourself when you last remember an American President calling a family to the Oval Office to receive an apology for the unintended effects of a United States government policy.
Actually it was not at all clear exactly what it was that the President and the CIA Director were apologizing for.
Was it for the reckless CIA LSD drugging at Deep Creek Lake?
Was it for the nonchalant medical treatment by the non-psychiatrist to whom Frank Olson was subsequently taken?
Was it for keeping the allegedly psychotic Frank Olson in a hotel rather than a hospital?
Was it for the fact that his CIA escort was asleep in the next bed when Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window?
Was it for not telling the truth to his family in 1953?
Or was it for not notifying the Olson family when this story was finally emerging twenty-two years later, in 1975?
The President assured us that the White House would support our efforts to obtain justice. Almost immediately we were advised by White House attorneys that a law suit would be risky, as the law was not on our side. Accordingly the government attorneys strongly recommended that we pursue a settlement via a Private Bill in Congress, which they said the White House would support.
In 1976 our family received a financial settlement from Congress for far less than the White House, CIA Director George Bush, the Justice Department, the Labor Department, and the Treasury Department had recommended. A single Congressman had decided to oppose the settlement, so it was enacted in drastically reduced form.
Having already received the document package from the CIA, the matter was now officially over. We signed an agreement saying that all our claims against the United States government in the death of Frank Olson were settled.
By that time the name “Frank Olson” had started to achieve the almost mythical status it subsequently acquired. “Frank Olson” became a symbol for the effects of careless human experimentation in general and reckless CIA behavior in particular. (“Psychology Today,” poster 5.)
The “fell or jumped” scenario at the window never really made sense. But nobody in the 1970’s spent much time thinking about how our father actually died. In fact the 1970’s version of the Frank Olson story was a story that everyone could love.
Journalists could pride themselves on having reported a story of horrendous governmental wrong-doing that now had a human face. Congressional investigators and legislators could pride themselves on their dutiful governmental housecleaning in the aftermath of Watergate. The White House could pride themselves on having acted responsibly when the truth came to light. The public could revel in wild stories of government-sponsored drug experiments. And the CIA itself could relax, knowing that behind the popular notion of buffoon-like behaviour of out-of-control-agents the real story had not even been touched.
Everyone seemed to get high on the Frank Olson story. In the midst of all this hubbub what nobody seemed to notice was that the story of Frank Olson’s death hadn’t changed at all.
In 1953 the story was that Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window due to job-related stress. The Olson children grew up saying that our father died of a “fatal nervous breakdown.”
In 1975 the story was still that Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window. Only now the reason was that he had been drugged with LSD by the CIA eight days earlier.
In both cases the claim was that nobody saw anything even though a CIA official allegedly acting as an escort and protector was sleeping in the next bed when Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window of a very small room.
Nobody saw anything in 1953. In the 1975 version nobody saw anything either (the only new element was the unwitting administration of LSD), and nobody notified the Olson family that a new story was coming out. In 1953 the Olson family was assured by the government within three days of Frank Olson’s death that the family would receive government employee’s compensation. In 1975 after the family press conference the Olson family was immediately assured by the President that the government would provide more restitution.
Despite the apparent narrative shift, the continuity in the structure of the story over two decades could scarcely have been more complete.
The story didn’t make any sense in 1953, and it didn’t make any more sense in 1975. But the sensational notion of LSD administered by the CIA served wonderfully to conceal this gap.
Frank Olson didn’t jump out the window (even in physical terms that would have been virtually impossible), and he certainly didn’t fall out. He was pushed out. Or, to use the words of CIA terminology that we would later discover, he was “dropped.”
But if there was foul play in the death of Frank Olson what was the motive? Why would the government murder an “Army scientist” who had been unwittingly drugged with LSD?
At that point the gap concerning what happened at the window turned into a chasm concerning the motive for the whole affair.
The story of Frank Olson’s death, illuminated for a moment with the anonymous news from the Rockefeller Report, seemed to return to inky darkness.
III. A story no one could love
Over the 27 years that have elapsed since 1975 light has been cast on all this from many directions, and the real story of Frank Olson’s death has gradually taken shape.
The real story is not merely a story that no one could love. The real story is a story that no one wanted to know. This made it easy to peddle the ludicrous fairy tale cover story in 1975, a story that in hindsight resembles “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
The real story is not a simple or short one, and we will not be able to tell all of it in detail in this statement. Instead we will fast forward to key the key moments that have, piece by piece, eviscerated the 1975 story and left a very different one in its place. The real story is not one in which anyone will take pleasure. Uncovering this story has been a decades-long agony for us as well.
The real story is like a murder mystery in which the tale begins with a body that floats to the surface of a murky lake. The mystery of the death can’t be solved until that body is reinserted into the sprawling network of crime, corruption, and power that motivated the murder.
In Eric’s quest for truth two quotes have been key:
One came from CBS correspondent Anthony Mason in 1994: “Eric,” Mason said, “you are going to get to the bottom of this, but it is going to be a false bottom.”
That is no longer the situation, but getting to a solid bottom has required a very long descent.
The second quote comes from Tommy Worsley, the genius Volvo mechanic who kept Eric’s car running during the long years of digging. Tommy said:
“Eric, you need to tell this story, because it will help a lot of people connect a lot of other dots in other stories that have nothing to do with this one.”
In that spirit, we will try here to convey the path we followed that led, finally, to a very different story of how, and why, Frank Olson died. We want to emphasize at the outset, however, that our purpose was never to prove that Frank Olson was murdered. Our purpose was to find out what had happened, and to arrive at a story—whatever that story might be—that made sense. In the course of a long search not a single shred of evidence has corroborated the government’s story, which, it is important to remember, was never really a story at all. The Emperor was naked from the start.
Problems with the conventional story
(The Colby documents)
In the years after the case was settled we had had time to grapple more carefully with the confusing stack of documents we had received from William Colby. The more we tried to absorb these documents the more they seemed to dissolve in ambiguity in front of our eyes. The story told by the government simply did not hold up to scrutiny.
Already in 1976 the New York Times had observed that the Colby documents were “elliptical, incoherent, and contradictory.” The Times wrote that:
Taken as a whole, the file is a jumble of deletions, conflicting statements, unintelligible passages and such unexplained terms as the “Artichoke Committee” and “Project Bluebird” that tend to confuse more than enlighten.
But the real problem was that the Colby documents seemed to be pointing to a story that they were not telling—a story quite at odds with the spin that had already been placed on the story by the initial account in the Rockefeller Commission Report.
For example, one of the reports submitted by the doctor (an allergist, as it turned out) to whom our father was taken in New York, states that “an experiment had been done to trap” Frank Olson.
We now know that this story begins long before the meeting at Deep Creek Lake November 1953 where the CIA conducted what it later called a “drug experiment.” It begins with concerns about Frank Olson’s commitment to CIA programs, especially after he witnessed terminal interrogations in Germany in the summer of 1953. The aim of the drugging at Deep Creek was apparently to assess the extent of Frank Olson’s disaffection and alienation, given the depth of his ethical qualms.
The CIA official (Sidney Gottlieb) who was reprimanded by the Agency for the drugging of Frank Olson was also personally involved in CIA attempts to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and other national leaders.
In another place the Colby documents refer to something called “the Schwab activity” at Frank Olson’s division at Detrick as being arguably “un-American.” The documents imply that issues pertaining to this activity were somehow involved in Frank Olson’s death.
In these documents the overall context for Frank Olson’s death is related not to the infamous MK-ULTRA program for mind and behavior control, as is generally assumed. The Colby documents locate Olson’s death in the context of a CIA operation called ARTICHOKE. However most of the passages pertaining to ARTICHOKE in the documents provided to the Olson family have been carefully deleted.
Operation ARTICHOKE was a CIA program that preceded MK-ULTRA. ARTICHOKE involved the development of special, extreme methods of interrogation. Officials responsible for the ARTICHOKE program were very concerned with the problem of disposing of “blown agents” and with the task of finding a way to produce amnesia in operatives who had seen too much and could no longer be relied upon.
The Colby documents state, as does William Colby in his 1978 autobiography, that Frank Olson was not an “Army scientist,” but, rather, a “CIA employee,” a “CIA officer.”
The key witness changes his story
(What Dr. Lashbrook told Dr. Gibson)
One of the most confusing aspects of the story of what happened to Frank Olson is the inconsistency in the accounts given by the key witness, CIA employee Dr. Robert Lashbrook, who was allegedly asleep in next bed in the same small hotel room at the time Frank Olson went out the window (“Psychology Today,” poster 5).
In the immediate aftermath of Olson’s death in 1953 Lashbrook told Alice Olson that he had seen her husband plunge through the hotel window. But later Lashbrook said that he had been awakened from sleep by the sound of crashing glass, and only upon noticing that the bed next to his was empty did he realize that his roommate had gone out the window. In 1995 we were contacted by Dr. Robert Gibson.
In 1953 Dr. Gibson was the admitting psychiatrist at the hospital near Washington to which Frank Olson was allegedly to have been taken after returning from New York City. Subsequently Dr. Gibson went on to a distinguished career in psychiatry, becoming President of the American Psychiatric Association, and Director of Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Baltimore.
Dr. Gibson reported to us the statement that had been made to him by the CIA official who contacted him on the morning of Frank Olson’s death—a statement identical to one Robert Lashbrook made to Alice Olson, but in direct contradiction to the story told in the Colby documents.
In the early morning of November 28, the CIA official who had shared the hotel room with Frank Olson did not tell Dr. Gibson that he was awakened by the sound of crashing glass when his roommate went through the window. Instead, Dr. Gibson was told that Frank Olson’s CIA escort had awakened to see Olson standing in the middle of the room. The witness had tried to speak to Olson, and had then watched as Olson plunged through the window on a dead run.
This account appears to have been the first draft of a cover story that was subsequently revised to the form in which it was eventually disseminated. In that version of the story nobody saw anything.
But if nobody saw nuthin, somebody did hear something. Immediately after the death a call was placed from Frank Olson’s hotel room. The call was overheard by the hotel switchboard operator and reported immediately to the night manager (Armand Pastore). The call consisted of only two sentences. According to the operator the person in the room had said:
“Well he’s gone.”
The person on the other end replied:
“That’s too bad.”
Then they both hung up.
In various versions of Lashbrook’s accounts of what occurred in room 1018A the window was either open or else it was closed; the blind was either drawn and pushed through the window when Frank Olson plunged through the window or else it snapped up and spun around the spindle when it was hit; and Lashbrook either did nor did not see what happened.
Digging up the body
(Exhumation and forensic investigation)
The doubts raised by the incoherent Colby documents, and by the many other anomalies in the story, led us to have Frank Olson’s body exhumed and a forensic investigation performed. This we did in 1994.
After his death the Olson family was told that Frank Olson’s body was too disfigured to be seen. For this reason at the funeral in 1953 Frank Olson’s casket was closed. The Olson family never saw his body after he left for New York four days earlier. This contributed to a feeling that Frank Olson had not so much died as disappeared.
When the casket was opened in 1994 Frank Olson’s upper body was not disfigured as the New York Medical Examiner’s Report had claimed in 1953. In fact Frank Olson was recognizable after forty-one years in the grave.
The forensic investigation in 1994 confirmed the family’s worst suspicions. In fact the results of this investigation led the principal forensic investigator, who is with us today, to conclude that the overwhelming probability was that Frank Olson’s death was not a suicide but a homicide.
In November of 1994 Professor Starrs and his team presented the initial findings of their forensic investigation at a press conference. “When you pull on the Frank Olson case,” Professor Starrs said then, “you get the feeling that something very big is pulling back.”
In 1994 nobody had a clear idea of what that big something might be.
The question of motive
(Why would the government murder Frank Olson?)
As indications accumulated that Frank Olson had been murdered the question of motive became more pressing. Why would the government murder an “Army scientist” simply because he had been used as an unwitting guinea pig in a drug experiment? Once again, as we went down the path suggested by these questions we discovered that all the assumptions on which they were based were incorrect.
First, as indicated earlier, we discovered that Frank Olson was not simply an “Army scientist.” He was a “CIA officer” associated with projects so heavily guarded that the term “top secret” gives only scant indication of their sensitivity. Actually they are better described as State Secrets.
Special Operations Division at Detrick
In 1952 Frank Olson was acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick; at the time of his death in 1953 he was SOD’s director of planning and evaluations. The Special Operations Divison at Detrick was the government’s most secret biological weapons laboratory. In fact the SO Division was only physically located at Detrick. In essence the SO Division was an off-campus CIA biological warfare laboratory, doing work on bacteriological agents for use in covert operations.
The Rockefeller Commission’s account of the suicide of an “Army scientist” not only neglected to add the man’s name and his CIA affiliation; it omitted any reference to his high position in the country’s most secret biological weapons laboratory.
When this information is added to the story, and when one obtains some idea of what sorts of projects were being pursued at the SO Division, then the overall picture of the death of Frank Olson changes entirely. (“Dangerous intersection,” poster 6.)
Projects at the Special Operations Division involved or related to the following activities:
• Assassinations materials research (e.g. the materials used in the CIA’s attempts to assassination Lumumba in the Congo and Castro in Cuba)
• Biological warfare materials for use in covert operations
• Biological warfare experiments in populated areas
• Terminal interrogations
• Collaboration with former Nazi scientists
• LSD mind-control research
• U.S. employment of biological weapons in the Korean War.
As our understanding of Frank Olson’s work grew, our attention was again drawn back to the Colby documents, and we became aware of another gaping hole in the story we had been given. Considering the ultra-secrecy and strategic importance of the work in which Frank Olson was engaged at the time of his death it is nothing less than astounding that among the documents we had been given by the CIA in 1975, which we were told was the complete file, there is no mention at all of any security issues.
Even within the parameters of the CIA’s own story this could not have been true. Here was a top government scientist, engaged in some of the most secret projects at the height of the Cold War. According to the CIA’s account, this scientist had now been used as an unwitting guinea pig in an LSD experiment. He reacts badly to the drug, becomes unstable, and is taken to New York for treatment. But he is not taken to a hospital, or even a safe house. He is kept in a hotel. Two days before his death he allegedly leaves his room in the middle of the night, wanders the streets alone, throws away wallet, including all of his money and his identification.
At no point do the documents describing this weird scenario mention a security problem.
But if the Colby documents fail to discuss security issues, other internal documents that we obtained do mention this issue. One document, found in Frank Olson’s personnel file at Detrick, specifically mentions “fear of a security violation” after Olson’s trip to Europe in the summer of 1953, just four months before his death.
The New York District Attorney
From every direction the story of Frank Olson’s death seemed only to become more dark as we were able to fill in more of the background and context. First, the CIA documents proved unconvincing. Second, the forensic investigation added fuel to the fires of our suspicions. And third, the motive for murder turned out to be far more substantial than we had dared to imagine.
By 1996 our suspicions had reached an intolerable threshold. We decided to turn for assistance to the only governmental institution that might be able to help us. Because the death occurred in New York we presented a memorandum to the New York District Attorney’s Office outlining the many reasons for believing that the death of Frank Olson was a murder. We asked the DA’s office to reopen the case. (Copies of this memorandum are available.) This memorandum proved persuasive. In 1996 the New York District Attorney opened a homicide investigation into the death of Frank Olson.
A “perfect murder”
One of the outcomes of the The New York District Attorney’s investigation has been confirmation of an allegation that had earlier seemed too extreme to be taken seriously. The New York DA was informed that for many years the murder of Frank Olson was taught as a case of “perfect murder” at the assassination training unit of the Israeli Mossad outside Tel Aviv. The Frank Olson case was included in the Mossad’s assassination curriculum due to the success with which a murder had been disguised as a suicide.
The New York District Attorney was in fact able to locate a source in Israel with close ties to Israeli intelligence which was able to confirm this allegation. In 2000 this source traveled to the United States to speak with the Assistant District Attorney assigned to the case, and also to Eric Olson. Eric was told directly by the New York DA’s source that the case of Frank Olson’s death has been taught in Israel as a case of “perfect murder.”
An alternative story of the death of Frank Olson
(Terminal interrogations and biological weapons in the Korean War)
Gradually a completely new story of the death of Frank Olson was emerging, one that bore very little resemblance to the one that had long-since become the conventional wisdom on this issue. But the question of motive remained a mystery. Eventually that piece of the puzzle appeared as well.
A little over a year ago we were contacted by one of our father’s oldest friends and closest colleagues at Detrick. Together with a small group of other scientists this colleague (Norman Cournoyer) and Frank Olson had designed the protective clothing for the invasion of Normandy during World War II.
Cournoyer told us that a crucial element had been omitted from published accounts of the Olson case. That element was the Korean War.
Cournoyer added three crucial elements to the story:
1. In the late 1940’s Frank Olson joined the CIA where he specialized in the field of “information retrieval.” This was the ARTICHOKE program, which we already knew was the operational context in which Frank Olson was working.
2. In the course of this work in information retrieval Frank Olson made numerous trips to Europe, during which he observed interrogations of persons (Soviet prisoners, former Nazis, and others) which involved the combined application of electro-shock, drugs, and torture. These interrogations sometimes led to the deaths of the subjects being interrogated.
3. Through the “information retrieval” work Frank Olson learned that in fact—despite vehement denials by the American government—the United States was using biological weapons, including anthrax, in the Korean War.
This information from Cournoyer fit well with what we already knew and with what we would soon learn. In documents from the Gerald Ford Library we were about to discover the extreme concern in the 1975 White House that “highly classified national security information” was at stake in the death of Frank Olson.
This information also fits closely with what Alice Olson had repeatedly said about her husband’s state of mind in the period prior to his death. Alice Olson had always insisted that Frank had been very worried that the United States may have been employing biological weapons in Korea. But she did not know whether her husband knew the truth about this or not, or even whether he would have been in a position to know.
This information also fits the fact that in the summer of 1953, after returning from a trip to Europe, Frank Olson underwent a moral crisis concerning his work. This moral crisis was noticed by his wife, by his close friends, as well as by relatives. This crisis occurred, it is important to emphasize, several months prior to the LSD drugging at Deep Creek Lake.
Frank Olson’s moral crisis culminated in his decision to quit his job during the weekend following the drugging, a fact which, again, is not mentioned in the Colby documents. Frank Olson went to work on a Monday morning and resigned from his job. By late Friday night he was dead.
For fifty years the United States has continued to deny that this country has used biological weapons in combat. As chief of the government’s most secret biological lab in the early 1950’s Frank Olson’s position concerning these allegations could not have been discredited.
An interview with Cournoyer elaborating these points appears in the new German documentary film, “Code Name ARTICHOKE.”
Technique of a concealed murder
(The CIA assassination manual)
The story of Frank Olson’s death now held two of the three elements that are required to be present to postulate a murder: motive, means, and opportunity. The days in the New York hotel room, away from family and community, had certainly offered an opportunity for the crime. What we had discovered about the scale of national security secrets to which Frank Olson had access, combined with Frank’s growing moral doubts, held a plausible motive. However, we were still unable to conceptualize a means for the execution of the crime. That too was about to change.
In 1997 we obtained a copy of the CIA’s 1953 assassination manual and were stunned to discover its pertinence to the questions that haunted us. The scenario presented in that manual dovetails not only with what we had learned from the forensic investigation, but also with what we had been told regarding the teaching of the Frank Olson case by the Mossad’s assassination training unit in Israel.
The CIA’s own assassination manual contains precise instructions for the technique of disguising a murder as a suicide or an accident through perpetrating what the manual calls a “contrived accident.”
The sort of “contrived accident” that the manual recommends for the purpose of disguising a murder as a suicide is a fall from a high window or roof onto a hard surface.
As with the original Washington Post story that had led us in 1975 to recognize our father—even though he was not named—the fit between what the manual says about this technique and what is known about Frank Olson’s death is stunningly precise. This fit led the principal forensic investigator who had exhumed our father’s body to say that the assassination manual “fits the death of Frank Olson like the fingers of a glove.” (“CIA assassination manual found,” poster 7.)
The assistant district attorney handling the homicide investigation in New York put it even more strongly. After reading the assassination manual the Assistant District Attorney said,
The assassination manual reads like a script for the murder of Frank Olson.… The only question is which came first, the manual or the murder. Was the manual based on the murder or was the murder carried out according to the manual? (“Saracco reads the manual,” poster 8.)
Here are some passages from the CIA’s own manual on the technique of disguising a murder through engineering a “contrived accident”:
Assassination is a term thought to be derived from “Hashish,” a drug similar to marijuana, said to have been used by Hasan-Dan-Sabah to induce motivation in his followers…
Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations.…
No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made…
The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject.
Techniques may be considered as follows:
It is possible to kill a man with bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well…
2. Accidents
For secret assassination, either simple [where the subject is unaware of the danger he is in] or chase [where the subject is aware of the danger but unguarded], the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.
The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve… If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.
If the subject’s personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used [2 words excised] to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.
3. Drugs
In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method.
5. Blunt weapons
Blows should be directed to the temple, the area just below and behind the ear, and the lower, rear portion of the skull.
It was on Frank Olson’s temple, above his left eye, that the forensic team discovered a suspicious hematoma which they concluded must have come from a blow to Frank Olson’s head before he went out the window. The forensic team discovered this hematoma, and concluded it must have come from a blow to the head in the room, a full three years before we found the CIA’s assassination manual. (“CIA assassination manual found,” poster 7.)
In the end it was impossible not to read the CIA’s assassination manual as anything but a blueprint for the murder of Frank Olson. Indeed the principal forensic investigator who had exhumed the body viewed it in exactly that way. Hard as it was to imagine that the government would murder an American citizen and then disguise that murder, first as a suicide and then as a reaction to an LSD overdose, we now felt compelled by the overwhelming weight of the evidence to accept this scenario as the only plausible account of this whole complex affair.
Clinching the story
(Documents from the 1975 Ford White House)
A long and grueling journey toward understanding seemed to be coming to an end. We now were able to clearly formulate a motive, a means, and an opportunity for the murder of Frank Olson, and to provide an account of the death that was more convincing than anything we had been told by the government. The glaring gap that still remained pertained not to what had happened in 1953 but to what had happened in 1975.
Certainly if the real story to which we were being led was correct, then the government would have been forced into a very awkward position when the Olson family suddenly attached a name to the anonymous story of an “Army scientist” that the Rockefeller Commission had divulged. This would explain why the goverment had reacted so quickly to our press conference in July of 1975, immediately inviting us to meet the President in the Oval Office of the White House to receive an official apology.
But was the truth that was buried in the death of Frank Olson so big that even the President would be enlisted to maintain the secret? Certainly the virtuoso job of disinformational engineering that had been applied to the whole affair seemed to suggest that no resources would be spared to keep the truth secret. But now, having reached what we were now convinced was the truth about the murder, how could we ever learn the truth about the renewal of the coverup in 1975?
That gap in our understanding—which seemed even wider than the one that had once surrounded the death itself—was about to be closed in the most astounding way.
In 2001 we obtained documents from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan pertaining to the handling of our case by the Ford White House in 1975. These documents include intra-office memoranda by senior White House staff members and attorneys. Copies of these documents are available. (“The White House reacts,” poster 9.)
These documents show that the White House was extremely alarmed that the Olson family had recognized the unnamed “Army scientist” as Frank Olson, and was concerned that the family was demanding the truth concerning Olson’s death. Already on July 11, 1975—just one day after our press conference—the White House was outlining a strategy to handle our case, a strategy that would ensure that we did not request pertinent information regarding what had actually happened to Frank Olson.
In 1975 the White House advised us that they were concerned that if we went to court we might lose and not obtain what the White House regarded as appropriate compensation.
But the memoranda we obtained show that the real concern at the White House was that if we went to court we it might become necessary to disclose “highly classified information.” The memos show that the government would refuse to disclose such information. This would mean that the government would have no defense at all against claims for information that the Olson family might legitimately make.
The invitation to our family to meet with President Gerald Ford was part of this strategy. Unbeknownst to us, the intent of the White House in having the family meet personally with the President was to ensure that the Olson family pursue a course that would enable the government to maintain secrecy even as it was being alleged that the full story concerning this incident was being released.
Despite the government’s claim to have released all information pertinent to the death of Frank Olson, we still have not received the information that the White House was so concerned to keep secret.
The 1975 White House documents include the following comments:
First, a passage from a September 1975 memorandum by White House attorney Roderick Hills addressed to Richard Cheney:
The Defense to the Olson Claim. …
two circumstances affect our analysis of the Justice Department position.
(i) The bizarre circumstances of his death could well cause a court of law to determine as a matter of public policy that he did not die in the course of his official duties.
(ii) Dr. Olson’s job is so sensitive that it is highly unlikely that we would submit relevance to the court on the issue of his duties.
The latter circumstance may mean as a practical matter we would have no defense against the Olson law suit. In this connection, you should know that the CIA and the Counsel’s office both strongly recommend that the evidence concerning his employment not be released in a civil trial.
In short, there is a significant possibility that a court would either (a) grant full discovery to the Olsons’ attorneys to learn of Dr. Olson’s job responsibilities; or (b) rule that as a matter of public policy, a man who commits suicide as a result of a drug criminally given him cannot as a matter of law be determined to have died “in the course of his official duties.”
If there is a trial, it is apparent that the Olsons’ lawyer will seek to explore all of the circumstances of Dr. Olson’s employment as well as those concerning his death. It is not at all clear that we can keep such evidence from becoming relevant even if the government waives the defense of the Federal Employees Compensation Act. Thus, in the trial it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons and any settlement of judgment reached thereafter could be perceived as money paid to cover-up the activities of the CIA.
These comments are from the same White House attorney, Roderick Hills, who was simultaneously advising us that we should not go to court because the law was not on our side.
Obviously it was not possible for the Olson family in 1975 to assess the government’s story of what Hills refers to here as Frank Olson’s “bizarre death” as long as the family was being misinformed as to the job Olson was doing—a job that Hills describes as so “sensitive” that the government would refuse to describe it.
The same concerns are evident in a memo that was written by White House Deputy Staff Director Dick Cheney to his boss Donald Rumsfeld on July 11, 1975, the day after our family press conference. In this memo Cheney refers to concerns about:
…the possibility that it might become necessary to disclose highly classified national security information in connection with any court suit, or legislative hearings on a private bill intended to provide additional compensation to the family.
Again, these comments have to be placed in the context of assurances given to us personally by the President of the United States that we would be provided with all relevant information concerning the death of our father.
IV. What’s it all about?
What do we learn, finally, from the harrowing story of the death of Frank Olson and its half-century concealment?
In the years after World War II the United States was busy learning what it could from the two powers it had just defeated—information it would then employ in its new battle against the Soviet Union. This occurred on both of World War II’s major fronts, and Detrick was involved in both.
Detrick scientists made a secret deal to obtain the results of Japanese biological warfare research that had entailed some of the most ghastly human experiements of the century. One of those scientists lived just across the highway from where we are sitting today, about a quarter of a mile from here. And Detrick scientists were also involved in collaboration with former Nazi scientists to obtain the results of experiments that had been performed in the death camps.
A Cold War context in which unethical research was being absorbed and sponsored was bound to see extreme forms of discipline and sanction applied to those who raised ethical questions or who might be likely to do so. In the wake of the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940’s the United States could not afford to be exposed as a sponsor of the sort of research it had prosecuted the Nazis for undertaking. Lacking a Siberia to which the reluctant could be sent, extreme security measures in the US took a more complex form.
We are familiar with the health risks to which workers in plutonium plants were subjected during the Cold War. And we are familiar with the risks taken with the lives of persons who were subjects of unwitting government experiments of various kinds. We are familiar with the stories of those whose lives were ruined when they became victims of unjustified accusations during the McCarthy witch hunts. The discrediting of Manhattan Project director Robert Oppenheimer, which began just two weeks before Frank Olson was killed, illustrates the jeopardy into which highly-regarded scientists who dared to criticize American weapons development in the early 1950’s were placed.
These are all phenomena that have become part of the record of Cold War history, a dark side of this nation’s history during that painful era. But even in this company the true story of Frank Olson opens a new chapter. “National security homicide” and “secret state assassination” are not terms with which we are familiar in this country. There are no other terms for Frank Olson’s “bizarre death,” and for the elaborate disinformational edifice that has been erected to obscure it.
V. Conclusion: An MIA with a name
With the information concerning biological weapons in the Korean War on the one hand and the information about the White House coverup in 1975 on the other, the story of the death of Frank Olson finally hit bottom. Frank Olson did not die as a consequence of a drug experiment gone awry. He died because of security concerns regarding disavowed programs of terminal interrogation and the use of biological weapons in Korea. This secret was so immense that even twenty-two years later the White House had been enlisted to maintain it.
The body that had floated to the surface of the murky lake had at last been reinserted into the network of shady, disavowed operations that led to the murder. Amazingly, the solution to the mystery had pertained to the most obvious fact of all concerning Frank Olson, but one that was conspicuously missing from the accounts in 1975: Frank Olson was a founding member and in the year prior to his death he was chief of the country’s most secret biological warfare laboratory.
For just under half a century the death of Frank Olson has been a weighty burden for the Olson family. But this is far more than a family story, which is why for many years it has been avidly followed by many people in this country and others.
At the end of this story one’s mind is inevitably drawn back to that Washington Post article which, under the ironic headline “Suicide Revealed,” reported the anonymous suicide of an “Army scientist.” Clearly the intent was that Frank Olson was an MIA who should remain forever nameless.
Frank Olson does have a name. Finally, forty-nine years after his death, he also has a story. We therefore feel ready to rebury the physical remains of our father, our grandfather.
New Evidence in Army Scientist’s Death
48-year-old case has links to CIA’s secret experimentation program
By H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly
Originally published by
WorldNet Daily, Friday, July 6, 2001
© 2001 H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly
Editor’s note: In 1998, WorldNetDaily first reported on the CIA’s secret behavior-modification program MK-ULTRA, which included experimentation with LSD on unsuspecting subjects. Authors H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly’s upcoming book deals with the mysterious death of one of those subject, Dr. Frank Olson. In this report, Albarelli and Kelly disclose new evidence they have uncovered in this case. By H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly
To view this article in on the WorldNet site go to WorldNet Daily and enter “Olson and CIA” in the WND search box at left side of the page. Links are also provided to three additional, previously published WorldNet articles pertaining to the Frank Olson case.
“I would turn our gaze from the past,” pronounced CIA Director George Tenet recently before Congress. “It is dangerous, frankly, to have to keep looking over our shoulders.” Whether Tenet had the unsolved death of Dr. Frank Olson in mind is not known, but there is little doubt that it is on his mind today.
Informed sources revealed this week that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is reviewing dramatic new evidence in the Olson case. The evidence is said to involve the Jan. 8, 1953, death of Harold Blauer and its subsequent elaborate cover-up.
Blauer, a widely respected tennis professional, died nine months before Olson after being injected with a massive dose of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Blauer was being treated at the Institute for depression related to a broken marriage, but the injection was not part of his treatment. It was administered only as part of a top-secret Army-funded experimental program. The program, codenamed Project Pelican, was overseen by Dr. Paul H. Hoch, director of experimental psychiatry at the Institute, who worked in secret collaboration with the Army Chemical Corps chief of clinical research, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi.
Born in Hungary and schooled in psychiatry in Germany, Hoch came to the U.S. in 1933 on a visitor’s visa and soon legally immigrated with the assistance of then-attorney and future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. (At the time of Frank Olson’s death, Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster, was head of the CIA.) Before joining the Institute’s staff, Hoch headed the Manhattan State Hospital Shock Therapy Unit and worked as chief medical officer for war neuroses for the U.S. Public Health Service.
Hoch, along with associates Dr. Harold A. Abramson and Dr. Max Rinkel, was among an elite group of five private researchers and six U.S. Army physicians who began quietly conducting LSD experiments in the U.S. in 1949.
Rinkel, the man responsible for first transporting LSD into this country, supplied the drug to Hoch and Abramson in that same year. Rinkel, who fled Nazi Germany before the war to work at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, had known both Abramson and Hoch when all three studied together at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany. According to 1998 interviews with former-CIA official Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, it was Rinkel’s close associate, Dr. H.E. Himwich, along with the Army’s Dr. L. Wilson Greene, who first drew the CIA’s attention to the “wonders of LSD.”
When he died in 1965, Hoch was eulogized by two of his closest friends, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, who would soon be exposed as administrator of some of the most horrendous CIA-funded experiments on record, and New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller.
For nearly five years, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s cold-case unit has been conducting an unprecedented criminal investigation into the mysterious death of Fort Detrick biochemist Frank Olson. On Nov. 28, 1953, Olson allegedly dove through a closed and shaded 10th-floor hotel window in the middle of the night.
He plummeted 170 feet to his death on the sidewalk below. Uniformed policemen, summoned to the hotel by night manager Armondo Diaz Pastore, discovered CIA official Robert V. Lashbrook calmly sitting in the room he shared with Olson. Lashbrook identified himself only as a “consultant chemist” for the Defense Department and inexplicably told the officers that he saw no reason to go down to the street to check on his colleague. Lashbrook also told police that Olson had journeyed to Manhattan to be treated by Abramson for “depression related to an ulcer.”
Two detectives from the 14th Precinct dispatched to the Statler Hotel were suspicious about what they observed. At first, they suspected they had a “homosexual affair” gone bad on their hands. Detective James Ward initially referred to the case as a possible “homocide” in his report. Ward and his partner, detective Robert Mullee, took Lashbrook to the precinct house for interrogation. Within less than two hours, Lashbrook was set loose and the case was closed out as “D.O.A. Suicide.” The final police report makes no mention whatsoever of the CIA or any drugs, nor does the report on Olson’s death filed by the New York City Medical Examiners Office.
After his release from questioning at the 14th Precinct station, Lashbrook went to the Medical Examiners office to officially identify Olson’s body. There he was briefly interviewed by a stenographer before returning to spend another day at the Statler Hotel.
The Olson death remained a suicide stemming from depression for 22 years. Then in June 1975, a blue-ribbon commission chaired by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller submitted a report on CIA domestic crimes to President Gerald Ford. In it, under a section headed “The Testing of Behavior-Influencing Drugs on Unsuspecting Subjects Within the United States,” the suicide of an unnamed man who jumped from a New York hotel after being given LSD “without his knowledge while he was attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on the drug project” was briefly mentioned.
The Olson family threatened to sue the government, were granted an Oval Office audience with President Ford, served a stately luncheon by then-DCI William Colby at the CIA’s Langley, Va., complex, and were generally placated with a pile of heavily redacted documents pertaining to Olson’s “suicide” and by a 1976 congressionally approved settlement in the amount of $750,000. At the time, Alice Wicks Olson, Frank’s widow, said she “was satisfied with the settlement” and that her family was ready to move on with their lives. After decades of doubts and confusion, it appeared that the strange story had finally found a fitting conclusion.
But then in 1994, Frank Olson’s only survivors, sons Eric and Nils, convinced noted forensic sleuth James E. Starrs of George Washington University, Washington, D.C., to disinter their father’s corpse and scientifically scrutinize the remains for any signs of suspected foul play.
Working with a team of 15 forensic experts, Starrs quickly discovered a number of peculiarities in the New York Medical Examiner’s 1953 report written by then-Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Dominick DiMaio.
Starrs noted, “That report was brief and to the point, but it was a report of what was only an external examination of the remains.” Starrs was troubled that “the accompanying toxicological report only assayed the presence of methyl and ethyl alcohol, including no drugs of any kind.” This despite that Olson had allegedly been dosed with LSD and given “nembutal” shortly before his death.
Starrs was even more puzzled to discover that Olson’s body lacked any lacerations on the face and neck. Said Starrs, “This finding stood in contradistinction to that of Dr. DiMaio in his report of his external examination of Dr. Olson’s remains in 1953.” Continued Starrs, “It is a matter of some consternation how Dr. DiMaio could have reported the existence of multiple lacerations on the face and neck of Frank Olson when in truth, there were none.”
In addition to these discrepancies in the medical examiner’s report, Starrs discovered a “highly suspicious” hematoma over Olson’s left eye that he concluded was “singular evidence of the possibility that Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head prior to exiting the window.” There was no mention of this hematoma in the 1953 medical examiner’s report.
Armed with Starrs’ startling findings, the Olson brothers retained high-powered Washington, D.C., attorney Harry Huge of Powell, Goldstein, Frazer, & Murphy, to convince Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to open a murder investigation. Earlier in 1975, spurred by the LSD revelations of the Rockefeller Commission, Morgenthau’s office had briefly considered doing so but for reasons reportedly tied to the Olson family’s settlement decided not to pursue the case. At the same time, DiMaio told reporters that he had been told nothing in 1953 about Olson being given LSD or having been brought to New York to see a physician.
DiMaio said that Robert Lashbrook, when questioned by the medical examiner’s stenographer, Max Katzman, failed to say anything about Olson having taken LSD or that he was under psychiatric treatment. DiMaio also said that while it “was routine for his office to review the police report in such cases,” the report on Olson’s death had “not been forwarded.”
Pertinent to note here is that the police report, dated Nov. 30, 1953, clearly states that Olson was being examined by Abramson for “a mental ailment” and that Abramson “had advised” that Olson “enter a sanitarium as he was suffering from severe psychosis and illusions.”
On March 31, 1995, attorney Huge sent Morgenthau a 12-page memorandum that methodically argued why an investigation should be opened. Within weeks, Morgenthau agreed with Huge’s findings and assigned the reopened case to his newly created cold-case unit headed by seasoned prosecutors Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb.
According to informed sources, newly emerging evidence in the Olson case revolves around Harold Blauer’s death and a number of previously unrevealed links between the CIA, Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, or SOD, Olson’s place of work and the New York City Medical Examiners Office.
Cold case prosecutors Saracco and Bibb have learned that, contrary to long-standing reports, both the CIA and SOD had a direct interest in the experiments conducted at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Sources say that Saracco and Bibb have obtained “incontrovertible evidence” that reveals that CIA officials Lashbrook and Gottlieb, as well as officials from the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office, directly participated in the cover-up of Blauer’s death. Gottlieb was the CIA branch chief that ordered “the experiment” with LSD that allegedly resulted in Olson’s suicide. In 1986, Lashbrook denied that he had any knowledge about Blauer’s death.
But a top-secret CIA memorandum obtained by the authors reveals that Lashbrook knew far more than he claimed. The document, written in January 1954, details a conversation Lashbrook had with a high-ranking Pentagon official who telephoned the CIA to inquire if the agency “had heard that the Chemical Corps was being sued” because “of an incident involving the use of chemical compounds” at “the New York Psychiatric Institute, which is affiliated with Columbia University.” The memo states: “A Dr. Paul Hoch was the Institute’s principal investigator. He was carrying out experiments involving the injection of Mescalin [sic] derivatives into patients. In this particular case the patient died. Relatives of the deceased have brought the action.”
The document goes on to detail that Lashbrook “had been advised of these facts by Dr. Marrazzi, civilian employee of the Medical Laboratory,” and that both Lashbrook and Gottlieb advised the inquiring Pentagon officer that Marrazzi “was keeping [CIA] informed of their various activities along these lines.” The document continues, “Chemical Corps’ contract is for approximately $1,000,000 dollars. We took a $65,000 financial interest in this place of research around 23 February 1953, after the referenced incident occurred.”
The memorandum goes on to explain that following Lashbrook’s telephone conversation, Gottlieb contacted the Pentagon officer the next day “and advised him we did not want the Agency’s name mentioned in connection with the case since we were in no way involved.” The officer, according to the memo, “assured” Gottlieb that the Agency “will not be mentioned and that he would keep us informed.” The last several sentences of the memo read: “Further information supplied by [officer] was that the lawyer [for the Blauer family] was a military man and had been advised the case involved military connections. The lawyer stated he would give the case no publicity. And finally, the reason for [officer’s] contacting the Agency in the first place was to see if we could help them in any way to hush the thing up. He advised they are now using other channels.”
Other recently discovered documents concerning Blauer’s death reveal a more complete portrait of the specifics surrounding the experiments at the Psychiatric Institute. A 1975 CIA document written by Technical Services Inspector General, Donald F. Chamberlain, reads: “The Army Inspector General informed me that the Army’s Special Operations Division, Fort Detrick (the unit that Frank Olson was in) had a contract for two years with the Psychiatric Institute (1952-53) to test various mescaline-related and other drugs [including LSD] that the Army was interested in. Blauer died 2-1/2 hours after an injection of an apparent overdose of 450 milligrams of EA 1298 [mescaline-related drug].”
That it was Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division that initiated the secret contracts with the New York State Psychiatric Institute is significant because the division was established with CIA assistance for the exclusive purposes of devising biological weapons that, according to CIA documents, could be targeted “at individuals for the purposes of affecting human behavior with the objectives ranging from very temporary minor disablement to more serious and longer incapacitation to death.” These purposes seriously call into question the motivations behind the “experiment” on Blauer.
Nearly a year before Blauer’s death, beginning in 1952, the relationship between the CIA and Fort Detrick’s SOD was formalized through a written agreement. It was officially referred to as Project MK/NAOMI, an adjunct to the larger CIA behavior modification program that within months became known as MK-ULTRA. According to former CIA officials, Project MK/NAOMI was named after Abramson’s assistant, Naomi Busner. Abramson, from 1951 through to at least the late 1960s, served as a high-level researcher for the CIA and Army. Earlier in 1943-1944, Olson, assigned to Division D at the Chemical Corps’ Edgewood Arsenal, and Abramson worked closely together on a prototype project involving simulated exercises aimed at biological-contamination of the New York City water supply.
Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division was the top-secret Chemical Corps branch that was Olson’s assigned place of work at the time of his death. Contrary to conventional press accounts, CIA-employee Olson was not a simple research scientist with SOD but was a high-ranking division administrator holding the titles assistant division chief and director of plans and assessments. Prior to that, according to military and CIA records, he served as the division’s director of planning and intelligence activities and as director of the SO division itself for about 12 months.
Documents uncovered by the authors reveal that within 48 hours of Blauer’s death, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi, the Chemical Corps contract officer for Project Pelican, traveled to the New York State Psychiatric Institute on Jan. 10 and met with Hoch. According to several documents, Marrazzi instructed Hoch to do everything possible to conceal the Army’s involvement in Blauer’s death. Additionally, documents reveal: “Marrazzi indicated in his trip report that while he was in New York he prevailed on one of the New York City Medical Examiners with whom he was well acquainted to place all the records (regarding Blauer) in a confidential file in the medical examiners office. Thus the Medical Examiner was informed that Blauer’s death was connected with secret Army experiments, but he was also told that this information was not to be disclosed.” This was the same office of the New York City Medical Examiner that months later received the body of Frank Olson.
Contacted at his home, retired medical examiner DiMaio said, “I don’t recall the incident involving Harold Blauer.” On Frank Olson’s death, he said, “It was a long time ago. They [the police] told me he was on LSD and had been acting aberrant and erratic for a while. There was no reason to do an autopsy.”
CIA spokesman Tom Crispwell declined to comment on any of the new evidence being examined by the District Attorney’s Office.
He said, “CIA activities related to the MK-ULTRA program were thoroughly investigated in 1975 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research. The CIA cooperated with each investigation.”
Olson family attorney Harry Huge said, “We are monitoring these developments closely and are very encouraged that we may now have the means to pursue things further. For obvious reasons, this is an extremely difficult case. The district attorney’s prosecutors have diligently logged hundreds of hours working on it, and we’re anxious about additional findings that may be forthcoming.”
Portions of this article were taken from the forthcoming book, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Cold War Experimentsby H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John F. Kelly.
Meet Sidney Gottlieb – CIA dirty trickster
Terry Lenzner’s CIA connection
Cold War legend dies at 80
To view these articles on the WorldNet site go to WorldNet Daily and enter “Olson and CIA” in the WND search box at left side of the page. Links are also provided to three additional
THE OLSON FILE
A secret that could destroy the CIA
by Kevin Dowling and Phillip Knightley
Dr. Frank Olson’s life was a mystery, full of dubious experiments for the CIA, and unexplained trips to Porton Down. His death, in 1953, was stranger still. Was it suicide? A failed exercise in brainwashing? Or murder? And what did he know that made his death so convenient? Next week, a grand jury may finally hear the truth about the Cold War’s darkest Secret.
Published in Night and Daymagazine, the Sunday supplement to The London Mail on Aug 23, 1998.
Reprinted June 12, 1999 in Dagens Nyheter, largest newspaper in Sweden. Used here with permission of the authors.
In the early hours of 28 November 1953, Armand Pastore, the night manager of the Statler Hotel, New York, was startled to hear a crash of breaking glass and then a sickening thump on the pavement outside his hotel. He rushed out to find a middle-aged man lying semi-conscious on the ground.
Pastore looked up to see light shining from a shattered window of a room on the hotel‚s thirteenth floor. He knelt down alongside the man, cradled his head in his arms and leaned closer as the man made an effort to speak, then died. He had obviously jumped out of the window, just another suicide in a city where the plunge from skyscraper to pavement was a shocking but not unusual event.
Suicide was certainly the finding at the inquest—Dr Frank Olson, a United States Army scientist, for reasons no one could fathom, had taken his own life. And that was what the record showed for the next twenty-two years.
Then in 1975 the Rockefeller Commission, set up by President Ford to examine the extent of the CIA‚s illegal domestic operations, revealed that an unnamed army scientist had died after CIA experts, experimenting with mind-bending drugs, had secretly slipped him a dose of potent LSD. During the ensuing uproar, the scientist was identified as Frank Olson.
The US government moved immediately to show how sorry it was for what had happened. Congress passed a private humanitarian relief bill which authorised a payment of $750,000 to the widow, Mrs Olson, and her three children. Mrs Olson and her son Eric were invited to the White House where President Ford publicly apologised to them. And the then CIA director, William Colby, held a lunch for Mrs Olson and Eric in his office at the CIA, apologised and gave them the CIA file on the case.
According to the file, Olson had suffered a “chemically-induced psychotic flashback” a week after he had been slipped the dose of LSD. So a CIA doctor, Richard Lashbrook, had been deputed to look after Olson until he was normal again. Lashbrook had been sharing the hotel room with Olson and was asleep in a bed next to him when, he said, he was awoken by the sound of breaking glass and realised that Olson had crashed through the window.
Eric, who is now 54,was never very convinced by this version of events but kept quiet so as not to distress his mother. Then when she died in 1994 he decided to test the official story of his father’s death. Experts told him that in order to achieve the momentum needed to vault over a central heating radiator under the window, burst through the closed blinds and smash through the hotel’s heavy glass panes, Olson would have had to struck the window travelling at more than 30km per hour. A trained athlete takes about fifty metres to accelerate to that speed. But the hotel room was only 5.5 metres long.
Next there was Dr. Lashbrook‚s strange behaviour when the hotel manager Pastore arrived in the room to tell him that his colleague was dead on the pavement below. Lashbrook went to the telephone, rang a number and simply said, “Olson’s gone”. Then he hung up and retired to the bathroom where he sat on the lavatory with his head in his hands.
Eric Olson, a Maryland clinical psychologist, began to spend every spare moment trying to get at the true story of what had happened to his father. Today he is convinced he is on the brink of doing so. But the story is so strange, so reminiscent of the TV series “The X-Files,” that despite compelling evidence, it is uncertain that anyone will believe it.
THE TERMS of the $750,000 government settlement for Olson‚s death prevented his family from pursuing the matter in the civil courts. But if Eric Olson could convince the authorities that his father’s death was a criminal matter, then he might eventually get at the truth. Four years ago he had his first breakthrough when he won a court order to exhume his father’s body.
“When he was buried the coffin had been sealed. They said he had been so badly mutilated in the fall that it wouldn’t be right for the family to see him. But when we opened the casket a lifetime later, I knew Daddy at once. He had been embalmed and his face was unmarked and untroubled. He hadn‚t been hurt the way they said he had.”
A new autopsy confirmed Eric Olson’s impression and entirely contradicted the findings of the first inquest. Carried out by a team led by James Starrs, Professor of Law and Forensic Science at The National Law Centre, George Washington University, it could find no sign of the cuts and abrasions that the first autopsy said had been caused by crashing through the window glass.
On the other hand, there was a haematoma, unrecorded at the first post mortem examination, on the left hand side of Olson’s skull. This had been caused by a heavy blow, James Starrs decided, probably from a hammer, before the fall from the window. Starrs and his team concluded that the evidence from their examination was “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”
Although the team did not say so—because it could be only supposition—someone had struck Olson on the head with a hammer, smashed open the window, probably with the same hammer, and had then thrown Olson out. But the new autopsy findings were certainly enough for a New York public prosecutor, Stephen Saracco, to win the right for a grand jury to begin hearing the evidence he had uncovered. If the jury, too, found the evidence of murder compelling, then Saracco requested that it should hand down indictments for murder and conspiracy to murder.
Saracco, an ambitious, aggressive lawyer with no fear about taking on the American establishment, says that the men he wants named in the indictments will include some of America’s most respected CIA veterans and, if the grand jury agrees to his request to widen his investigations, former officers of the British Secret Intelligence and Security Services as well.
Already there are indications that the international intelligence community is running scared. The CIA and the Department of Justice have resisted Saracco ‘s attempts to subpoena Dr. Lashbrook, who now lives in California, to question him, among other things, about Olson’s last hours, the telephone call that Lashbrook made immediately after Olson’s death and the work that Lashbrook and Olson had been engaged in together.
Early in July, after months of negotiation, the two government departments gave in and agreed that the grand jury should hear Saracco’s team examine Lashbrook at Venture County Courthouse during the week beginning 24 August. Saracco has already offered Lashbrook immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony. He was too late, however, to do the same for William Colby, the CIA chief who apologised for Olson’s death.
On 27 April 1996, after Saracco won the right to a grand jury hearing, Colby who realised that he would be forced to give evidence, vanished from his country retreat about forty miles south of Washington. It looked as if he had left in a hurry: the lights and the radio were still on, his computer was still running, and a half finished glass of wine was on the table. The next day his empty canoe was found swamped on a sand bar. Five days later divers found a body identified as Colby’s. He had apparently been the victim of a boating accident.
If so, it would appear that Maryland waters are particularly unkind to retired members of the CIA. In 1978 another CIA officer, John Paisley, also vaanished there in another boating accident. A week after Paisley‚s abandoned boat was located, a body with a gunshot wound to the head was found. But the condition of the body meant that precise identification was impossible—making the area a conspiracy blackspot.
Suppose the grand jury does in the end find that the evidence that Olson was murdered and that the perpetrators were other CIA officers, there will still remain a major barrier to an eventual conviction–what was the motive? What was so sensitive to the CIA that it would kill one of its own? To find an answer we have to go back to the fifties when the two great ideologies of the 20th century, communism and capitalism, were locked in a battle to the death and no act no matter how morally shocking was ruled out in the struggle for victory.
THE NUCLEAR stand-off of the Cold War had sent both sides back to their drawing boards. If it were impossible to employ nuclear weapons without assuring mutual total destruction, what other weapons could the boffins come up with—given virtually unlimited funds and no moral restraints—that would win any future war? Two possibilities attracted attention. The first was bacteriological warfare.
Bacteriological warfare is remarkably cheap; it has been described as “the poor man‚s nuclear bomb.” A deadly virus sufficient to wipe out every living person over an area of one square mile would cost only about $50. In the 1950s both sides in the Cold War set up research establishments to develop biological weapons, methods of delivering them, and methods of protecting against them. Dr. Frank Olson worked in this area.
Trained as a biochemist, he had been employed since 1943 in the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was associated with a CIA secret research unit known at the time as MK-ULTRA, and came to Britain frequently between 1950-53 to work at the British Microbiological Research Establishment (MRE) at Porton Down. Olson was part of a team which was developing aerosol delivery systems for biological weapons that included staphylococcus enterotoxin, Venezuelan equine encephalo- myelitis, and anthrax. Olson seems to have concentrated on counter- biological warfare, trying to find vaccines and special clothing that would protect against attack.
Deadly effective though it may be, biological warfare has drawbacks. There is always the risk that it may get out of control and attack not only the enemy but those who decided to employ it in the first place. Like nuclear warfare, biological warfare could wipe out civilisation as we know it. So Olson and some of his colleagues became intrigued by another type of weapon altogether, one which attacked not the body but the mind.
Those scientists in the Western intelligence community who supported the idea of developing brain-washing programmes had two gurus—Dr Douglas Ewan Cameron, a Glasgow-born psychiatrist, and Dr. Sydney “The Gimp” Gottlieb, the CIA‚s top expert on brainwashing. Cameron won his post-graduate diploma in psychiatric medicine at the University of London before joining the staff at John Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, in 1926. He became convinced that the mentally ill posed a grave threat to Anglo-American civilisation and should be forcibly sterilised.
During the Second World War he was a member of the Military Mobilization Committee of the American Psychiatric Association and was appalled to learn that of the fifteen million men inducted into the US armed forces, two million had to be rejected on neuropsychiatric grounds, a proportion far higher than in any other nation. He set about finding remedies including electroshock (60,000 ECTs in a single year), lobotomies and other forms of psychosurgery, sensory deprivation and mind-altering drugs–all used on patients who had little or no say in their treatment. Conscientious objectors, many of them Quakers, were defined by Cameron as mentally-ill and sometimes forced to accept treatment.
When the end of the war revealed that the Nazis had been carrying out similar experiments—23 German doctors were convicted at Nuremberg—the Western intelligence community suddenly became very interested in Cameron’s work. This interest grew to an obsession after the Stalin show trials with the robotic, apparently artificially-induced confessions made by the accused. Then the behaviour of American POWs held in Chinese camps during the Korean War and their subsequent denunciation of the American way of life, futher convinced the CIA that the communists were already well advanced in mind control techniques. In intelligence circles there were rumours of a Soviet plot to place brain-washed zombies in the White House and other citadels of Western power.
The American response was MK-ULTRA. Its director, Dr. Gottleib, sought help from his Scottish hero, Cameron, and set him up with cover organisations to distance the CIA from some of the more abbhorent aspects of MK-ULTRA‚s work. So Cameron founded the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, ran a proprietary company called Psychological Assessment Associates, and contributed papers to learned journals on “Psychic Driving”, “The Restructuring of the Personality” and “Suggestion and Extra-Sensory Perception.”
The short term goals were to counter any communist plot to insert brain-washed assassins into the West. However, according to authors Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett, biographers of Nelson Rockefeller—one-time chairman of a committee overseeing the MK-ULTRA operation—the scientists also wanted to find drugs or techniques by which “a man could be surreptitiously drugged through the medium of an alcoholic cocktail at a social party . . . and the subject induced to perform the act of attempted assassination of an official in a government in which he was well-established socially and politically.”
A far-fetched ides, perhaps, but one whose currency was not limited to the CIA. A few years later, the surreptitious administration of a mind-altering drug in a drink at a party was suggested as a possible solution to a strange double death in Sidney, Australia. On the morning of January 1, 1963, Dr. Gilbert Bogel, and his lover, Mrs. Margaret Chandler, were found dead on a river bank after a riotous party given by staff of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Bogle, a brilliant scientist, had told friends that he was about to go to the US to work on scientific research of great military importance. The deaths were never solved, but Sydney detectives became convinced that Bogle and his colleagues had been experimenting with LSD and the effect it produced on their thought-processes—the invitation to the New Year’s party required each guest to bring a painting done under the influenced of the drug—and their either by accident or by design someone had slipped the couple what turned out to be an overdose.
Repeated requests to the BBI under the Freedom of Information Act asking for details of the work that Boigle would have been doing in the US have met with refusal on the grounds of national security. But the speculation is irresistible that it might have involved experiments in mind control similar to those that Olson had worked on.
The long-term aim of these experiments with mind-altering drugs is thought by those who have studied the MK-ULTRA programme to have been to ensure the dominance of Anglo-American civilisation in the “war of all against all—the key to evolutionary success.” Brain-washing would be used not only to defeat the enemy but to ensure compliance and loyalty of one’s own population.
Where did Dr. Olson fit into all this? A Harley Street psychiatrist, Dr. William Sargant, now dead, was sent by the British goverment in the early 1950s to evaluate MK-ULTRA. On his return he told a colleague and friend, former BBC television producer, Gordon Thomas, that what Cameron and Gottlieb were up to was as bad as anything going on in the Soviet gulags.
Thomas, whose books include a 1988 study of the CIA’s forays into mind-control, Journey into Madness: Medical Torture and the Mind Controllers, says “Sargant told me that he had urged the British government to distance this country from it. He said it was blacker than black.” According to Thomas, Sargant told him that Frank Olson had come to Britain between 1950-53 to work on attachment at Porton Down and had also made frequent visits to “an intelligence facility” in Sussex. This is confirmed by entries in the special passport that Olson used.
The stamps on the passport, which declare that the bearer was on “official business for the Department of the Army” indicate a pattern of travel that took Olson between various British military airfields, France, Occupied Germany, Scandanavia and the United States between May 1950 and August 1953. Prosecuting attorney Saracco believes that something happened on one of these trips that holds the key to Olson’s death. Since the matter is still before a grand jury Saracco cannot talk about it but Gordon Thomas has his own idea of what it was. “The CIA was using German SS prisoners and Norwegian Quislings [collaborators] taken from jails and detention centres as guinea pigs to test Cameron’s theories about mind control. The agency preferred to conduct such clinical trials outside the United States because sometimes they were terminal—the human guinea pig ended up dead. Olson was accustomed to seeing lethal experiments done on animals but when human beings were used in this way it was too much for him. I believe that he wanted out.”
Mike Miniccino, an American businessman and historical researcher who has spent 25 years studying the MK-ULTRA programme and developing a database on its activities says that if Olson expressed doubts about MK-ULTRA and its work then he would have done so to William Sargant, the Harley Street psychiatrist, who had evaluated MK-ULTRA‚s work and who had been a close colleague of Olson’s.
And although—as we already know—Sargant wanted the British government to distance itself from the CIA’s work with MK-ULTRA, Miniccino says he nevertheless was committed to the principle of mind control and became the link between the British Secret Intelligence Service and MK-ULTRA. Miniccino adds, “So if Frank Olson expressed serious doubts about the MK-ULTRA project to Sargant, then he signed his own death warrant.”
What Miniccino is implying and what public prosecutor Saracco wants to prove is that the MK-ULTRA mind control project—with its clinical trials on unsuspecting human beings—was such a sensitive issue with the western intelligence community that it would go to any lengths to prevent an insider like Olson, from blowing the whistle.
Is this, then, what happened? Did Olson tell the British psychiatrist/SIS agent Sargant that he wanted out of the mind-control project, and that his conscience might compel him to reveal publicly what the intelligence services had been doing? Did Sargant then pass this on to SIS, who in turn told the CIA? Was a decision then taken to make certain that Olson never talked by destroying his memory with drugs and, when this failed, by murdering him and making it look like a suicide?
Apart from the evidence set out earlier, there is another compelling fact that supports this theory. Until Mrs Olson died in 1993, a regular visitor at her house was Olson’s former boss in Special Operations, Vincent Ruwet. Ruwet would spent long-daytime hours with Mrs Olson. The two would drink together at her house (Mrs. Olson became an alcoholic) while Ruwet listened to the problems she faced in bringing up her three fatherless children. Everyone considered him to be a sympathetic family friend. But newly-discovered documents reveal that Vincent Ruwet had been assigned by the CIA to “keep track of the wife.”. If Olson was a threat because of what he knew, and knowledge can be passed on, then the CIA would have to spy on all those who had been close to him in case he had told them the truth about MK-ULTRA? THE CIA has always maintained as a matter of historical record that it has never murdered an American citizen on American soil. If, as a result of Eric Olson’s persistence in trying to uncover what really happened to his father, and the investigating skills of public prosecutor Saracco, this turns out to be a lie, it could well be the beginning of the end of the agency.
Eric Olson says, “The Cold War is over and there are now ongoing national debates about the future of the CIA and about unethical medical testing on humans. My father’s case covers both. The use of hallucinogens, hypnosis, electroshock and other procedures in an attempt to control the way people behave was the CIA‚s equivalent of the Manhattan [atom bomb] Project. MK-ULTRA was secret, shocking and incredibly dangerous. They couldn‚t afford to take the risk of letting my father continue to be involved or, considering all he knew, allowing him to quit. So he was terminated instead. My father’s murder crossed a line in the sand which the U.S. government has always publicly respected. The guilty ones will not be allowed to get away with it.” Or as Fox Mulder would say, “The truth is out there.”
Code Name: Artichoke
The CIA’s Secret Experiments on Humans
A film by Egmont R. Koch and Michael Wech
Camera: Sven Kiesche
Sound: Jan Schmiedt
Editing: Arno Schumann
Archive Research: John H. Colhoun
English version: Mark Rossman
Editorial Director: Gert Monheim
Production: Egmont R. Koch Filmproduktion
Bremen, Germany
Premier, ARD, WDR August 12, 2002
(distorted voice, like a radio newscast)
Frederick/Maryland. More than 40 years after his death, the body of former CIA scientist Dr. Frank Olson has been exhumed. Olson’s son Eric is convinced his father was murdered by agents of the American government because he wanted to leave the CIA. Dr. Frank Olson was an expert for anthrax and other biological weapons and had top security clearance. Forensic pathologists at George Washington University performed an autopsy and concluded that Olson probably was the victim of a violent crime.
00.50 Voice of Eric Olson
“I was strongly identifying with him, I loved him. And I am sure that’s why in the end I came to take on this task trying to figure out what had become of him.”
Title: “Code Name: Artichoke.”
It has been eight years since the exhumation. Eric Olson is still searching for the reasons behind his father’s death in November of 1953. Eric was nine years old at the time. It’s a quest he inherited as the oldest of three children. To solve the mystery of their father’s death.
2.01 Voice of Eric Olson
“My real memories of my father are not very many or very clear, because the trauma of his death really darkened a lot of these memories. His death was so dark and so unmentionable. After he died, it was a subject one couldn’t really go near.”
Eric Olson has returned to live in the house his father built for the family in Frederick in 1950. Back then, Olson senior was one of the biochemists responsible for the biological weapons center the U.S. army ran nearby. The anthrax letters that killed five and caused illness to several others have haunted Eric ever since. Could there be a connection between his father’s death five decades ago and the acts of terror taking place today? (3.00)
The deadly disease that frightened America after the terrorist attacks on September 11th seems to have come from the same US Army Laboratory in Frederick where Olson had worked: Fort Detrick.
The biological weapons lab was founded in 1943. At the time, the Americans feared Hitler might attack the allied troops with a virus or bacteria. They quickly produced gas masks and anthrax weapons, in order to be able to strike back in kind.
Dr. Frank Olson, an army captain and one of the first scientists at Fort Detrick, worked together with Norman Cournoyer. The two became good friends. Their first sons were born within a few days of each other in 1944.
4.18 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“We worked about five months in this thing called aerosols to see if we could test gas masks and impregnated clothing to see how good they were. And then one day he was transferred to working on hot agents. He said: ‘Norm, how about working for me in the hot stuff?’ That’s how we always referred to it. N was Anthrax, X was botulism and so forth.” (4.53)
Christmas 1947. The war is finally over. Norman and his family celebrate together with Alice and Frank Olson and their children.
“Were we close? Yes! Very, very close, every day of the week for two and a half years. You are going to expect us to be close.”
Among the things his father left behind, Eric Olson found some home movies and slides. At first he didn’t pay them much attention. But today, he sees that material from a different point of view. Might it contain any indication of the secret anthrax research his father was doing after the war?
Frank Olson made a hobby of home movies. These scenes reveal nothing of his secret task involving deadly weapons. They show the perfect world of a young father, captured with the latest 8-mm camera to hit the market.
Frank Olson also used photography. He brought home a lot of slides from his many travels. His photographs also primarily show private moments.
Frank with his wife Alice and son Eric in 1945. Both in 1947 with son Eric and daughter Lisa. Christmas 1949 in a tuxedo. Alice had given birth to their third child, Nils, in the meantime.
6.19 Voice of Eric Olson:
“The whole subject of the relationship between a wife and a husband who is doing top secret, classified work is a subject one could discuss at some length. The wife develops uncanny kind of intuitions, about all the things that are not being said and she knows the limits of what she can ask. And for quite a long time, possibly ever since my father began working at Detrick, the whole business about the monkey dying was a very delicate matter for him.
When he would come home for lunch and have a certain kind of expression, she would immediately know that this meant that this morning all the monkeys had died, which meant that the experiment had been a success.”
Arthur Vidich is Frank Olson’s brother-in-law. Their families regularly spent their summer vacation together. Vidich remembers Frank Olson as an American patriot, who was enthusiastic about working for the Army’s biological weapons program.
7.22 Voice of Arthur Vidich/Brother-in-law of Frank Olson
“He was a person who believed in what he was doing, who felt the work that he was doing at the Center in Frederick was important for the United States. He considered himself a terribly loyal and patriotic person. That kind of an attitude of loyalty was one way of expressing your Americanism.”
Dr. Frank Olson had worked for the US Army’s biological weapons laboratory for exactly ten years when he died in New York in the wee hours of November 28, 1953. He spent the night at the Hotel Pennsylvania, along with a CIA agent who was there to guard him. That night, Frank Olson plunged to his death from his room on the hotel’s thirteenth floor. Through a closed window, it was said.
“Army Bacteriologist Dies In Plunge From New York Hotel”.
Nils, the youngest of Olson’s three children, scribbled on the clipping with a crayon.
“I was simply told that ‘Your father has had an accident,’ and that ‘he has died.’ The only detail that I was then given was that he had fallen or jumped out of a window. I remember quite clearly just being quite stupefied by this.
As a nine-year-old I was old enough to have some idea of cause and effect. And I had no idea what does it mean to fall out of a window. How you fall out of a window in the middle of the night. What is that?”
Eric didn’t understand.
And for his mother, the subject of his father’s death became a taboo.
The search for the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death of Dr. Frank Olson begins in 1945, with the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. American troops discovered the corpses of hundreds of prisoners who had been murdered or starved to death. Many of the survivors told US doctors about cruel experiments the camp’s doctors carried out using disease germs and various drugs.
A few weeks later, at Kransberg Castle north of Frankfurt, the scientific elite of Nazi Germany is arrested and questioned by American officers. The name of the project is “Operation Dustbin.” The American military hopes to evaluate and exploit the findings German researchers made during the war. Among the prisoners at Kransberg Castle is rocket scientist Professor Hermann Oberth, who collects autographs from his colleagues.
Also at Kransberg Castle: Some of the leading scientific experts in Nazi Germany had been involved in biological warfare, testing the effects of deadly germs on human beings in Dachau and other concentration camps. One of them was Professor Kurt Blome. Blome was the Third Reich’s Deputy Surgeon General and the man behind German research into biological weapons.
Blome will be among those charged in the case against concentration camp doctors brought before the military tribunal in Nuremberg. He will face the death penalty.
In spite of the fact that there is enough evidence against him, Kurt Blome will be acquitted in Nuremberg. The Americans have other plans for him.
11.21 Voice of Professor Kurt Blome: Untertitel // Subtitles
1) I stated publicly and openly that I was a conscientious National Socialist…
2) and a follower of Adolf Hitler.
11.29 Voice of Norman Cournoyer
“We were interested in anyone who did work in biological warfare. Did they want to use that? The Nazis? Yes, absolutely! They wanted to use anything that killed people. Anything!”
The Americans save Kurt Blome, seen here on the left, from death by hanging. In turn, he provides them with information about the Nazi biological weapons program. One of the specialists interrogating Blome is Donald Falconer, a friend and colleague of Frank Olson. Falconer is responsible for developing anthrax bombs.
Today, more than 50 years later, Donald Falconer lives in a convalescent home not far from Frederick.
Eric Olson has visited Falconer several times, hoping his father’s old friend might one day confide a crucial secret in him. But Falconer refuses to say anything, feeling bound by his military oath, and doesn’t want to be interviewed.
In one of his father film’s, immediately following images of his grandfather, Eric discovers a sequence that seems to show secret crop-dusting flights that took place in 1947. Using the findings of Blome and other Nazi scientists, the Americans experimented with artificial diseases capable of destroying crops.
After this short clip, more family pictures of the children.
Meanwhile, in Fort Detrick, a massive arms program is taking place with bacteriological weapons, primarily anthrax spores, which have proven to be highly resistant and therefore suitable for biological warfare.
Anthrax was cultivated in this building, then placed in bombs. The Americans are concerned about the Soviets’ biological arsenal. If the cold war should ever turn hot, deadly bacteria might be used as weapons. The army demands ample weapons at the ready.
Frank Olson often uses the Air Force to test germ warfare in the field, for example on the Caribbean island of Antigua. These tests are carried out to monitor the spread of diseases under realistic conditions. Most of the tests Olson’s team carries out in the Caribbean and on the Alaskan tundra deal with relatively harmless bacteria, but some tests are conducted using actual pathogens – called “hot stuff.”
14.20 Voice of Norman Cournoyer:
“We did not use anthrax, we used bacillus globigii which is very similar a spore as Anthrax is. So to that extent we did do something that was not kosher. We picked it up all over. It was picked up months after it.”
It’s an easy-going life they lead, but they have a secret mission. In California, Olson and his team drive up the Pacific coast in a yellow convertible to prepare an experiment to take place over San Francisco Bay. Spores will be released in order to test the city’s vulnerability to an act of Russian sabotage. Frank Olson loves life and has little interest in following rules. His unconventional manner seems inconsistent with his job working for the army.
In October of 1949, Olson is suspected of disclosing government secrets. He is interrogated by military intelligence.
(visual texts) “Olson was mildly impatient with the questioning conducted during the course of this interview. This attitude is regarded as typical by persons at Detrick who are acquainted with him.”
“Olson is violently opposed to control of scientific research, either
military or otherwise, and opposes supervision of his work. He does not follow orders, and has had numerous altercations with MP’s (…)”
15.52 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“He was very, very open and not scared to say what he thought. For that matter to the contrary. He did not give a damn. Frank Olson pulled no punches at any time. And I don’t know. That’s what they were scared of, I am sure. He did speak up any time he wanted to. Was he gonna be caught on this? Could be. Could be.”
As the scientist responsible for biological warfare experiments, Frank Olson was among the most important holders of confidential information during the Cold War.
November 1953. Four years after he was suspected for disclosing secrets – an accusation that was never proved: During a trip to New York, Olson is accompanied by a CIA agent who watches him constantly, never leaving his side. Olson and the CIA agent take a room in the famous Hotel Pennsylvania. So, what are they doing in New York?
Armand Pastore is the manager of the hotel. He is on duty that night, when Frank Olson falls from the 13th floor, landing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.
17.12 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager:
“He was laying there looking at me, trying to speak to me, very earnest
look in his eyes, wide open …. but there was blood everywhere: blood from his nose, blood from his eyes, blood from his ears, there was a bone protruding from his left arm, sticking straight out. And I kept trying to speak to him, but we were not really communicating, because I could not understand anything he was saying, and then finally he died.”
Pastore notifies the police and accompanies them to the 13th floor. In the meantime, he has determined that Olson must have fallen to his death from 1018A, and that there was probably another person in the room at the time.
“’Wait a minute’, I said, ’it is possible that there is somebody in there’. Then they became alert and they pulled their guns out and said: ’You open the door and we’ll go in.’ I opened the door with my key and they rushed in. Here this guy was sitting in the commode with the hands on his knees, his hands up to his head. The cops said ’what happened’ he said: ’I don’t know, I just heard a crash of glass and I then I see, that Frank Olson is out of the window. And he is down on the street.’”
The CIA shadow testifies that he was fast asleep and didn’t hear Olson get out of bed. He can offer no explanation for the suicide. He has nothing else to say. He makes no statement regarding the reason the two were visiting New York. The case is closed quickly. No one is interested in the telephone call that was made from Olson’s room immediately following his death.
“The operator said, ’yes there was one call out of that room’. So I said ‘What was the conversation?’ She said the man in the room called this number out in Long Island and said ‘Well, he’s gone’ and the man on the other end said ’Well, that’s too bad’ and they both hung up.”
Was that the CIA agent reporting that he had solved the “Frank Olson problem” in the Hotel Pennsylvania?
Eric Olson in New York. For years now, he has been searching for witnesses who might know something about his father’s death, which he considers to be a murder perpetrated by the CIA. He wants to know the motive. Was the government afraid Frank Olson might reveal state secrets? The recent terror attacks involving anthrax were a shock to Eric.
Eric finds himself wondering about a lot of things. Was the anthrax terrorist one of our own? Is that the reason he hasn’t been caught? Because he knows something no one else should find out about? A secret his father knew, too?
In a suburb of New York, Eric Olson meets long-time CIA veteran Ike Feldman. In the fifties, he worked in drug enforcement. At least, that was the official version. Although Feldman never met Eric’s father personally, he discovered some information about the circumstances of his death.
21.07 Voice of Ira (“Ike”) Feldman/Former CIA agent:
“The source that I have was the New York City Police Department, the Bureau of Narcotics Agents and the CIA Agents themselves. They all say the same thing: that he was pushed out of the window and that he did not jump.
People who wanted him out of the way said he talked too much and he was telling people about the things he had done which is American secret. If you work on a top government secret, a city secret, a state secret, and it spills out to people who should not know, there is only one way to do it: kill him.”
In April of 1950, Dr. Frank Olson received a diplomatic passport, unusual for an army scientist. Did he have a new job? In the following years, he traveled often to Europe, including making several trips to Germany.
“He was a member of the CIA. I only found this out after he told me about it. To me he was a Captain. That’s all I knew about it at first. It turned out that he was a CIA agent. And stayed on, right on through to 1953.”
Pictures taken in Frankfurt and Heidelberg will later turn up among Olson’s slides. These cities were home to the US Army’s most important facilities in Germany. There is also a picture of the top secret CIA headquarters in Germany, located in the building of IG Farben in the heart of Frankfurt.
What is Olson’s new assignment? He is now working in an area that has nothing to do with biological weapons. Here, in the German offices of the CIA, the biochemist is conducting important conversations with US intelligence officers.
Increasingly, he can be found in the company of other CIA agents, including a certain John McNulty. It has to do with a top secret project to use chemicals, drugs and torture on human beings in order to break their will and make them submissive. Brainwashing.
The code name for this operation: Artichoke.
(Visual text!)
“The (…) team would enjoy the opportunity of applying
“Artichoke” techniques to individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or plants and subjects having known reasons for deception.”
In Oberursel, in the Taunus hills north of Frankfurt, hidden in old half-timbered houses, the US Army led a quiet interrogation center: “Camp King”. It was primarily Soviet agents and defectors from East Germany who were kept here, people the CIA considered to be communist spies. Special teams, the so-called “rough boys”, interrogated the prisoners.
Former SS member Franz Gajdosch was hired just after the war by the Americans to tend the bar in the officers’ mess at Camp King. Sometime in the year of 1952, in the top secret interrogation center, Gajdosch runs across another German: Professor Kurt Blome.
24.42 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./ Former barkeeper at “Camp King”:
“For a long time, Blome was a doctor at Camp King, he also ran the clinic. He was a protégé of the Americans, and had been a concentration camp doctor. He conducted experiments.”
The American officers who lived the good life at Camp King aren’t disturbed about Blome’s past. Was the former concentration camp doctor expected to lend his experience for their own planned experiments on human beings? A CIA consultant began planning the Artichoke experiments as early as September of 1951.
“The conversations at Oberursel pointed up (…) signs
and symptoms of drugs that might be used (…) We should look into the use of amnesia-producing drugs.”
“Of course their methods were not humane, they exerted a lot of pressure. There are ways of breaking people. At Camp King, they were notorious, the “rough boys” – anything somebody didn’t want to reveal, they would try to get it out of them.”
There are many indications that the cruel experiments involving human beings – “Operation Artichoke” – took place in this isolated CIA safe house near Camp King, at the edge of a town called Kronberg.
The former “Schuster Villa”, now called “Haus Waldhof”, was built shortly after the turn of the century as the summer residence of a Jewish banking family from Frankfurt. The Nazis confiscated it in 1934, and the Americans took it over after the war.
26.33 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./Former bartender at “Camp King”:
“The neighbors, the community didn’t know who it was, what this place was, because the military personnel going in and out of the house weren’t in uniform, they wore civilian clothing. The vehicles had no license tags, so the community wasn’t even aware it was an American facility.”
At “House Waldhof,” in June 1952, the CIA begins conducting brain-washing experiments, using various drugs, hypnosis, and probably torture. One of the top secret protocols documents a Russian agent being pumped full of medication.
The goal of the experiments is to manipulate the human mind in order to extract secrets from its subjects. And then to erase their memory, so they can’t remember what happened to them.
Dr. Frank Olson arrived in Frankfurt on June 12, 1952, from Hendon Military Airport near London. He left the Rhine-Main region three days later, on June 15.
On June 13, experiments are conducted with “Patient No. 2”, a suspected Soviet double-agent.
28.03 Voice of Norm Cournoyer
“He was troubled after he came back from Germany one time. He came back and told me and he said Norm, I tell you right now you and I never talked about this, but we were both grown-ups and this was rough. He said ‘Norm, you would be stunned by the techniques that they used.’
They made people talk! They brainwashed people! They used all kinds of drugs, they used all kinds of torture.”
The CIA’s unscrupulous experiments on human beings continued the Nazi drug experiments they learned of during the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.
“They were using Nazis, they were using prisoners, they were using Russians, and they didn’t care whether they got out of that or not.”
Meanwhile, the US army was conducting extensive experiments with a new miracle drug: LSD. Here, for example, a soldier was expected to assemble a rifle while under the influence of the hallucinogen.
The army’s LSD experiments took place on the campus of the Chemical Corps in Edgewood Arsenal. The scientists who worked in these laboratories in the early fifties, and who collaborated closely with Frank Olson, were looking for new hallucinogenic substances. They hoped to find a way to use the drugs on the battle ground.
Dr. Fritz Hoffmann, a chemist from former Nazi Germany, had been hired a few years earlier to spur the search for new behavior-modifying substances. Immediately after the war he courted the Americans, seeking to ensure a job in the United States.
30:21 Voice of Bennie E. Hackley/Chemical Corps US Army:
“There was an interest in the U.S. during that time in looking at mood-altering drugs from LSD to BZ and other possible mood-altering drugs. Fritz was interested in that area as well.”
After its experiments on soldiers, the army saw potential in using LSD and other drugs to sedate and “dope” enemy troops. In short order, it would be possible to conquer territory without a fight.
A short time later, the CIA begins conducting its own LSD experiments in the bohemian New York neighborhood of Greenwich Village, on Bedford Street. But unlike the army experiments, the subjects of these tests, which took place in an apartment disguised as a brothel, would not be informed. The CIA hired prostitutes to pour LSD into their customers’ drinks. And then lure them into revealing secrets.
31.41 Voice of Ira (“Ike”) Feldman/Former CIA agent
“My purpose was to see that we got guys up there we wanted to talk and through other people we got prostitutes to talk to these guys and each prostitutes would put something – which I found out later was LSD – into their drink and made them talk. Either they wanted to talk about narcotics, security or crime. This was all part of the CIA experiments. They called it ‘dirty tricks’”.
LSD, it was soon learned, was a much more effective way to loosen the tongue than alcohol was.
Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland, a three-hour drive from Washington. In an isolated vacation house at the edge of the lake, the CIA’s “dirty tricks” department converged here for a meeting with ten of its scientists in November 1953.
The meeting is about Artichoke. According to the invitation, it was a conference for sports journalists. But in reality, the participants, one of them Frank Olson, were to be placed under the influence of LSD.
One of the drinks has been spiked. Later, it will be said the CIA was conducting a kind of self test – but without the knowledge of the participants.
“I do not think again from what I heard, that he was drugged because he was a security agent. He was drugged because he talked too much.”
When Frank Olson was later briefed about the LSD experiment, he knew immediately what it meant: They had interrogated him with Artichoke techniques.
33.30 Voice of Eric Olson:
“Friday evening he came home and spent the weekend in this house with my mother, my brother and sister and me and during much of the weekend they sat on the sofa which was just over here. It was a foggy November weekend, as she described it, and they sat here, holding hands and staring out of this big window into the fog, and he described having made something he referred to as a terrible mistake.”
The CIA brings Olson, accompanied by an agent, to New York. In the hotel they are joined by a doctor working for the secret service, who administers medication. Frank Olson has become a security risk. But it seems the CIA has already found a solution.
Forty years later, at the Institute for Forensic Sciences at George Washington University. The body of Dr. Frank Olson has been exhumed and is undergoing an autopsy. Eric wants clarity, once and for all. And as it turns out, the results of the first autopsy in 1953 in New York were manipulated.
34.52 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University:
“The report from New York City, from the Medical Examiner’s office which I had before me was totally inaccurate in some very important respects. It talks about lacerations, cuts of the flesh that in all probability might have been caused by glass in the course of his fall.
There were no lacerations. They were not there, totally non-existent.
We also noticed immediately that he had a hemorrhage, which we call a hematoma, which is under the skull by the frontal bone. That is only reasonably explainable as having occurred by reason of his being shall we say silenced, being rendered unable to defend himself, so that he could be tossed out of the window.”
Starrs arranges to visit the Pennsylvania Hotel with Armand Pastore, the hotel manager who found Frank Olson that night. Afterwards, he makes his judgment:
“It is my view and a number of my team members, not all of them, that it was homicide.”
That would mean Frank Olson was first knocked out by a targeted blow and then thrown out of the open hotel window. Just a few months before the murder took place, the CIA had this “Study of Assassination” prepared, a how-to book for agents, on how to kill people without leaving any clues. In this report, it says:
“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. (…) In some cases it will be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him.”
“What was spelled out in that ‘Assassination Manual’ was almost letter for letter what happened to Doctor Olson and it was a protocol, as we call it, for an assassination, which fit like the fingers in a glove.”
So was it in fact murder? But for what reason? Why did Olson speak of a “terrible mistake” he had made?
“There is a piece missing and I am not sure that I am the one to give it to you. What happened was, that he just got involved in it in a way he was unhappy about it. But there was nothing he could do about it. He was CIA and they took it to the end.”
Summer 1953. Frank Olson and his father-in-law cut down a tree. Then the family goes to Tupper Lake on vacation. Just like every year. With Arthur Vidich, his wife and their children. Everything seems the same as always. But that appearance is deceiving. Frank is troubled by something. And he makes an attempt to confide in his brother-in-law Art.
38:16 Voice of Arthur Vidich/Brother-in-law of Frank Olson:
“I had never had a conversation with him about anything that might have involved moral values. What had startled me about it was that he had mentioned the Bible and that he was struggling with something. I knew that there was a problem that he was attempting to confront. But what that problem was, I did not know. I can visualize his face actually: It was drawn, in a way I had never seen it before.”
While the family enjoys summertime at the lake, Frank retreats into his own world.
39:03 Voice of Eric Olson:
“My mother also recalled that my father was short-tempered during that last summer. She knew that he had been going through some kind of crisis. She knew he had not been sleeping well, she knew he wasn’t really at peace. He had been agitated and worried about something and from time to time discussed leaving Detrick, leaving his job and retraining himself as a dentist. She had encouraged him to do this if that is what he wanted to do.”
In Asia, at that time, a bitter war was going on between allied US troops against the North Koreans and Chinese. It had already been going on for three years. It was the first, long-awaited and long-feared battle between the West and Communism. Could the Korean War have anything to do with Frank’s personal problems?
He still has an office here in Fort Detrick, in the US army’s center for biological weapons. At the same time, he is working for the CIA. Among the tasks of the dirty tricks department in Building 1412 are brainwashing, drugs and torture, as well as murder by means of poisons and bacteria.
On July 17, 1953, Olson celebrates his 43rd birthday with friends. A few days later, he leaves for the last trip he will ever take. He took his movie camera.
First stop: London. First objects filmed: Big Ben and a parade on the Mall.
Then on to Paris. Near the Eiffel Tower, his two CIA colleagues sit in a sidewalk café and watch pretty French girls go by, on the left is John McNulty.
“Paris, London, Stockholm”, Frank will later write on the packaging. His son Eric is seeing his father’s last film consciously for the first time.
Then, suddenly, a picture of the ruins of the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate. The Soviet Memorial for the Victims of the Second World War. So Frank Olson was also in Berlin early in August 1953.
In Zehlendorf he photographs the headquarters of the American army.
Is Frank Olson on a secret Artichoke mission? Several top-level communist agents were being interrogated in Berlin at the time. It was a time of intense political and military tension in the divided city, just weeks after the civilian uprising in the Soviet sector. At the army headquarters in Berlin, Olson apparently witnessed brutal interrogation methods.
42.19 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“After he came back from Germany the last time he sounded different. When he talked to me he said, I can probably tell you things, that I can’t tell other people, because they are still in top secret material. The people he saw in Germany went to the extreme. He said: ‘Norm, did you ever see a man die?’
I said ‘No.’
He said, ‘Well, I did.’
Yes, they did die. Some of the people they interrogated died. So you can imagine the amount of work they did on these people.”
“He said, that he was going to leave. He told me that. He said, ‘I am getting out of that CIA. Period’.”
In Korea, it’s just a matter of days before the first American prisoners of war will be released. Some of them will face charges of high treason, because they accused their own country of conducting biological warfare.
43.31 Voice of US Air Force Pilot (Prisoner of War in North Korea):
“If my son asked me what I did, what I did in Korea, how can I tell him that I came over here and dropped germ bombs on people destroying, and bringing death and destruction. How can I go back and face my family?”
Are their accusations accurate? Or are they themselves the victims of communist brainwashing? One thing is for certain: Back home, in freedom, the soldiers making these confessions will be interrogated again, using drugs and torture – by their own people!
“All hands agreed that (…) among the returning POWs
from Korea (…) the ‘hard core’ group and those who had been successfully indoctrinated were excellent subjects for Artichoke work.”
The American soldiers who claimed to have committed biological warfare were apparently manipulated using Artichoke techniques. This is documented in CIA papers. And indeed, all discredited their confessions.
44.30 Voice of US Air Force-Pilot (after his return):
“I did sign a confession, relating to germ warfare. The statements contained in this confession were false they were obtained under duress from Chinese communists. When making these statements I deliberately attempted to put in much as was false and ridiculous that I could possibly get away with.”
“I took an oath when I left the Army that I would not talk about that. I am sorry.”
The Korean War Memorial in Washington honors the Americans who died in that fight. Of those who returned, some were interrogated by the CIA using cruel methods, and forced to rescind their confessions. But were the confessions the truth? Did the Americans in fact use biological weapons in the Korean War? As a test? And was this the secret Frank Olson knew, and might disclose?
“This fits with what my mother had always said: Korea really bothered your father.
Finally when one my father’s colleagues within the past year only told me that my father had come to understand that Korea was the key thing and that they were using biological warfare methods in Korea.
And then I preceded to ask him about the germ warfare confessions, this was alleged to be by the American government, these confessions made by the American servicemen were immediately discredited by the U.S. government under the idea that these were manipulated and produced only by the effect of brainwashing.
And at that point my father’s colleague looked at me as if to say ‘read-my-lips’: ‘it wasn’t all brainwashing’.”
Would this colleague, Norman Cournoyer, repeat this statement in front of the camera? He has never made a public statement. Neither about Frank Olson, nor about biological warfare in the Korean War. Will he, now in his 80s, pay last respects to his old friend Frank Olson? And to Frank’s son Eric, who takes part in this conversation?
“I took an oath when I left the United States Army that I would never divulge that stuff.”
“You divulged it to me.”
“You cannot prove it, can you?”
“I can assert it. You told me.”
“So you don’t want to say it?”
“No …. I don’t want to say it. But, there were people who had biological weapons and they used them. I won’t say anything more than that. They used them.”
47:24 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“Was there a reason for your Dad being killed by the CIA? Probably so.”
Around Frederick, Maryland, where Frank Olson lived while working for both the US Army’s secret biological warfare program and the CIA, the FBI is still looking for the anthrax terrorist.
For months, the largest investigation in the history of American criminal justice has been underway. Should the perpetrator be accused and the case come to court, the government in Washington might be forced to reveal what Eric Olson believes is top secret information about illegal research on biological weapons, about the use of anthrax in the Korean War – and about his father’s murder.
Eric wants to tell his friend Bruce about the latest evidence. Bruce has been at his side throughout his years of research. Once, in the summer of 1975, the American government didn’t hesitate to see to it that the truth was not made known.
The conspiracy originated at the top, in the White House, initiated by Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney. It had just been learned that the CIA allegedly drugged its employee Frank Olson with LSD before his supposed suicide.
Rumsfeld and Cheney, heads of the White House chiefs of staff, at the time recommended to President Gerald Ford that he apologize to the family in the name of the government, and to support retribution. In order to prevent worse things from happening. That’s the content of this White House memo:
“There (is…) the possibility that it might be necessary to disclose highly classified national security information in connection with any court suit or legislative hearings.”
Ten days later, Ford hosted the Olson family and apologized. This allowed him to remain silent about state secrets – and the true reasons for Frank Olson’s death.
“What this means for me is that a national security homicide is not only a possibility, but really it is a necessity, when you have a certain number of ingredients together.
If you are doing top secret work that is immoral, arguably immoral, especially in the post-Nuremberg period, and arguably illegal, and at odds with the kind of high moral position you are trying to maintain in the world, then you have to have a mechanism of security which is going to include murder.”
The two politicians who collaborated in the conspiracy in 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney, are back in power. As vice president and secretary of defense of the government of the United States. The Frank Olson case, it seems, is far from being closed, even 50 years later. That, at least, is one thing of which Olson’s son is now certain.
Frederick’s ‘Candidate’ was not Frank Olson, but Frederick itself
Frederick News-Post
By Eric Olson
Roy Meachum’s column “Frederick’s ‘Candidate'” (News-Post, Aug. 4) makes a very useful contribution to the burgeoning literature on the death of my father, Dr. Frank Olson. Meachum’s column becomes even more informative when combined with the two long articles by Scott Shane on Detrick’s Special Operations Division and on the Olson case that ran in the “Baltimore Sun” three days earlier, on August 1.
Meachum does an excellent job of sketching the context of my father’s work at Detrick and the CIA, his objections to biological warfare, and the Cold War climate in which the whole saga unfolded and in which his 1953 murder must be understood.
However, in discussing this history in relation to “The Manchurian Candidate” movies, both the new and the old versions, Meachum inadvertently adds to the confusion.
Why has it taken half a century to arrive at the truth about what happened to Frank Olson?
What Meachum doesn’t say is that “The Manchurian Candidate” has been a large part of the problem.
The notion of a “Manchurian Candidate,” the idea that someone could be programmed to make statements or commit actions contrary to their own will, bears a very complicated relationship to the Frank Olson story.
Actually “Manchuria” conjoins exactly the two disparate ideas — biological weapons and mind control — that initially seem such unlikely bedfellows in the Frank Olson story.
Manchuria is the area in northeast China directly north of North Korea where, beginning in 1932, the Japanese began an intense program of research in biological warfare. Detrick was established a decade later during World War II as a response to the infamous Japanese BW program in Manchuria (“Unit 731”) which used thousands of Chinese as live, human guinea pigs for biological warfare experimentation. One of Detrick’s early scientific directors told me that the impetus to get the United States into biological warfare research was driven much more by what the Japanese were doing in Manchuria than by what the Nazis were doing in Germany.
The second notion in the Frank Olson story, that of mind control, enters the picture during the Korean War, when captured American GI’s were taken to Manchuria for what the Chinese called “thought reform,” the strenuous program of interrogation popularly called “brainwashing.”
While still in captivity in Manchuria some of the captured American pilots made statements that became known as “germ warfare confessions.” In these statements the pilots said they had dropped biological weapons on North Korea.
When they returned to the States these same pilots made statements recanting their former confessions. They now claimed that their earlier statements had been made under the duress of psychological manipulation and torture. Available documents indicate that a Detrick-CIA interrogation program called “Artichoke” with which my father was involved had “debriefed” these POWs prior to their recantations.
The experience of American GIs imprisoned in Manchuria became the basis of Richard Condon’s 1959 novel, “The Manchurian Candidate,” and then of the 1962 film by the same name. The novel and the film then supplied the name for John Marks’ 1979 nonfiction work on CIA mind-control experiments, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. A long chapter on Frank Olson, called “The Case of Dr. Frank Olson” forms the centerpiece of that book. (This chapter and many other materials are available on the Frank Olson website at www.frankolsonproject.org.)
John Marks’ chapter, combined with the spin that was put on the story of my father’s death by the CIA in 1975, formed the basis for the public’s belief that Frank Olson committed suicide after being drugged with LSD in a secret CIA experiment. It is this version of the story that has required another quarter of a century to deconstruct, as Meachum explains.
What Meachum does not explain is that the spurious link of Frank Olson’s death to the whole notion of mind control and LSD — in short the link to the Manchurian scenario — was actually a major stumbling block in arriving at a lucid account of what really happened.
At the time of his death my father’s colleagues at Detrick were informed that Frank Olson had been an unwitting participant in a drug experiment, and that this caused the psychological reaction that led to his taking his own life ten days later. His closest colleagues knew that this explanation was not the true reason for his death. Many others at Detrick were highly skeptical to say the least. But the notion of an LSD suicide provided at least a placeholder to quiet rumors and suspicions, even as it left room for the message that was being sent by security to all the personnel at Detrick: potential whistle-blowers will be dealt with harshly.
Fifty years later old-timers at Detrick are still reduced to quivering jelly at the mention of the name “Frank Olson.”
The story those colleagues were given in 1953 is the one that the public received in 1975 when the Rockefeller Commission released the news that an unnamed scientist had been drugged with LSD in 1953 and then plunged to his death.
This story of my father’s death as it was experienced by insiders was brought up to date for me in 2001 when one of my father’s closest Detrick colleagues and friends told me what he knew about the events that preceded my father’s death. This colleague explained that my father had become alarmed both by terminal experiments and interrogations that were being conducted by American forces in Europe using Detrick-CIA techniques, and also by the use of biological weapons in Korea.
When my father’s colleague told me about the use of biological weapons in Korea, I responded by saying. “Yes, but what about the claim that those allegations were the result of brainwashing?”
As if he were stunned by my naïveté, this colleague looked into my eyes said, “It wasn’t all brainwashing. Get it?”
“It wasn’t all brainwashing. Get it?”
In its disinformation wars the CIA did not hesitate to use whatever arrows it had in its quiver, including the claim of brainwashing, in the service of what it called “psychological discrediting.”
What my father’s colleague was telling me was that this discrediting technique had been used to neutralize the “germ warfare confessions.”
The LSD drugging story was used with similar effect to neutralize suspicions that my father had been murdered for security reasons.
This complex story is told in detail in the 2002 documentary film on the Frank Olson story “Code Name Artichoke”which has now been shown internationally in many countries and in the United States on Link-TV. Copes of the film on VHS or DVD are available from Satellite Video in Walkersville.
The essential point is this: it is necessary to insert the notion of “psychological discrediting” into the Manchurian Candidate scenario as it applies to the Frank Olson story. It then becomes clear that the real target of mind control was not Frank Olson. Frank Olson was killed the old fashioned way. He was simply knocked on the head and thrown out the window, as the CIA’s assassination manual suggests (and as Roy Meachum asserts).
The real target of mind control was the public to whom the story of a suicidal, deranged, drugged scientist would be told. That story was so shocking and sensational that, even though it didn’t hold together, nearly thirty more years have been required to shake it loose.
In understanding this phenomenon of directed misperception the most pertinent literary source is not “The Manchurian Candidate,” but, rather, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” What that classic story illustrates is the power of authority to establish a perceptual illusion among a public who are instructed to see things in a certain way. No one in H.C. Anderson’s story, except a small child, has the courage to break ranks and point out that the emperor is stark naked.
In that sense the real Frederick Candidate, the real subject of brainwashing and mind control, was not Frank Olson. It was Frederick itself.
– Eric Olson, PhD
By Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen
Revised, updated, and expanded.
A Citadel Press Book
(Used with the permission of the authors.)
Chapter 80 of:
The Eighty Greatest Conspiracies of All Time: History’s Biggest Mysteries, Coverups, and Cabals
No one saw Frank Olson plunge to his death from the 13th story of New York’s Statler Hotel. No one, at any rate, willing to admit it. Not the man from the CIA who was in room 1018A with Olson when the 43-year-old biochemist and father of three crashed through a closed, shuttered window and tumbled to the cold sidewalk below. To believe the CIA man, he either awoke in his bed some time after midnight to see his roommate charge the window and throw himself through the thick plate-glass; or, as he told it on another occasion, he awoke after Olson had already defenestrated, startled from sleep by the sound of shattering glass.
The CIA man with the shifting story was Robert Lashbrook, deputy to the spy agency’s wizard of mind-control and exotic assassinations. Despite its many inconsistencies, the CIA account of what happened during the early morning hours of November 28, 1953 would become the official story of Frank Olson’s death: It was an unfortunate suicide triggered by a small dose of Lycergic Acid Diethylamide – LSD – secretly administered to Olson in a mind-control experiment gone awry.
Fifty years after the fact, conventional history records Dr. Frank Olson’s death as perhaps the most infamous repercussion of MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s illegal quest to “modify an individual’s behavior by covert means” using hypnosis, electroshock treatment and psychotropic drugs such as LSD. According to this interpretation, Olson’s fatal fall was the result of a “bad trip,” a tragic, yet accidental, consequence of the CIA’s Cold War wet dream of developing a magical brainwashing elixir.
But could the Frank Olson story have an even simpler, albeit darker, explanation? Is it possible that the accidental death scenario – however embarrassing to the CIA at the time of its disclosure during the mid-1970s — served as a cover story to conceal a more disturbing truth? To wit: Was Frank Olson deliberately assassinated?
Two decades after the bizarre tragedy, Olson’s eldest son, Eric, would begin to dispute the official account. His search for answers would ultimately span the course of three decades, becoming a personal obsession that would drain his finances, upend his relationships, and derail his once promising career as a Harvard-trained psychologist. No obstacle would deter him from his mission, not even the taboo of unearthing his father’s bones. (The Shakespearean parallels weren’t lost on the scholarly Eric; “think Hamlet,” he liked to say, “but on the order of years, not months.”) Eventually, Eric would uncover tantalizing evidence suggesting that his father, far from being the victim of a “drug experiment gone awry,” may have been murdered as the proverbial man who knew too much.
Yet in the aftermath of that ill-fated Thanksgiving weekend in 1953, and for a numbing 22 years afterward, the Olson family had been given no explanation at all for Frank Olson’s mysterious death.
It was still dark outside when two grim visitors arrived at the Olson house in Frederick, Maryland, two days after Thanksgiving. Alice Olson roused her nine-year-old son, Eric, from bed and led him into the living room. The sleepy boy immediately recognized the two men as the family doctor and Lt. Col. Vincent Ruwet, his father’s boss at U.S. Army Camp Detrick, just down the road from the Olson home.
Ruwet delivered the terrible news: Alice’s husband was dead. Earlier that morning, Frank Olson had “fallen or jumped,” as Ruwet put it, from the window of a New York City hotel room. Calling it a “work-related accident,” Ruwet explained that the family would be eligible for government compensation. (In the compensation form he subsequently filed on behalf of the family, Ruwet wrote that Olson had died of a “classified illness.”)
Exactly what kind of work Olson had been engaged in at the time of his “accident” wasn’t a part of the morning’s ad hoc grief counseling. Alice, a 38-year-old housewife, had only a vague knowledge of her husband’s classified work at Camp Detrick, where he was director of planning and evaluations in the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division (SOD). She knew that as a biochemist, Frank Olson’s specialty during World War II had been the airborne delivery of biological toxins and bacteria, including anthrax. Before the end of the war, a painful stomach ulcer had forced Olson to seek a medical discharge from the Army. But he had stayed on at Camp Detrick as a civilian scientist.
In consoling the Olsons, Ruwet made no mention of the nature of the work at Detrick. Nor did he ever mention LSD or the CIA.
As Eric struggled to absorb the devastating news, Alice composed herself enough to tell her two other children, seven-year-old Lisa and five-year-old Nils, that their father would not be coming home. Compounding the family’s sense of shock was the seeming improbability of the tragedy. That Frank Olson had taken his own life just didn’t square with the devoted husband and caring father they knew. It made no sense. And in the absence of a reasonable explanation – the missing how and why – a kind of numbness began to set in. As Eric would later recall, “In that moment when I learned that my father had gone out a window and died, it was as if the plug were pulled from some central basin of my mind and a vital portion of my consciousness drained out.”
Yet Alice knew that her husband had been troubled by something of late. A deeply moral and religious man, Frank Olson had been grappling with an ethical dilemma related to his work. Whenever a group of lab monkeys died upon completion of a successful experiment, Olson had come home depressed and withdrawn. At one point, he had said to his wife rather enigmatically, “If the Germans had won the Second World War, my colleagues and I would have been prosecuted for war crimes.”
The casket, draped with an American flag, remained closed at the funeral four days later. The government explained to the family that even though the body had been embalmed, it was badly disfigured from the fall. Among the mourners at the ceremony were two CIA men: Robert Lashbrook – the man from room 1018A – and his boss, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, architect of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program and the spy agency’s mastermind of bizarre assassination techniques employing lethal biological agents ranging from anthrax to shellfish toxin.
As the coffin was lowered into the ground, the CIA men might have felt an odd sense of relief. After all, the mystery of what killed Frank Olson – and, perhaps, who killed him – was buried on that day along with the body.
The mystery would remain underground – literally — for the next 22 years. In the absence of “closure,” the Olsons’ personal trauma would also remain buried, in a state of unspoken denial. As Eric would later explain, “So great was the shock experience by the family that we did not grieve our loss at all; it was as if nothing had happened.” But as they often do, calm surfaces belied turbulent undercurrents. By the 1960s, Alice had developed a drinking problem that eventually led to the loss of her job as a teacher and a drunk driving arrest on Christmas Eve. Unable to broach the subject of their father’s death with their mother, the Olson children were left to grapple with a legacy of shame and pain. To their friends, they would explain that their father had died of a “fatal nervous breakdown.”
It was long after the Olson children had grown up – and Alice had recovered from alcoholism — that the ghost of the father returned. On June 11, 1975, startling new details turned up on Alice Olson’s front doorstep, in the morning edition of The Washington Post. A front-page story headlined “Suicide Revealed” zeroed in on a sensational item from the just-released report of the Rockefeller Commission, the first of the post-Watergate inquiries into CIA misdeeds. According to the report, an “Army scientist” had leaped to his death from the 13th floor of a New York City hotel room in 1953 after being dosed with LSD by the CIA.
Though the report didn’t name the victim, the family recognized their father in the details. A check with Ruwet confirmed it.
According to the report in the Post – based on the official findings of an internal CIA investigation conducted after the incident – a “civilian employee” of the Army had been dosed with LSD during a government retreat in western Maryland. As the Rockefeller Commission summarized, “This individual was not made aware he had been given LSD until about 20 minutes after it had been administered. He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment. Several days later, he jumped from a tenth-floor window of his room and died as a result.” (Actually, Room 1018A was on the 13th floor.)
In the weeks following the Post story, no one from the government bothered to contact the Olsons. Frustrated and understandably indignant, the family – and their lawyers — held a press conference in the back yard of the home in Frederick. Now the bizarre story had a face and a name, and journalists flocked to the event. Eric, by then a 31-year-old graduate student working toward a Ph.D in clinical psychology at Harvard, recalls brushing elbows with the likes of Rolling Stone magazine’s Hunter S. Thompson and Leslie Stahl of CBS News. The Olsons took turns reading from a family statement demanding full disclosure from the government. “We feel our family has been violated by the CIA in two ways,” Eric declared. “First, Frank Olson was experimented on illegally and negligently. Second, the true nature of his death was concealed for twenty-two years. … In telling our story, we are concerned that neither the personal pain this family has experienced nor the moral and political outrage we feel be slighted.”
That evening and the following day stories about Frank Olson and his family dominated network news broadcasts and newspaper headlines. Suddenly, information so long denied the Olson family began to dribble in. Two days after the press conference, a man named Armand Pastore contacted the family. In 1953, Pastore had been the night manager at the Statler Hotel. He explained that at around 2 a.m. on November 28 of that year, a panicky busboy had summoned Pastore out to the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Lying on the pavement, bloodied and broken, was Frank Olson. Looking up 13 floors, Pastore saw a dangling blind flapping through an open window frame. Amazingly, Olson was still alive. “He was trying to mumble something,” Pastore later told reporters, “but I couldn’t make it out. It was all garbled, and I was trying to get his name.” Pastore called for a priest and an ambulance. By the time the ambulance arrived, Olson was dead.
Pastore recalled that immediately after the incident someone had made a phone call from Olson’s hotel room to a number in Long Island. According to the hotel switchboard operator, who had listened in, it was a short conversation consisting of only two lines:
“Well, he’s gone,” a man in the hotel room had said.
“That’s too bad,” a man on the other end of the line had replied, before hanging up.
Pastore told Alice Olson that he had always been disturbed by the “unusual circumstances” of her husband’s death. As he later elaborated to reporters, “In all my years in the business, I never encountered a case where someone in the middle of the night jumped through a closed window with the shades and curtains drawn.”
Pastore wasn’t the only interested party to take note of the recent news headlines. Less than two weeks after their backyard press conference, the Olsons were summoned to White House for a personal meeting with President Ford. In the Oval Office, Ford offered the family an official government apology. In a photograph taken during the 1975 meeting, Alice Olson and her grown-up children – Eric, 30; Nils, 27; and Lisa, 29 – look at ease and, more to the point, relieved, as they stand with the president. At the time, it must have been a reassuring, and even heady, experience. After years of government silence on the subject of Frank Olson’s death, the family had finally achieved recognition – and, most importantly, a promise of full disclosure.
The Olsons had been considering legal action, but White House attorneys advised the family against it, telling them, Eric Olson recalls, that “the law was not on our side.” Instead, the government lawyers promised that the White House would support a private bill in Congress to pay the family a settlement. The family signed a waiver releasing the CIA from liability, and in return the Olsons were eventually awarded $750,000 in compensation. The family decision not to file suit, made in deference to Alice Olson’s desire to bring the 22-year ordeal to closure, would prove to be a mistake.
Yet at the time, the family believed that full disclosure was finally at hand. Five days after the Oval Office session, the Olson family met with CIA Director William Colby at the spy agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Over a lavish multi-course luncheon in the Director’s dining room adjacent to his 7th-floor office, Colby offered the Olsons his apologies. The meeting was as awkward as the food was elegant. In his memoirs Colby later referred to the encounter as “one of the most difficult assignments I have ever had.” At the end of the hour, the CIA chief gave the family an inch-thick file of declassified documents, calling it the complete dossier on the death of Frank Olson.
Though heavily redacted, the file fleshed out the narrative bones of the Washington Post story. On November 19, 1953, Olson had joined nine colleagues for a three-day working retreat at Deep Creek Lodge, a rustic cabin in the secluded woods of western Maryland. Five of the attendees were SOD men from Camp Detrick, including Olson and his boss Ruwet. The remaining four were CIA officers from the Technical Services Staff (TSS), commonly known inside the Agency as the “dirty tricks department.” The official purpose of the gathering was to discuss MK-NOAMI, a top-secret joint program of the SOD and TSS to develop germ weapons to infect enemy spies in the field. To maintain absolute secrecy, the participants had been instructed to remove all Camp Detrick tags from their automobiles, and to adopt the occupational “camouflage” of sports journalists.
Assisted by his deputy Lashbrook, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the TSS Chemical Division, led the sessions in the lodge’s chestnut-paneled living room, opposite a roaring fire in a stone hearth. A brilliant chemist with personality tics numerous enough to satisfy a novelist’s appetite for the aberrant (Norman Mailer and Barbara Kingsolver have immortalized him in their fiction), Gottlieb at the time had not yet been dubbed “the CIA’s Dr. Strangelove.” But a few decades of diligent work – and a congressional inquiry or two – would eventually remedy that oversight.
Born with two clubfeet, Gottlieb spent much of his life almost compulsively adapting himself to the external world. According to a cousin, in the hospital when the blanket covering his feet was removed, his mother screamed. Unable to walk, he spent his earliest years in her arms. As a child, he underwent foot surgery three times. Although he remained handicapped for life, he compensated by teaching himself to become a graceful square dancer. A habitual stutterer, Gottlieb exhibited the same zeal for self-improvement and personal reinvention in every other aspect of his life. He excelled in his studies and eventually earned a doctoral degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology.
After joining the CIA in 1951, he quickly proved himself to be an ardent Cold War patriot. As his CIA recruiter later noted, “He always had a certain amount of ‘guilt’…about not being able to be in the service during World War II like all his contemporaries because of his clubfoot, so he gave an unusual amount of patriotic service to make up for that.” Working in the CIA’s chemical group, he impressed his superiors as a resourceful, inventive administrator.
By early 1953, Gottlieb had been given control of the Agency’s newly minted mind-control program, MK-ULTRA. At the same time, he ran the research efforts into germ warfare being conducted out of Camp Detrick. Later, he would become the CIA’s expert in better assassination through chemistry. Some colleagues saw Gottlieb, in his single-minded ardor for his work, as a something of a “wild man.”
In less than a year on the job as steward of MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb had already established a rather wild and arguably unscientific methodology that involved dosing unsuspecting CIA men at Langley with LSD and then watching them freak out. According to the official CIA account, Gottlieb performed the same experiment on the men at Deep Creek Lodge.
After dinner on the second night, Gottlieb or one of his CIA men secretly slipped LSD into seven glasses of Cointreau liqueur. If Gottlieb and Lashbrook are to be believed, each of the seven men received a relatively modest dose of 70 micrograms. (Ten years later, Hollywood luminaries such as Cary Grant and James Coburn would regularly ingest doses of 200 micrograms under the supervision of a handful of Los Angeles psychiatrists who briefly dabbled in LSD therapy.) The meeting quickly devolved into laughter and random psychedelic incoherence, and by various accounts several of the men grew uneasy. Olson reportedly had the worst trip. As the biochemist’s SOD colleague Ben Wilson would later tell author John Marks, “Olson was psychotic. He couldn’t understand what happened. He thought someone was playing tricks on him.”
Olson and several others spent a sleepless night under the effects of the drug. The next morning, their nerves frayed, the men decided to adjourn early. When Olson returned home, Alice found her husband to be uncharacteristically withdrawn. After a silent dinner, he told his wife he had made a “terrible mistake” at the retreat. He refused to elaborate, and he didn’t mention anything about Gottlieb drugging him.
Over the weekend, Olson remained quiet and emotionally remote, his thoughts as impenetrable as the dense November fog that hung over the landscape outside. He and Alice spent much of that weekend sitting on the couch, holding hands, quietly looking out the window at the obscuring mist. At one point, Alice asked her husband whether he had falsified information. He said he hadn’t. When Alice asked if he had broken security, Olson replied, “You know I would never do that.” Although he revealed little more, he did tell his wife that he planned to resign his job and retrain himself as a dentist. Alice said that if he felt it was necessary, she would support his decision.
On Sunday night, Frank and Alice Olson took in a movie, Martin Luther, the just-released biopic on the 16th-century Protestant reformer. As Alice would later note, it wasn’t the best choice of movies, given her husband’s mood. The film, which chronicles Luther’s struggles against moral corruption in the Catholic Church and his ultimate break with Catholicism, greatly upset Olson. At the end of the film, Luther nails his 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Whittenburg, officially severing his ties to the Catholic Church.
Early the next morning, Frank Olson appeared in his boss’s office to tender his resignation. Lt. Col. Ruwet reassured Olson that he had done nothing wrong at the retreat, and persuaded his employee to stay on. But the next morning, Olson, still agitated, was back in Ruwet’s office determined to quit. According to Ruwet, Olson said he felt “all mixed up” and questioned his own ability to perform his duties. Ruwet decided that Olson needed “psychiatric attention.” But instead of sending him to the base hospital, Ruwet called Lashbrook at the CIA.
Lashbrook and Gottlieb hastily made arrangements for Olson to see Dr. Harold Abramson, a New York M.D. and allergist who had parlayed a fascination with behavior-modifying drugs into lucrative MK-ULTRA contract work. (In one of his “experiments,” Abramson had dosed goldfish with LSD to see their reaction.) The fact that Abramson was not a psychiatrist apparently didn’t bother Gottlieb, who later sought to justify the peculiar patient referral on national security grounds, that last refuge of panicky civil servants: Abramson, who had considerable experience dosing himself and others with LSD on behalf of the CIA, was already vetted for secrecy.
Ruwet phoned Alice on Tuesday morning to tell her that he and a colleague were taking her husband to New York for treatment because they were “concerned that Frank might become violent with you.” According to Eric, this statement “completely shocked my mother, because she had seen no indications of anything remotely like violent tendencies.” Eric now believes that Ruwet was lying, in an effort to frighten Alice and thereby “preempt the possibility that she might object in any way to their plans.” Later that day, Alice drove with her husband to Washington, D.C., where he was to catch a flight to New York with Ruwet and Lashbrook. The couple stopped for lunch at a coffee shop just outside the Capitol, but Olson wouldn’t touch his coffee. “I can’t drink this,” he said. He grew anxious that someone might have tampered with the beverage, a not entirely paranoid concern given his earlier secret LSD dosing. A half-hour later, Frank Olson boarded a flight to New York. It was the last time Alice would ever see him.
According to the CIA file, Olson saw Abramson for the first time later that day. By then, Olson had become increasingly “paranoid,” as the CIA report put it, and was convinced that the Agency was putting Benzadrine or some other stimulant into his coffee to keep him awake.
The next day, Lashbrook and Ruwet took Olson to the home of John Mulholland, a professional magician whom the TSS had hired to write a manual adapting “the magician’s art to covert activities.” Gottlieb had tasked Mulholland with developing sleight-of-hand techniques that CIA agents could use to slip drugs into drinks. Although Lashbrook later asserted that he was only trying to amuse Olson, the visit had an opposite effect – it freaked him out. If anyone had wanted to unhinge a guy already convinced that he was being drugged against his will, they probably couldn’t have done better than to commission an impromptu magic show by a known conjurer of CIA mickey fins.
Cutting the visit with Mulholland short, Lashbrook and Ruwet hustled Olson back to Abramson’s Long Island office. The CIA allergist talked to Olson for about an hour, then gave him permission to spend Thanksgiving with his family. Olson and his two escorts had an evening to kill before their flight back to Washington the next morning, so the trio took in a Rogers & Hammerstein musical. But Olson became agitated during the first act, believing, according to Ruwet, that people were waiting outside the theater to arrest him. Ruwet took Olson back to the Statler hotel. That night while he slept in the adjacent bed, Olson slipped out of the room and wandered the streets of New York. According to Ruwet, Olson proceeded to tear up his paper money and throw his wallet away, purportedly under the delusion that he was following orders. Ruwet and Lashbrook claimed to have found Olson sitting in the Statler lobby early the next morning.
In Ruwet and Lashbrook’s version of events, the three flew back to Washington later that morning. However, during the drive from National Airport back to Frederick, Maryland, Olson purportedly grew alarmed. If Ruwet is to be believed, Olson said he was “ashamed” to see his family in his present condition, and worried that he might become violent with his children. Lashbrook supposedly contacted Gottlieb, interrupting his boss’s Thanksgiving dinner, and the CIA men decided it would be best to take Olson back to Abramson in New York. Ruwet agreed to return to Frederick and notify the family that Frank Olson wouldn’t be coming home for the holiday.
Later that day, Lashbrook escorted Olson to Abramson’s office, and the non-shrink finally decided to get Olson qualified professional help. According to the CIA’s version of events, Olson agreed to check himself into Chestnut Lodge, a Maryland sanitarium staffed by psychiatrists who allegedly had special security clearance. (In fact, Eric Olson would later discover that the doctors at Chestnut Lodge had no special security clearance, a fact that begs the question, Why did the CIA lie about this?) . According to Lashbrook, he and Olson were unable to get a departing flight until the weekend, so they settled for Thanksgiving dinner at a Horn & Hardart Automat, then checked into room 1018A of the Statler Hotel.
At some point on Friday – the last day of Frank Olson’s life — Abramson showed up at the hotel with a bottle of bourbon and the sedative Nembutol. To say the least, it was an odd prescription for a man who already believed – irrationally or not — that the CIA was trying to drug him. The CIA report offers no more details about Olson’s doings on that Friday. However, we do know that Olson called his wife on Friday evening. It was the first time they had spoken in three days, and Alice was relieved to discover that his mood had improved (a state of mind in stark contrast to the angst-ridden portrait depicted by the CIA). They spoke for several minutes, and Olson told his wife that he was looking forward to seeing her and the kids the next day. By 2 a.m. Saturday morning, just hours after the phone call, and hours before his scheduled flight back to Washington, Olson was dead.
When police arrived on the scene, they found Lashbrook sitting on the toilet in room 1018A, cradling his head in his hands. The CIA man immediately began to tell lies. First, he claimed that he worked for the Defense Department. Then he insisted he had no clue as to why Olson jumped, but added, irrelevantly, that the dead man had “suffered from ulcers.” Police initially suspected a homicide with homosexual overtones, but they dropped the matter after Ruwet and Abramson backed Lashbrook’s account and hinted at classified government connections.
While the CIA’s Office of Security went to work scrubbing New York clean of any telltale evidence linking Olson’s death to the Agency, Lashbrook and Abramson got their own cover stories straight. Lashbrook dictated the specifics of Olson’s alleged psychiatric symptoms while Abramson took notes. Lashbrook went so far as to claim that Alice Olson had urged her husband to seek psychiatric help months before the LSD dosing – a bald-faced lie, according to Alice.
Despite Lashbrook’s pathetic attempts to deflect blame by trumping up a bogus psychiatric history for Olson, CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick officially (but secretly) concluded that Olson’s “suicide” had been “triggered” by the LSD dosing. Kirkpatrick recommended stern censures for Gottlieb and his immediate TSS superiors, but CIA Director Allen Dulles interceded, reducing the reprimand to a weak hand-slap that did no harm to Gottlieb’s career as the Agency’s Cold War alchemist.
Although the CIA documents that Colby had given the Olson family filled in some missing details, it raised as many questions as it purported to answer. In fact, the New York Times called the file “elliptical, incoherent, and contradictory.” It was, the newspaper concluded, “a jumble of deletions, conflicting statements [and] unintelligible passages.” For one thing, despite LSD’s tendency to provoke mercurial responses in distressed individuals, Olson’s bad trip – a week-long psychosis escalating to suicide – seemed out of proportion to the small dose he supposedly swallowed. Then there were several contradictory statements made by Abramson in the report. In one memo, he wrote that Olson’s “psychotic state…seemed to have been crystallized by [the LSD] experiment.” But in another document, he characterized the LSD dose as “therapeutic,” and an amount that “could hardly have had any significant role in the course of events that followed.
Even more puzzling were the report’s numerous references – with all details blacked out — to the CIA’s Project ARTICHOKE. As the precursor to MK-ULTRA, ARTICHOKE concerned the search for a “truth drug” to aid in interrogation. But the top-secret program had also involved other interrogation methods, including torture and attempts to induce amnesia in “blown agents” who knew too much. If Frank Olson’s death was indeed the unintended result of an MK-ULTRA experiment – as the report concluded — then why all the cryptic references in the document to ARTICHOKE?
Unanswered questions or not, the family wanted to believe – needed to believe — that vindication and justice had prevailed. It was time to move on. But, it seemed, the curse of the past wouldn’t let go. In 1976, Eric’s sister Lisa, her husband, and her two-year-old son took off from Frederick in a small plane, bound for the Adirondacks, where they planned to invest Lisa’s share of the settlement money in a lumber mill. The plane crashed and no one survived.
That same year, Eric moved to Sweden, the birth country of his father’s parents, hoping to put some distance between himself and the family curse. In Stockholm, he worked to develop the psychotherapeutic technique he had begun at Harvard: the “collage method,” a process that involved clipping pictures and pasting them into photomontages. Eric found that when patients assembled a collection of nonverbal images in a tableau, they often gained powerful insight into suppressed emotions and memories. (Eric’s own collages often featured images of men tumbling from buildings.) He believed that the collage method might provide a “whole new conceptual base for psychotherapy.” During what would become a decade-long sabbatical in Sweden, Eric fathered a son, Stephan, with a woman he did not marry.
But his new life abroad offered little insulation from the past. Ironically, Eric’s retreat to a “neutral and very quiet country” only sharpened his resolve to exorcise the old family ghosts. “Sweden gave me a great deal of distance from the whole CIA business,” he explained. “And it was precisely the new-found calm which enabled me to see that, objectively, the CIA’s version of events made no sense. My effort was not to hold on to the issue, but to put it behind me. The problem was that every time I turned over another rock, I discovered another snake.”
The serpents were in the details. In his spare time Eric continued his labors to “decode” the meaning of the Colby documents. It was a process not unlike the collage method – piecing together seemingly fragmentary data, but often uncovering deeper or hidden connections.
Back home in the United States, some of those deeper connections had begun to surface on their own. In late 1975, summoned by the U.S. Senate, Sidney Gottlieb returned from semi-retirement as a hospital volunteer in India (he dedicated the latter portion of his life to charitable pursuits, almost as if doing penance for earlier sins). In secret testimony before the Senate Church Committee on Assassinations, the former CIA chemist admitted to his key role in CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders. In 1960, for instance, Gottlieb himself had hand-delivered an “assassination kit” to the CIA station chief in the Congo, with instructions that it be used to eliminate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. The kit consisted of a lethal toxin – possibly anthrax — concealed in a tube of toothpaste. When the Church Committee published its findings, Eric realized that Gottlieb had been involved in work much darker than mere “experimental drugging.”
In 1978, an even bigger shocker surfaced: In his memoir, former CIA chief William Colby admitted that Frank Olson was more than an “Army scientist,” as the official story claimed. At the time of his death, in fact, Olson had been a full-fledged “CIA employee,” and a “CIA officer.”
Clearly, in its post-mortem investigation, the CIA had attempted to conceal the fact that Olson was one of its own. But why? Eric wondered. Ransacking the Colby documents for the umpteenth time, Eric stumbled upon a new, possibly telling clue. One of the reports submitted by Abramson, the CIA allergist, described the drugging at Deep Creek Lodge as “an experiment [that] had been done to trap” Frank Olson. This description of the fateful session as a “trap” obviously contradicted the official CIA story that Olson had been one of seven human guinea pigs in a simple LSD experiment. Given the many references in the Colby document to ARTICHOKE, Eric began to wonder if the Deep Creek dosing had been part of an interrogation targeting his father.
In 1984, Eric returned to the United States. His first order of business was to visit room 1018A at the Statler Hotel (by that time, renamed the Pennsylvania Hotel). Standing in the tiny room, Eric was struck by the physical impossibility of the official scenario. There wasn’t room enough for a running start, and the window sill was high and blocked by a radiator. Says Eric: “I knew that my father couldn’t have jumped out through that closed hotel window even if he wanted to.”
That same year Eric, Nils and Alice paid a visit to Sidney Gottlieb at his secluded farmhouse in Rappahannock County, Virginia. The 66-year-old former master assassin was now devoted to two of his presumably less lethal passions, goat farming and communal living. He greeted the Olsons warily. “Oh my God,” he said. “I’m so relieved to see you all don’t have a gun.” The night before, he told them, he had dreamed that the Olsons had shot him dead. The family wanted answers, but Gottlieb, true to his espionage training, was evasive. He said that he regretted the incident, but denied that Olson was pushed out the window. At the end of the meeting Gottlieb snapped to Eric, “I can see you’re still wrapped up in your father’s death. I recommend that you join a support group for children whose parents have committed suicide.”
The family also called on Lashbrook, by then retired, at his home in Ojai, California. Eric recalls that Lashbrook was uncommunicative and nervous, claiming to have forgotten key details. The one useful item he revealed was that Gottlieb had been with Olson in New York the week before he died – a fact Gottlieb had failed to mention.
If the CIA’s cult of secrecy remained the proverbial immovable object, by the early 1990s Eric had become its unstoppable force. Eric’s avocation had become a fixation that had eclipsed his career; having returned to the United States for good, he gave up his work as a clinical psychologist to focus full-time on his father’s case. To bankroll his investigation, he became adept in the art of nonprofit fundraising. But he also borrowed money from friends and family, maxed out half a dozen credit cards, and began to sink into debt. Personal relationships faltered. Friction grew between Eric and brother Nils, a successful dentist who had helped Eric financially in his quest, but who now worried that Eric had gone off the deep end.
Concern for his mother, who by the early 1990s had developed pancreatic cancer, held Eric back from taking the next logical step in his investigation. But after Alice died in 1993, Eric, with the consent of Nils, decided to exhume his father’s body. In June 1994, 41 years after Frank Olson’s burial, Eric watched as a steam shovel began to dredge up the earth at his father’s grave. Supervising the disinterment was Professor James Starrs, a criminologist and forensic scientist at George Washington University who had previously unearthed and re-examined the corpses of Jesse James and Dr. Carl Weiss, alleged assassin of Senator Huey Long. After two hours of digging, Starr’s men hauled the rusted casket out of the hole and transported it to a nearby police lab.
In the lab, as he prepared to unseal the lid, Starrs warned Eric not to watch. The sight of his father’s shrunken corpse might prove disturbing. “I’m seeing this!” Eric shot back. When Starrs raised the lid, he was surprised to find Frank Olson’s body remarkably well preserved. The skin was brown and shriveled, but the face was still recognizable. After Eric left the lab, Starrs began his autopsy. He quickly discovered that the New York medical examiner’s report from 1953 was dead wrong. That report had described multiple facial lacerations caused by the impact with the glass. But Starrs was looking at an undamaged face, devoid of cuts. Even more remarkable than what he did not find was what Starrs did find: A large bruise over Olson’s left eye, which suggested to Starrs that the victim had been smashed on the head before plunging through the window. Starr’s concluded that the forensic evidence was “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”
“I am exceedingly skeptical of the view that Frank Olson went through that window on his own,” Starrs said at the end of his investigation. The evidence suggested that someone had knocked Olson over the head either while he slept or during a struggle, and then tossed him out the window.
Three years later, Eric would discover that a CIA assassination manual written in late 1953 – the period of his father’s death – prescribed exactly that technique. The manual, declassified by the CIA in 1997, contained the following eerie passage: “The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. . . . The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [redacted] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge.” The manual recommended a sharp blow to the victim’s temple: “In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him.”
Eric had other reasons to believe that his father had been the victim of a CIA assassination. Investigative writer H.P. Albarelli, who had been conducting his own research into the Olson death, claimed to have contact with retired CIA agents in Florida. According to these unnamed sources, the CIA had hired contract killers associated with the Trafficante mob family to murder Frank Olson in Room 1018A. Citing confidentiality agreements with the Agency, these sources have thus far declined to go public with their claims.
Though armed with a mountain of circumstantial evidence, Eric remained hamstrung by the waiver he and his family had signed promising not to sue the CIA. Barred from pursuing the case in civil court, he turned to the criminal justice system. In 1996 Eric asked Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morganthau to open a new investigation. Morganthau agreed, assigning the task to his “cold case” unit. Almost immediately, though, the investigation encountered a major setback. A week after the case was reopened, William Colby, a key witness, vanished. After an intensive ten-day search of the Wicomico River in Southern Maryland, where he had last been seen canoeing by himself, the former CIA chief’s body washed ashore. The death was ruled accidental.
Meanwhile, ex-CIA man Robert Lashbrook fought the New York D.A.’s attempts to interview him; he eventually submitted to a deposition. But the D.A.’s attempts to question Sidney Gottlieb – who was to become a central target of the investigation – hit a terminal snag in 1999 when the ailing Gottlieb died, taking whatever secrets he still guarded to his grave.
Although their cold case proceeded to get colder, the D.A.’s office did manage to dislodge a number of interesting leads. Most notably, a source with connections to Israeli intelligence told the investigators that for years the Mossad had used the case of Frank Olson in its operative training program as an object lesson in the “perfect murder.”
But as new millennium ushered itself in, it was becoming clear to Eric that the New York D.A. was losing interest. Eric inundated cold case unit daily with potential leads, but few were being checked out. Then in early 2002, to Eric’s dismay and frustration, the D.A. quietly dropped the case (the New York D.A.’s office has declined to comment, citing grand jury secrecy). In an angry letter to the New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, Eric and Nils accused the D.A.’s office of being “corrupted [by] and … knuckl[ing] under to federal pressure to back off from any real examination of the facts and motives involved” in the Frank Olson case. In another letter to Assistant D.A. Stephen Saracco, Eric wrote, “I know that you have reason to believe (no – that is too weak a way of putting it; to “know” is more like it) that my father was murdered. You have made that abundantly clear on numerous occasions… Looking back, I realize that it was when you returned from California [to depose Lashbrook] that everything changed. You stopped taking any initiative, you stopped gathering evidence….”
For Eric, the D.A.’s dumping of the Frank Olson case was yet another in a long line of betrayals by the state. But even the worst setbacks can be instructive. He now realized he had been naïve to expect justice from the same government that had committed the crime in question. After all, he observed, “The CIA has never been convicted of any crime in this country.”
Ironically, the Frank Olson case itself may have played a key role in fortifying the CIA’s ability to commit felonies with impunity – the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. Eric would later uncover an official “memorandum of understanding” between the CIA and the Department of Justice essentially excusing the Agency from having to report crimes committed by its own personnel when doing so might compromise “highly classified and complex covert operations.”
The timing of the memo was interesting. It was drafted in early 1954, shortly after Olson’s death, contemporaneous to the CIA’s internal probe into the Olson affair, and in anticipation of then-pending legislation requiring government agencies to report criminal violations of its employees to the Justice Department.
The memo remained under wraps and officially off the books for decades – until the Frank Olson case erupted again, in 1975. The day after President Ford apologized to the Olsons in the Oval Office, a congressional subcommittee headed by Bella Abzug met to question Lawrence R. Houston, the former CIA general counsel who had drafted the 1954 memo. In the transcript of the hearing, Abzug presses the ex-CIA lawyer to explain the genesis of the memo. When the lawyer hems and haws, Abzug rather astonishingly asks whether the memo might have been used to cover up murder in the Frank Olson case.
ABZUG: It may very well have been a State offense if there was foul play. Was [the Olson case] ever referred to the New York Police Department or State authorities for consideration?
HOUSTON: Not that I recall.
ABZUG: In other words, this memorandum of understanding in your judgment gave authority to the CIA to … give immunity to individuals who happened to work for the CIA for all kinds of crimes, including possibly murder.
Failing to get a straight answer, the indomitable congresswoman presses harder, and Houston finally yields:
HOUSTON: It could have that effect, yes.
ABZUG: Did it have that effect?
HOUSTON: In certain cases it did.
By the time Eric Olson unearthed the hearing transcripts, Abzug had passed away. So it’s not possible to know for sure whether she had any specific reason – other than a well-oiled suspicion of the CIA — to suspect that Frank Olson had been murdered.
Eric would later wonder whether Houston’s “memo of understanding” – or another backroom agreement – had played a role in the abortive investigation by the New York D.A.’s office. As Professor Starrs had once summed up the mystery, “When you pull on the Frank Olson case you feel that something very big is pulling back.”
Embittered, cynical, frustrated — and utterly undeterred — Eric pressed ahead with his own private investigation. Now living by himself in the family home his father built, he surrounded himself with stacks of documents and bits of evidence accumulated in his decades-long pursuit of justice. What little money he managed to scrape together he funneled back into the investigation. Meanwhile, without proper maintenance, the Olson home had fallen into disrepair, its paint peeling and roof sagging. It was, in a sense, a house haunted by its own history.
Although Eric was convinced that his father had been the victim of a CIA assassination, the possible motive behind a murder had long remained the weak link in his theories. But new sources were emerging. One of them was a former CIA pimp named Ira “Ike” Feldman. A squat, muscular fellow who played the tough guy card to the hilt, Feldman had worked as a federal narcotics agent during the 1950s. Most of his historical foot-notoriety, however, stems from his freelance work using prostitutes to lure unsuspecting “johns” to a CIA safehouse in San Francisco, where the unwitting pleasure-seekers would instead be dosed with MK-ULTRA acid. Feldman told Eric that Frank Olson had been murdered.
As Feldman elaborated in a 2002 documentary about Olson aired on German television: “The source that I have was the New York City Police Department, the Bureau of Narcotics agents and the CIA agents themselves. They all say the same thing: that [Olson] was pushed out of the window and did not jump. People who wanted him out of the way said he talked too much and he was telling people about the things he had done, which are American secrets. If you work on a top government secret… and it spills out to people who should not know, there is only one way to do it: kill him.”
To be sure, as a CIA scientist working on some of the nation’s most secret Cold War projects, Frank Olson was in a position to know things that, if exposed publicly, would prove embarrassing to the government. But, Eric wondered, what sort of secrets might his father have known? Another clue arrived when a European investigator and journalist contacted Eric and told him of a trip his father had made to England, Germany and Scandinavia during the summer of 1953. The investigator had interviewed William Sargant, the English psychiatrist and consultant to British intelligence (and author of an early book on brainwashing). Frank Olson had met with Sargant to discuss a moral crisis: he had been horrified to witness “terminal experiments” conducted by the CIA on human subjects – Nazi prisoners and suspected spies who had been plied with the various, sometimes lethal, ARTICHOKE interrogation techniques.
Frank Olson’s special diplomatic passport confirmed that he had indeed traveled on government business to Europe during that time frame. Eric recalled family descriptions of Olson’s state of mind upon returning from the European junket. According to Eric’s uncle, who spoke to Olson during the summer of 1953, he had undergone an ethical crisis of some sort. And at one point, Olson had commented to his wife that Americans were just as responsible for “war crimes” as the Germans had been.
In the spring of 2001, Eric heard from one of his father’s colleagues at Camp Detrick, Norman Cournoyer, a man Eric had assumed was dead. Cournoyer had worked with the elder Olson during World War II to design the protective clothing worn by American soldiers during the invasion of Normandy. He had remained close to Eric’s father after the war, when Olson had been recruited into the CIA. Cournoyer had recently seen an article about Eric in the New York Times Magazine. “Eric,” he said, “you’ve got everything right except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” Eric replied.
“The historical context.”
Eric asked him to elaborate but the old man demurred. “I am eighty-two years old and I’m no longer afraid,” he said. “I’m going to tell you the truth. But I don’t want to do it on the phone.”
A week later, Eric flew to Massachussets to meet Cournoyer in his home. The man who greeted him at the door was physically frail, confined to a wheelchair as the result of a stroke, but still sharp of mind. Cournoyer directed Eric into his dining room, instructing him to remove all the paintings from the wall to make room for the eight-foot-long historical timeline Eric had brought with him, a chronological collage.
Cournoyer got right to the point: “Yes, your father worked for the CIA. He told me that directly.” Cournoyer explained that Frank Olson had revealed sometime in 1946-47 that he was “on a new path” as a CIA employee. That path involved “information retrieval,” an intelligence euphemism for interrogation techniques pioneered under the ARTICHOKE project.
Cournoyer affirmed that Frank Olson had returned from Germany during the summer of 1953 feeling “troubled.” Later, in the documentary aired on German TV, Cournoyer would elaborate, stating that “the people [Olson] saw in Germany [at the CIA interrogation center] went to the extreme. He said: ’Norm, did you ever see a man die?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, I did.’”
Olson told Cournoyer that CIA interrogators were using experimental techniques first employed in Nazi drug experiments during wartime. Now the Americans were testing the same techniques on captured Germans and others. “They were using Nazis,” Cournoyer said, “they were using prisoners, they were using Russians.”
But terminal ARTICHOKE experiments weren’t the only matters weighing heavily on Olson’s conscience during the summer of 1953. Pointing to the section on Eric’s timeline spanning the early 1950s, Cournoyer offered a laconic statement: “Korea is the key.” This was the historical context he had referred to in the earlier phone call.
“Your father,” Cournoyer explained, “was horrified to discover that the Americans were using biological warfare in Korea.”
According to Cournoyer, through his work at Camp Detrick, Frank Olson had acquired direct knowledge of illegal biowarfare experiments conducted by U.S. armed forces and the CIA on Korean soldiers and civilians. One of the virulent agents deployed was none other than airborne anthrax, the elder Olson’s area of expertise. Cournoyer’s assertions resonated strongly with Eric. He recalled his mother telling him that Frank Olson had been concerned that the United States was using biological weapons in Korea.
The U.S. government has always denied allegations that it sprayed Korean soldiers with anthrax and dropped a number of other lethal germ warfare agents, including Bubonic plague-bearing fleas. However, the allegations have proved persistent, and, thanks in large part to a 1952 international study into the matter, are generally taken as a given everywhere in the world outside the 202 area code.
Did Frank Olson – hardly reticent about his growing ethical dilemma – become a perceived security risk. Did his superiors fear he might turn whistleblower, exposing dangerous knowledge about America adopting the killing techniques of German and Japanese war criminals? Cournoyer believed so. “This,” he told Eric, “is quite probably what got your father murdered.”
As Eric spoke with his father’s old friend and colleague, Cournoyer’s gardener interrupted them. “There’s something out there,” he said, pointing at the window overlooking the lawn. The men moved to the window. From behind a tree in the middle of the lawn, a huge mountain lion emerged. Padding slowly, it crossed the yard while the men gazed in astonishment. A third-rate novelist couldn’t have ordered up a more obvious literary trope: The cat was indeed out of the bag.
As he continued to assemble his postmortem collage, Eric also encountered signs and symbols of a less fantastical nature.
There was the peculiar memo in Olson’s personnel file at Detrick, which indicated that the CIA did indeed see him as a potential security risk. In 1994, an Associated Press reporter discovered the typewritten memo, which quoted an earlier, hand-written note forwarded to Detrick in 1975 by a person described only as “retired Army and retired DAC” (Army shorthand for “Department of the Army Civilian”). The hand-written note, headlined “Re – Dr. F. W. Olson,” suggested further investigation into Olson’s background in connection to his death. One item on the list suggested that someone look into “Trip to Paris and Norway in 1953(?) and possible fear of security violation. Sources – F.W. Wagner, H.T. Eigelsbach, Robert Lashbrook, and Dr. [Abramson].”
That the CIA had much to hide became dramatically evident during the summer of 2001, when Eric obtained documents from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Among the papers were memos written by senior White House staffers and attorneys who were concerned about the possibility of an Olson family lawsuit – and the inevitable public disclosure it would entail. White House attorney Roderick Hills wrote to White House Deputy Staff Director Dick Cheney (yes, that Dick Cheney) stating, “Dr. Olson’s job [was] so sensitive” that in a trial the government would refuse to reveal it. Another of the memos, written by Cheney on July 11, 1975, the day after the Olson family press conference, and addressed to his boss Donald Rumsfeld (yes, that Donald Rumsfeld) raised concern for:
“…the possibility that it might become necessary to disclose highly classified national security information in connection with any court suit, or legislative hearings.”
Such a revelation was to be avoided at all costs, the internal correspondence stated. What exactly was this “highly classified national security information”? MK-ULTRA? As far as that program was concerned, disclosure was already well underway. . Was the big secret that Olson was a CIA employee? That hardly seems shocking in the context of an accidental LSD dosing. In fact, it might be argued that, PR-wise, a CIA employee dying in a bungled CIA drug experiment is somewhat less scandalous than an innocent Army civilian as fallguy.
Fifty years after the fact, Eric Olson came to believe that he had finally prized loose the carefully guarded state secret of his father’s death. In the summer of 2002, he and his brother Nils were finally ready to lay their father, and the mystery, to rest. Nine years after unearthing Frank Olson’s body, Eric and Nils Olson put their father’s cursed bones back into the ground (the tissue remains in Professor Starr’s lab). They now rest in a plot beside the remains of their sister, Lisa, her husband and child, and their mother, Alice.
The day before the reburial, the surviving Olsons held one last backyard press conference. It wasn’t exactly the sort of closure the Olson family had sought for so many years; after all, no one from the District Attorney’s office was on hand to announce an official finding, or even to call for a congressional inquiry. And no government panel would be publishing a report acknowledging that Frank Olson had been murdered. But nevertheless it was a kind of justice – hard-fought and self-won.
“Frank Olson did not die as a consequence of a drug experiment gone awry,” Eric said, addressing a small huddle of television cameras. “He died because of security concerns regarding disavowed programs of terminal interrogation and the use of biological weapons in Korea. This secret was so immense that even twenty-two years later the White House had been enlisted to maintain it.”
Finally, the fall that had begun 49 years earlier was over. It had held the family suspended in a kind of weightless limbo, captives to the pull of their own unrevealed and unresolved history. And like bodies in motion around a distant, immense, and barely visible object, their destination was forever falling away from under them. But on the day Eric put his father to rest for the second time, the son seemed to have found his footing again. At last, he said, he was ready to move on. “Today,” he announced, “Frank Olson finally hit bottom.” Eric Olson might just as well have been talking about himself.
Click on the image above to purchase the book from Amazon.
Click on the image above to read the chapter on the Olson story from the previous edition, now part of a re-edited Chapter 1 of the new edition.
MAJOR SOURCES
Conversations and correspondence with Eric Olson.
Albarelli Jr., H.P. and John Kelly. “The Strange Story of Frank Olson.” Weekly Planet (Tampa, FL), December 6, 2000.
Fischer, Mary A. “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Gentlemen’s Quarterly, January 2000.
Olson, Eric. Frank Olson Project Web site:
http://www.frankolsonproject.org
Gup, Ted. “The Coldest Warrior.” The Washington Post Magazine, December 16, 2001.
House of Representatives, 94th Congress, First Session. “Hearings Before a Subcommittee on Government Operations.” U.S. Government Printing Office, July 22, 23, 29, 31 and August 1, 1975.
Ignatieff, Michael. “What Did the CIA Do to Eric Olson’s Father?” New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2001.
Koch, Egmont R. and Michael Wech.“Codename: ARTICHOKE.” Egmont R. Koch Filmproduktion. First aired on German television August 12, 2002.
Marks, John. The Search for “The Manchurian Candidate.” New York: Norton, 1991.
The Men Who Stare at Goats
(Picador Books, Sept. 2004; Simon and Schuster, April, 2005.)
The 1953 House
There is a house in Frederick, Maryland that has barely been touched since 1953. It looks like an exhibit in a down-at-heel museum of the Cold War. All that brightly coloured Formica, and the kitschy kitchen ornaments — breezy symbols of 1950s American optimism — haven’t stood the test of time.
Eric Olson’s house – and Eric would be the first to admit this – could do with some re-decoration.
Eric was born here, but he never liked Frederick and he never liked this house. He got out as quickly as he could after high school and ended up in Ohio and India and New York and Massachusetts and Stockholm and California, but in 1993 he thought he would just crash out for a few months, and then ten years passed, during which time he hasn’t decorated for three reasons:
He hasn’t any money.
His mind is on other things.
And, really, his life ground to a shuddering halt on November 28th, 1953, and if your living environment is meant to reflect your inner life, Eric’s house does the job. It an inescapable reminder of the moment Eric’s life froze. Eric says that if he ever forgets ‘why I’m doing this’, he just needs to look around his house, and 1953 comes flooding back to him.
Eric says 1953 was probably the most significant year in modern history. He says we’re all stuck in 1953, in a sense, because the events of that year have a continual and overwhelming impact on our lives. He rattled through a list of key events that occurred in 1953. Everest was conquered. James Watson and Francis Crick published, in Nature magazine, their famous paper mapping the double helix structure of DNA. Elvis first visited a recording studio, and Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock gave the world rock and roll, and subsequently the teenager. President Truman announced that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb. The polio vaccine was created, as was the colour TV. And Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, gave a talk to his Princeton alumni group in which he said ‘Mind warfare is the great battlefield of the Cold War, and we have to do whatever it takes to win this.’
On the night of November 28th 1953, Eric went to bed, as normal, a happy 9-year-old child. The family home had been built three years earlier, and his father Frank was still putting the finishing touches to it, but now he was in New York on business. Eric’s mother Alice was sleeping down the hall. His little brother Nils and his sister Lisa were in the next room.
And then, somewhere around dawn, Eric was woken up.
‘It was a very dim November pre-dawn,’ Eric said.
Eric was woken up by his mother and taken down the hall, still wearing his pyjamas, towards the living room – the same room where the two of us now sat, on the same sofas.
Eric turned the corner to see the family doctor sitting there.
‘And,’ Eric said, ‘also, there were these two…’
Eric searched for a moment for the right word to describe the others. He said, ‘There were these two …men… there also.’
The news that the men delivered was that Eric’s father was dead.
‘What are you talking about?’ Eric asked them, crossly.
‘He had an accident,’ said one of the men, ‘and the accident was that he fell or jumped out of a window.’
‘Excuse me?’ said Eric. ‘He did what?’
‘He fell or jumped out of a window in New York.’
‘What does that look like?’ asked Eric.
This question was greeted with silence. Eric looked over at his mother and saw that she was frozen and empty-eyed.
‘How do you fall out of a window?’ said Eric. ‘What does that mean? Why would he do that? What do you mean, fell or jumped?’
‘We don’t know if he fell,’ said one of the men. ‘He might have fallen. He might have jumped.’
‘Did he dive?’ asked Eric.
‘Anyhow,’ said one of the men. ‘It was an accident.’
‘Was he standing on a ledge and he jumped?’ asked Eric.
‘It was a work-related accident,’ said one of the men.
‘Excuse me?’ said Eric. ‘He fell out a window and that’s work related? What?’
Eric turned to his mother.
‘Um,’ he said. ‘What is his work again?’
Eric believed his father was a civilian scientist, working with chemicals at the nearby Fort Detrick military base.
Eric said to me, ‘It very quickly became an incredibly rancorous issue in the family because I was always the kid saying, “Excuse me, where did he go? Tell me this story again.” And my mother very quickly adopted the stance, “Look, I’ve told you this story a thousand times.” And I would say, “Yeah, but I didn’t get it.”
Eric’s mother had created – from the same scant facts offered to Eric – this scenario: Frank Olson was in New York. He was staying in the 10th floor of the Statler Hotel, now the Pennsylvania Hotel, across the road from Madison Square Gardens, in midtown Manhattan. He had a bad dream. He woke up, confused, and headed in the dark towards the bathroom. He became disorientated and fell out of the window.
It was 2 A.M.
Eric and his little brother Nils told their school friends that their father had died of a ‘fatal nervous breakdown’ although they had no idea what this meant. Fort Detrick was what glued the town together. All their friends’ fathers worked at the base. The Olsons would still get invited to neighbourhood picnics and other community events but there didn’t seem any reason for them to be there any more.
When Eric was 16, he and Nils, then 12, decided to cycle from the end of their driveway to San Francisco. Even at that young age, Eric saw the 2,415-mile journey as a metaphor. He wanted to immerse himself in unknown American terrain, the mysterious America that had, for some impenetrable reason, taken his father away from him. He and Nils would ‘reach the goal’ – San Francisco – ‘by small continuous increments of motion along a single strand.’ This was in Eric’s mind a test-run for another goal he would one day reach in an equally fastidious way: the solution to the mystery of what happened to his father in that hotel room in New York at 2am.
I spent a lot of time at Eric’s house, reading his documents and looking though his photos and watching his home movies. There were pictures of the teenage Eric and his younger brother Nils standing by their bikes. Eric had captioned the photograph ‘Happy Bikers.’ There were 8mm videos shot two decades earlier of Eric’s father, Frank, playing in the garden with the children. Then there were some films Frank Olson had shot himself during a trip to Europe a few months before he died. There was Big Ben and the Changing of the Guard. There was the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin. There was the Eiffel Tower. It looked like a family holiday, except the family weren’t with him. Sometimes, in these 8mm films, you catch a glimpse of Frank’s travelling companions, three men, wearing long dark coats and trilby hats, sitting in Parisian pavement cafés, watching the girls go by.
I watched them, and then I watched a home movie that a friend of Eric’s had shot on June 2nd 1994, the day Eric had his father’s body exhumed.
There was the digger breaking through the soil.
There was a local journalist asking Eric, as the coffin was hauled noisily into the back of a truck, ‘Are you having second thoughts about this, Eric?’
She had to yell over the sound of the digger.
‘Ha!’ Eric replied.
‘ I keep expecting you to change your mind,’ shouted the journalist.
Then there was Frank Olson himself, shrivelled and brown on a slab in a pathologist’s lab at Washington Georgetown University, his leg broken, a big hole in his skull.
And then, in this home video, Eric was back at home, exhilarated, talking on the phone to Nils: ‘I saw daddy today!’
After Eric put the phone down he told his friend with the video camera the story of the bicycle trip he and Nils took in 1961, from the bottom of their driveway all the way to San Francisco.
‘I’d seen an article in Boys Life about a 14-year-old kid who cycled from Connecticut to the West Coast,’ Eric said, ‘so I figured my brother was 12 and I was 16 so that averaged at 14, so we could do it. We got these terrible two-speed heavy twin bikes, and we started off right here. 40 West. We heard it went all the way! And we made it! We went all the way!’
‘No!’ said Eric’s friend.
‘Yeah,’ said Eric. ‘We cycled across the country.’
‘No way!’
‘It’s an incredible story,’ said Eric. ‘And we’ve never heard of a younger person than my brother who cycled across the United States. It’s doubtful there is one.
When you think about it, 12, and alone. It took us seven weeks, and we had unbelievable adventures all the way.’
‘Did you camp out?’
‘We camped out. Farmers would invite us to stay in their houses. In Kansas City the police picked us up, figuring we were runaways, and when they found out we weren’t they let us stay in their jail.’
‘And your mom let you do this?’
‘Yeah, that’s a kind of unbelievable mystery.’
(Eric’s mother Alice had died by 1994. She had been drinking on the quiet since the 1960s, and had begun locking herself in the bathroom and coming out mean and confused. Eric would never have exhumed his father’s remains while she was alive. His sister Lisa had died too, together with her husband and their 2-year-old son. They’d been flying to the Adirondacks, where they were going to invest money in a lumber mill. The plane crashed, and everyone on board was killed.)
‘Yeah,’ said Eric, ‘it’s an unbelievable mystery that my mother let us go, but we called home twice a week from different places, and the local paper, the Frederick paper, twice a week had these front-page articles: Olsons Reach St Louis! All across the country back then there were billboards advertising a place called Harolds Club, which was a big gambling casino in Reno. It used to be the biggest casino in the world. And their motif was HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! Every day we’d see these billboards, HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! It became a kind of slogan for our journey. When we got to Reno we realised we couldn’t get into Harolds Club because we were too young. So we decided to make a sign that said HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! tie it to the back of our bikes, go over to Harolds Club and tell Harold, whoever he might be, that we’d had this across the whole United States and we were just crazy to see Harold’s Club.
So we went into a drugstore. We brought an old cardboard box and some crayons, and we started writing this sign. The woman who sold us the crayons said, “What are you guys doing?”
We said, “We’re going to make a sign, HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! and tell Harold that we cycled all the way from…”
She said, “These people are very smart. They’re not going to fall for this.”
So we made this thing, took it out onto the streets, scuffed it up, tied it to the back of our bikes, went over to Harolds Club, got to this big entry-way – Harolds Club was this gigantic thing, literally the biggest gambling casino in the world – and there was a doorperson there.
He said, “What do you boys want?”
We said, “We want to meet Harold.”
He said, “Harold is not here.”
We said, “Well, who is here?”
He said, “Harold senior is not here but Harold junior is here.”
We said, “That’s fine, we’ll take Harold junior.”
He said, “Okay, I’ll go in and see.”
Pretty soon out strides this dude in a fancy cowboy suit. Handsome guy. So he comes out and looks at our bikes and he says, “What are you guys doing?”
We said, “Harold. We’ve been cycling across the United States and we’ve wanted to see Harolds Club the whole time. We’ve been sweating across the desert.”
And he said, “Well, come on in!”
We ended up staying for a week at Harolds Club. He took us up in a helicopter around Reno, put us up in a fancy hotel. And when we were leaving he said, “I guess you guys want to see Disneyland, right? Well let me call up my friend Walt!”
So he called up Walt Disney, and this is one of the great disappointments of my life, Walt wasn’t home.’
I have wondered why Eric spent the evening of the day he had his father’s body exhumed telling his friend the story of Harolds Club Or Bust. Maybe it’s because Eric had spent so much of his adult life failing to be offered the kindness of strangers, failing to benefit from anything approaching an American dream, but now Frank Olson was out there, lying on a slab in a pathologist’s lab, and perhaps things were about to turn around for Eric. Maybe some mysterious Harold junior would come along and kindly explain everything.
Happy Bikers.
In 1970, Eric enrolled at Harvard. He went home every Thanksgiving weekend, and because Frank Olson went out of the window during the Thanksgiving holiday of 1953, the family invariably ended up watching old home movies of Frank, and Eric inevitably said to his mother, ‘Tell me the story again.’
During Thanksgiving weekend 1974, Eric’s mother replied, ‘I’ve told you this story a hundred times, a thousand times.’
Eric said, ‘Just tell me it one more time.’
And so Eric’s mother sighed and she began.
Frank Olson had spent a weekend on an office retreat in a cabin called the Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland. When he came home, his mood was unusually anxious.
He told his wife, ‘I made a terrible mistake and I’ll tell you what it was when the children have gone to bed.’
But the conversation never got around to what the terrible mistake had been.
Frank remained agitated all weekend. He told Alice he wanted to quit his job and become a dentist. On the Sunday night Alice tried to calm him down by taking him to the cinema in Frederick to see whatever was on, which turned out to be a new film called Martin Luther.
It was the story of Luther’s crisis of conscience over the corruption of the Catholic Church in the 16th Century, when its theologians claimed it was impossible for the Church to do any wrong, because they defined the moral code. They were fighting the Devil, after all. The film climaxed with Luther declaring, ‘No. Here I stand, I can do no other.’ The moral of Martin Luther is that the individual cannot hide behind the institution.
(TV Guide’s movie review database gives Martin Luther 2/5 stars and says, ‘It is not “entertainment” in the usual sense of the word. One wishes there might have been some humour in the script, to make the man look more human. The film was made with such respect that the subject matter seems gloomy when it should be uplifting.’)
The trip to the cinema didn’t help Frank’s mood, and the next day it was suggested by some colleagues that he go to New York to visit a psychiatrist. Alice drove Frank to Washington DC and she dropped him off at the offices of the men who would accompany him to New York.
This was the last time she ever saw her husband.
On the spur of the moment, during that Thanksgiving weekend in 1974, Eric asked his mother a question he’d never thought to ask before:
‘Describe the offices where you dropped him off.’
So she did.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Eric, ‘that sounds just like CIA headquarters.’
And then Eric’s mother became hysterical.
She screamed, ‘You will never find out what happened in that hotel room!’
Eric said, ‘As soon as I finish at Harvard I’m going to move back home and I’m not going to rest until I find out the truth.’
Eric didn’t have to wait long for a breakthrough. He received a telephone call from a family friend on the morning of June 11th 1975: ‘Have you seen the Washington Post? I think you’d better take a look.’
It was a front-page story, and the headline read:
SUICIDE REVEALED
‘A civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test, then jumped 10 floors to his death less than a week later, according to the Rockefeller commission report released yesterday.’
(The Rockefeller Commission had been created to investigate CIA misdeeds in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.)
‘The man was given the drug while attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on a test project that involved the administration of mind-bending drugs to unsuspecting Americans.
The practice of giving drugs to unsuspecting people lasted from 1953 to 1963, when it was discovered by the CIA’s inspector general and stopped, the commission said.’
‘Is this my father?’ thought Eric.
The headline was misleading. Not much was ‘revealed’ – not even the name of the victim.
‘Is this what happened at the Deep Creek Lodge?’ thought Eric. ‘They slipped him LSD? No, but it has to be my father. How many army scientists were jumping out of hotel windows in New York in 1953?’
On the whole, the American public reacted to the Frank Olson story in much the same way that they responded, 50 years later, to the news that Barney was being used to torture Iraqi detainees. Horror would be the wrong word. People were basically amused and fascinated. As in the case of Barney, this response was, I think, triggered by the disconcertingly surreal combination of dark intelligence secrets and familiar pop culture.
‘For America it was lurid,’ said Eric, ‘and exciting.’
The Olsons were invited to the White House so President Ford could personally apologise to them – ‘He was very, very sorry,’ said Eric – and the photographs from that day show the family beaming and entranced inside the Oval Office.
‘When you look at those photographs now,’ I asked Eric one day, ‘what do they say to you?’
‘They say that the power of that Oval Office for seduction is enormous,’ Eric replied, ‘as we now know from Clinton. You go into that sacred space – that oval – and you’re really in a special charmed circle and you can’t think straight. It works. It really works.’
Outside the White House, after their 17-minute meeting with President Ford, Alice Olson gave a statement to the press.
‘I think it should be noted,’ she said, ‘that an American family can receive communication from the President of the United States. I think that’s a tremendous tribute to our country.’
‘She felt very embraced by Gerald Ford,’ said Eric. ‘They laughed together, and so on.’
The Olsons in the Oval Office. Eric is second from the right.
The Olsons back at home.
The President promised the Olsons full disclosure, and the CIA provided the family, and America, with a flurry of details, each more unexpected than the last.
The CIA had slipped LSD into Frank Olson’s Cointreau at a camping retreat called the Deep Creek Lodge. The project was code-named MK-ULTRA, and they did it, they explained, because they wanted to watch how a scientist would cope with the effects of a mind-altering drug. Would he be unable to resist revealing secrets? Would the information be coherent? Could LSD be used as a truth serum for CIA interrogators?
And there was another motive. The CIA later admitted that they very much enjoyed paranoid thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate and they wanted to know if they could create real life brainwashed assassins by pumping people with LSD. But Frank Olson had a bad trip, perhaps giving rise to the legend that if you take LSD you believe you can fly and you end up falling out of windows.
Social historians and political satirists immediately labelled these events ‘a great historical irony’, and Eric repeated these words to me through gritted teeth because he doesn’t appreciate the fact that his father’s death has become a fragment of an irony.
‘The great historical irony,’ Eric said, ‘being that “the CIA brought LSD to America thereby bringing a kind of enlightenment, thereby opening up a new level of political consciousness, thereby sowing the seeds of its own undoing because it created an enlightened public.” It made great copy, and you’ll find that this theme is the motif of a lot of books.’
The details kept coming, so thick and fast that Frank Olson was in danger of becoming lost, swept away like a twig in the tidal wave of this colourful story. Also in 1953, the CIA told the Olsons, they created an MK-ULTRA brothel in New York City, where they spiked the customers’ drinks with LSD. They placed an agent called George White behind a one-way mirror where he moulded, and passed up the chain of command, little models made out of pipe cleaners. The models represented the sexual positions considered, by the observant George White, to be the most effective in releasing a flow of information.
When George White left the CIA his letter of resignation read, in part, ‘I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun … Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?’
George White addressed this letter to his boss, the very same CIA man who had spiked Frank Olson’s Cointreau: an ecology-obsessed Buddhist named Sidney Gottlieb.
Gottlieb had learnt the art of sleight-of-hand from a Broadway magician called John Mulholland. This magician is all but forgotten today but back then he was a big star, a David Copperfield, who mysteriously bowed out of the public eye in 1953, claiming ill health, when the truth was that he had been secretly employed by Sidney Gottlieb to teach agents how to spike people’s drinks with LSD.
Mulholland also taught Gottlieb how to slip bio-toxins into the toothbrushes and cigars of America’s enemies abroad. It was Gottlieb who travelled to Congo to assassinate the country’s first democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba by putting toxins in his toothbrush (he failed: the story goes that someone else, a non-American, managed to assassinate Lumumba first).
It was Gottlieb who mailed a monogrammed handkerchief, doctored with brucellosis, to Iraqi colonel Abd a-Karim Qasim. Qasim survived.
And it was Gottlieb who travelled to Cuba to slip poisons into Fidel Castro’s cigars and his diving suit. Castro survived.
It was like a comedy routine, like the Marx Brothers Become Covert Assassins, and sometimes it seemed to Eric as if his family were the only people not laughing.
‘The image that was presented to us,’ Eric said, ‘was fraternity boys out of control. “We tried some crazy things, and we made errors of judgement. We put various poisons in Castro’s cigars but none of that worked. And then we decided that we weren’t really good at that sort of thing.”’
‘A clown assassin,’ I said.
‘A clown assassin,’ said Eric. ‘Ineptitude. We drug people and they jump out of windows. We try to assassinate people and we get there too late. And we never actually assassinated anybody.’
Eric paused.
‘And Gottlieb turns up everywhere!’ he said. ‘Is Gottlieb the only person in the shop? Does he have to do everything?’ Eric laughed. ‘And this is what my mother was seizing on when she talked to Gottlieb. She said, “How could you do such a harebrained scientific experiment? Where’s the medical supervision? Where’s the control group? You call this science?’ And Gottlieb basically replied, ‘Yeah, it was a bit casual. We’re sorry for that.”’
As I sat in Eric Olson’s house and listened to his story I remembered that I had heard Sidney Gottlieb’s name mentioned before, in some other faraway context. Then it came to me. Before General Stubblebine came along, the secret psychic spies had another administrator: Sidney Gottlieb.
It took me a while to remember this because it seemed so unlikely. What was someone like Sidney Gottlieb, a poisoner, an assassin (albeit a not particularly good one), the man indirectly responsible for the death of Frank Olson, doing in the middle of this other, funny, psychic story? It seemed remarkable to me that the organizational gap in the intelligence world between the light side (psychic supermen) and the dark side (covert assassinations) has been so narrow. But it wasn’t until Eric showed me a letter his mother received out of the blue on July 13th 1975 that I began to understand just how narrow it was. The letter was from The Diplomat Motor Hotel, in Ocean City, Maryland. It read:
Dear Mrs Olson,
After reading the newspaper accounts on the tragic death of your husband, I felt compelled to write to you.
At the time of your husband’s death, I was the assistant night manager at the Hotel Statler in New York and was at his side almost immediately after his fall. He attempted to speak but his words were unintelligible. A priest was summoned and he was given the last rites.
Having been in the hotel business for the last 36 years and witnessed innumerable unfortunate incidents, your husband’s death disturbed me greatly due to the most unusual circumstances of which you are now aware.
If I can be of any assistance to you, please do not hesitate to call upon me.
My heartfelt sympathy to you and your family.
Armond D. Pastore
General Manager.
The Olsons did phone Armond Pastore to thank him for his letter, and it was then that Pastore told them what happened in the moments after Frank had died in his arms on the street at 2am.
Pastore said he went back inside the hotel and he spoke to the telephone switchboard operator. He asked her if any calls had been made from Frank Olson’s room.
She said that there was just one call, and she had listened in to it. It was very short. It was made immediately after Frank Olson went out of the window.
The man in Frank Olson’s room said, ‘Well, he’s gone.’
The voice on the other end of the phone said, ‘That’s too bad.’
And then they both hung up.
Harolds Club Or Bust!
Eric Olson has a swimming pool in his back garden – one of the very few additions to the house made since 1953. On a hot day in August, Eric and his brother Nils and Eric’s son, who usually lives in Sweden, and Nils’s wife and their children, and some of Eric’s friends and I, were sunbathing by the pool, when a truck covered with pictures of party balloons – Capital Party Rentals – pulled up in his driveway to drop off 100 plastic seats.
‘Hey! Coloured chairs!’ yelled Eric.
‘You want the coloured chairs?’ said the driver.
‘Nah,’ said Eric. ‘Inappropriate.’
Eric had brought a ghetto blaster down to the poolside and he tuned it to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered because the legendary reporter Daniel Schorr was about to deliver a commentary about him. Daniel Schorr was the first man to interview Khrushchev, he won three Emmys for his coverage of Watergate, and now he was turning his attention to Eric.
His commentary began.
‘…Eric Olson is ready to charge in a news conference tomorrow that the story of a suicide plunge makes no sense…’
Eric leaned up against the wire fence that surrounded his swimming pool and he grinned at his friends and his family, who were listening intently to this broadcast.
‘…and that his father was killed to silence him about the lethal activities he’d been involved in, projects codenamed Artichoke and MK-ULTRA. Today a spokesman for the CIA said no congressional or executive branch probes of the Olson case have turned up any evidence of homicide. Eric Olson may not have the whole story. The thing is, the government’s lid on its secrets remains so tight, we may never know the whole story…’
Eric flinched.
‘Don’t go there, Dan,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Don’t go there.’
‘…This is Daniel Schorr…’
‘Don’t GO there, Dan,’ Eric said.
He turned to us all, sitting by the pool. We sat there and said nothing.
‘See?’ said Eric. ‘That’s what they want to do. ‘“We may never know the whole story.” And there’s so much comfort they take in that. Bullshit. Bullshit. “Oh, it could be this, it could be that, and everything in the CIA is a hall of mirrors, layers, you can never get to the bottom…” When people say that, what they’re really saying is, “We’re comfortable with this because we don’t want to know.” It’s like my mother always said, “You’re never going to know what happened in that hotel room.” Well, something DID happen in that room and it is knowable.’
Suddenly, Eric is 60 years old. Decades have gone by, and he has spent them investigating his father’s death. One day I asked him if he regretted this, and he replied, ‘I regret it all the time.’
Piecing together the facts has been hard enough for Eric, the facts being buried in classified documents, or declassified documents covered with thick black lines made with marker pens, or worse – Sidney Gottlieb admitted to Eric during one meeting that he had, on his retirement, destroyed the MK-ULTRA files. When Eric asked him why, Gottlieb explained that his ‘ecological sensitivity’ had made him aware of the dangers of ‘paper overflow’.
Gottlieb added that it didn’t really matter that the documents were ruined, because it was all a waste anyway. All the MK-ULTRA experiments were futile, he told Eric. They had all come to nothing. Eric left Gottlieb realising he’d been truly beaten by a first class mind.
‘What a brilliant cover story,’ he thought. ‘In a success-obsessed society like this one, what’s the best rock to hide something under? It’s the rock called failure.’
So most of the facts were retained only in the memories of men who did not want to talk. Nonetheless, Eric has constructed a narrative that is just as plausible, even more plausible, than the LSD suicide story.
Collecting the facts has been difficult enough, but there has been something even harder.
‘The old story is so much fun,’ Eric said, ‘why would anyone want to replace it with a story that’s not fun. You see? The person who puts the spin on the story controls it from the beginning. Its very hard for people to read against the grain of what you’ve been told the narrative is about.’
‘Your new story is not as much fun,’ I agreed.
‘This is no longer a happy, feelgood story,’ Eric said, ‘and I don’t like it better than anyone else does. It’s hard to accept that your father didn’t die because of suicide, nor did he die because of negligence after a drug experiment, he died because they killed him. That’s a different feeling.’
And, vexingly for Eric, on the rare occasions he’s convinced a journalist that the CIA murdered his father, the revelation has not been greeted with horror. One writer declined Eric’s invitation to attend tomorrow’s press conference by saying ‘We know the CIA kills people. That’s old news.’
In fact, Eric told me, tomorrow would be the first time anyone had ever publicly charged the CIA with murdering an American citizen.
‘People have been so brainwashed by fiction,’ said Eric as we drove to the local Kinko’s to pick up the press releases for the conference, ‘so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, “We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.” Actually, we know nothing of this. There’s no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunisation against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don’t know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they’re not cynical at all.’
It isn’t that people aren’t interested: it’s that they’re interested in the wrong way. Recently a theatre director approached Eric for his permission to turn the Frank Olson story into ‘an opera about defenestration’, but Eric declined, explaining that this was a complex enough tale anyway even without having the facts sung at an audience. Tomorrow’s press conference was really Eric’s last chance to convince the world that his father was not an LSD suicide.
There were so many ways for Eric to recount his new version of the story at the press conference. It was impossible for him – for anyone – to know how to do it in the most coherent and still entertaining way. Eric’s new story is not only no longer fun, it is also exasperatingly intricate. There’s so much information to absorb that an audience could just glaze over.
Really, this story begins with the proclamation delivered by the CIA director Allen Dulles to his Princeton alumni group in 1953.
‘Mind warfare,’ he said, ‘is the great battlefield of the Cold War and we have to do whatever it takes to win this.’
Before Jim Channon and General Stubblebine and Colonel Alexander came along, there was Allen Dulles, the first great out-of-the-box thinker in US intelligence. He was a great friend of the Bushes, once the Bush family lawyer, a pipe-smoking patriarch who believed that the CIA should be like an ivy league university, taking inspiration not only from agents, but also from scientists, academics, and whoever else might come up with something new. It was Dulles who moved the CIA’s headquarters from central Washington DC to suburban Langley, Virginia (now renamed The George Bush Center For Intelligence) because he wanted to create a thoughtful, out-of-town campus milieu. It was Dulles who sent undercover CIA agents out into the American suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s to infiltrate séances in the hope of unearthing and recruiting America’s most talented clairvoyants to his mind-warfare battlefield, which is how the relationship between intelligence and the psychic world was born. But it was General Stubblebine who, inspired by the First Earth Battalion, proclaimed a generation later that anyone could be a great psychic, and so he opened the doors wide, and Major Ed Dames joined the program, and subsequently revealed the secrets of the unit on the Art Bell show, and then all hell broke loose and 39 people in San Diego killed themselves in an attempt to hitch a ride on Prudence and Courtney’s Hale Bopp companion.
Allen Dulles put Sidney Gottlieb in charge of the fledgling psychic program, and also MK-ULTRA, and then a third covert mind-warfare project known as Artichoke.
Artichoke is the program that is not fun.
Recently declassified documents reveal that Artichoke was all about inventing insane, brutal, violent, frequently fatal new ways of interrogating people.
Frank Olson was not just a civilian scientist working with chemicals at Fort Detrick. He was a CIA man too. He was working for Artichoke. This is why he was in Europe in the months before he died, sitting in pavement cafes with the other men wearing long coats and trilbies. They were there on Artichoke business. Eric’s father was – and there is no pleasant way of putting this – a pioneering torturer, or at the very least a pioneering torturer’s assistant. Artichoke was the First Earth Battalion of torture – a like-minded group of ground-breaking out-of-the-box thinkers, coming up with all manner of clever new ways of getting information out of people.
An example: according to a CIA document dated April 26th 1952, the Artichoke men ‘used heroin on a routine basis’, because they determined that heroin (and other substances) ‘can be useful in reverse because of the stresses produced when they are withdrawn from those who are addicted to their use.’
This is why, Eric has learnt, his father was recruited to Artichoke. He, alone among the interrogators, had a scientific knowledge of how to administer drugs and chemicals.
And now, in 2004, this Artichoke-created cold turkey method of interrogation is back in business. Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down, interviewed a number of CIA interrogators for the October 2003 edition of Atlantic Monthly, and this is the scenario he constructed:
‘On what may or may not have been March 1 [2003] the notorious terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was roughly awakened by a raiding party of Pakistani and American commandos …Here was the biggest catch yet in the war on terror. Sheikh Mohammed is considered the architect of two attempts on the World Trade Center: the one that failed, in 1993, and the one that succeeded so catastrophically, eight years later …He was flown to an “undisclosed location” (a place the CIA calls “Hotel California”) — presumably a facility in another cooperative nation, or perhaps a specially designed prison aboard an aircraft carrier.
It doesn’t much matter where, because the place would not have been familiar or identifiable to him. Place and time, the anchors of sanity, were about to come unmoored. He might as well have been entering a new dimension, a strange new world where his every word, move, and sensation would be monitored and measured; where things might be as they seemed but might not; where there would be no such thing as day or night, or normal patterns of eating and drinking, wakefulness and sleep; where hot and cold, wet and dry, clean and dirty, truth and lies, would all be tangled and distorted.
The space would be filled night and day with harsh light and noise. Questioning would be intense—sometimes loud and rough, sometimes quiet and friendly, with no apparent reason for either. The session might last for days, with interrogators taking turns, or it might last only a few minutes. On occasion he might be given a drug to elevate his mood prior to interrogation; marijuana, heroin, and sodium pentothal have been shown to overcome a reluctance to speak. These drugs could be administered surreptitiously with food or drink, and given the bleakness of his existence, they might even offer a brief period of relief and pleasure, thereby creating a whole new category of longing—and new leverage for his interrogators.’
See how in this scenario a slice of Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion (‘harsh light and noise’) and a slice of Frank Olson’s Artichoke (‘a whole new category of longing’) come together like two pieces of a jigsaw.
On the day before Eric’s press conference, Eric and I watched old 8mm home movies of his father playing in the garden with his children. On the screen, Frank was riding a wobbly old bicycle and Eric, then a toddler, was resting on the handlebars. Eric gazed, smiling, at the screen.
He said, ‘There’s my father. Right there! That’s him! In comparison with the other guys from the CIA, he has an open face. Um…’
Eric paused. ‘Basically,’ he said, ‘this is a story about a guy who had a simple moral code and a naïve view of the world. He wasn’t fundamentally a military guy. And he certainly wasn’t someone who would be involved in “terminal interrogations”. He went though a moral crisis, but he was in too deep and they couldn’t let him out.’
We continued watching the home video. Then Eric said, ‘Think of how much could have been different if he was alive to tell any of this. Ha! The whole history of a lot of things would be different. And you can see a lot of that just in his face. A lot of the other men have very tight, closed faces. He doesn’t…’
And then Eric trailed off.
At some point during his investigation, Eric hooked up with the British journalist Gordon Thomas, who has written numerous books on intelligence matters. Through Thomas, Eric learned that during a trip to London in the summer of 1953 his father had apparently confided in William Sargant, a consultant psychiatrist who advised British intelligence on brainwashing techniques.
According to Thomas, Frank Olson told Sargant that he had visited secret joint American-British research installations near Frankfurt, where the CIA was testing truth serums on “expendables,” captured Russian agents and ex-Nazis. Olson confessed to Sargant that he had witnessed something terrible, possibly “a terminal experiment” on one or more of the expendables. Sargant heard Olson out and then he reported to British intelligence that the young American scientist’s misgivings were making him a security risk. He recommended that Olson be denied further access to Porton Down, the British chemical-weapons research establishment.
After Eric learnt this, he told his friend, the writer Michael Ignatieff, who published an article about Eric in the New York Times. A week later, Eric received the telephone call he’d been waiting for his whole life. It was a real Harold Junior, one of his father’s best friends from Detrick, a man who knew everything, and was willing to tell Eric the whole story.
His name was Norman Cournoyer.
Eric spent a weekend at Norman’s house in Connecticut. Revealing to Eric the secrets he’d been harbouring all these years was so stressful for Norman that he repeatedly excused himself so he could go to the toilet and vomit.
Norman told Eric that the Artichoke story was true. Frank told Norman that ‘they didn’t mind if people came out of this or not. They might survive, they might not. They might be put to death.’
Eric said, ‘Norman declined to go into detail about what this meant but he said it wasn’t nice. Extreme torture, extreme use of drugs, extreme stress.’
Norman told Eric that his father was in deep, and horrified at the way his life had turned. He watched people die in Europe, perhaps he even helped them die, and by the time he returned to America he was determined to reveal what he had seen. There was a 24-hour contingent of Quakers down at the Fort Detrick gates, peace protestors, and Frank would wander over to chat to them, much to the dismay of his colleagues. Frank asked Norman one day, ‘Do you know a good journalist I can talk to?’
And so, Eric said, slipping LSD into his father’s Cointreau at the Deep Creek Lodge was not an experiment that went wrong: it was designed to get him to talk while hallucinating. And Frank failed the test. He revealed his intentions to Gottlieb and the other MK-ULTRA men present. This was the ‘terrible mistake’ he had made. Seeing Martin Luther on the Sunday night had made him all the more determined to quit his job. Here I stand. I can do no other.
And on the Monday morning Frank did, indeed, tender his resignation, but his colleagues persuaded him to seek psychological counselling in New York.
Documents reveal that Frank never saw a psychiatrist in New York. He was taken instead, by Gottlieb’s deputy, to the office of the former Broadway magician John Mulholland, who probably hypnotised him, and Frank probably failed that test too.
Housing a possibly deranged and desperate man in a hotel room high above Seventh Avenue no longer seemed like a regrettable error of judgment. It seemed like the prelude to murder.
When Eric had his father’s body exhumed in 1994, the pathologist, Dr James Starrs, found a hole in Frank’s head that – he concluded – came from the butt of a gun and not a fall from a 10th floor window.
‘Well, he’s gone,’ said the voice of Sidney Gottlieb’s deputy, Robert Lashbrook.
‘That’s too bad,’ came the reply.
And they both hung up.
There were around 40 journalists at Eric’s press conference – crews from all the networks and many of the big newspapers. Eric had decided – for the purposes of clarity – to tell the story primarily through the narrative of his weekend with Norman Cournoyer. He repeatedly stressed that this was no longer a family story. This was now a story about what happened to America in the 1950s and how that informs what is happening today.
‘Where’s the proof?’ asked Julia Robb, the reporter from Eric’s local paper, the Frederick News Post, when he had finished. ‘Does all this rest on the word of one man, your father’s friend?’
Julia looked around her to make the point that this Norman Cournoyer wasn’t even in attendance.
‘No,’ said Eric. He looked exasperated. ‘As I’ve tried to tell you it conceptually rests on the idea that there are two vectors in this story and they only intersect in one place.’
There was a baffled silence.
‘Are you in any way motivated by ideology over this?’ the man from Fox News asked.
‘Just a desire to know the truth,’ sighed Eric.
Later, as the journalists milled around, eating from the buffet that was laid out on the picnic tables, the conversation among the Olsons and their friends turned to Julia Robb, the reporter from the Frederick News Post. Someone said he thought it was a shame that the most hostile journalist present represented Eric and Nils’s local paper.
‘Yeah it is,’ said Nils. ‘It’s painful to me. I’m a professional here in town. I have connections with local people as a dentist, and I see people on a daily basis who come in and read the local paper, and that affects me.’
Nils looked over at Eric, who was saying something to Julia, across the garden, but we couldn’t hear what.
Nils said, ‘At times you go through a phase of believing that maybe the story is a bunch of hooey, and that it was just a simple LSD suicide and that…’
Nils glanced at Julia.
‘…can trigger a kind of shame spiral. Its like the feelings you’ve had in the middle of the night, at 3am, when you’re trying to get to sleep and you start having some thought and the thought spins you into another negative thought and it kind of spins out of control and you have to shake yourself and maybe turn the light on and get grounded in reality again.’
Eric and Julia were arguing now. Julia said something to Eric and then she walked away, back to her car. (Later Eric said to me that Julia seemed ‘incensed, as if the entire story made her furious in some deep way that she was completely at a loss to articulate.’)
‘I mean,’ said Nils, ‘America fundamentally wants to think of itself as being good, and we’re fundamentally right in what we’re doing, and we have a very compelling responsibility for the free world. And looking at some of these issues is troubling, because if America does have a darker side it threatens your hold on your view of America and it’s kind of like, “Gee, if I pull out this one underpinning of the American consciousness, is this a house of cards? Does it really threaten the fundamental nature of America?”’
We drifted back down to the swimming pool, and an hour passed, and then Eric joined us. He’d been in the house on the telephone. He was laughing.
‘You hear the latest?’ he said.
‘Bring me up to date,’ said Nils. ‘I’m dying to hear.’
‘Julia,’ said Eric, ‘called Norman. I just called her and she said, “Eric, I’m glad you phoned. I just called Norman. He says he has no reason to believe that the CIA would murder Frank Olson.” I said, “Julia thanks for respecting my wishes about not calling Norman.” She said, “Eric, I’m a reporter. I have to do what’s necessary to get the story.”’
Eric laughed, although nobody else did.
And so I drove to Connecticut, to Norman Cournoyer’s house. I was slightly shaken by the news of the telephone call between Julia Robb and Norman. Had I got Eric wrong? Was he some kind of fantasist?
Norman lives in a large white bungalow in an upmarket suburban street. His wife answered the door and she led me into the living room where Norman was waiting for me. He pointed to the table and said, ‘I dug out some old photographs for you.’
They were of Norman and Frank Olson, arm in arm, somewhere in the middle of Fort Detrick, circa 1953.
‘Did you tell the reporter from the Fredrick News Post that you had no evidence to suggest that Frank was murdered by the CIA?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Norman.
‘Why did you do that?’ I asked.
‘Over the phone?’ said Norman. ‘I think a journalist is making a big mistake in trying to get somebody to talk over the phone.’
‘So you do think Frank was murdered?’ I said.
‘I’m sure of it,’ said Norman.
And then he told me something he hadn’t told Eric.
‘I saw Frank after he’d been given the LSD,’ he said. ‘We joked about it.’
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘He said, “They’re trying to find out what kind of guy I am. Whether I’m giving secrets away.”’
‘You were joking about it?’ I said.
‘We joked about it because he didn’t react to LSD.’
‘He wasn’t tripping at all?’ I said.
‘Nah,’ said Norman. ‘He was laughing about it. He said, “They’re getting very, very uptight now because of what they believe I am capable of.” He really thought they were picking on him because he was the man who might give away the secrets.’
‘Was he going to talk to a journalist?’ I asked.
‘He came so close it wasn’t even funny,’ said Norman.
‘Did he come back from Europe looking very upset?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Norman. ‘We talked about a week, ten days, after he came back. I said “What happened to you Frank? You seem awfully upset.” He said, “Oh, you know…” I must admit, in all honesty, it’s just coming back to me now. He said…’
Suddenly, Norman fell silent.
‘I don’t want to go on further than that,’ he said. ‘There are certain things that I don’t want to talk about.’
Norman looked out of the window.
‘It speaks for itself,’ he said.
Eric hoped his press conference would, at least, change the language of the reporting of the story. At best it would motivate some energetic journalist to take the challenge and find an unequivocal smoking gun that proved Frank Olson was pushed out of the window.
But in the days that followed the press conference it became clear that every journalist had decided to report the story in much the same way.
Eric had finally found ‘closure.’
He was on the way to being ‘healed’.
He had ‘laid his mystery to rest.’
He could ‘move on’ now.
Perhaps we will ‘never know’ what really happened to Frank Olson, but the important thing was that Eric had achieved ‘closure’.
The story was fun again.
From Norman Mailer’s novel, Harlot’s Ghost
© Random House 1991, used with permission of the author
[The Family Jewels and the “High Holies”]
All the same, not many occasions in my life had been more momentous than the summer day in 1982 when Harlot had invited me to work again with him. “Yes,” he had said, “I need your assistance so much that I will forgo my true innings.” His knuckles, huge as carbuncles, fretted his wheel chair forward and back.…
It was exactly at this time, when disaffection was collecting in my pores like bile, that Harlot summoned me to his rump office at the farmhouse in Virginia, much as he must have called in several other men like myself, still ambitious enough to know rage that their careers were in irons, yet old enough to suffer the knowledge that their best years were committed and gone. Who knows what Harlot cooked up for the others? I can tell you what he talked about with me.
We, at the CIA, had gone through some considerable suffering on the exposure of the Family Jewels in 1975. Maybe a few bushmen in Australia had not heard how we labored to rub Fidel Castro out, but by the time the Senate Select Committee to Study Intelligence Activities had done inquiring, there were very few bushmen. The rest of the world had learned that we were ready to kill Patrice Lumumba as well, and had gone in for LSD experiments in brainwashing so exuberantly that one of our subjects, a Dr. Frank Olson (on government contract), had jumped out the window. We hid the fact from his widow. She spent twenty years thinking her husband was an ordinary suicide, which is onerous for a family to believe since there are no ordinary suicides. We opened mail between Russia and the U.S. and closed it again and sent it on. We spied on high government officials like Barry Goldwater and Bobby Kennedy; we had all of those activities advertised in the marketplace. Since we are, at CIA, a proud and secretive people, we felt not unlike a convention of Methodist ministers who are sued by a fine hotel for infesting the bed linen with crab lice. The Company had never been quite the same since exposure of the Family Jewels.
In its wake many of our top men had to go.…
Seven years later [Harlot] was calling me to action. “I ask us, Harry boy,” he said, “to forgive the spears we’ve left in one another. There is a scandal forming that will prove worse than the “Skeletons”—which was his term for the Family Jewels. “I’d estimate about as much worse as Hiroshima was an order of magnitude beyond Pearl Harbor. The Skeletons decimated our ranks; the High Holies, if not excised, will cut us right out of the map.
(PP. 26-28 Ballentine paperback edition)
[Herrick]
“How are your headaches?” asked my father at the bar at Twenty-One.…
“Herrick, I haven’t seen a superior hell of a lot of you lately, have I?” he asked, unfolding his napkin, and sizing up the room.…
“Well, there’s a reason I haven’t seen a lot of you Rick.” He was the only one to call me Rick, rather than Harry, for Herrick. “I have been traveling an unconscionable amount.” This was said for the blond woman as much as for me. “They don’t know yet whether I’ll be one of the linchpins in Europe or the Far East.”
Now the man in the pencil-strip suit began his counteroffensive. He must have put a curve on what he said, for the woman gave a low intimate laugh. In response, my father leaned toward me across the table and whispered, “They’ve given OPC the covert operations.”
What’s covert?” I whispered back.
“The real stuff. None of that counterespionage where you drink out of my teacup and I drink out of yours. This is war. Without declaring it.” …
(pp. 115-116)
[The letter]
“Yes, one more thing,” I said. “You mentioned that you would let me see Rosen’s letters.”
“Why do you want to see them now?”
I shrugged. “For diversion.”
“Yes,” he said. “that’s right. All right.” But I could see he was reluctant. He went to his room, closed the door, came out, locked the door, and handed me a thick envelope. “Read it tonight,” he said. “And when you’re done, slip it under the sill.”
“I’ll read in this room,” I said, “and if anybody unfamiliar knocks, anyone official, that is, I’ll put the letter under your door before I go to answer.”
“Approved,” he said.
Dear Dix,
Well, here I am on hotshot duty in TSS, and there you are, honcho number one to the big man in Berlin. Congratulations. The old training group PQ 31 is doing all right for itself, even if PQ has to stand for peculiar—which is what I can say about my work now. Dix, procedure and any other I send you, is BAP (which in case you forgot is Burn After Perusal). I don’t know if work at TSS deserves to be as hush-hush as is presented to us here, but it is certainly a special place. Only geniuses need apply—how did they ever miss you? (Before you get too pissed off, recognize that I mean it.) The overseer for all us Mensa types is Hugh Montague, the old OSS legend, and he’s an odd one, as remote as Mt. Everest, confident as God. I can’t imagine what would happen if you ever tangled with him. Anyway, TSS is but part of his demesne, which I deliver as a gift to you love of big words. (Demesne is the etymological origin of domain, that is, the lands belonging to the Lord for which he pays no rent.) Montague, so far as I can see, pays no rent.) He reports only to Dulles. Over at Top Sanctum Sanctorum (true meaning of TSS), we tend to be savage our opinions of everybody, but on Montague, we agree. Unlike many in the Company, he is no dedicated brwon-noser.
…back to TSS. I find an unholy desire to tell you about the worst fiasco we ever had, which is why this letter has to be Ultra—BAP [Burn After Perusal]. It could fry my kishkes if read by the wrong eyes. Do not bother about the meaning of kishkes. That is argot from Yiddish and will advance nothing you’re interested in. I mention it only because the nominal head of TSS is named Gottlieb, and kishkes is the only Jewish word I ever heard him use. Of course, they assigned me to him — I guess they figure we have something in common. Well, not all that much. Some Jews are deep in tradition like my family, which is half religious-orthodox, half socialist — typically Jewish, ha, ha — but some Jews go in the other direction. They become mirrors of their culture. (Like me!) Disraeli, the British Prime Minister under Queen Victoria, born of Jewish parents, but they say he had the best upper-class English accent of anyone in the British Isles.
Well, Gottlieb is like that except he’s cosmic in scope, interested in everything. Odd! He lives on a farm outside of Washington and gets up every morning to milk his goats. The farmhouse itself used to be a slave cabin, but Gottlieb is a Sunday carpenter, so it’s big enough now to house his family. Mrs. Gottlieb, incidentally, spent her childhood in India. That may be the explanation for the goats! She’s the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries. Gottlieb also raises Christmas trees. And he has a clubfoot, but loves all the same to square dance. He’s only a chemist with a degree from City College, but he’s nonetheless a genius. Which is why in summary he sounds like nothing but pieces and parts. I must say, he messed up. Of course, only a genius can when in concert with another genius like Hugh Montague. It actually happened three years ago, but it’s still the worst-kept secret at TSS. You can’t go out with a colleague for a drink and get a little intimate without being told The Story. I find it interesting. There’s some principle of reverse-morale here. Montague is so elevated that I think The Story makes him human for us. Of course he only failed in a judgment call. He put his bet on Gottlieb, and Sidney did the damage.
Here’s the gen. (Old OSS word for poop.) Three years ago the big rumor at TSS was that the Sovs had synthesized some magic drug. They could not only control the behavior of their agents, but could fix a spy’s memory to self-destruct upon capture. They also had schizophrenia-inducing chemicals to free their agents from all moral concerns. Isn’t this what Communism is all about anyway! The magic drug is in the ideology! Anyway, Gottlieb had come upon a physical substance that turns a few corners in schizophrenia. It is called lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD for short, and TSS people harbor the hope that it will become our wonder drug, since present techniques of debriefing enemy agents are too slow. Allen Dulles wants a chemical spigot to turn a defector on and off. Kind of a truth cocktail. LSD inspires one to tell the truth.
Now, it’s hard to be sure, Dix, because I only acquired this at several removes, but Gottlieb seems to have had a honey of a theory, worked out in collaboration with Mrs. Montague and her theories. It is built on the premise that the psychic wall which schizophrenia builds to close off communication between opposite parts of the personality is composed of an immense number of lies, and the truth is encysted behind it. Any drug that can induce schizophrenia might also, if used on a start-stop -start-stop basis, induce enough of a vibration in the lies of that schizophrenic wall to shake it and, conceivably, crack it. More normal people, in contrast, only choose the lies that will keep their ego intact. By the Gottlieb-Gardiner theory, a defector’s wall, whether psychotic or normal, can be shattered by the use of LSD. First, however, Gottlieb had to test the compatibility of LSD to his purpose. He and a few colleagues tried it on one another, but they were aware of the experiment. Unwitting LSD recipients were what was needed.
So, one night at a small cocktail party a TSS researcher managed to slip ad’s of LSD into a pony of Cointreau that a contract scientist was drinking. The victim was not witting of the experiment. Now, I don’t know his name — that fact is sealed, but let’s call him what he is — VICTIM.
As it turned out, he did not react well. VICTIM returned to his home in a state of agitation. A very disciplined man, he fought the effects of the LSD. No symptoms of overt derangement presented themselves. The only manifestation was that he could not sleep. Then he began to tell his wife that he had made terrible mistakes. Only he could not specify what they were. After a couple of days, he was so agitated that Gottlieb sent him to New York to see one of our psychiatrists. Gottlieb’s own deputy stayed with VICTIM in a New York hotel room. VICTIM, however, got worse and worse. Finally, right in front of his keeper, he took a running dive through a closed window and crashed ten stories to his death. They gave his widow and children a government pension, and Gottlieb got away with a slap on the wrist. Montague sent a memo to Dulles: Formal punishment would tend to interfere with ‘that most necessary spirit of initiative and outright enthusiasm so prerequisite to this work.’ Dulles did send a personal letter to Gottlieb scolding him for poor judgment, but no copy of this letter — at least so goes the gen — ever landed in Gottlieb’s file. Sidney is in fine shape at TSS these days.
I had a strong reaction to the letter. I could read no further. The fear that I was being used by Harlot in careless fashion had just been confirmed. VICTIM kept falling in my mind.
[“Wet jobs” and termination experiments]
So I went on to TSS with Allen [Dulles’] blessing and Hugh’s strong arm around my waist. I was prepared to dive into the dark depths, but, of course, as soon as I finished training, they wrapped me in cotton. Technical Services Staff, as you can guess, is as highly compartmentalized as any place you’re going to work in the Agency. Even now, after five years in TSS’s recessive folds, I still can’t decide such basic things as whether we go in for wet jobs, or leaving assassination quite to the side, whether we indulge in even worse deeds, such as honest-to-god termination experiments. If one were to believe the more sinister gossip, it’s true. Of course, such rumors do come to me in the large from Arnie Rosen, and I’m not sure he’s always to be trusted. (He loves wild stories too much.!)
Frank Olson: The Man Who Fell 13 Stories
Chapter 3, of
A Voice for the Dead: A Forensic Investigator’s Pursuit of the Truth in the Grave
By James E. Starrs with Katherine Ramsland
(G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2005) Used with permission of the author
We grow accustomed to the Dark—
When light is put away…
The Bravest—grope a little—
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead—
But as they learn to see—
Either the Darkness alters
Or something in the sight…
He was a conflicted man living in conflicted times who died leaving conflicting leads.
When a forty-three-year-old man falls thirteen stories from a hotel room window in mid-town New York City, to his death, it may seem to be a daunting task to determine the true circumstances of his death, especially after his being buried for more than 40 years. Yet after exhuming and examining his remains a specific injury that went undetected at the time of his death turned out to be an important lead in re-evaluating the manner of the man’s death.
Not only had the elite government scientist whose death was in question not died in the manner officially described, his body did not bear the injuries stated in his autopsy report. Upon discovering these new and troubling facts, many questions arose, such as whether this “suicidal leap” (the deceased being referred to in the parlance of officialdoms as a jumper) had been related to his employment resignation, which was offered only a few days before the incident. Had he found out something he was not supposed to know?
These questions remained for my scientific team to try to answer, and once the victim’s family asked for my aid, told me what they knew, and then warned me, “Now of course, you know you’re taking on the C.I.A,” I began walking with my back to the wall, any wall would do for cover.
What seemed to be at first glance a simple and straight-forward set of events leading to a death turned out to be much more complicated than had been anticipated, including the occurrence of yet more mysterious deaths.
The victim under scrutiny was Frank Olson, Ph.D. who had died sometime after midnight on November 28, 1953, on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk outside New York’s Hotel Statler. Robert Lashbrook, Ph.D. who was with Olson on that fateful night, recounted his version of the events leading up to and occurring at the tragic moment many times: Lashbrook and Olson were together in Room 1018A on the 10th floor, actually the 13th when the first three unnumbered floors are counted, when Dr. Olson suddenly went out the room’s only window. In his initial version of the events, Lashbrook insisted that he had been asleep at the time, and that he awoke to the sound of crashing glass. Only then did he realize that Dr. Olson had catapulted through the room’s closed window, apparently bent on suicide.
A New York City assistant medical examiner, Dr. Dominick De Maio, confirmed Lashbrook’s recital, stating in his report of his external (not internal) examination of Olson’s body that there were many compound fractures of Olson’s extremities and multiple lacerations on his face and neck as well as his lower extremities. This report was filed, was uncontested, and as such, became the official record. Yet there were perturbing features surrounding Olson’s death that only gradually came to light over a span of many years during which the Olson family tried to unlock what they were convinced was a more terrible truth about his death.
Eric Olson, Dr. Olson’s elder surviving son, was nine years old at the time of his father’s unexpected death. On the morning after the incident, he learned from his father’s government boss, Colonel Vincent Ruwet, that his father had died in a work-related accident that had occurred in a hotel. He had either “fallen or jumped,” but young Eric could not understand the full importance of what that meant. Over the years, as he came to think about the claim that his father’s death resulted from a “fatal nervous breakdown,” he discovered that his father had been an employee of the C.I.A. engaged in sinister and clandestine research activities of a biochemical nature.
The Olson family was in 1953 living on the verge of Frederick, Maryland, while Frank Olson was employed as a biochemist at nearby Fort Detrick, the Army’s premier bacteriological warfare research installation. Since 1943, he had been part of a team of scientists who were immersed in a top-secret program aimed toward developing lethal biological and chemical weapons for America’s defense during the Cold War, a subject considered to be a matter of utmost secrecy for the protection of national security.
In 1949, Frank Olson had helped to set up the Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, where written records were forbidden and only a trusted few were allowed to know about the more sensitive projects. Olson was tasked to develop new and secret biological means for effective interrogation and warfare. Olson soon became the acting head of this division. Among its projects, according to what Eric’s research taught him, were the development of assassination materials, collaboration with former Nazi scientists, LSD mind control research, and the use of biological weapons during the Korean War. The ominous nature of such mind-control research was exposed to public view in the Hollywood movie “The Manchurian Candidate,” starring the late Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey.
Eric remembers that his mother was uncomfortable about the work her husband was doing. He is of a mind that his father had expressed distress over experiments he was conducting and the possible use of the results. While a great deal about his activities remained unknown to his family, apparently during the weekend preceding his death Frank Olson had been uncharacteristically distraught, he being a person of considerable cheerfulness and bonhomie. He had come home early from a meeting at a mountain retreat and he had said something to his wife, Alice, about “a terrible mistake” he had made while presenting a paper at the meeting. He seemed deeply and singularly anxious about it but he would not reveal the nature of his mistake. According to Mrs. Olson, he felt certain that his career was in jeopardy and he had decided to resign.
Yet when he returned from work the next day, he told Alice that his colleagues had reassured him. Consequently he withdrew his resignation letter. However, he said it was recommended that he obtain treatment for some newly emergent behavioral problems he was having. The plan of action included his seeing a psychiatrist. Otherwise, he said, she might not be safe with him under the same roof. Alice Olson was stunned. Nothing in his demeanor had indicated that he was dangerous. But he did not explain what he meant any further. It was only two days before Thanksgiving, 1953 but, notwithstanding the importance of his family holiday he insisted he needed to leave for treatment. He believed he would return in time for Thanksgiving dinner.
The next day an official SOD car came to convey Frank Olson to New York. Alice joined her husband during the 30plus mile trip to Washington, where she saw her husband enplane for New York. He was accompanied by his boss, Vincent Ruwet and a stranger who was introduced to her as Dr. Robert Lashbrook.
In New York City, at 58th Street, Olson reportedly had several sessions with a medical doctor that lasted most of the day. He and Dr. Lashbrook had Thanksgiving dinner in New York, but Olson telephoned his wife on Friday and told her he expected to be home that Saturday. He was contemplating entering a psychiatric hospital in Washington for treatment. But his plans were not to be. That night he died in New York City. He was 43, and left behind a wife and three young children, two sons, Eric and Nils, and a daughter, Lisa.
His death being ruled a suicide, his body was sent home to Maryland for a burial. His casket was at all times kept closed due, so the family was informed, to the massive injuries he sustained in his fatal fall. Frank Olson was buried in a solemn ceremony on December 1, 1953 in Linden Hills Cemetery n Frederick, Maryland where a stone monument was put in place to his memory.
For twenty odd years, the Olson family remained in a state of perplexity about these events. In her grief Alice Olson took drinking to excess, ultimately becoming an alcoholic.
His father’s sudden death haunted Eric, who was now the man of the house. He felt certain that his father had not deliberately jumped out the window, but he was at a loss as to how to resolve his suspicions.
Then on June 11, 1975, a front-page article in the Washington Post engaged his excited attention. Now after the passage of so many years since his father’s death, the political scene in Washington, D.C. had changed. No longer were people afraid of Soviet biological warfare. In fact, many people had expressed distrust of the government’s conduct of the Cold War and were rooting out past secrets, some of which were shameful and unethical. This Post newspaper report, revealing the results of the Rockefeller Commission’s findings about illegal C.I.A. activities, noted that a civilian employee of the Department of the Army had jumped from the tenth floor of a New York hotel after he was surreptitiously given the hallucinogenic drug, LSD. “This individual,” the article stated, “had not been made aware he had been given LSD until twenty minutes after it had been administered.” It had been part of a larger C.I.A. orchestrated project that had involved the administration of psychoactive drugs to numerous unsuspecting Americans.
The victim’s name was not disclosed, but the description of the incident was too similar to the circumstances of Frank Olson’s death for Eric to ignore. He showed the article to the rest of his family. He proceeded with direct inquiries to Vincent Ruwet, who had been his father’s supervisor at Fort Detrick. Indeed he had visited with Alice Olson often after her husband’s death, purporting to sense and share her grief.
Ruwet reluctantly admitted that the unnamed man in the Post’s article was in fact Frank Olson. He had been a guinea pig in a CIA sponsored testing of LSD at a retreat at Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland. Afterward, when he seemed to be suffering from serious side effects, the C.I.A. had decided to seek treatment for him, taking him to New York for that purpose. Before it was completed, however, he had jumped to his death, so Ruwet maintained.
In righteous outrage, the Olson family invited the media to a press conference in July 1975 to announce their intention of suing the government for its complicity in the wrongful death of Frank Olson. It was hoped the media attention would pressure the C.I.A. to make a full disclosure of Olson’s tragic death. Alice made the first statement, indicating that she believed her husband must have been suffering from some sort of bad dream to have jumped as said through a closed window. Then Eric recalled that the family had never been told any of the details, that they had been callously deceived, and that they wanted to know why a cover-up had been in place all these years.
Four days later, an invitation to the White House arrived. In a meeting that lasted less than twenty minutes, President Gerald Ford offered a complete and uncompromising apology and urged the government to grant the family 3⁄4 of a million dollars as a monetary settlement. The President also ordered the C.I.A. Director William Colby to cooperate with them.
When the family, in due course, met with Colby, who later reported that this had been among the most difficult assignments he had ever had, he offered them 150 pages of redacted documents that he claimed amounted to the entire file that was relevant to their concerns. It was the C.I.A.’s investigation into Frank Olson’s death. He believed it would answer any questions they might have. He seemed unaware of the importance of what he was giving them, for the material soon raised more questions than it answered. It became clear to them that there was something darker in this tragic incident than a failed LSD experiment.
Pouring over the documents in which many lines and names were blacked out, the Olsons believed that significant information about their father’s death was still missing. There was no explanation in these pages, for example, about why the C.I.A. agents had bundled Frank Olson off to a New York City hotel rather than a hospital. If he had been in such a self destructive frame of mind, why was his supposed escort asleep when he exited the room through the window? And why, when he went out the window, had Lashbrook failed to summon help or even notify the hotel’s staff? The family now came to the painful realization that Frank Olson might have been murdered. But if so, what was the motive for such a nefarious deed?
In their questing for the truth they discovered that C.I.A. higher-up Sidney Gottlieb, Ph.D., who was officially reprimanded for the handling of the Olson incident, had been involved in C.I.A. assassination plots on national leaders and was an enthusiastic supporter of mind control. Gottlieb’s experiments occurred at a time in our country’s history when no act performed with a view toward thwarting communism was considered out-of-bounds. The standoff between these two world powers meant that survival was seen as the end that justified all means, including the development of biological weapons and mental manipulation. Intelligence reports had the Soviets on the fast track and the Americans playing catch up. The C.I.A.’s activities were disguised in projects bearing innocuous names that concealed their actual purpose.
Passages in the documents they had received pertaining to a C.I.A. operation called “Project Bluebird” and renamed ARTICHOKE were deleted, but Eric Olson plumbed the depths from other sources. ARTICHOKE had involved extreme methods of interrogation and an attempt to develop a way to produce complete amnesia in questioned subjects or in agents who had seen too much and could no longer be trusted. It was also disclosed that Olson was not just a “civilian scientist” with the Army but a full-fledged C.I.A. employee. He had been an agent in a powerful position and possessing detailed covert information.
The laboratory experiment in which Frank Olson had unwittingly participated had been part of a “truth drug” program, supervised by Sidney Gottlieb and George Hunter White, which involved getting people to disclose all under the influence of a drug clandestinely administered. If the C.I.A. found the right drug, they could use it to extract secrets from enemy agents as well as learn how to protect their own agents against such disclosures. They had started with the active ingredient in marijuana and moved on to more dangerous drugs, like LSD once the program directors decided that informed subjects could not give authentic results, agents had administered LSD in large doses to unsuspecting soldiers at the Edgewood Arsenal and to unconsenting civilians in hospitals. The C.I.A. managers offered emoluments to universities soliciting their involvements. For the purposes of this research, some people were kept in a hallucinogenic state for days at a time.
At the New York Psychiatric Institute in January 1953, less than a year before Olson died, other experiments had been conducted. Harold Blauer, a tennis professional, went there for depression. He became one of the guinea pigs, but his reaction to the LSD spelled disaster for him. After a bad reaction, he succumbed to a coma and in short order died.
Operation Realism, a top-secret project run by George White, involved giving citizens in bars and restaurants LSD without their knowledge. White even set up massage parlors for Operation Midnight Climax another C.I.A. program as a way to lure people into their LSD experiments.
Frank Olson was described in these heavily redacted reports as one of the C.I.A’s guinea pigs, making him a victim. But being so involved in its operation, he would hardly have been an easy target. Nevertheless, the report described how on November 19, 1953, Gottlieb or someone acting at his behest had slipped the drug into Olson’s glass of Cointreau at Deep Creek Lodge. After twenty minutes, Olson was said to have developed hallucinations, after which he was told that he had been a subject in their experimenting. By morning, he was still in an agitated state.
After his return home in a dispirited and depressed state, he went to work and told Ruwet of his intention to resign. Ruwet indicated to investigators that he had appeared to be “all mixed up.” He and Lashbrook then took Olson to New York. Instead of being under the care of a qualified psychiatrist, Olson was taken to Harold Abramson, an allergist with a C.I.A. clearance who was a firm believer in the therapeutic value of LSD for psychiatric patients. At one point he apparently gave Olson bourbon and the sedative nembutal both central nervous system depressants whose adjuvant affect could have killed Olson. The sleep they might have induced in him could have been his last.
By some accounts, Olson might also have met a magician by the name of John Mulholland, who may have tried to use hypnosis on him. Ruwet told investigators that Olson became highly agitated and paranoid while New York. He spent one night wandering the streets, and at one point he discarded his wallet and his identification papers asking to be allowed to “disappear.” Ruwet said that Olson did not want to go home to face his wife. Yet the next day, he called his wife to assure her that he was better and expected to see her the following day.
Lashbrook reported to the police who were investigating Olson’s death that he, Olson, worked for the Defense Department, and that Olson had been calm that evening, washing out his socks in the sink before going to bed.
Yet, four hours later, Olson fell (sic) to his death.
As part of the police investigation Lashbrook was taken to the 14th Precinct station house, spending only a brief period there. He told the police that he did not know why Olson had killed himself, except that he did suffer from ulcers. The detectives asked him to empty his pockets but did not keep a record of what they found. However, a Security Office report indicated that he had airline ticket stubs for the trips that he and Olson had taken, and a receipt for $115, dated November 25, 1953 and signed by John Mulholland. Supposedly this was an advance for travel to Chicago.
Lashbrook also had hotel bills and papers with phone numbers, including those for Vince Ruwet and Dr. Abramson. In addition, he had an address for a house on Bedford Street that was used for Operation Midnight Climax. One sheet of paper had New York City addresses for people identified only by the initials G.W., M.H., and J.M. Lashbrook said that for security reasons, he preferred not to reveal who they were. The detectives apparently did not press the matter.
Since John Mulholland had died in 1970, there was no way for the Olsons to interview him about his possible involvement in this tragedy. However, he had been under contract to prepare a manual, “Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception,” that applied the magician’s art to covert activities, such as slipping drugs into drinks. There was no record of the actual manual having been produced.
Right after Olson’s death, the C.I.A. sent five investigators to New York, without explaining why they would send so many in the case of an outright, uncontested suicide. An internal memo the following week refers to Olson’s “suicide” in quotation marks, as if the memo’s author was aware that it had not been a suicide. And one of the phone numbers that Lashbrook carried that fateful night was for George White, the man in charge of the program, whose alias was Morgan Hall. Lashbrook’s immediate boss was Sidney Gottlieb. Although George White operated a CIA safe house in Greenwich Village, only minutes from the Hotel Statler, where Olson and Lashbrook had taken lodging, they apparently did not visit it.
The investigating team recommended disciplinary action against Lashbrook and Gottlieb, but while Lashbrook left the agency, Gottlieb remained in power for the next two decades. (He can be said to have dismissed Olson’s death during hearings in 1977 as one of the risks of running such experiments.)
The Olson family was disturbed by what they had learned. Although the men who were investigated had claimed that Frank Olson was in a suicidal frame of mind, they had roomed him on a high floor. He had even managed to slip away from them one night, a good indication that they were not really watching him. On Thanksgiving Day, they had found him in a shell-shocked state in the hotel lobby. Dr. Abramson had diagnosed him as psychotic and recommended hospitalization. Yet he remained in the hotel for two more nights.
Piecing these facts together, Eric Olson thought that Lashbrook’s account was implausible. He decided to investigate on his own. So in 1984, he went to the Hotel Statler (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) to see the room for himself. It was a basic hotel room with two double beds, small and rather spare in its furnishings. He could not imagine how anyone could have gotten a running start in such a room without awakening the person in the next bed—the man who was posted there to watch Eric’s supposedly delusional and suicidal father. The sill was high and there was a radiator right in front of it. The shade had also been pulled down. He wondered if it was in the realm of possibility to break through the window with so little space allowed to gain momentum and so many obstructions at the window.
Experts later told Eric that a man would have to be running more than thirty miles per hour to crash through such a window and the hotel room was too short for even an accomplished athlete to accomplish it.
Another mystery that seemed to be part of Olson’s November death involved the trip that he had taken overseas during the prior summer. Again, the family had to piece together different sources of information to understand his travels. He had been to Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain, that was certain. But for what purpose?
In London, Eric learned from a reporter that his father had talked with an expert on brainwashing about something he had witnessed at research installations in Frankfurt. Eric was led to believe that these facilities tested human subjects, called “expendables”— who were enemy agents or collaborators and that they sometimes died from the experiments. Perhaps Frank Olson had voiced his dismay and disgust over this inhumane behavior and was for that reason considered a potential security risk. Alice recalled that when Frank returned from Europe that summer, he was unusually withdrawn and morose and contemplative.
To Eric, the newly revealed facts painted a grim picture of his father’s death having been a C.I.A. staged suicide. The C.I.A. operatives may have slipped the LSD into his father’s drink to get him talking, and once they saw his reaction, decided to get him to New York where the suicide could be faked convincingly.
That was the hypothesis he felt was cementing itself into place.
Yet even before this new angle could be explored more thoroughly the Olson family was visited by yet another tragedy—one that was indirectly instrumental in bringing me into this steamy John Carre-like brew. To tell that story, I ask the reader’s indulgence in my turning the clock back a few years.
The Olson family and I were linked in a friendly, social relationship through Greg Hayward, a student of mine at George Washington University’s law school. Greg had married Eric Olson’s sister, Lisa.
Greg was a rugged and totally engaging outdoorsman who had served as an Airborne Ranger in Vietnam. We were biking companions, and also went rock climbing and rappelling. He owned a farm in Frederick Maryland, to which I would journey with my family on many occasions. But during that time I knew nothing about the death of Frank Olson or the family’s sustained grief over it, a grief which they keep well closeted from me.
Gregg was readying himself for a run for Congress. I have no doubt his likeable and knowledgeable personality would have carried the day for him. Lisa was active as a teacher for the deaf. They were a wonderful, much-loved couple with a young son, Jonathan. It was a joy to know them.
One day in 1978, Greg came to my university office, his face glowing, and his smile evoking the best of news.
“I’m here to tell you,” he said, “that the government has paid the Olson family close to a million dollars for their wrongdoing in causing the death of Frank Olson.”
Surprised and curious, I invited him to tell me more about it, and so he did, putting me on notice of the circumstances of Frank Olson’s death. I congratulated him on the government’s fessing up for their wrongdoing and his finding solace in it. The moment was one to be savored by him and the Olson family.
Shortly thereafter Greg called to invite me to join him in an airplane trip to the Adirondacks where he had a cottage. I was sorely tempted to join him and his family since I had once before visited his remote cabin and felt the memory of that good time tugging me to go.
But I was compelled to decline, my classes at the University demanding my attention. Reluctantly he accepted me decision. He signed off with one of his favorite expressions. “Remember Jim,” he excited, “danger is no stranger to an Airborne Ranger.” As it turned out that was the last conversation I ever had with Greg Hayward.
That same night, I received another phone call from another former student, Hugh Lewis, stating that the plane carrying Greg to the Adirondack retreat had encountered a sudden, unexpected snowstorm causing it to crash into a mountainside. Both Greg and Lisa, their two-year-old son, Jonathan, and the child that Lisa was carrying had died in the crash, the entire family wiped out.
And if I had not been so stuffy, so wedded to my faculty duties, I would have gone, too. This tragedy stayed with me as did my questioning the reason for the fate that had saved me. Would there come a time when I would be called to repay my good fortune?
Then in 1993, Alice Olson died. This was the impetus for Eric to act more aggressively on his unflagging suspicions over his father’s death. The knock once again came at my office door from a member of the Olson family. This time it was Eric who was familiar to me due to my cycling excursions to Greg Hayward’s farm.
Eric explained to me that his mother, Alice, had been buried in Mount Olivet cemetery in Frederick, Maryland while his father, Frank, had been interred in 1953 in Linden Hills Cemetery, also in Frederick. It was his wish, which he articulated with his usual enthusiasm, to remove his father’s remains to the Mount Olivet cemetery so that, in death, they could be reunited. But, at the same time, he was quite obviously suffused with another, even more compelling, desire.
Eric represented in a very straightforward way and with a calm and determined mind that he and his brother, Nils, wanted to have their father’s remains scientifically scrutinized to see if modern methods of analysis could provide tangible evidence of the underlying cause and manner of his death. “We want to find out if we can learn more than we already know,” he emphasized.
Eric’s request, even entreaty, was entitled to and received my immediate and careful attention. I cautioned him that I would coordinate and oversee the project only if my exacting criteria for an exhumation were fulfilled. He was entirely agreeable to that arrangement.
From what I could determine from many background sources, there was certainly substantial controversy over whether Frank Olson’s death was an accident, a suicide or, more ominously, a homicide. Further the fact that no autopsy had been performed on Olson militated in favor of our discovering new and possibly determinative evidence to shed new light on his death. It was also clear that all of the immediate family supported this project.
The first step involved a word by word examination of the New York City medical examiner’s report, rendered in 1953, on the death of Dr. Olson. With the necessary consent of Eric Olson, I secured a copy which revealed its author to be Dr. Dominick Di Maio later to become the New York City medical examiner. His report was most abbreviated since the death had been “no posted,” (reported out based only on an external examination of Olson’s dead body). The accompanying toxicological report only assayed the presence of methyl and ethyl alcohol in the liver, with negative results, and included no drug scan of any kind. Those were strong indicia that a thorough autopsy could potentially accomplish something more than previously-contingent on the condition of Olson’s remains. That condition, for good or for ill, was the most uncertain and the most significant aspect of this as it is in any exhumation, especially where the time elapsed since burial is prolonged.
Seeking to flesh out the particulars of Di Maio’s written report, I telephoned him in New York City and found him to be cordial and candid. He conceded that no x-rays had been taken at the time of his examining the remains. As he put it, he had been “taken in” by the reports he received that this death was an uncomplicated out-and-out suicide. Indeed, in the 1970s, after the Washington Post’s revelations, his ire over learning that he had been misled resulted in his contemplating revisiting the death of Dr. Olson. But other matters had pre-empted his time.
These discussions with Dr. Di Maio, along with my review of the vast documentary evidence regarding Dr. Olson’s death and the congressional investigations into it, convinced me that an exhumation was warranted.
Three main objectives loomed largest in my approach to this exhumation:
1. To give the Olson family confidence that all available scientific and investigative means had been employed to bring the truth about Frank Olson’s death under public and scientific scrutiny;
2. To provide a forum for the utilization of new or under-utilized scientific technologies and experiences, such as the bio-engineering aspects of a fall from a height, an analysis of the causal features in fractures resulting from such a fall, a toxicological analysis of bodily tissues and hair for therapeutic and abused drugs (whether defined as “controlled substances” or not), the use of the computer to animate a re-enactment scenario of the event, and to provide an identification of the remains by a computerized skull superimposition.
3. To examine and to ponder whether the tragedy of scientific experimentation with the lives and well-being of unwitting persons which marred and stigmatized this C.I.A. research enterprise might conceivably be replicated in today’s society.
But first it was requisite to obtain written and notarized authorizations for the exhumation and analysis of the remains from Eric and Nils Olson, as the two surviving children. Fulfilling any legal requirements in Maryland for an exhumation was next in my line of investigative fire. As I have found in other states the Maryland statutory provisions governing exhumations are haphazard, spotty and unclear. For clarity I went to a presumed reliable source – the state’s medical examiner’s office in Baltimore. After explaining my interest in removing Frank Olson from one cemetery and his reburial in another cemetery, beside his wife, I was directed to the local district attorney for Frederick County.
That contact, by phone and mail, was cordial and cooperative in the sense that no court order approving the exhumation was deemed necessary. Of course, it is fair to say that if the full details of the exhumation had been demanded of me a different attitude and result might have ensued. The autopsy and its sequelae which were to intervene between the exhumation and the reburial were not featured in my approaches to the legal authorities in Maryland. Whether the investigation would have been stymied or side-tracked if all had been told I cannot say, but it is probable that Frank Olson’s remains would not have been housed above ground under lock and key in my office and in that of Dr. Jack Levisky at York College, Pennsylvania over the nearly ten year span that transpired until his reburial.
With these preliminaries accomplished by October 1993, I proceeded to assemble a team of qualified and eminent specialists in the multiple scientific disciplines that would be put to the task in this investigation.
The total came to fifteen. Dr. “Jack” (James) Frost, a West Virginia Medical Examiner, agreed to perform the autopsy at the Hagerstown (Md) Community College, arranged through the contacts made by Jeff Kercheval, a criminalist with the Hagerstown police lab, who served on the team. Geologist George Stevens, Ph.D. of The George Washington University was in charge of any geological assessments. Yale Caplan Ph.D., a former President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, would perform the toxicological analyses. Michael Calhoun, a radiolographer with Shady Grove (Md) Adventist Hospital would do the x-raying. Jean Gardner Esq., stood by for her legal insights, along with three photographers, including Gerry Richards, a retired chief of the photography section at the FBI and a former student of mine in the MFS curriculum at George Washington University.
Last to mention but always in the forefront throughout the project was Dr. “Jack” John Levisky, a forensic anthropologist and department chairman at York College, PA. A scientific consultant, and an assortment of support staff were also used. Some of these people would become regulars with me in my future exhumations.
I provided the background on the case to each person and all of them responded with alacrity to my invitation, even after hearing the many complexities and, possibly imponderables that lurked on the horizon. Each team member deserves the highest praise and has my most genuine and entirely unreserved gratitude for their selfless, uncompensated labors in our attempts to disentangle this mystery.
All was now in readiness.
I organized the project in my usual bi-level manner. On one level, the below ground one, it was strictly a scientific investigation. On another level, the above ground one, it partook of investigations into the facts and circumstances of Olson’s death. In combination with the scientific findings the above ground investigations would contribute to a better understanding of how Dr. Frank R. Olson came to his death. Those above ground investigations would include securing interviews, with people with knowledge of the incident.
My foremost interest was to locate the whereabouts of persons present at the Hotel Statler on the night Frank Olson had died. I focused on the Statler’s night manager, Armand Pastore, who first found Dr. Olson lying supine and barely alive on the 7th Avenue west-side sidewalk; the Statler’s telephone operator, who overheard Dr. Lashbrook’s call from room 1018A following Olson’s exiting the window; the priest from the nearby Roman Catholic Church who had given Dr. Olson the Last Rites as he lay dying on the sidewalk; and the New York City police officer on the beat who had responded to the death scene. As the investigations progressed others would be added to the list of interviewees, including the C.I.A’s mandarin for clandestine research projects, Sidney Gottlieb.
While the above ground investigations proceeded, the exhumation was given the go-ahead.
The Exhumation
The exhumation at Linden Hills Cemetery took place on Thursday, June 2, 1994, commencing at 8:30 A.M, under clear skies and in the presence of the Olson brothers, my team members, representatives of the press and a smallish group of voyeurs. We removed the metal coffin from the grave without incident, and transported the unopened coffin to the nearby (30 miles plus west) Hagerstown Police Department Crime Laboratory for the unveiling of the remains and for Michael Calhoun and his wife to perform their radiographic wizardry.
On Friday, we transported the remains to the biology department at Hagerstown Junior College where we would conduct the autopsy, analyze the skeletal features and obtain specimens for toxicological analysis.
Upon opening the coffin, the remains proved to be immaculately well preserved, albeit mummified, under a tight wrapping of linen acting as a full body shroud. We were able to look at the body as if the incident had happened only yesterday. We did not observe the slightest sign of mold or decay. After some forty years in the grave, despite embalming, one expects that the coffin’s interior dampness from the moisture resulting from the release of body fluids would have produced some mildew and that the body would have begun to putrefy.
Yet there is never any assurance as to the condition of the remains overtime, the type of coffin used, and the preservative qualities of the embalming fluid, keeping decay at bay for sixty years plus or minus, are just two factors to take into account. I have seen corpses in much worse condition with a lesser time period in between burial and exhumation. But such was not the case here, probably because of the lack of the disruption of an autopsy on the remains and the care taken to preserve the remains for interstate transfer from New York City to Frederick, Maryland.
On other occasions the remains of persons long dead have been exhumed and surprisingly, even startlingly, seen to be fully fleshed and well-preserved although mummified. The finding and the opening in Paris, France in 1905 of the leaden coffin of American Naval hero John Paul Jones, some 113 years after his death was one such instance. His preservation is best explained by Ambassador Porter who reported to the Secretary of State that “the body fortunately was found well-preserved, the coffin having been filled with alcohol but which had evaporated.” Of course, like Frank Olson, the linen winding sheet in which both he and John Paul Jones had been wrapped was added protection against post-mortem decay.
In the first instance our attention was drawn to Olson’s face and neck. I saw no lacerations there, nary a one, although Dr. Di Maio’s report had indicated the presence of “multiple abrasions and lacerations.” While we were examining the remains prior to the autopsy, Eric Olson arrived and insisted on viewing his father’s remains. Although it is the standard practice to keep the relatives out of the autopsy room I made an exception in this case due to my noticing the uncanny resemblance between Eric in life and his father in death.
Seeing Eric standing beside his father’s remains gave me a start for one was a look-a-like for the other, in the same way that civil rights leader Medgar Evers and his son were seen to be duplicates of each other when Medgar Evers was exhumed from his grave in Arlington National Cemetery.
The Olson family had been advised against an open casket funeral cemetery on the advice of Dr. Olson’s superiors who had represented that his injuries were too gruesome to behold. Yet on our close inspection there was no evidence of such injuries. That was a matter of some considerable consternation. How could Dr. Di Maio have reported the existence of multiple lacerations when, in truth and in fact, there were none?
Further, the entire anterior (front) portion from head to toe of the flesh of Frank Olson’s remains was devoid of lacerations, save those to be expected from the many compound fractures, and from that in the upper thoracic region where a laceration had been sutured up, probably during embalming.
The significance of this absence of lacerations is less a criticism of Dr. Di Maio than a commentary on the way Dr. Olson exited through the window. Certainly going through an open window would be one feasible explanation, because if it had been closed, it is reasonable to expect that the glass would have cut his skin at some place or other. If a drawn shade separated the glass from the flesh, then perhaps the shade buffered kept the glass from piercing Olson’s underwear-clad body, but it is nevertheless inexplicable that we found no cuts on the front of the lower extremities from dragging across glass shards on the bottom edge of the window.
The literature reporting on broken-glass type burglaries reveals that the broken glass causes lacerations most frequently when the body, generally an arm inserted through the broken glass to open a door or window to facilitate the burglar’s entry, withdraws from the broken window.
For the moment, we could only say that it is most probable either that Dr. Olson went to his death through an open window or that he went through a closed window with a shade drawn in front of it. The lack of lacerations gives only an immeasurable edge to the open window hypothesis.
We turned our attention to the head. It is altogether improbable that Dr. Olson would have gone unresisting to his death if he were conscious of a third person’s trying to force him out the window to a certain death. His resistance or, rather, the reaction to quiet his resistance by such third persons might have left its imprint on the skull of Dr. Olson. Our sights were therefore particularly set on that portion of his anatomy.
Yet before we could go further with these examinations, we must needs establish the identification of the remains as that of Frank Olson. It may seem superfluous for us to have labored to identify the remains from the grave, marked by a toe tag as Frank Olson, as those of Frank Olson, but such are the intrinsic necessities of a scientific investigation. The grave marker was presumptive evidence of his identity and burial location, as was the toe tag attached to the remains in the coffin.
We knew that Dr. Olson had been a pipe smoker, which could be reflected in his teeth, that he might have taken some falls from horseback riding, and that he’d been discharged from the army for an ulcer. These could become helpful for the purpose of solidifying the identification. In exhumations, no stone should be left unturned for there will probably be no future opportunity to revisit an exhumation once the remains are reburied.
Jeff Kercheval rolled the mummified palmar surface of the finger pads after having in fused them with a saline solution to puff up the flesh of the finger pads, and I mikrosiled (a “silly putty” type of material) cast them, both with splendid results, in the hope that ante-mortem fingerprints of Frank Olson in his military records might be retrieved for comparison purposes. However, we were not to be blessed by such good fortune, since his fingerprints if they had ever appeared in his military records had been destroyed long ago.
Jack Frost, our pathologist from West Virginia, performed the autopsy. Jack is an active, wiry man, a contemporary of mine, who has more than once tracked the story of an undetermined death to resolve its particular manner. His instincts are superb and his work ethic exacting and conscientious.
In a full autopsy, the external evaluation consists of examining old injuries, along with tattoos and scars. Trace evidence, such as hairs and fibers, is collected off the body and from under the fingernails. Even the nails are clipped or retained in full.
In the standard autopsy, the pathologist makes a ‘Y’ incision, cutting into the body from shoulder to shoulder, with the arms of the “Y” meeting at the sternum (breast plate) and then going straight down the abdomen to the groin. A saw (often a Stryker saw) is used to cut through the ribs so that the ribcage can be lifted away as one piece from the soft internal organs.
The next step is to take a blood sample from the heart for drug and other subsequent tests, and then start taking the organs out, one by one, to examine and to weigh them. If there is fluid in an organ, it gets drained for a sample, and then the stomach and intestines are opened to examine the contents. We were only interested in the condition of the organs of Dr. Olson for the purpose of assaying injuries to them.
Injuries are generally categorized as blunt-force trauma, gunshot, and sharp-force trauma. In all cases, the number of wounds is recorded and each wound is carefully measured and its characteristics described.
A blunt force injury comes from impact with an object, lacking sharp edges, like a gun butt, a hammer or, in this instance, the 7th Avenue sidewalk. A medical examiner will try to determine the direction of impact, the type of object that caused it, and how often contact was made. A suspect weapon may or may not be available, but if it is, then the wound patterns may be connected to the instrumentality causing them, described as a pattern-type injury.
Sometimes lacerations result, which is a tearing injury from impact and has ragged or abraded edges, often with bruising. There may also be abrasions, or friction injuries that remove superficial layers of skin. Contusions are ruptures of small subcutaneous blood vessels. Crushing wounds result from blunt violence to skin which is close to bone, causing these wounds to bleed into the surrounding tissues.
With gunshot wounds, the coroner looks for distinct patterns that indicate the type of weapon used, where the bullet entered and exited (if it did), and how far from the body the gun was when the shot occurred.
With knife or “incised” wounds, the ME must draw a distinction between cut and stab or puncture wounds, and among different types of piercing implements such as an ice pick or a knife.
Some victims are asphyxiated, which results from cutting off oxygen to the brain. Hanging, obstruction of airways with some object, smothering, or strangulation can cause asphyxia and each has specific manifestations. Carbon monoxide poisoning can also be a cause of death.
After examining and describing wounds for the documentary record, the ME takes swabs from all orifices and cuts pieces from the organs to place on slides for further trace evidence, including firearms, toxicological (poisons), histological (cellular) studies. Samples of hair are taken as well, and if the body has recently died, urine is removed from the bladder for drug testing. The scientific studies following the autopsy can take weeks to months. Consequently, we knew those results would likely be a long time coming.
Finally, we examine the head, first examining the eyes and skin for pinpoint capillary hemorrhages (called petechiae) that may reveal evidence of strangulation. After that, we incise the scalp behind the head and carefully reflect the skin over the face to expose the skull. Using a high-speed oscillating saw, we open the skull and remove the calvarium (the top of the skull above the brow ridges) so we can lift out the brain to examine and weigh it and examine the intra-cranial walls of the skull.
All of this, of course, depends on having a well-preserved body, and organs, which we did.
As Dr. Frost systematically worked his way over the body, it was seen through the x-rays that Olson’s right foot had taken the greatest impact upon colliding with the pavement. There was a small laceration in the bottom of the right heel causing a fracture of the calcaneus (the heel bone). The right tibia (lower leg bone) was massively fractured resulting in its being in two linear pieces. On the left side of the body, there was an indication of hitting something hard with the bottom of the foot.
During all these close and careful scientific perambulations, my overriding concentration was with the goings-on in Olson’s room that might have precipitated his fall from it. If Eric Olson’s suspicions of homicide were correct, then it was possible that Frank Olson had been hit with something in the room and then thrown or dropped out the window. The most likely source revealing such a happening was Olson’s head.
Over the left eye, underneath unbroken skin, was a fist-sized hematoma embedded in the sub-galeal sheath. This sub-galeal hematoma necessarily resulted from the hemorrhage of a blood vessel over the left eye. The flesh in that area of the scalp was intact, having experienced, as best we could tell, neither a laceration nor an incised wound. No fracture of the skull or any other hemorrhage could be directly related to the impact causing this hematoma. In a way it seemed to stand apart and alone. It had not been noted in Dr. Di Maio’s first autopsy report.
Yet Jack Frost thought that if Olson had been hit with a blunt force object in the room, he would expect to find some indication on the skull’s surface. He thought what he found was more consistent with the man’s head hitting a broad, flat, firm obstruction—possibly the window frame or the window’s plate glass itself. However, the size of the injury suggested to me that if Olson hit his head against a wall or window frame first, he would have been unconscious when he took another run at the glass. And if he had butted his head against the glass on his way out, breaking it in the doing, then he’d necessarily had his head up and was looking where he was going with his arms at his sides.
While I didn’t find it entirely unlikely that someone would want to see what was about to happen to him, I did think it unlikely that such a suicidally-minded person would have his arms at his sides, as Jack Frost’s opinion suggested, with his head taking the brunt of the collision with the window. It was improbable that Olson’s exit was as Jack Frost hypothesized especially with the shade drawn and the window closed. Not even Superman has been pictured soaring off into the blue in that fashion.
To get a closer analysis of the bones and flesh, we transported the remains an hour north to Dr. Jack Levisky’s anthropology lab at York College in York, Pennsylvania, where more intensive analysis could be conducted under his supervision.
Chair of the behavioral Sciences Department there, Dr. Levisky is a quiet and unassuming scientist with a lively interest in historical cemeteries in the York county arena. Being located close to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where a fierce four-day battle was waged in 1863 that turned the tide of the American Civil War, he is fully apprized of local efforts in historical preservation
.In Dr. Levisky’s laboratory at York College the remains of Dr. Olsen were kept in a secure vault under lock and key while Jack Levisky and his assistant, Sherry Brown, worked to macerate (deflesh) the bones. With the bones defleshed it would be possible to gain closer insights into the fractures and their patterns and interconnectedness than even the x-rays provided to us. As it happened, some hairline fractures, undetected on the radiographs, were discovered only after inspection of the skeletorized remains. The objectives of the project thus required that the bones be defleshed.
Dr. Levisky’s calculations revealed three separate fracture sites: one was in the upper body, particularly the ribs and shoulders where Olson must have collided with a construction barrier at street level; another in the lower legs as they impacted the sidewalk with the forces of velocity having traveled upward to cause a “book” fracture in the pelvis (opening it like the pages of a book); and dissipating the upward thrust so as to protect the vertebral column from any dislodgement; and thirdly, a horizontally aligned fracture to the right temporal and parietal bones of Dr. Olson’s skull, occasioned in all probability when his head hit the sidewalk after his feet had first struck the pavement and he just toppled over. At the point of impact, the skull was split from right to left across the top of the skull allowing it to be manipulated as if it were hinged.
From our anthropological appraisal, we concluded that in his descent, Dr. Olson’s upper body had first struck an obstruction, and we learned later that a wooden barrier had been in place that night, located along the building wall for sandblasting purposes. It was likely he had struck that, spinning his body about so that he landed feet first on the sidewalk in an almost upright posture. Then he fell like a rag doll to his side, coming to a full stop lying supine on the sidewalk.
Yet nothing had been seen thus far to account for the large hematoma to Olson’s head. It remained for us to assess how and where it had come into existence, because we were convinced it would be signally instrumental in resolving the dispute over whether his death was an accident, a suicide or, worse yet, a homicide.
To assist in our evaluation, we excised the skin around the site of the parietal laceration and studied it microscopically. Viewing it under a stereo microscope left no doubt that this laceration was a unit and not the sum of more than one blow at the same site inflicted at different times or places.
Then we looked for trace elements in the excised tissue that might resolve some of the mystery as to how and where it came in to being. A scanning electron microscope, coupled with energy dispersive X-ray, disclosed the presence of a number of elements, one of which was silicon in a rather high concentration. The element silicon, second only to oxygen in its abundance in the earth’s crust, is a principal component of glass. The supposition surfaced that the laceration showed evidence of a fragment of glass of micron size (one thousandth of a millimeter).
Yet even supposing that this trace of silicon demonstrated the presence of glass, the question remained whether it was glass from the window of Room 1018A or from some other source. And if it were determined to be glass from the window of Room 1018A, there remained a question whether it came to adhere in this laceration when Dr. Olson’s head struck the window of Room 1018A in exiting it or whether it was the broken window glass of Room 1018A already lying on the sidewalk of 7th Avenue when Dr. Olson’s head hit there. Of course it bears mention that it could be random broken glass on the sidewalk having no connection to Dr. Olson’s death.
Since the laceration and its subjacent skull fracture plainly seemed to be linked to a single impact, and since that impact would have to have been a blow well beyond the capacity of a window or its housing to inflict, I believed that the glass in that laceration must have originated from a particle of glass picked up at the street level.
But whether that glass was the window glass of room 1018A or some foreign piece of glass of infinitesimally minute size that had been lying about on the 7th Avenue sidewalk of the Hotel Statler are equally possible, and that issue is a conundrum not answerable by scientific means. We can only infer that the laceration had glass in it and that it came from glass from the sidewalk. Further than this we dare not even hazard a guess.
Our next port of call for identification purposes lay in the teeth. Not having ante-mortem dental X-rays of Frank Olson, how were we to make an acceptable identification? Photographs of Olson showing his teeth through a smiling face were assembled and forwarded to the team’s forensic odontologist, Dr. John McDowell, at the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver. At the same time the actual skull from our exhumation was forwarded to Dr. McDowell. His report of his dental comparisons was thorough and constituted additional strong support for the remains being those of Frank Olson, even though it lacked the element of surprise that his dental expertise revealed from the exhumed teeth of Jesse Woodson James.
While we had no reasonable doubt about the identity of these remains, we decided to go one long stride forward with new technology still on the scientific cusp to attempt a computerized superimposition of the skull to known photographs of Frank Olson. Calling upon the combined services of Dr. Vernon Spitzer, also of the University of Colorado in Denver, and Michael Sellbert of Engineering Animation, Inc, we were able to use computer wizardry to see how the ante-mortem photographs of Olson matched the skull from the grave. These telling results left no further doubt that the remains we had autopsied were those of Dr. Frank Olson to the exclusion of anyone else.
A computer animation of the most likely scenarios for Frank Olson’s fall was to follow after additional on scene measurements based on the recollections of those present at the scene on the occasion of Olson’s death-fall.
Later in June, 1993 I located and visited with Armand Pastore, the Hotel Statler’s assistant night manager in 1953, who had been summoned to Olson’s side. His recollection of the location of Dr. Olson’s body on the sidewalk fronting the hotel was quite fresh and keen, giving us a base from which to synthesize a computer animation of the event. It also provided a backdrop for our reconstructing the scene at the street level of the hotel. He said that when he found Olson, his eyes were open while he was making a supreme effort to speak, but words were only an incomprehensible gurgle. As he lay on his back one of his legs was twisted at a terrible angle. Before a priest and an ambulance arrived, Olson died in Pastore’s arms.
Pastore then went across the street to look at the upper floors from which Olson had doubtlessly fallen. He espied a window shade sticking out through one of the windows in the upper floors — a window that was broken. Having identified the room as 1018A, he proceeded to check the hotel records and found that two people were staying in that room: Frank Olson and Robert Lashbrook. Upon the arrival of the police Pastore escorted them to the tenth floor. As Pastore placed his pass-key into the door, the police drew their guns as a precautionary measure.
Upon the door being opened by Pastore the room, its window broken, appeared to be empty, aswim in cold air. Lashbrook, the other occupant of the room, was found to be sitting in the bathroom on the toilet with his head in his hands. Lashbrook, giving the impression of being befuddled, said he had been sleeping when he awoke to the sound of crashing glass.
Pastore told me that Lashbrook’s statements and behavior disturbed him and led him to doubt the truth of Lashbrook’s recitals. Why hadn’t he called downstairs to the desk to find out about his friend’s condition? Why had he placed a most curious telephone call only to another C.I.A. operative stating only that “he” was “gone”? And why was he just sitting there many removes from any positive action?
Another peculiar aspect of the incident was the condition of the bed in which Olson supposedly had been asleep. The bedclothes were pulled back in a way that was consistent with someone ripping him out of bed forcibly.
His suspicions aroused, Pastore spoke to the hotel’s phone operator, asking if any calls had come from room 1018A. She recalled one call. The man in the room had called a number out on Long Island while she had listened in. When an unidentified person answered, the caller said, “Well, he’s gone.” At the other end the reply was brief and unemotional. “That’s too bad” he said. They then both had both hung up with nothing more being said. This report did nothing to quiet Pastore’s suspicions.
A later report from the C.I.A., which Eric Olson had brought to my attention, disclosed that the operator had overheard a call from Lashbrook to Dr. Harold Abramson’s clinic on Long Island— Abramson was the man charged with overseeing Olson’s treatment in New York City.
Other suspicious circumstances emerged. Olson was rushed into the autopsy room but then they decided not to do a full autopsy. We also learned that the priest who came to the site for the purpose of giving Dr. Olson the Last Rites was quietly moved aside. So there were many aspects of this case that were very suspicious, and they would become even more so.
While interviewing Pastore he showed us the approximate location of a wooden barrier that had been in place at the time Olson fell. It was on the sidewalk in front of the Penn Bar, adjacent to the place where he had found Dr. Olson’s body. I gained confirmation for some of Pastore’s remembrances from another former Hotel Statler employee, employed, upon my meeting with him, at the relocated Penn Bar.He was on duty at the hotel the night of Olson’s death. It was also his recollection that there was a barrier in front of the Penn Bar during steam cleaning of the building’s street level stone facing.
From what Pastore could recall, I determined that Dr. Olson had landed at a particular location on the sidewalk, and he told us that when he looked up, the drapes and shades from 1018A were flapping in the breeze outside the window. This firsthand information fixed the location of Dr. Olson’s fall and enabled us to reverse his travel for reenactment from that point back to the room. We used that information to assist in a reconstruction.
We had a triad of possibilities to consider: that someone in the room had hit Olson and pushed or dropped him out; that he had hit something on the way out or down; and that he had received his injury on the sidewalk. We would use the injury and the information to make this determination.
Two matters of a bioengineering nature that drew our attention deserve separate mention here. The first relates to the speed at which Dr. Olson exited the window of Room 1018A. The other concerns the physical difficulties to be encountered in falling through a closed window or its housing.
The distance from the sidewalk to the windowsill of Room 1018A was about 173 feet as determined by triangulation made by Geologist George Stephens and myself from actual measurements we made onsite. Using Pastore’s information and our measurements, we had the engineers from Engineering Animation, Inc. create a computer simulation of the fall, figuring in the height in feet to room 1018A with the location of the beds in the room and the floor measurements in room 1013A to determine both the horizontal and vertical velocity of Olson’s exiting the room and falling to the street.
It was calculated that for Dr. Olson to have struck the sidewalk-level wooden barrier causing him to land where Pastore said, his exit velocity would have had to have been no more than 1.5 miles per hour, because a greater speed would have propelled his body beyond striking range of the barrier. Consequently, so he had fallen at about half the speed of a normal walker’s pace, hardly running as if his death depended on it. Yet this estimate of horizontal velocity did not shed light on whether Olson went through an open or closed window, or with or without a drawn shade. Those factors would have an impact on his speed in exiting the room. Would one and one-half miles per hour be sufficient speed for him to exit through a closed window? That remained a lingering and unresolved puzzle.
And still the possibility could not be discounted that someone in the room had inflicted a blow to Dr. Olson in the process of stunning him into submission, preparatory to ejecting him from the window, especially if the window was open at the time and broken thereafter to coincide with Lashbrook’s contemporaneous statements.
The next step in our reconstruction efforts was to assay the size of the room, the location of the beds in the room, the height and dimensions of the window, and any obstructions that might have been in front of it. It was within our engineering objectives to seek an answer to the question of the velocity needed to exit the room, whether the window was open or closed at the time. In addition, we learned that the nature and thickness of the window glass, although altered at the time of our on-scene investigations, was identical to that of a window in an upstairs unit at the hotel.
More importantly, the window in 1018A was unchanged in its dimensions from 1953, and even the current radiator that had fronted the window then was now a similarly sized heating unit in the same position. I also learned upon a visit to the window shade’s manufacturer in Alexandria, Virginia, that the shade, if drawn, would have impeded Dr. Olson’s exit making it implausible that he could have exited with it drawn at the time. All of these factors affected our computerized reconstruction of the incident and augmented the complexities and the imponderables of bringing the truth of Dr. Olson’s death to light.
We know that the horizontal divider on this double-hung window was five feet ten inches from the floor of Room 1018A. We accepted as a fact that Dr. Olson himself was five feet ten inches tall, necessitating his bending over to some degree to clear the horizontal bar of the window. Our measurements also revealed that the lower window ledge was thirty-one inches from the floor, requiring a person bent on throwing himself head first through the window to elevate himself and be airborne to clear the ledge. The combination of these two gymnastic feats leaves it highly problematic that striking the window glass or the window’s housing could realistically be said to have been the cause of the hematoma situated just over and traveling to the orbit of the left eye.
To gain a measure of certainty on this matter, we would have to experiment with a number of five-foot-ten inch bodies (or simulations of them in the form of mannequins) hurtling through a window of the dimensions and the location of the one in Room 1018A. Ruefully, no such experiment could be designed with any approach to verisimilitude. No would-be “A” students in any of my classes in law or forensic science were game to be guinea pigs in such an experiment. The one component that we cannot factor into such an experiment and without which such an experiment would be fatally flawed is the agony of disorientation that one must surmise overpowered Dr. Olson if he went through the window by his own unreasoned choice.
We gave serious consideration to whether the hematoma to Dr. Olson’s skull had occurred at the street level when his body, determined to have been traveling in excess of sixty miles per hour, struck one or more hard and unresisting objects. I discussed this matter with Dr. Batterman, our team’s bioengineer, and he left me with the distinct understanding that if this part of Dr. Olson’s frontal bone had come into direct contact with an object at ground level at any speed above eleven miles per hour the frontal bone would have suffered a fracture, and the skin would have been lacerated. None of that having occurred, that possibility seemed to be excluded. In other words, had the hematoma been caused by hitting the sidewalk, there would have been much more damage to the skull than we found.
Regarding this hematoma, however, we must address another matter. Hemorrhages of the head do occur from trauma inflicted at a site removed from the situs of the hemorrhage. Intra-cranial contrecoup hemorrhaging is a classic example, as is the hemorrhaging of the eye from gunshot wounds to the head, resulting in what is known in the parlance of forensic pathologists as “raccoon’s eye.” A contre-coup injury within the intra-cranial vault occurs when the skull has sustained trauma to one side, say in a fall, but the interior hemorrhaging is massed on the opposite side of the intra-cranial vault. The blow to the head creates a wave effect on the brain tissue, causing it to flow to the side of the skull opposite the injury site where hemorrhaging occurs when the moving brain tissue finds no outlet and crashes against the inner table of the skull. A contra-coup hemorrhage is the consequence.
The specific question, then, was whether the sub-galeal hemorrhage over the left eye can reasonably be attributable to the impact to the right parietal bone, resulting in the hinge fracture of the skull.
I noted that the hematoma over Dr. Olson’s left eye did not bear even the remotest resemblance to a hemorrhage resulting from a contrecoup cephalic insult. It was not even remotely similar, and likewise, Olson’s hemorrhage over the frontal bone had no association with the firearms-injury phenomenon that produces a raccoon’s eye. That is not to say that this hematoma could not have resulted from the force fracturing the right parietal bone, only that more than speculation must be demonstrated to reach that conclusion.
I realized full well that the major unresolved mystery continued to be: the large hemorrhage above the left eye. All of the team members agreed that it was most likely that it had occurred as the result of some incident in the room, not from hitting the sidewalk nor in Olson’s descent. The question was, did it happen in the room prior to his going out the window or did it happen at the window when he went out? Given what we knew about Lashbrook’s immediate reaction that night, I thought a straight-forward uncomplicated interpretation was likely to be the correct one. Investigations of suspicious events are justifiably reliant on an Occam’s razor’s approach in reaching their conclusions. When two or more possibilities exist, sometimes even when equally plausible, it is incumbent to adopt that rationale which is the simplest, the most direct and the least convoluted, so Occam’s razor teaches.
Among the few matters on which we can only speculate is the likelihood that the traditional view (at least since 1976) of Dr. Olson’s exiting the window – glass, shade and all – is scientifically and realistically plausible. This is a matter which is just not scientifically testable in view of our not knowing and not being able to reconstruct, if we did know, the state of mind of Dr. Olson as he hurtled head first through the window on his own (or that induced by LSD) misbegotten choice, if such was indeed the case. For myself, I am solidly skeptical of anyone in Dr. Olson’s allegedly distraught state of mind, or even someone of sound mind and memory, clearing a 31-inch high window opening obscured by a drawn shade, all in the darkness of a hotel room at night without having his line of travel so obstructed as to cause the venture to misfire. On this issue, until this query is put to rest by adequate scientific testing, I am a diehard skeptic.
It came time to probe other avenues of possible information on Dr. Olson’s death. Testing for the presence of drugs in the bodily tissues and the hair of Dr. Olson was a first order of our scientific sequelae following the autopsy. But what drugs or their metabolites should we seek to discover?
Self-evidently LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) was at the very top of our list, but other drugs were on it as well. With all the outrage over the C.I.A.’s LSD experimentation, little attention has been paid to the government’s testing of other drugs, many of which also have hallucinogenic affects–some like benztropine, or BZ, ever more potent in even smaller doses than LSD.
After a thorough perusal of the various available Freedom of Information documents of the C.I.A.’s drug experiments, I narrowed the field of candidates for our drug testing to tetrahydrocannabinol (the active ingredient in marijuana), mescaline, morning glory, radioactive LSD, LSD and benztropine. Highlighting these drugs or drug sources, I personally delivered a variety of well-preserved, carefully logged and continuously refrigerated bodily tissues harvested by Dr. Frost to Dr. Yale Caplan, one of our forensic toxicologists who had established a private, commercial toxicology lab in Baltimore. Hairs from a number of bodily locations on Dr. Olson, some fitted with a root structure, were also submitted to Dr. Caplan.
His written report came back to me in two parts, with the LSD testing considered separately from other therapeutic or abused substances. The testing of bodily tissues for substances other than LSD was negative. The LSD testing of these tissues through radio-immunoassays (RIA) was deemed inconclusive. I telephoned Dr. Bruce Goldberger, Dr. Caplan’s associate and the man from whose testing these results were derived. From him I learned that the RIA tests had all given positive results for the presence of LSD in the tissues. However, he added, these results were so unusually uniform as to be considered unreliable. Something about the RIA kits was deemed to be plainly out of whack.
Dr. Goldberger, a toxicologist with the University of Florida and an internationally recognized toxicologist, recommended further confirmatory testing at the one location that possessed the knowledge and the technique sufficient to give a firm determination. However, this added testing would cost a minimum of $2000. I knew that if the Olson sons had only a vendetta against the C.I.A., the report of inconclusive results which we had in hand would add a dollop of scientific certainty to their anger leaving them disinclined to go further with drug testing, but much to their credit they agreed to fund the new testing. This proved their stated interest in getting to the root cause of their father’s death, whether the findings implicated the C.I.A. or not in something more nefarious than an accidental death.
On my instruction, Dr. Goldberger forwarded selected bodily tissue samples to Dr. Rodger Foltz at Northwest Toxicology in Salt Lake City, Utah. Dr Foltz is an eminent toxicologist well versed in the use of gas chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry to assay the presence of LSD in bodily tissues. His report confirmed the absence of any traces of LSD in the submitted samples. Happily the extraction process had hit no snags. The detection limits set by Dr. Foltz for his analysis were so low that it can be said with no hint of uncertainty that those tissues were, at the time of testing, devoid of any evidence of LSD.
Having said as much, however, is most definitely, not an affirmation of the lack of LSD in those tissues at the time of Dr. Olson’s death in 1953, or prior to it. The dosage of LSD concededly administered to Dr. Olson was so miniscule—70 micrograms, according to CIA project director Dr. Sidney Gottlieb; the half-life of LSD is so short (only a few hours at the outside), and the liability of LSD in embalmed tissues over time is so unknown that not finding LSD is absolutely non-probative on the issue of whether Dr. Olson had ingested the substance in 1953.
At every turning this investigation brought new issues to light to burden and perplex us. One of these perturbing matters was the question of Dr. Olson’s mental stability prior to the Deep Creek experiment on November 19, 1953. According to an undated statement made by Lt. Col. Vincent Ruwet, Olson’s supervisor at then Camp Detrick, “during the period prior to the experiment my opinion of his state of mind was that I noticed nothing which would lead me to believe that he was of unsound mind.” This assessment was said by Colonel Ruwet to be founded on professional opinions and C.I.A. contacts with Dr. Olson and his family, which he described as “intimate” over a two and a half year period prior to Dr. Olson’s death.
Similarly Dr. John Schwab, another of Dr. Olson’s supervisors at Camp Detrick, gave a statement from the perspective of one who knew Dr. Olson both over a long period of time and at home and in the office, that “(h)is general state of mind and outlook on life was always that of extreme optimism. Never was there any indication of pessimism.”
On the contrary Lyman Kirkpatrick would report on December 1, 1953 that in a conversation with Dr. Willis Gibbons, a higher-up in the C.I.A., Gibbons indicated that, “Olson had a history of mental disturbances.” His source for this knowledge was not revealed.
In piecing out the puzzle of the reasons for Dr. Olson’s death, the state of his mental health prior to and at the time of his surreptitiously being given LSD is of prime importance. Mental health professionals recognize that in certain persons suffering from mental distress the ingestion of LSD can have consequences that are reflected in altered personality traits and behavior. Yet the weight of the evidence from friends, the family and professional colleagues of Dr. Olson is that he was outgoing, even extroverted, a family man devoted to his children and in all respects a well-balanced individual prior to the night of November 19, 1953 at Deep Creek. But Dr. Gibbons and the C.I.A. in questionable apologies following Olson’s death would have us believe otherwise.
A well-documented effect of LSD use in some persons is the occurrence of flashbacks, days and even months after the LSD has been taken. However the voluminous literature on the hallucinogenic effects of LSD, compiled from a time before that of Dr. Timothy Leary, the LSD guru of his time, to the present, demonstrates well-nigh conclusively that during flashbacks LSD users do not commit violent acts such as throwing themselves through a closed window. Even a Government study commissioned on account of Dr. Olson’s death and published by the Government Printing Office makes a telling point – a point not in any degree compromised by more recent experience – that LSD flashbacks are a rarity and that during such flashbacks violence is all but non-existent.
Of course violent, and even self-destructive, acts are not uncommon in the immediate aftermath of LSD use, while “tripping,” as it is colloquially said. The death of Diane Linkletter, daughter of celebrity Art Linkletter, reportedly occurred while she was in the grip of LSD and not during a flashback—although it is difficult to say which is which in the case of an LSD habitué.
Is it possible, then, that in the early morning hours of Saturday, November 28, 1953, in Room 1018A of the Hotel Statler in New York City that Frank Olson’s body and mind were so possessed by a dose of LSD that he was given that night which precipitated his exiting the 13th floor window to his death? That possibility is not as fantastical as it might at first blush appear to be.
More searching and additional questing lay before me.
According to Colonel Ruwert’s further recollections in 1953 he journeyed to New York City with Dr. Olson on the Tuesday prior to Olson’s death for an emergency visit to Dr. Harold Abramson, a medical doctor who had a grant-in-aid from a C.I.A. cover organization to engage in LSD experimentation, using it as an adjunct to psychotherapy on “abnormal” or mentally disturbed persons. According to Ruwet, Abramson prescribed the use of “sedatives” and a “high-ball” to relieve Olson’s mental distress. Later in the evening of that same Tuesday, Abramson visited Olson’s hotel room and “brought a bottle of bourbon and some Nembutal for Dr. Olson. After “a couple of high-balls,” Abramson left, recommending “to Dr. Olson that he should take a Nembutal which he did at the time and that Dr. Olson take another should he have difficulty sleeping.”
Medicating Dr. Olson with two interacting central nervous system depressants had the real potential of killing him, as columnist Dorothy Kilgallen learned to her fatal distress. What sort of medical practitioner would prescribe with such reckless abandon?
We know that Dr. Harold Abramson was a true believer, in the Eric Hoffer sense, in the value of LSD in psychotherapy for disturbed persons. The literature of his writing on that theme is bountiful, even up to 1975, when the use of LSD had been long prohibited by Federal criminal statutes. It is known also that in 1953, he was under contract with the C.I.A. to experiment with LSD on his mental patients.
Although Dr. Abramson is now deceased, it appeared from the C.I.A. files still available, that his associate Dr. Margaret Ferguson was still alive in 1993. However, my assistant’s phone call to her was abruptly terminated by her. When it was mentioned that the call related to the death of Dr. Olson, she was unwilling to discuss the matter of Dr. Abramson’s treatment of Dr. Olson’s or his experiments with LSD or her knowledge or involvement in it.
The extant record of Dr. Abramson’s commitment to LSD in psychotherapy and his ministrations to Dr. Olson trembles with the disquieting possibility that Dr. Abramson might have given Dr. Olson an additional dose of LSD, under a misguided belief that it would relieve his symptoms of depression. That dose might have catapulted him to his death.
For myself, however, the likelihood of Dr. Abramson’s direct involvement in the death of Dr. Olson is less plausible than that it was the outcome of the C.I.A.’s own calculated misdeeds. Not only does the paper record do more than whisper of this possibility, but the statements and silence of persons privy to insider information on the matter who were interviewed or sought to be interviewed by me reinforce that conviction.
I am fully cognizant of the dread scourge of non-involvement that causes many people to play the clam when information is sought. I am also aware that there are those who refuse to speak because they view the subject under inquiry as too well rung to have any value in pursuing yet another time. Notwithstanding these purported justifications for silence, there are those whose intimate knowledge of critical details imposes upon them a singular duty to speak. Thus, their refusal can legitimately be read as evidence of concealment, and conceivably, even more incriminating mirrorings.
Dr. Margaret Ferguson was not the only one who refused to be interviewed. Vincent Ruwet, both a supervisor of Olson and his supposed friend, also adamantly refused to enter into a dialogue on the death of Dr. Olson. His reiterated one-liner to me during my telephone call was “I have nothing to say on the matter.”
Yet I did find people who would talk, though there were major frustrations in the doing.
Retired New York City Patrolman Joseph Guastafeste (meaning a “good feast,” as he told me while preening himself, but the correct translation would be “wasted or ruined feast”) took a different tack and talked a blue streak, but his uncommunicativeness on Dr. Olson’s death was just as indefatigable as that of Colonel Ruwet. He authored the first police report on the death of Dr. Olson and, therefore, presumptively, was the first police officer on the beat to respond to the alarm of a man’s having fallen. My letter to the New York City police department’s pension division seeking to contact him was forwarded to him but I received no reply from him.
However, I was not to be deterred or flummoxed by this administrative impenetrability. My unflagging investigator, Gary Eldredge, located Guastafeste through driver’s license and vehicle registrations as having homes both in New York and in Florida. While attending a scientific convention in Orland, Florida, I decided to rent a car and pay a surprise visit to the former patrolman at his west coast Florida retreat. As it turned out my knock at his door went unanswered. The neighbors, however, said Gustafeste was only momentarily absent. So I hid out at a nearby Hooter’s, courtesy of a CBS camera crew, who were following me about.
Upon my returning to Gustafeste’s home in the darkness I noted a light was on in the dimly lighted interior. I was beginning to sense that I was approaching a fog-laden back alley in a London byway.
With a mike concealed in my pocket connected to the CBS camera crew across the street, I knocked imploringly on Gustafeste’s door. “Who’s there?” came a gruff and uninviting male voice. “A professor investigating the death of Dr. Frank Olson,” I gently responded. Suddenly a female voice interjected “I knew they’d find you some day. Don’t let him in.”
That voice having had its strongly voiced say the door was opened and Joseph Gustafeste stepped out on the porch having turned on a bare bulb over my head. As the curtains fluttered on a window next to the front door, Gustafeste shut the door and turned his imposing full seventy year old frame toward me. “What do you want?” he said with emphasis on each word. “Your remembrances of Dr. Olson’s death in a fall from the Hotel Statler in November 1953 is what brings me to you,” I answered in an unquavering voice.
Guastafeste professed to remember little of the events at the time of his investigation into Olson’s death. He did confirm night manager Armond Pastore’s statement that Olson was still breathing as he lay on the sidewalk. On matters of more vital moment, such as what Lashbrook’s statement or behavior might have been when confronted in room 1018A, his memory went blank and immovably so. As he explained it to me, he was just a “dumb cop.”
I cannot comment on that, except to say that his memory was obviously very selective, sometimes showing crystal clarity and sometimes mired in opacity. His failure to recall whether he kept a record of the event in his patrolman’s notebook was a challenge to his credibility as was his memory lapse on whether this was the one and only jumper he had investigated. Inexplicable silence during an interview comes in many tones and hues. A failure to recall is but one dubious kind.
Dr. Robert Lashbrook was to be next in my investigative sights. No devious or long-term tracking was necessitated in this instance. One telephone call said it all. And that all was a most disturbing revelation.
Many persons with insider information whom I contacted were more or less generous with their time. Dr. Lashbrook, then retired from the C.I.A., permitted a member of my team to question him at some length over the telephone. The most important new and unexpected revelation from Lashbrook was his contradicting all the previous reports of what had caused him to awaken when Olson plummeted to his death.
It was not as the Church Committee and the New York City Police Report and all the many other reports, including his own signed report, had said that “a crash of glass” had cast his sleep aside. It was rather the noise of the window shade spinning in its upper housing. As to whether the glass had been broken at all, he asserted he had no recollection, even though the New York City Police report had simply repeated his own recitals that he had heard “a crash of glass” and he admitted to having gone to the window, put his head outside it, and viewed the body of what he surmised was Dr. Olson on the sidewalk below. In addition his signed statement to the C.I.A. on December 7, 1953 speaks of Olson having exited through a closed window. Moreover Lashbrook’s remembrance of the window-shade’s snapping back into its housing was out of joint with Armond Pastore’s oft-repeated recollection of the shade’s having been pushed through the window’s broken glass.
Moreover my prior interview with Lyman Kirkpatrick, a long-time manufacturer of window shades, left me with little doubt that a shade of the type fitted to the window of room 1018A would not snap back to its housing if a body had struck it full-tilt.
Was Lashbrook’s memory playing tricks on him, or was he playing hob with the truth of the matter? Clearly his statements must be considered to be the most self-serving of all, since he was the last person known to have seen Dr. Olson before he plunged to his death and it was he who was charged with supervising Olson’s well-being.
I had yet one more interview to pursue, and that was with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the man reported to have been instrumental in the death of Patrice Lumumba in South Africa. It turned out to be the most mind-bending of all the interviews I had conducted in this investigation.
My meeting with him took place in his home near Culpepper, Virginia, early on a Sunday morning as the sun was peeking over the eastern horizon. Hearing of this impending interview Eric Olson had cautioned me, a genuine smile creasing his face, not to “drink his coffee.” I did and lived to drink more on another day.
I had almost been foiled in this opportunity by my initial attempt to engage him in conversation unannounced with CBS cameramen in the background. That encounter came to naught because of his distress over the presence of the media. However on his initiative in telephoning me at my office, a later meeting was scheduled at which he demanded the right to question me for one hour in return for my interviewing him for an equal period of time. A most uncommon request, but one to which I acceded. His stipulations made me make haste to sit in his presence, the presence, as it appeared, of a most curious man with a puzzling mind.
Even though I had my tape recorder in my pocket at our meeting, I judged it best not to seek my interviewee’s permission to turn it on remitting myself to four pages of handwritten notes and a contemporaneous transcription of them into my tape recorder as I motored home after our meeting.
My over-all assessment of this interview was not at all favorable to Dr. Gottlieb. His undue concern over my investigation and its findings evidenced more than idle curiosity. His reaction to the glare of the rising sun’s blinding me like an interrogation lamp causing me to seek to move to another chair out of the sun’s bright light had C.I.A. written all over it. Instead of my moving to another chair at the table he politely insisted that I relocate the same chair upon which I had been sitting up to then. Query: was the chair “bugged” or was my Robert Redford movie viewers idea of the C.I.A. verging on paranoia? His explanations for his actions both before and after Olson’s death were at least unsatisfactory and at most incredible.
For example, when I asked whether any of the eight unwitting participants in the LSD experiment had been pre-screened for any medical disabilities that might put them at risk, he unhesitatingly said, “No.” When I inquired whether any medical personnel had been in attendance at the Deep Creek meeting in the eventuality that some one of the LSD subjects would have an untoward reaction requiring immediate medical attention, he again replied, “No.” Yet his own prior use of LSD, which he openly admitted, had not been so devoid of medical supervision.
Other questions gave rise to answers sufficient to stand plausibility on its head. Had he shredded documents relevant to this matter? “Sure” was his immediate reply.
“But why,” I rejoined?
So that those documents would not be “misunderstood,” he answered.
Misunderstood? Or was it rather necessary to destroy them so that they would not be understood, I silently mused?
When I asked what action he had first taken upon being apprised by Lashbrook of Olson’s death, he said he called his boss, Dr. Gibbons, to arrange a meeting at 5 A.M. that very morning. In reply to my raised eyebrows and my inquiry as to the purpose for such a meeting with such urgency, he said the meeting was designed to be “informational.”
As he spoke my mind raced with a stream of unvoiced questions. Informational, and not to plot to cover the tracks of persons responsible for Dr. Olson’s death? If informational only, why the rush to have an immediate meeting? If not a deliberate effort to present a united front in the event of a skeptical and official inquiry, why not wait until regular business hours for the “informational” meeting?
Probably the most unsettling, even unnerving moment in my conversation with Dr. Gottlieb occurred toward its close when he spontaneously sought to enlighten me on a matter of which I might not take due notice—so he thought. He pointedly explained that in 1953 the Russian menace was quite palpable and that it was potentially worsened by the Russians’ having cached many kilograms of LSD from the Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland.
Listening awe-struck to him as I gazed at a picture of South African Bishop Tutu on the wall, I was emboldened to ask “how he could so recklessly and cavalierly have jeopardized the lives of so many of his own men by the Deep Creek Lodge experiment with LSD.”
“Professor,” he said without mincing a word, “you just do not understand. I had the security of this country in my hands.” He did not say more, nor need he have done so nor did I, dumb-founded, offer a rejoinder. The means-end message was pellucidly clear. Risking the lives of the unwitting victims of the Deep Creek experiment was simply the necessary means to a greater good, the protection of the national security.
And that was my final interview in this deeply disturbing investigation. I realized then that my professional ivory-tower had not equipped me for the C.I.A.’s world of feints, flaws and foibles.
The original plan was to rebury Frank Olson at Mount Olivet Cemetery beside his wife, Alice, in July 1994, but instead his remains were stored for possible re-examination. The bones lay in pieces in boxes under lock and key in my office at GW, and the soft flesh was placed in a vault in storage at York College. These are the places where Olson’s remains were deposited for eight years while Eric pursued further avenues of investigation. Not even the presentation of my team’s scientific and investigative findings at the National Press Club on November 28, 1994, closed the door to the emergence of new eye-opening details. It was the day following the National Press Club’s public disclosure of our work and findings that I received a telephone call from Dr. Robert Gibson, a retired psychiatrist, who indicated that his memory had been jogged by his reading the newspaper accounts of my Olson labors.
Dr. Gibson informed me that he had been the psychiatrist on duty at the Chestnut Lodge hospital in Rockville, Maryland when Lashbrook, without identifying himself, had called from New York City just hours before Dr. Olson died. He told me he could never forget that call although so many years had passed because he was also the recipient of a second phone call the next morning from Dr. Lashbrook stating that Dr. Olson had died in New York City and, therefore, he would not be coming to Chestnut Lodge Hospital.
Dr. Gibson explained that the affair was still vivid in his memory because he grieved over the fact that he had dissuaded Dr. Lashbrook from journeying with Dr. Olson to the hospital on the night of the first phone call. His recommendations against hospitalization had been voiced when Dr. Lashbrook had insisted that Olson was then no danger to himself or to others.
Upon my inquiring about the conversation between him and Dr. Lashbrook on the morning of Olson’s death, I was stunned to hear yet another conflicting account from Lashbrook of the occurrence. Dr. Gibson affirmed that Lashbrook had said he awakened to find Olson standing in the middle of the hotel room. He had tried to speak to Olson, but Olson had run straight toward the window, through it and to his death. But Lashbrook had not said a word about whether the window was closed, whether the shade was drawn or otherwise. However, I now had another conflicting view of the last moments in the life of Frank Olson. And this latest account came from the recollections of an unimpeachable reporter, a psychiatrist of impeccable credentials who had gone on to become the director of the esteemed Sheppard, Enoch and Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. This telephone call was memorialized by me in a subsequent taped interview with Dr. Gibson at the Sheppard, Enoch and Pratt Hospital.
That same year, Eric and Nils retained attorney Harry Huge, based in Washington, D.C., to represent them in their effort to re-open the case and instigate a criminal investigation. They had high hopes of suing the government for misrepresentation or concealment of the facts. Huge drafted a fifteen-page memorandum in support of their position. That memorandum, together with the urging of others, persuaded New York’s District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, to re-open the investigation. He assigned the case to Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb, seasoned prosecutors on the “cold cases” unit. They immediately began to run down leads, and were surprised to learn that the C.I.A. had not turned over to my team Olson’s fingerprints or dental records. They also noted my interview with Gottlieb and my unshakeable feeling that he was concealing information.
In addition, it was at least odd that C.I.A. Director William Colby had produced documents about Olson’s projects that Gottlieb had testified before Congress in 1977 were destroyed. At that time he had asked for immunity, but Saracco was not sure why he would do so, nor why so much material had been redacted from the Olson files. They looked more closely at several aides-de-memoirs that the Olson’s had not accessed believing they held the key to why Frank Olson had been considered a security hazard.One of these memos indicated that Olson had been associated with what it dubbed “un-American” groups. The message was cryptic, but it characterized Frank Olson as having “no inhibitions.”
Saracco and Bibb decided to interview William Colby, Vincent Ruwet, Robert Lashbrook, and Sidney Gottlieb. They mailed letters to Ruwet and Colby. Within days, Colby suddenly turned up missing. He left a computer running in his home, a glass of wine on the table, and the lights and radio on. It was a mystery, solved a week later when searchers found his decomposing remains on a Chesapeake Bay island. His death was ruled an accidental drowning when water swamped his canoe.
Saracco and Bibb did manage to meet with Ruwet in Frederick, Maryland, as reported by H.P. Albarelli, and they found him skillfully evasive. They decided to set up a second meeting to explore further what he had said, but on November 16, Vincent Ruwet suffered a fatal heart attack.
Lashbrook, now 80, refused to respond to the request for an interview, so the DA’s office issued a subpoena. Lashbrook refused it. Saracco and Bibb flew to meet him in California, but he would only talk in the presence of an attorney, which resulted in his stone walling all the questions asked.
Gottlieb was another matter. Even as they were seeking an interview, they learned that he was being sued in civil court by the family of an aspiring artist whom he had allegedly drugged with LSD in Paris in 1952. The incident had made this man unstable and had ruined his life, so it was alleged, possibly precipitating his early death. The situation was consistent with the CIA’s surreptitious drugging of hundreds of unwitting American citizens as part of their Cold War experiments. At Senate hearings on the matter in 1977, Gottlieb had stated that these were risks worth taking for the sake of national security, the same position he had expressed to me at our one and only meeting.
With this information in hand, Saracco and Bibb prepared to see him. He had told reporters in the past that he was not going to discuss Frank Olson any further. Nevertheless, the attorneys prepared a draft of a letter to him. On that same day, Gottlieb died from a heart attack.
A bit befuddled and bemused, the prosecutors turned their attention to David Berlin, who had investigated the C.I.A. in 1975 and had brought Frank Olson’s LSD dosing to public attention. They wanted to know the wherewithal of those details. Prophetically enough, before they could make contact with him, Berlin fell in a hotel room and died from head injuries.
Eric Olson, always on the qui vive for new information, discovered that in the assassination training unit of the Israeli Mossad, the Olson case was used as an example of the perfect murder. Eventually investigative essayist H.P. Albarelli came to Olson in his research into the case. He had contacts among C.I.A. agents in Florida, he said, and some of them had told him they knew who had killed Frank Olson in Room 1018A that night. It was his belief that the perpetrators were contract killers associated with a mob family and the C.I.A. had hired them to do their dirty work. However, these agents refused to spill the details without the C.I.A.’s releasing them from their confidentiality agreements, and that never happened.
Then in 1997, Eric obtained a copy of the C.I.A.’s 1953 assassination manual, now declassified. In it, the scenario promoted for “contrived accident” murder precisely fit like the key that would unlock the door the mystery of Frank Olson is death — so much so that the only question remaining was whether his murder was the paradigm for the manual or whether the manual offered the blueprint for his death. That manual clearly suggested disguising a murder as a suicide by dropping the subject from a high window or roof. It also suggested that the perpetrator then play the “horrified witness,” and that drugs be used for the subject’s preparation. If the subject had to be controlled, blows to the temple or behind the ear were said to be effective means of silencing him.
That manual certainly might explain why the C.I.A. had taken an allegedly psychotic man to a hotel room situated on a high floor rather than to a safe house or hospital. It would also explain the low exit velocity that allowed Olson to hit the wooden impediment on the sidewalk below. That is exactly what would have transpired if he had been dropped rather than propelled through the window.
Through an unnamed source, the DA’s office learned that at the Deep Creek meeting, Olson had been given LSD mixed with Meretran, a drug that made people talk more freely. This confirmed the document from Dr. Abramson, written a few weeks after Olson’s death, that the drug had been used to set a trap. He had also told Army researchers that Olson’s death had been in the wake of security breaches by him following his 1953 trip overseas, and that only two people knew the complete story about it. One of them had received a substantial sum of money in the month of Olson’s death for “services rendered.” So had Abramson.
It was learned that an agent who had gone to New York immediately after Olson’s death had listened to a conversation between Lashbrook and Abramson that clearly concerned their conspiring to devise a report to the effect that Olson’s mental state had been deteriorating. But that was not all. Even more frightful discoveries were aborning.
The Olsons discovered documents in Michigan’s Gerald Ford Library that indicated that the government had been extremely concerned upon learning that Frank Olson’s family was questioning the official explanation of his death. The government feared that highly classified information was at stake and that a court might grant full discovery, including information on the nature of Olson’s work. That had to be avoided at any cost. As Eric Olson surmised, “In the wake of the Nuremburg trials in the late 1940s, the United States could not afford to be exposed as a sponsor of the sort of research it had prosecuted the Nazis for undertaking.”
While these myriad investigations were occurring around me, I was not quiescent. At the urging of Eric and Harry Huge I took a train to New York City accompanied by Olson’s boxed skull. Traveling with human skeletal remains in tow always leaves me, as Albert Camus said on another subject, “strangely aching.” I cannot leave the skull out of sight but at the same time I cannot treat it in away to generate suspicions. After all, what would the prying eyes say to my explanation that I was carrying it to the New York City Medical Examiner for his inspection.
Upon arriving in New York City I had my usual professional difficulty of finding my way successfully from Point A, Grand Central Station, to Point B, the District Attorney office where I was to meet a member of the Medical Examiner’s staff. Finding myself lost in the warrens of lower Manhattan I happened by chance upon a police station where I asked for directions. The directions were forthcoming and very accommodating, even to the point of a uniformed officer’s volunteering to show me the way even to the extent of carrying the box with the skull for me. The police officer was most courteous and pointed to my being somewhat over burdened, as he said, for a man of my years with the items I was lugging about with me. Needless to say I declined his offer, not wanting to be exposed as a possible follower of Milwaukee’s cannibalistic killer Jeffrey Dahmer who collected the skulls of his victims.
I made my way unescorted to the District Attorney’s office, where by happenstance I met Patricia Cornwall who said she was there researching material for a book. “What brought you here?” she asked.
“Oh,” I said, “just a skull session with an assistant medical examiner.”
She inquired no further nor did I volunteer anything more.
My meeting with the assistant medical examiner was most unsatisfactory. He entered the meeting with a negative frame of mind, wondering aloud why such a “cold case” would be deserving of his or anyone’s attention. It was, therefore, not unexpected that he would down-play the significance of the sizeable blood stain on the skull over Olson’s left eye. As he put it, the staining could have come about post-mortem. When I asked for his experiential evidence that such a thing had happened in some reported case or cases involving an exhumation many years after the fact, the answer was one that no true scientist would tender. “Everyone knows that to be the case,” he said. I could have asked, but, getting the drift of the position he had taken, I pretermitted asking whether he was telling me that bleeding continued after death even for thirty-six years after the fact.
Here was a pathologist who wanted a smoking gun, not a skull with a massively blood-stained frontal bone, to induce him to declare the manner of death a homicide. I wondered, to myself, with that attitude controlling his decision-making, how many murderers had escaped their just deserts in New York City on his watch.
Foiled and frustrated I made a quick but courteous departure and in my abstracted frame of mind took a taxi back to Grand Central Station.
Early in 2001, Harry Huge reportedly expected the DA’s office to declare Olson’s death a murder, which would free the Olsons to file a substantial lawsuit. However, things began to crumble and by the end of the year, Eric discerned that the DA’s office had retrenched on their efforts. Notwithstanding, the DA’s men had learned that two men had gone into Olson’s room the night of his death. Unfortunately, these men were untraceable at this late date. The C.I.A. denied any knowledge of them, but one man appeared to be related to several assassination cases, and therefore no one was going to talk.
I had thought all along of the possibility of the presence of a third person in room 1018A when Olson exited it. Such a third person could have been positioned to enter from the room next door through a door from that room to room 1018A. The hotel management had refused my request to disclose the identity of any person resident on November 27, 1953 in the adjoining room. It was said not to be the hotel’s policy to reveal the names of its guests since they might be temporarily resident there, shall we say, under circumstances possibly compromising their marital vows or otherwise.
More was yet in the offing.
In the spring of 2001, Norman Cournoyer, who had been a close friend of Olson’s and a colleague at Detrick, contacted the Olson brothers. He had seen the published accounts of the investigations and believed that something was missing. He pointed out that Olson had witnessed harsh interrogations of former Nazis and Soviet spies, and that sometimes these persons had died as a result of those procedures. Olson had heard it said that, despite official denials, the American government had used biological weapons in Korea during the Korean “Conflict.” Alice Olson had said that Frank, her husband, had expressed distress over this possibility, but she had not known if he actually knew anything.
On September 12, 2001, Harry Huge suddenly bowed out. He was swamped with too many other cases, he said. Disappointed, Eric found it difficult acquiring another attorney to take the lead. He decided the time had come to close the case and to rebury his father. He called me in mid-July 2002 to obtain the return of his father’s remains. After eight years of his presence in my office I parted with them with mixed emotions.
On the day before the funeral, Eric and his family held a press conference to call finis to everything he had learned to anyone who was interested. The Olson family had written a twenty-three-page statement for the media, reminding everyone that it had been forty-one years since their father’s death, twenty-seven years since the government had offered what they said was the truth, and eight years since the exhumation.
It was their belief, although they had no smoking gun, that their father had been murdered to keep him from disclosing information about a secret C.I.A. program, and that the story of a “bad trip” on LSD had been concocted either as a cover-up for his murder or as a cloak that concealed the dagger they had figuratively used to kill him.
On August 9, 2002, I went in the company of team members Jack Frost and Jack Levisky to Mount Olivet Cemetery on Market Street in Frederick, Maryland, for Dr. Olson’s reburial beside his wife Alice. It had been eight years since we had exhumed his remains and more than time had passed since that time. Nils and Eric had discussed with me the possibility of cremating the remains of their father. I prevailed on them not to do so for the sake of Alice, their mother, and for the solace they would take in knowing the investigation was not ended, only interrupted by the reburial.
In Mount Olivet Cemetery, which dates its first interment to 1854, lay hundreds of soldiers from both sides of the Civil War, as well as veterans from the past century’s world wars. Eight miles of paved roads run past more than 34,000 graves. Also the impressive monument to Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star Spangled Banner,” stood tall and erect there.
At the funeral, attended by several dozen relatives, friends of the family, and members of my team, the remains were lowered into the ground for what could be their final rest.
From my view and that of the clear majority of my team members, with all the other investigative details, as well as what we found scientifically, Dr. Olson’s death was not a suicide. The probabilities, taken together, strongly and relentlessly suggest that it was a homicide.
In the present state of our factual knowledge about the death of Dr. Olson, I would venture to say that the sub-galeal hematoma is singular evidence of the possibility that Dr. Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of Room 1018A, a person or persons with a homicidal frame of mind The convergence of this physical evidence from our scientific investigations with the results of our non-scientific inquiries raises this possibility from the merely possible to the realm of real and incontestable probability.
The documentary evidence from 1953 demonstrates a concerted pattern of concealment and deception on the part of those persons and agencies most closely associated with–and most likely to be accountable for–a homicide most foul in the death of Dr. Olson. And the steeled reluctance to be honest, forthright and candid by persons with knowledge of the occurrence on matters pivotal to the question of homicide or suicide bespeaks an involvement more sinister than mere unconcern, arrogance or even negligence. The confluence of scientific fact and investigative fact points unerringly to the death of Frank Olson as being a homicide, deft, deliberate and diabolical.
A father lost
By Scott Shane
Baltimore Sun,
page one, “Perspectives” section
Since 1953, Eric Olson has heard more than one explanation for his father’s mysterious death. Now he believes it was murder.
He was 9 years old when his mother woke him before dawn half a century ago in Cold War America. Eric Olson came blinking into the living room of their Frederick home, where his father’s boss and friend, Col. Vincent Ruwet, sat with the family doctor.
“Everybody had this stony-faced expression,” Olson recalls. “I remember Ruwet saying, ‘Your father was in New York and he had an accident. He either fell out the window or jumped.'”
After decades of dogged inquiry, Eric Olson now has a new verb for what happened to his father, Frank Olson, who worked for the Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, where he developed bioweapons and experimented with mind-control drugs.
Eric Olson found the verb in a 1950s CIA manual that was declassified in 1997 – one more clue in a quest that has consumed his adult life.
The verb is “dropped.” And the manual is a how-to guide for assassins.
“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface,” the manual says, adding helpfully: “It will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him.”
Eric Olson believes his father – who developed misgivings about his work and tried to resign – was murdered by government agents to protect dark government secrets.
To find out what happened in the Statler Hotel on the night of Nov. 28, 1953, Eric once spent a sleepless night in the room from which his father fell. He confronted his father’s close-mouthed colleagues. He had his father’s mummified body exhumed. And he built a circumstantial case that Frank Olson was the victim of what he calls a “national security homicide.”
The government has long denied the charge of murder. But it has admitted what might be called negligent manslaughter. Its version: that Frank Olson crashed through the window in a suicidal depression nine days after he was given LSD without his knowledge in a CIA mind-control experiment.
Eric never bought that argument. His devotion to the case derailed a promising career as a clinical psychologist that began with a doctorate from Harvard. In some Frederick circles, you’ll hear disapproving murmurs about Eric’s obsession – contrasted with the success of his younger brother, Nils, a dentist. But Nils Olson, 55, says he admires his brother’s tenacity and agrees with his conclusion.
“At every point there seems to be a convergence of the evidence,” Nils Olson says. “It all points to my father’s being murdered.”
The patriotic community surrounding Fort Detrick has long been reluctant to believe such a possibility. Once, Eric Olson says, he was, too.
“I’m not essentially conspiratorial in my worldview,” says the lanky psychologist, who seems almost boyish at 59. “In my father’s case, I just started turning over stones, and there was a snake under every one.”
It may well be that Olson is wrong – that the government merely drugged his father with LSD, treated him thoughtlessly when he fell into madness and covered it up for 22 years. But if Frank Olson was murdered, then part of the plan would naturally be a cover-up.
“No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded,” says the CIA assassination manual. “Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons.”
It adds: “For secret assassination … the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.”
Whether the truth is homicide or suicide induced by a reckless drug experiment, the Olson saga is a cautionary tale in an era that echoes the early days of the Cold War. In the war on terror, America again appears tempted to use extreme measures.
In Olson’s case, it took the government until 1975 to admit to the LSD experiment. When an investigation of CIA abuses exposed the facts in 1975, two White House aides named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld helped set up a meeting at which President Gerald Ford apologized to the Olson family.
The goal, according to a declassified White House memo, was to avert a lawsuit in which it “may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons.”
What evidence was concealed, the memo does not reveal. But people who are far from wild-eyed conspiracy theorists accept the plausibility of Frank Olson’s death as an execution.
Among them is Army intelligence veteran Norman G. Cournoyer, 85, who worked with Olson at Detrick and became one of his closest friends.
“If the question is, did Frank commit suicide, my answer is absolutely, positively not,” says Cournoyer, now frail and wheelchair-bound, living in Amherst, Mass.
Why would he have been killed?
“To shut him up,” Cournoyer says. “Frank was a talker … . His concept of being a real American had changed. He wasn’t sure we should be in germ warfare, at the end.”
William P. Walter, 78, who supervised anthrax production at Detrick, says Olson’s colleagues were divided about his death. “Some say he jumped. Some say he had help,” Walter says. “I’m one of the ‘had-help’ people.”
So is James Starrs, a George Washington University forensic pathologist who examined Olson’s exhumed corpse in 1994 and called the evidence “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”
Based on that finding, the Manhattan district attorney’s office opened a homicide investigation in 1996. Two cold-case prosecutors, Steve Saracco and Daniel Bibb, conducted dozens of interviews, hunted records at the CIA and went to California with a court order to question CIA retiree Robert V. Lashbrook, who shared Olson’s room the night he died. (Like everyone known to be directly involved, Lashbrook is now dead.)
In 2001, they gave up.
“We could never prove it was murder,” says Saracco.
But Saracco, now retired, found plenty to fuel his suspicions: a hotel room so cramped it was hard to imagine Olson vaulting through the closed window; motives to shut Olson up; the ambiguous autopsy; and the CIA assassination manual.
“Whether the manual is a complete coincidence, I don’t know,” Saracco says. “But it was very disturbing to see that a CIA manual suggested the exact method of Frank Olson’s death.”
Covert work
For 20 years after its creation in 1949, Detrick’s Special Operations Division developed covert germ weapons – dart guns and aerosol sprayers to assassinate foreign enemies.
There is no evidence they were ever used. In fact, the only death that clearly resulted from the program was that of Frank Olson, one of its senior officers.
The son of Swedish immigrants, Frank Rudolph Olson earned a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and joined the World War II bioweapons program at what was then Camp Detrick.
In 1949, Olson was recruited by Detrick’s Special Operations Division. Within months, the Korean War was raging, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was launching his hunt for Communist agents, and pressure was on to build new U.S. germ weapons.
By 1951, the Special Operations Division had won praise from a Pentagon committee for the “the originality, imagination and aggressiveness it has displayed in devising means and mechanisms for the covert dissemination of bacteriological warfare agents.”
In October 1952, Olson was promoted to acting director of the division. Although his family didn’t know it, he had also been recruited by the CIA for a program code-named Artichoke, part of a decades-long hunt for drugs to make enemy prisoners spill their secrets.
As his career prospered, Olson and his wife, Alice, built a dream house on a hillside above Frederick. They became regulars at Detrick’s officers’ club.
“He and his wife were both fun people,” recalls Curtis B. Thorne, a Detrick veteran who pioneered anthrax studies at the University of Massachusetts.
But promotions and parties concealed Olson’s qualms about his work. Suffering from ulcers, he left the Army and stayed on at Detrick as a civilian – though he bridled at the Army’s strict oversight. A 1949 security document reported: “Olson is violently opposed to control of scientific research, either military or otherwise, and opposes supervision of his work.”
The same year, colleagues recall, Olson was influenced by a new book by a mentor. In Peace or Pestilence: Biological Warfare and How To Avoid It, Theodor Rosebury said science should combat disease, not find devious ways to spread it.
Cournoyer, the Army intelligence veteran, says Olson began to raise ethical issues the friends had discussed during night courses in philosophy at the Catholic University of America. Colleagues were astonished to spot Olson chatting with the pacifists who protested outside Detrick’s gates.
“He was turning, no doubt about it,” Cournoyer says.
By the fall of 1953, according to Cournoyer, Olson was approaching a crisis of conscience. He had witnessed “special interrogations” of prisoners under the Artichoke program during a secret trip to Europe in July.
After returning, Cournoyer recalls, Olson asked, “Have you ever seen a man die?”
“He actually called it torture,” Cournoyer recalls. “He said they went so far as to take a life – lives, definitely more than one. Whatever they got out of them, he didn’t consider it worth a life.”
One colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity, thinks Olson was upset because he believed the U.S. had used biological weapons against North Korea. Two Canadian researchers, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, wrote a 1998 book arguing that such attacks occurred.
But the U.S. government has long denied using bioweapons, and most U.S. experts reject the charge. The issue may not be resolved until all the relevant documents are declassified, if ever.
Whatever its source, Olson’s disillusionment came to a head after the LSD experiment on Nov. 19, 1953, at a rented cabin on Deep Creek Lake in Western Maryland. Olson – who had stepped down to deputy chief of Special Operations – joined six Army colleagues and three CIA men led by Sidney Gottlieb, the eccentric and powerful CIA liaison to Detrick.
By his own account, Gottlieb served Cointreau to seven of the men without telling them he had laced it with LSD, ostensibly to study the drug’s effects.
A ‘terrible mistake’
Alice Olson would recall that her husband returned home deeply depressed. He told her he had made a “terrible mistake” but wouldn’t elaborate. He said he planned to leave the Army and retrain as a dentist.
According to the official CIA version of events, made public in 1975, Olson became increasingly despondent and paranoid. On Nov. 24, concerned colleagues took him to New York to see a doctor, Harold Abramson, who had experimented with LSD.
Three days later, Olson agreed to be admitted to a Rockville psychiatric hospital. He and CIA officer Robert Lashbrook decided to spend the night at the Statler and head south the next morning.
But at 2:45 a.m., Lashbrook told investigators, he awoke to the sound of breaking glass. Olson had thrown himself through the closed shade and closed window, falling 170 feet to his death on the sidewalk below.
From 1953 to 1975, as Alice Olson descended into alcoholism and fought back to sobriety, she and her children were told nothing about LSD. When the story finally surfaced in the Rockefeller Commission report on CIA abuses, they got official apologies from President Ford and from CIA Director William Colby, who handed over CIA documents on the case. They later received $750,000 in compensation.
But 22 years of deception made it difficult to persuade the family that the new official story was the whole truth.
The betrayal was deeply personal. The LSD cover-up had involved Frank Olson’s colleagues, particularly his boss, the late Col. Vincent Ruwet – who had consoled Eric with the gift of a darkroom set and a jigsaw after his father’s death.
“Whenever suspicions came up, the family would say: ‘This can’t be correct, because Ruwet would have known, and Ruwet wouldn’t deceive us.’ Our relationship to Ruwet was symbolic of our relationship to the whole Detrick community,” Eric said.
As a teenager, Eric was a patriotic member of that community, where he became an Eagle Scout in the base-sponsored troop. But in college and graduate school, he grew skeptical.
If his mother shared his doubts, Eric said, she never acted on them: “My mother’s mantra was: ‘You are never going to know what happened in that hotel room.’ It’s an injunction, a kind of threat, a taboo and a prediction.”
Eric’s younger sister, Lisa, was killed in a 1978 plane crash along with her husband and 2-year-old son. Ironically, she died on the way to inspect a lumber mill as a place to invest her share of the government’s compensation for Frank’s death.
His brother, Nils, who was only 5 in 1953, consciously chose dentistry, the alternate career his father had considered.
But Eric, the eldest, couldn’t settle down. He moved to Sweden, his father’s ancestral home, and had a son, Stephan, with a Swedish woman. Then he returned to the family home, determined to explain his father’s death.
One clue came from Armand Pastore, the assistant night manager at the Statler in 1953. He approached the family in 1975 to report what he’d heard from the hotel switchboard operator that night. Immediately after Olson’s fall, CIA officer Lashbrook phoned Abramson, the physician. Instead of shocked and emotional voices, the operator had told Pastore, there was a brief and seemingly expected exchange.
“He’s gone,” Lashbrook said.
“That’s too bad,” Abramson reportedly answered.
A similar impression came from a CIA investigator’s report in Colby’s documents. Dispatched to New York immediately after Olson’s death, the investigator listened through a closed door as Abramson told Lashbrook he was “worried as to whether or not the deal was in jeopardy” and thought “the whole operation was dangerous and the whole deal should be reanalyzed.”
In a report to the CIA on the death, Abramson wrote that the LSD experiment was designed “especially to trap [Olson].” This conflicted with Gottlieb’s story and raised a troubling possibility: that the LSD experiment was actually designed to see whether Olson could still be trusted to keep the agency’s dark secrets.
And there was Frank Olson’s mummified body, exhumed in 1994, the year after Alice Olson died. Starrs, the pathologist, found none of the facial cuts the original autopsy described, but he did find a contusion to the head that he thought was caused by a blow struck before the fall.
All these anomalies Eric Olson has duly recorded on a Web site devoted to his father’s memory: www.frankolsonproject.org.
A half-century after his father’s death, Eric Olson seems to be struggling to put it behind him. He says he believes he knows what happened, even if he doesn’t know details of perpetrators and motives. “You can see the truth through the fog,” he says. “But you can’t quite make out what it is.”
Sometimes, in moments of frustration – which come often because he’s struggling to earn a living – he says he’s sorry he ever looked into his father’s death.
“I’ve ruined my life,” he says in one interview. “I regret everything. I regret digging my father’s body up … . For me, the end has come with facing a hard truth, confronting my own naivete. I thought I wanted knowledge. I didn’t think that if knowledge is knowledge of murder, then it’s not enough – because then you want justice. And you don’t get justice with a secret state murder.”
At other times, he seems eager for any new scrap of information. He explains the contradiction by citing the Shakespearean son who pursues the truth about his father’s murder.
“Read Hamlet,” he says. “Hamlet has become like a friend to me. Once you start looking into your father’s death, you go to the end.”
A new documentary film, “Code Name Artichoke” (produced this year by German public television and widely shown internationally and in the US on WorldLink TV) on the death of my father, Dr. Frank Olson, revisits this question and presents new evidence. (See this link for a transcript of the film.)
TO: Eric Olson
FROM: Gordon Thomas
c.c.: To Whom Else It Concerns
DATE: 30th November 1998
This memo sets out the information provided by both Dr William Sargant, consultant psychiatrist, and William Buckley, former Station Chief of the CIA in Beirut, Lebanon. Both believed your father was murdered by the CIA. To judge my credibility in accepting this claim I begin with:
PERSONAL BACKGROUND:
I am the author of thirty eight books published world wide. Total sales exceed 45 million copies. Five of my books have been made into successful motion pictures, including the Academy Award winning Voyage of the Damned. My other awards include the Critics; and Jurys’ prizes at the Monte Carlo Film Festival, an Edgar Allen Poe Award and three citations from the Mark Twain Society for Reporting Excellence.
I have written a number of non-fiction books dealing with the activities of various intelligence agencies. in 1998 1 wrote and presented for Britain’s Channel 4, “The Spying Machine”, a major television documentary in which for the first time key members of Mossad appeared, describing their work. My latest book on the Israeli service, “Gideon’s Spies,” to be published by St Martin’s Press in New York, will be published in 40 countries in April 1999.
In the 1950/60 period that is relevant to the events surrounding your father, I was a senior BBC writer/producer employed by the Science Department. Dr Sargant was engaged by me as a consultant for a number of programmes. A relationship developed between us that became close and remained so until his death in 1988.
The first lesson I learned during what has been a quarter of a century of writing about secret intelligence is that deception and disinformation are its stock-in-trade, along with subversion, corruption, blackmail and sometimes assassination. Agents are trained to lie and to use and abuse friendships. They are the very opposite of the dictum that gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.
I first encountered their behaviour while investigating many of the great spy scandals of the Cold War: the betrayal of America’s atomic bomb secrets by Klaus Fuchs and the compromising of Britain’s M15 and M16 by Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby. Each made treachery and duplicity his byword. I also was one of the first writers to uncover the CIA’s obsession with mind control, a preoccupation the Agency was forced to confirm ten years after my book on the subject, Journey into Madness, appeared. Denial is the black art all intelligence services long ago perfected.
Nevertheless, in getting to the truth, I was greatly helped by two professional intelligence officers: Joachim Kraner, my late father-in-law, who ran an M16 network in Dresden in the post-World War II years, and Bill Buckley who was station chief of the CIA in Beirut in the 1980s. Both constantly reminded me that a great deal can be heard from what Bill called “murmurs in the mush;” a deadly skirmish fought in an alley with no name; the collective hold-your breath when an agent or network is blown; a covert operation which could have undone years of overt political bridge-building; a snippet of mundane information that completed a particular intelligence jigsaw. Through them I made contacts in a number of military and civilian intelligence agencies, Germany’s BND and France’s DGSE; the CIA; Canadian and British services. Later that network extended to include members of Israel’s security services including senior members of Mossad.
It is these contacts who have helped to reinforce the belief of both William Sargant and Bill Buckley that your father was murdered. I am assured that because of the highly unusual circumstances of your father’s death, the details have remained on file with several of the above-mentioned agencies, specifically the Mossad. The circumstances surrounding the death are taught as a case study at the Mossad Training School outside Tel Aviv. This has been confirmed by two former Mossad agents, Ari Ben-Menashe and Victor Ostrovsky.
Let me now turn to the specific information that both William Sargant and Bill Buckley provided me with on separate occasions over a number of years. At that time they were both alive and spoke on the usual understanding we had: that what they had to say would not be directly sourced to them. Both made a specific request that I should not publish ‘in any form’ what they told me about your father’s death because, as they believed they were among the few who knew the true circumstances, publication of such information could almost certainly be traced back to them. Given the circumstances they outlined, the outcome for either of them could be severe.
So: First to William Sargant,
At the time we spoke of your father, Dr Sargant was Director of Psychological Medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, England. He was also a consultant to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI5/6), largely because of his work in the eliciting of confessions by the Soviets. His conclusions can be found in his textbook “Battle for the Mind”; it remains a standard work on the subject of mind control
Because of my own family connections (detailed above), I was able to gain the trust of Dr Sargent. This developed during the time I used him in various documentary programmes for the BBC. It was during that period (1968169), that I first began to explore with him his own relationship with both M15/6 and the CIA. He told me lie had visited Langley several times and had met with Dr Sydney Gottlieb, Richard Helms and other senior CIA officials. During those visits he had also met with Dr Ewan Cameron and, on one occasion, he had met Dr Lashbrook and your father, Frank Olson.
Subsequently Dr Gottlieb and Frank Olson visited London and, according to Dr Sargent, he accompanied them to Porton Down, Britain’s main research centre for biological/chemical research. Dr Sargent’s interest in the work going on there was to study the psychological implications of mind-blowing drugs such as LSD.
He told me that he developed a rapport with Frank Olson during a number of subsequent visits Frank Olson made to Britain. Dr Sargant remarked that “he was just like any other CIA spy, using our secret airfields to come and go”. Evidence in support of that can be found in Frank Olson’s passport.
During this period (1953/5), Dr Sargant had met several more times with Dr Ewan Cameron, both in Washington and in Montreal, Canada. Cameron was engaged in secret experimental work for the CIA (details of that can be found in my book Journey into Madness).
Sargent said he knew that Frank Olson and Cameron knew each other and that Frank Olson also shared his (Sargant’s) view that some of the work Dr Gottlieb was funding Cameron to do through the Human Ecology Foundation (a CIAfront Organisation, was bordering on the criminal.
During the research and writing of Journey into Madness, Dr Sargent and I met on many occasions, perhaps as many as 20. During that time he gave me much valuable material relating to the work of Dr Cameron and insights into what he knew of Dr Gottlieb, Richard Helms and, of course, the death of your father.
By then, Dr Sargant was physically not a well man but his memory was still good. He could remember exact details with compelling clarity; for instance we once had a somewhat esoteric; conversation on how Patty Hearst (whom he had seen during her trial as an expert witness) would have survived some of the techniques that the CIA had developed in mind control.
From time to time, he referred to the death of your father and, as I clearly recall, he said his paperwork on the case had been handed over to the competent authorities in the British Secret Intelligence Service.
Time and again Dr Sargant expressed the view that, from all he had learned from the M15 and his own contacts in Washington, there was a strong prima facie case that Frank Olson had been murdered. Sargant believed that Frank Olson could also have been given a cocktail of drugs that included more than LSD. He said he knew that Dr Gottlieb had been researching into slow-acting depressants which, when taken, could drive a person to suicide.
He also believed that, from his own meetings with Frank Olson, there was a very real possibility that your father could become a whistle-blower if he believed that what was happening was wrong.
After my book was published, I continued to meet with Dr Sargent. At that time, I was hoping to see a new edition of the book published (this was not to be) and I wanted to get Dr Sargant’s permission to use all he had told me in a new edition. He said I could only publish what he had said after his death. He died in 1988. This Is the account he gave me of your father’s death which I now feel free to make public.
in the summer of 1953 Frank Olson travelled to Britain, once again to visit Parton Down. Sargent met with him. Olson said he was going to Europe to meet with a CIA team led by Dr Gottlieb. By then Sargent had learned that Frank Olson was acting deputy head of SO (Special Operations).
Sargent was satisfied that the CIA team were doing similar work that M16 were conducting in Europe – executing without trial known Nazis, especially SS men. (One of the survivors of the British “hit squad” is Peter Mason who lives in Montana: I know nothing about him).
Sargant saw Frank Olson after his brief visit to Norway and West Germany, including Berlin, in the summer of 1953. He said he was concerned about the psychological changes in Frank Olson. In Sargent’s view Olson, primarily a researchbased scientist, had witnessed in the field how his arsenal of drugs, etc. worked with lethal effect on human beings (the “expendable” SS men etc.). Sargant believed that for the first time Olson had come face to face with his own reality.
Sargant told me he believed Frank Olson had witnessed murder being committed with the various drugs he had prepared. The shock of what he witnessed, Sargent believed, was all the harder to cope with given that Frank Olson was a patriotic man who believed that the United States would never sanction such acts. Part of that assumption was formed by Sargent because he had come to see Frank Olson as a somewhat naive man: “locked up in his lab mentality” was, I recall, one of the phrases Sargant used.
I remember Sargent telling me that he spoke several times in 1953 with Frank Olson at Sargent’s consulting rooms in Harley Street, London. These were not formal patient/doctor consultations but rather Sargent trying to establish what Frank Olson had seen and done in Europe.
Dr Sargent’s own conclusion was that Frank Olson had undergone a marked personality change; many of Olson’s symptoms — soul searching, seeking reassurance etc. were typical of that, Sargent told me.
He decided that Frank Olson could pose a security risk if he continued to speak and behave as he did. He recommended to his own superiors at the SIS that Frank Olson should no longer have access to Portion Down or to any ongoing British research at the various secret establishments Olson had been allowed prior free access to.
Sargent told me his recommendation was acted upon by his superiors. He was also certain that his superiors, by the nature of the close ties with the CIA, would have informed Richard Helms and Dr Gottlieb of the circumstances why Frank Olson would no longer be given access to British research. Effectively a substantial part of Frank Olson’s importance to the CIA had been cut off.
When Dr Sargant learned of Frank Olson’s death — I recall him telling me it came in a priority message from the British Embassy in Washington Sargant came to the immediate conclusion that Olson could only have been murdered. I recall him telling me that in many ways the staged death was almost classic.
BILL BUCKLEY, Station Chief of the CIA in Beirut (1983).
Again through my family connection and the contacts I had established independently with various Intelligence services, I came to know Bill Buckley. (see pp Chap 4, “Journey into Madness”). At various stages in our friendship the question of Frank Olson’s death came up.
I told Bill what Dr Sargant believed. Bill said that Sargant was right but that he was sure that Richard Helms and Sydney Gottlieb would have ensured that nothing would ever be proven. Buckley described both men as expert in hiding or destroying evidence.
I hope this helps to set the record straight.
Also by Gordon Thomas:
Non-Fiction:
DESCENT INTO DANGER
PHYSICIAN EXTRAORDINARY
HEROES OF THE R.A.F.
THEY GOT BACK
MIRACLE OF SURGERY
THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE AND YOU
THAMES NUMBER ONE
MIDNIGHT TRADER$
THE PARENT’S HOME DOCTOR (with lan D Hudson, Vincent Pippet)
TURN BY THE WIN DOW (with Ronald Hutchinson)
ISSELS: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A DOCTOR
THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED (with Max MorganWitts)
EARTHQUAKE (with Max MorganWitts)
SHIPWRECK (with Max MorganWitts)
VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED (with Max MorganWitts)
THE DAY GUERNICA DIED (with Max MorganWitts)
ENOLA GAY/RUIN FROM THE AIR (with Max MorganWitts)
THE DAY THE BUBBLE BURST (With Max MorganWifts)
TRAUMA (with Max MorganWitts)
PONTIFF (with Max MorganWitts)
THE YEAR OF ARMAGEDDON (with Max MorganWitts)
THE OPERATION
DESIRE AND DENIAL
THE TRIAL: The Life and Inevitable Crucifixion of Jesus
JOURNEY INTO MADNESS
CHAOS UNDER HEAVEN
TRESPASS INTO TEMPTATION
GIDEON’S SPIES
Fiction:
THE CAMP ON BLOOD ISLAND
TORPEDO RUN
DEADLY PERFUME
GODLESS ICON
VOICES IN THE SILENCE
ORGAN HUNTERS
POISONED SKY
Screenplays:
EMMETT (With Gordon Parry)
ENSLAVED (With Jeff Bricmont)
ORGAN HUNTER
Army harvested victims’ blood to boost anthrax
Ex-scientists detail Detrick experiments
In an attempt to make America’s biological arsenal more lethal during the Cold War, the Army collected anthrax from the bodies or blood of workers at Fort Detrick who were accidentally infected with the bacteria, veterans of the biowarfare program say.
The experiments, during the 1950s and ’60s, were based on long experience with animals showing that anthrax often becomes more virulent after infecting an animal and growing in its body, according to experts on the bacteria and scientific studies published at the time. Former Army scientists say the anthrax strain used to make weapons was replaced at least once, and possibly three times, with more potent anthrax that had grown in the workers’ bodies. But some of the key scientists who did the work more than four decades ago are dead, and records are classified, contradictory or nonexistent, so it is difficult to establish with certainty the details of what happened.
The use of human accident victims to boost the killing power of the nation’s germ arsenal is a macabre footnote to a top-secret program designed to destroy enemy troops with such exotic weapons as botulism, smallpox, plague and paralytic shellfish poison.
The offensive bioweapons program was launched during World War II and ended by President Richard M. Nixon in 1969.
Today, after a few grams of mailed anthrax have killed five people, sickened 13 others and disrupted the postal system and government, the old program’s gruesome potential for destruction seems unimaginable. But at the time, fearing correctly that the Soviet Union had an even larger bioweapons program, Army scientists were driven to come up with more and more lethal disease strains.”
Any deadly diseases, anywhere in the world, we’d go and collect a sample,” said Bill Walter, 76, who worked in the weapons program from 1951 until it closed.
Walter was involved in anthrax production from selection of seed stock to the dry, deadly spore powder ready to be loaded into a bomb; his final job was as “principal investigator” in a lab that studied anthrax and other powder weapons.
Walter believes the original weapons strain of anthrax, a variety called Vollum after the British scientist who isolated it, was upgraded with bacteria collected from three Detrick workers who were accidentally infected. Two of them died.
His recollection is supported by another veteran of the anthrax program, 84-year-old James R.E. Smith. A third bioweapons veteran, William C. Patrick III, confirms two of the cases but says he is not sure about the third.”
Anthrax gets stronger as it goes through a human host,” said Walter, now retired in Florida. “So we got pulmonary [lung] spores from Bill Boyles and Joel Willard. And finally we got it from Lefty Kreh’s finger.”
William A. Boyles, a 46-year-old microbiologist, inhaled anthrax spores on the job in 1951 and died a few days later. Seven years after that, Joel E. Willard, 53, an electrician who worked in the “hot” areas where animals were dosed with deadly germs, died of the same inhalational form of the disease.
The third anthrax victim, Bernard “Lefty” Kreh, was a plant operator who spent night shifts in a biohazard suit, breathing air from a tube on the wall, using a kitchen spatula to scrape the anthrax “mud” off the inside of a centrifuge. One day in the late ’50s or early ’60s, his finger swelled to the size of a sausage with a cutaneous, or skin, anthrax infection.
Kreh went on to become a nationally known outdoors writer and expert on fly fishing. He did not know that the bacteria that had put him in Fort Detrick’s hospital for a month had gone on to another life, too – as a sub-strain of anthrax bearing his initials.
“We called it `LK’ – that’s what we’d put on the log sheets for each run,” Walter said. A “run” was an 1,800-gallon batch of anthrax mixture, grown in one of the 40-foot- high fermenters inside Building 470, which stands empty at Detrick, its demolition planned.
“Lefty’s strain was rather easy to detect,” Walter said. When a colony of bacteria grew on growth medium, he recalled, “it came out like a little comma, perfectly spherical.”
Surprised by his role
Orley R. Bourland Jr., 75, who worked as a plant manager, said anthrax from Kreh’s finger was isolated and designated “BVK-1,” for Bernard Victor Kreh.
Walter said he assumes the initials in the log sheets were shortened by someone who knew the source of the new sub-strain of anthrax never went by his formal name. Yet in the secret, compartmented biological program, Kreh himself does not recall ever being informed of the use to which his government put his illness.
“You’re kidding,” Kreh said. “I’ll have to tell my wife.” He doesn’t remember which finger it was, he said, but he does remember that his wife, Evelyn, could see him only through a glass barrier designed to keep any dangerous microbes contained during treatment
At 77, Kreh, who lives in Cockeysville, lives the full life of a fishing celebrity, writing magazine articles, taking VIPs on fly-fishing expeditions and endorsing products. A former outdoors columnist for The Sun, he credits his 19 years at Fort Detrick with giving him time to develop his expertise. Because of the rotating night-shift work, he said, “Two out of three weeks I could hunt and fish all day long.”
The available evidence confirming the use of bacteria from the two men who died, Boyles and Willard, is less complete. W. Irving Jones Jr., 80, of Frederick, a biochemist, remembers his supervisor, Dr. Ralph E. Lincoln, giving him an unusual request some months after the electrician’s death.
“Dr. Lincoln had me pull a sample of Willard’s dried blood,” Jones said. “We were able to grow [the anthrax bacteria] right up. And it was deadly,” a determination he made by testing it on animals.
Jones said he cannot confirm the recollection of others that Willard’s sub-strain of anthrax was used for a new weapons strain. That might well have happened, he said, if animal tests showed it to be more virulent than the existing weapons strain, the only means of checking potency at the time. But like any secret program, the Army’s biowarfare operation was run on a “need-to-know” basis, and weapons development was not his bailiwick, Jones said.
Contradictory evidence
The evidence on Boyles is contradictory. Patrick, who joined the bioweapons program in 1951, the year the microbiologist died of anthrax, said unequivocally that the Vollum weapons strain was altered by passage through Boyles’ body and became Vollum 1B.
“That’s where Vollum 1B came from,” said Patrick, of Frederick, who eventually headed Detrick’s product development division. “It’s 1-Boyles.”
A review of scientific papers on anthrax published by Fort Detrick scientists in the 1940s and ’50s offers indirect support for Patrick’s contention. The Vollum strain found in the early Detrick papers is first replaced by a Vollum sub-strain called “M36,” produced by the British biological weapons program by passing the Vollum strain through a series of monkeys to increase its virulence.
Then, in the late 1950s, references to the M36 variant of Vollum give way to references to “the highly virulent Vollum 1B strain.” No 1A strain seems to have existed. Nor is there an explanation of the 1B sub-strain’s origin – a break with the standard practice in describing sub-strains derived from passage through animals.
On the other hand, a medical report prepared by the Army 18 years after Boyles’ death states that live anthrax bacteria “could not be (and never was) cultivated from blood, sputum, nose and throat, or skin at any time during the illness, not from tissue and fluids taken at autopsy.
“The cause of death was confirmed by an autopsy finding of bacteria resembling anthrax in the brain.
The absence of live bacteria may have a simple explanation. Doctors say a person with inhalation anthrax who is given intravenous antibiotics might soon show no live bacteria, even though the person might still die of toxin produced earlier by the bacteria. But if the medical report is accurate, it appears to rule out the possibility that the weapons strain included bacteria collected during or after Boyles’ illness.
It is possible that after Boyles’ death, blood taken early in his illness was found to contain anthrax. Or, anthrax spores, which are not killed by antibiotics, might have been found in his lungs after death.
Scientists say it is possible, but not certain, that one pass through a human host would boost the virulence of anthrax. Repeated passes through a particular species usually increase the bacteria’s lethality toward that species, said David L. Huxsoll, who oversaw anthrax vaccine tests as commander of the Army’s biodefense center in the 1980s.
“If you pass it through a rabbit repeatedly, it will kill rabbits, but it won’t kill a cow,” Huxsoll said. In humans, “you could have a switch toward more virulence on one passage, but it wouldn’t necessarily happen.”
Officials of the biological defense program at Fort Detrick, where Vollum 1B is still used to test vaccines, do not know of any connection to the accidental human infections, said Caree Vander Linden, spokeswoman for the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. One account passed down by a former staff member was that Vollum 1B was produced by passage of the Vollum strain through rabbits, she said.
If the “B” actually stands for Boyles, it’s news to William Boyles’ family. Natalie Boyles said Friday that her husband, Charles M. Boyles, William’s son, had never heard of such a thing.
Kenneth E. Willard, Joel Willard’s son, said the same. “Shock would be my first feeling,” Willard said on hearing the evidence described in this article. “Second would be that my mother or I should have been made aware of it, if it happened. We should have been given more information all along.”
But secrecy governed everything in the program, including the deaths, because the American bioweapons makers had a keen awareness of the threat from their counterparts in the Soviet Union, occasionally supplemented by detailed information.
“We used to get intelligence reports telling me what my Russian counterpart was doing,” Walter said. “Our rate and the Russian rate was the same – about 7 kilograms of dry anthrax a week.”
Another parallel exists. If the United States took advantage of tragic accidents to make its anthrax deadlier, those experiments were mirrored at least once in the Soviet program. Far larger than the U.S. effort, the Soviet biowarfare program was also secretly continued after 1972, when the nations signed a treaty banning such work.
According to Ken Alibek, a former deputy chief of the Soviet program who defected to the United States in 1992, a scientist named Nikolai Ustinov accidentally pricked himself while injecting a guinea pig with Marburg virus in 1988. He died an agonizing death two weeks later.
“No one needed to debate the next step,” Alibek wrote in his 1999 book Biohazard. “Orders went out immediately to replace the old strain with the new, which was called, in a move the wry Ustinov might have appreciated, `Variant U.'”
Altered States of America
By Richard Stratton
Spin Magazine, March 1994
In the early 195O’s the US chased the world’s LSD supply as just the first step in a debauched CIA program code-named MK-ULTRA. In an exclusive interview, Ike Feldman, one of the operation’s kingpins, talks to Richard Stratton about deadly viruses, spy hookers, and bad trips.
“I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vinyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
—George Hunter White
The meeting was set for noon at a suitably anonymous bastion of corporate America, a sprawling Marriott Hotel and convention center on Long Island. Driving out of the city, I was tense and paranoid. For one thing, I was leaving Manhattan without permission from my parole officer, What was I going to tell him? “I want to travel to Long Island to interview a former narcotics agent who worked undercover for the CIA dosing people with LSD.” My parole officer would have ordered a urine test on the spot.
Then there was the fact that previous run-ins with drug cops had usually resulted in criminal prosecutions. I spent most of the ’80s in prison for smuggling marijuana. How would this ex-agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (BBN), forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) take to a retired outlaw writing a story about M K-ULTRA, the CIA’s highly secretive mind-control and drug-testing program?
Ira “Ike” Feldman is the only person still alive who worked directly under the legendary George Hunter White in MK-ULTRA. The program began in 1953 amid growing fear of the Soviet Union’s potential for developing alternative weaponry. The atomic bomb was a sinister threat, but more terrifying still were possible Soviet assaults on the mind and body from within — through drugs and disease. In an attempt to preempt foreign attacks and even wage its own assaults, the CIA funded a group of renegade agents to experiment with ways to derail a human being.
For years, Feldman had ducked reporters. He agreed to meet with me only after a private detective, a former New York cop who also did time for drugs. put in a good word. There was no guarantee Feldman would talk.
The LSD, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. The study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That’s what I was doing when I worked for the CIA.
I recognized Feldman immediately when he waddled into the lobby of the Marriott. I had heard he was short, five three, and I’d read how George White used to dress him in a pinstriped zoot suit, blue suede shoes, a Bursalino hat with a tu rned-up brim, and a phony diamond ring, then send him onto the streets of San Francisco to pose as an East Coast heroin dealer. Now in his 70s, Feldman still looks and talks like Edward G. Robinson playing gangster Johnny Rocco in Key Largo.
Feldman leveled a cold, lizard-like gaze on me when we sat down for lunch. He wielded a fat unlit cigar like a baton, pulled out a wad of bills that could have gagged a drug dealer, slipped a 20 to the waitress and told her to take good care of us.
“What’s this about?” Feldman demanded. “Who the fuck are you?”
I explained I was a writer researching George White. White, a world-class drinker known to polish off a bottle of gin at a sitting and get up and walk away, died of liver disease in 1975, two years before MK-ULTRA was first made public.
“Why do you want to write about White? I suppose it’s this LSD shit.”
No, I said, not just the LSD. George White deserved to have his story told..
“White was a son of a bitch,” Feldman said. “But he was a great cop. He made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew.”
Again he gazed stonily at me. “Lots of writers asked me to tell my story. Why should I talk to you?”
I decided to come clean. “I used to be part of your world,” I answered. “I did eight years for the Feds because I refused to rat when I got busted for pot.”
Feldman stared at me for a long time. “I know,” he said. “I checked you out. That’s why I’m here. Now get out your pencil.” He waved for the waitress and palmed her a 50 to cover the tab.
“The LSD,” Feldman began, “that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. Dirty tricks. Drug experiments. Sexual encounters and the study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That’s what I was doing when I worked for George White and the CIA.”
For my next Interview with Feldman, I rented a day room at the Marriott and brought along a tape recorder. Feldman tottered in, pulled a small footballshaped clear plastic ampule out of his pocket and plunked it on the table. It was filled with pure Sandoz LSD-25. He also showed me a gun disguised as a fountain pen which could shoot a cartridge of nerve gas. “Some of the stuff George White and I tested,” he explained.
“It all began because the CIA knew the Russians had this LSD shit and they were afraid the KGB was using it to brainwash agents,” Feldman told me. “They were worried they might dump it in the water supply and drive everybody wacky. They wanted us to find out if we could actually use it as a truth serum.”
Actually, it all began with a mistake. In 1951, Allen Dulles, later appointed director of Central Intelligence, received a report from military sources that the Russians had bought 50 million doses of a new drug from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland. A follow-up memo stated that Sandoz had an additional ten kilos – about 100 million doses – of the drug, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25), available for sale on the open market
Dulles was alarmed. From the beginning, LSD was lauded by military and intelligence scientists working on chemical warfare compounds and mind-control experiments as the most potent mind-altering substance known to man. “Infinitesimally small amounts of LSD can completely destroy the sanity of a human being for considerable periods of time (or possibly permanently),” stated an October 1953 CIA memo. In the wrong hands, 100 million doses would be enough to sabotage a whole nation’s mental equilibrium.
Dulles convened a high-level committee of CIA and Pentagon officials who agreed the agency should buy the entire Sandoz LSD supply lest the KGB acquire it first. Two agents were dispatched to Switzerland with a black bag containing $240,000.
In fact, Sandoz had produced only about 40 grams of LSD in the ten years since its psychoactive features were first discovered by Albert Hofmann. According to a 1975 CIA document, the U.S. Military attaché in Switzerland had miscalculated by a factor of one million in his CIA reports because he did not know the difference between a milligram (1 /1,000 of a gram) and a kilogram (1,000 grams).
Nevertheless, a deal was struck. The CIA would purchase all of Sandoz’s potential output of LSD. (Later, when the Eli Lilly Company of Indianapolis perfected a process to synthesize LSD, agency officials insisted on a similar agreement.) An internal CIA memo to Dulles declared the agency would have access to “tonnage quantities.” All that remained was for agency heads to figure out what to do with it.
“The objectives were behavior control, behavior anomaly -production, and counter-measures for opposition application of similar substances,” states a heavily redacted CIA document on MK-ULTRA released under a 1977 Freedom of Information Act request, The chill winds of the Cold War were howling across the land. Dulles was convinced that, as he told Princeton University’s National Alumni Conference, Russian and Chinese Communists had secretly developed “brain perversion techniques … so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them.”
Pentagon strategists began to envision a day when battles would be fought on psychic terrain in wars without conventional weaponry. The terrifying specter of a secret army of “Manchurian Candidates,” outwardly normal operatives programmed to carry out political assassinations, was paraded before a gullible and easily manipulated public.
Ike Feldman remembers that time well. A Brooklyn boy, he was drafted into the Army in 1941. Army tests showed he had an unusual facility for language, so he was enrolled in a special school in Germany where he learned fluent Russian, By the end of the war, Feldman was a lieutenant colonel with a background in Military Intelligence. The Army sent him to another language school, this time in Monterey, California, where he added Mandarin Chinese:to his repertoire.
While with Military Intelligence in Europe, Feldman first heard of George White. “White was with the OSS [Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA]. I heard stories about him. Donovan [William “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the OSS] loved White. White supposedly killed some Japanese spy with his bare hands while he was on assignment in Calcutta. He used to keep a picture of the bloody corpse on the wall in his office.”
In the early ’50s, after a stint in Korea working for the CIA under Army auspices, Feldman decided he’d had enough of military life. He settled in California. “I always wanted chickens,” Feldman recalled, “so I bought a chicken ranch. In the meantime, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do with chickens.
“Before long, I got a call—this time from White,” Feldman continued. “We understand you’re back in the States,” he says.“I want you to come in to the Bureau of Narcotics.” This was ’54 to ’55, White was District Supervisor [of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics] in San Francisco. I went in. I go to room 144 of the Federal Building, and this is the first time I met George White. He was a big, powerful man with a completely bald head. Not tall, but big. Fat. He shaved his head and had the most beautiful blue eyes you’ve ever seen. “Ike,” he says, “we want you as an agent. We know you’ve been a hell of an agent with Intelligence. The CIA knows it. You speak all these languages. We want you to work as an under cover agent in San Francisco.”
What Feldman didn’t know at the time was that George White was still working for the CIA. White’s particular area of expertise was the testing of drugs on unwitting human guinea pigs. During the war, one of White’s projects for the OSS was the quest for a “truth drug,” a serum that could be administered to prisoners of war or captured spies during interrogations. After trying and rejecting several substances the OSS scientists settled on a highly concentrated liquid extract of cannabis indica, a particularly potent strain of marijuana. Never one to shrink from the call of duty, White first tried the drug on himself. He downed a full vial of the clear, viscous liquid and soon passed out without revealing any secrets.
Meanwhile, at the CIA’s Technical Services Staff (TSS), the department specializing in unconventional weaponry such as poisons, biological warfare, psychoactive substances, and mind control, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb was searching for a candidate to head MK-ULTRA. Gottlieb, a club-footed scientist who overcame a pronounced stutter in his rise to head the TSS, had discovered White’s name while perusing old OSS files on the Truth Drug Experiments. White’s credentials were impeccable: A former crime reporter on the West Coast before he joined the narcotics bureau, White had soon become one of the top international undercover agents under Harry Anslinger, the grandfather of America’s war on drugs.
After meeting with Gottlieb, White noted his initiation into the world of psychedelics in his diary: “Gottlieb proposes I be CIA consultant and I agree.”
Moonlighting for the CIA, with funds disbursed by Gottlieb, White rented two adjoining apartment safe houses at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village. Using the alias Morgan Hall, he constructed an elaborate alter-identity as a seaman and artist in the Jack London mode. By night, CIA spy Morgan Hall metamorphosed into a drug-eating denizen of the bohemian coffeehouse scene. With a head full of acid and gin, White prowled downtown clubs and bars. He struck up conversations with strangers, then lured them back to the pad where he served drinks spiked with Sandoz’s finest.
“Gloria gets the horrors … Janet sky high,” White dutifully recorded in his diary. In another entry, he proudly noted, “Lashbrook at 81 Bedford Street—Owen Winkle and the LSD surprise—can wash.” In recognition of the often bizarre behavior brought on by the drug, White assigned LSD the codename “Stormy.”
Secret agent man: Allen Dulles (top), the former director of the CIA, who authorized the purchase of Sandoz LSD; George White (middle) examines opium pipes as he takes over as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Boston in 1951; Harry Anslinger (bottom), circa 1954, then head of FBN.
According to an agency memo, the CIA feared KGB agents might employ psychedelics “to produce anxiety or terror in medically unsophisticated subjects unable to distinguish drug-induced psychosis from actual insanity.” In an effort to school “enlightened operatives” for that eventuality, Dulles and Gottlieb instructed high-ranking agency personnel, including Gottlieb’s entire staff at TSS, to take LSD themselves and administer it to their colleagues.
“There was an extensive amount of self-experimentation for the reason that we felt that a firsthand knowledge of the subjective effects of these drugs [was] important to those of us who were involved in the program,” Gottlieb explained at a Senate Subcommittee hearing years later. In truth, CIA spooks and scientists alike were tripping their brains out. “I didn’t want to leave it,” one CIA agent said of his first LSD trip “I felt I would be going back to a place where I wouldn’t be able to hold on to this kind of beauty.”
But as covert LSD experiments proliferated, things down at CIA headquarters began to get out of hand. “LSD favors the prepared mind,” wrote Dr. Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and early LSD devotee. Non-drug factors such as set and setting—a person’s mental state going into the experience and the surroundings in which the drug is taken—can make all the difference in reactions to a dose of LSD.
Frank Olson was a civilian biochemist working for the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. In another sub-project of MK-ULTRA code-named MK-NAOMI, the CIA had bankrolled SOD to produce and maintain vicious mutant germ strains capable of killing or incapacitating would-be victims. Olson’s specialty at Fort Detrick was delivering deadly diseases in sprays and aerosol emulsions.
Just before Thanksgiving in 1953, at a CIA retreat for a conference on biological warfare, Gottlieb slipped Olson a huge dose of LSD in an after-dinner liqueur. When Gottlieb revealed to the uproarious group that he’d laced the Cointreau, Olson suffered a psychotic snap. “You’re all a bunch of thespians!” Olson shouted at his fellow acid trippers, then spent a long night wandering around babbling to himself.
Back at Fort Detrick, Olson lapsed in and out of depression, began to have grave misgivings about his work, and believed the agency was out to get him Ten days later, he crashed through the tenth-floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York and plummeted to his death on the sidewalk below.
I don’t know if [Olson] jumped or he was pushed. They say he jumped…
“White had been testing the stuff in New York when that guy Olson went out the window and died,” Feldman said. “I don’t know if he jumped or he was pushed. They say he jumped. Anyway, that’s when they shut down the New York operation and moved it to San Francisco.” The Olson affair was successfully covered up by the CIA for over 20 years. White, who had been instrumental in the cover-up, was promoted to district supervisor.
Unfazed by the suicide of their colleague, the CIA’s acid enthusiasts were, in fact, more convinced of the value of their experiments. They would now focus on LSD as a potent new agent for offensive unconven-tional warfare. The drug-testing program resumed in the Bay Area under the cryptonyrn Operation Mid-night Climax. It was then that White hired Feldman.
Posing as Joe Capone, junk dealer and pimp, Feldman infiltrated the seamy North Beach criminal demimonde. “I always wanted to be a gangster,” Feldman told me. “So I was good at it. Before long, I had half a dozen girls working for me. One day, White calls me into his office. ‘Ike,’ he says, ‘you’ve been doing one hell of a job as an undercover man. Now I’m gonna give you another assignment. We want you to test these mind-bending drugs.’ I said, ‘Why the hell do you want to test mind-bending drugs?’ He said, ‘Have you ever heard of The Manchurian Candidate?’ I know about The Manchurian Candidate. In fact, I read the book. ‘Well,’ White said,‘that’s why we have to test these drugs, to find out if they can be used to brainwash people.’ He says, ‘If we can find outjust how good this stuff works, you’ll be doing a great deal for your country.’”
These days, Feldman takes offense at how his work has been charqcterized by former cops who knew him. “I was no pimp,” Feldman insisted. Yet he freely admitted that his role in Midnight Climax was to supply whores. “These cunts all thought I was a racketeer,” Feldman explained. He paid girls $50 to $100 a night to lure johns to a safe house apartment that White had set up on Telegraph Hill with funds provided by the CIA. Unsuspecting clients were served cocktails laced with powerful doses of LSD and other concoctions the CIA sent out to be tested.
“As George White once told me, ‘Ike, your best information outside comes from the whores and the junkies. If you treat a whore nice, she’ll treat you nice. If you treat a junkie nice, he’ll treat you nice.’ But sometimes, when people had information, there was only one way you could get it, If it was a girl, you put her tits in a drawer and slammed the drawer. If it was a guy, you took his cock and you hit it with a hammer. And they would talk to you. Now, with these drugs, you could get information without having to abuse people.”
The “pad,” as White called the CIA safe house, resembled a playboy’s lair, circa 1955. The walls were covered with Toulouse-Lautrec posters of French cancan dancers. In the cabinets were sex toys and photos of manacled women in black fishnet stockings and studded leather halters. White outfitted the place with elaborate bugging equipment, including four microphones disguised as electrical outlets that were connected to tape recorders hidden behind a false wall. While Feldman’s hookers served mind-altering cocktails and frolicked with the johns, White sat on a portable toilet behind the two-way mirror, sipping martinis, watching the experiments, and scribbling notes for his reports to the CIA.
“We tested this stuff they call the Sextender,” Feldman went on. “There was this Russian ship in the harbor. I had a couple of my girls pick up these Russian sailors and bring ’em back to the pad. White wanted to know all kinds of crap, but they weren’t talking. So we had the girls slip ’em this sex drug. It gets your dick up like a rat. Stays up for two hours. These guys went crazy. They fucked these poor girls until they couldn’t walk straight. The girls were complaining they couldn’t take any more screwing. But White found out what he wanted to know. Now this drug, what they call the Sextender, I understand it’s being sold to guys who can’t get a hard-on.”
One such drug, called papavarine, is injected directly into the penis with a half-inch needle containing about two raindrops’ worth of the medicine. “I tell [the men] to thrust it in like a bullfighter finishing off the bull,” said a San Antonio urologist in a recent report on the new therapies used to treat male impo-tence. “Dangers include injecting too much drug, so that an erection can last dangerously long and kill penile tissue.” The potions are not administered orally, as they were by the CIA, because the drug must affect only the penis and not the rest of the body. Drug companies are now working on a cream that can be rubbed directly into the penis before intercourse. Feldman claims we have the CIA to thank for these medical breakthroughs.
“White always wanted to try everything himself,” Feldman remembered. “Whatever drugs they sent out, it didn’t matter, he wanted to see how they worked on him before he tried them on anyone else. He always said he never felt a goddamn thing. He thought it was all bullshit. White drank so much booze, he couldn’t feel his fucking cock.
“This thing” — Feldman held up the fountain pen gas gun — “the boys in Washington sent it out and told us to test the gas. White says to me,’C’mon, Ike. Let’s go outside. I’ll shoot you with it, then you shoot me.” ‘Fuck that,’I said.‘You ain’t gonna shoot me with that crap.’ So we went outside and I shot George White with the gas. He coughed, his face turned red, his eyes started watering. He was choking. Turned out, that stuffwas the prototype for Mace.”
I asked Feldman if he’d ever met Sidney Gottlieb, the elusive scientist who was the brains behind MK-ULTRA. “Several times Sidney Gottlieb came out,” Feldman assured me. “I met Gottlieb at the pad, and at White’s office. White used to send me to the air-port to pick up Sidney and this other wacko, John Gittinger, the psychologist. Sidney was a nice guy. He was a fuckin’ nut. They were all nuts. I says, ‘You’re a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn, like me. What are you doing with these crazy cocksuckers? He had this black bag with him. He says, ‘This is my bag of dirty tricks.’ He had all kinds of crap in that bag. We took a drive over to Muir Woods out by Stinson Beach. Sidney says, ‘Stop the car.’ He pulls out a dart gun and shoots this big eucalyptus tree with a dart. Then he tells me, Come back in two days and check this tree.’ So we go back in two days, the tree was completely dead. Not a leaf left on it. Now that was the forerunner of Agent Orange.
“I went back and I saw White, and he says to me, ‘What do you think of Sidney?’ I said, ‘I think he’s a fuckin’ nut.’ White says,’Well, he may be a nut, but this is the program. This is what we do.’ White thought they were all assholes. He said, ‘These guys are running our Intelligence?’ but they sent George $2,000 a month for the pad, and as long as they paid the bills, we went along with the program.” Gottlieb, who now lives in Virginia, refused to be interviewed for this article.
“Another time, I come back to the pad and the whole joint is littered with these pipe cleaners,” Feldman went on. “I said, ‘Who’s smokin’ a pipe?’ Gittinger, one of those CIA nuts, was there with two of my girls. He had ’am explaining all these different sex acts, the different positions they knew for humping. Now he has them making these little figurines out of the pipe cleaners-men and women screwing in all these different positions. He was taking pictures of the figurines and writing a history of each one. These pipe cleaner histories were sent back to Washington.”
A stated goal of Project MK-ULTRA was to determine “if an individual can be trained to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily” while under the influence of various mind-control techniques, and then have no memory of the event later. Feldman told me that in the early ’60s, after the MK-ULTRA program had been around for over a decade, he was summoned to George White’s office. White and CIA director Allen Dulles were there.
“They wanted George to arrange to hit Fidel Castro,” Feldman said. “They were gonna soak his cigars with LSD and drive him crazy. George called me in because I had this whore, one of my whores was this Cuban girl and we were gonna send her down to see Castro with a box of LSD-soaked cigars.”
Dick Russell, author of a recent book on the Kennedy assassination titled The Man Who Knew Too Much, uncovers new evidence to support the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of MK-ULTRA. One of the CIA’s overseas locations for LSD and mindcontrol experiments was Atsugi Naval Air base in Japan where Oswald served as a Marine radar technician. Russell says that after his book was published, a former CIA counter-intelligence expert called him and said Oswald had been “viewed by the CIA as fitting the psychological profile of someone they were looking for in their MK-ULTRA program,” and that he had been mind-conditioned to defect to the USSR.
Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, while working as a horse trainer at the Santa Anita race track near Los Angeles, was introduced to hypnosis and the occult by a fellow groom with shadowy connections. Sirhan has always maintained he has no memory of the night he shot Kennedy,
One of the CIA’s mob contacts long suspected of involvement in John Kennedy’s assassination was the Las Vegas capo mafioso John Roselli. Roselli had risen to prominence in the Mob by taking over the Annenberg-Ragen wire service at Santa Anita, where Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, sold a handicapper’s tip sheet. Ike Feldman told me Roselli was one of White’s many informants.
“On more than one occasion, White sent me to the airport to pick up John Roselli and bring him to the office,” said Feldman. Roselli was originally from Chicago, where White had served as District Supervisor of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1945 through 1947. Following a big opium smuggling bust in 1947, Jack Ruby was picked up and hauled in for interrogation, then later let off the hook by none other than White. Federal Bureau of Narcotics files indicate Jack Ruby was yet another of White’s legion stool pigeons.
The connections between MK-mind-control experiments, the proliferation of the drug culture, Mob/CIA assassination plots, and the emergence of new, lethal viruses go on and on. Fort Detrick in Maryland, where Frank Olson worked experimenting with viral strains (such as the deadly microbes Sidney Gottlieb personally carried to Africa in an aborted attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba), was recently the locale of a near disaster involving an outbreak of a newly emerged virus. The event was chronicled in a lengthy article published in the New Yorker.
Though the New Yorker writer did not make the connection between Fort Detrick, SOD, Frank Olson, and MK-NAOMI, he told of a number of monkeys who all died of a highly infectious virus known as Ebola that first appeared in 55 African villages in 1976, killing nine out of ten of its victims. Some epidemiologists believe AIDS originated in Africa. Feldman claimed the CIA used Africa as a staging ground to test germ warfare because “no one gave a goddamn about any of this crap over there.”
The MK-ULTRA program, the largest domestic operation ever mounted by the CIA, continued well into the ’70s. According to Feldman and other CIA experts, it is still continuing today under an alphabet soup of different cryptonyms. Indeed, one ex-agent told me it would be foolish to think that a program as fruitful as MK-ULTRA would be discontinued. When the agency comes under scrutiny, it simply changes the name of the program and continues unabated.
The public first learned of MK-ULTRA in 1977, with the disclosure of thousands of classified documents and CIA testimony before a Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy. Ike Feldman was subpoenaed and appeared on a panel of witnesses, but the senators failed to ask him a single question. Sidney Gottlieb, complaining of a heart condition, testified at a special semi-public session. He delivered a prepared statement and admitted to having destroyed perhaps one set of files. Another set was turned over to Senate investigators. The full extent of the CIA’s activities under the rubric of MK-ULTRA may never be known.
George White retired from the Narcotics Bureau in 1965. The last ten years of his life, he lived in Stinson Beach, California, where, known as Colonel White, he went on the wagon for a few years and became chief of the volunteer fire department. Local residents remember him once turning in four kids for smoking pot, and in another incident, spraying a preacher and his congregation with water at a beach picnic. He was also known to terrorize his wealthier neighbors by driving his jeep across their lawns. After White’s death, his widow donated his papers, including diaries, to an electronic surveillance museum. As information on MK-ULTRA entered the public domain, people who had known White only in his official FBN capacity were stunned to learn of his undercover role as Morgan Hall.
Ike Feldman, kept alive by a pacemaker, lives with his wife in a quiet suburban Long Island community where he tends his garden and oversees a number of business interests. According to George Belk, a former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency in New York, Feldman quit the drug agency following a probe by the internal security division. “Feldman was the sort of guy who didn’t have too many scruples,” said Dan Casey, a retired FBN agent who worked with Feldman in San Francisco. “For him, the ends justified the means.” A DEA flack confirmed Feldman “resigned under a cloud” at a time when a number of agents came under suspicion for a variety of offenses, none having to do with secret drug-testing programs. Feldman asserts he still works for the CIA on a contract basis, mostly in the Far East and Korea.
On the day of our last interview, over lunch at a restaurant in Little Italy, Feldman told me the CIA had contacted him and asked him why he was talking to me.
“Fuck them,” Feldman said. “I do what I want. I never signed any goddamn secrecy agreement.”
I asked him why he decided to talk with me. “There’s too much bullshit in the world,” Feldman said. “The world runs on bullshit.
“To make a long story short,” he said, using one of his favorite verbal segues, “I want the truth of this to be known so that people understand that what we did was good for the country.”
We ambled down the street to a Chinese grocer, where Feldman carried on a lengthy conversation with the owner in Chinese. A couple of young girls, tourists, wanted to have their picture taken with Feldman. “Are you a gangster?” they asked.
“No,” Feldman replied with a wave of his cigar, “I’m a goddamn CIA agent.”
As we walked on, I asked Feldman to explain how his work had been helpful to the country.
“I learned that most of this stuff was necessary for the United States,” he said, “and even though it may have hurt somebody in the beginning, in the long run it was important. As long as it did good for the country.”
I pressed him. “How so?”
“Well, look,” Feldman gestured with his cigar, “We’re goddamn free, aren’t we?”
SCIENTIST WAS ‘KILLED TO STOP HIM REVEALING DEATH SECRETS’; SO DID CHENEY AND RUMSFELD COVER UP A CIA ASSASSINATION?
London Sunday Express
By Gordon Thomas
US Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld have been sensationally accused of covering up the “murder” of a former army scientist.
In 1953, Frank Olson, a key member of the CIA’s brainwashing programme MKULTRA, “plunged” from a New York hotel window.
He had allegedly threatened to reveal the CIA involvement in “terminal experiments” in post-war Germany and in Korea during the Korean War.
For almost half a century, his son Eric, a psychologist, has insisted his father as murdered on orders from the highest level. Now, California history professor Kathryn Olmstead says she has found documents written by Cheney and Rumsfeld which show how far the White House went to conceal information about Olson’s death.
She says Olson made anthrax and other biological weapons and that part of his work had been at Britain’s Porton Down Research Centre.
Eric Olson believes that Cheney and Rumsfeld were later given the task in the 1970s of covering up the details of his father’s death.
At that time Rumsfeld was White House Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford. Dick Cheney was a White House assistant.
Among the papers found by Professor Olmstead is one that allegedly states: “Dr Olson’s job was so sensitive that it is highly unlikely that we would submit relevant evidence.”
In a memo, Cheney allegedly acknowledges that: “The Olson lawyers will seek to explore all the circumstances of Dr Olson’s employment, as well as those concerning his death. In any trial, it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons and any settlement or judgement reached thereafter could be perceived as money paid to cover up the activities of the CIA.”
Frank Olson’s family received $ 750,000 (then about GBP 400,000) to settle their claims in 1976.
Both the offices of Rumsfeld and Cheney have declined to comment on their role concerning the alleged coverup but, from his home outside Washington, Eric Olson said that the documents involving Rumsfeld and Cheney show they “have questions to answer”.
He added: “The documents show the lengths to which the government was trying to cover up the truth.”
However, CIA spokesman Paul Nowack insisted: “The CIA fully cooperated in allowing the truth to surface. Tens of thousands of documents were released”.
Eric Olson said his father was murdered to cover up his ultra-secret research in Korea and Europe.
He said: “My father was among scientists studying the use of LSD and other drugs to enhance interrogations as Cold War tensions ran high.”
He contends that, in the final days of his life, his father became “morally distraught” over his work and decided to quit.
Mercury News reporter Frederick Tulksy said: “In 1993, Eric Olson arranged for his father’s body to be unearthed and examined by James Starrs, a forensic scientist. Starrs concluded that Frank Olson had probably been struck on the head and then thrown out of the hotel window.”
In late November 1953, Frank Olson, then 43, joined a group of government officials at a conference at Deep Creek Lodge in western Maryland. For days afterward, Olson was withdrawn. His son, Eric, says his father told his wife that he intended to quit his job.
Frank Olson did not quit. On November 23, he went to New York and visited LSD researcher Harold A Abramson.
Olson went back to New York on November 28 and checked into the Statler Hotel. He was scheduled to enter a sanitarium the next day.
Early in the morning of November 29, Frank Olson went through the window of the hotel room he was sharing with colleague Robert Lashbrook. Lashbrook told the police he was awakened by the sound of breaking glass.
In 1975, a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller issued a report on CIA abuses, Days later, the family was invited to the White House to meet President Ford. He assured them they would be given all information about what happened to Frank Olson.
This week, the Olsons’ attorney David Rudovsky, of Philadelphia, said: “It now appears that was not the case.”
“Justice Delayed”
Final section of new Postscript to:
Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans
by Jonathan Moreno
Professor of Biomedical Ethics, University of Virginia
In Chapter Seven I chronicled some of the outrageous activities of the national security agencies during the 1950s. Perhaps the most famous single case of CIA “mind control” experiments was that of Frank Olson, the scientist who has long been said to have committed suicide by jumping out of a New York City hotel room window after being given LSD without his knowledge. That, at least, is the story that the public has come to know and that is recounted in this book.
However, in the fall of 1999 the A&E cable television network aired a program that reiterated previously broadcast doubts about the official story and also offered the most comprehensive alternative theory yet presented. The program noted that the New York City district attorney’s office has reopened the 1953 case as a homicide investigation. The D.A. was partly influenced by the findings of a forensic pathologist from George Washington University who examined Olson’s remains and concluded that Olson suffered a blow on the head with a blunt object prior to his fall. Just as importantly, the pathologist did not find the facial lacerations that had been recorded by the coroner in 1953 (though the skin was intact upon exhumation of the remains), though cuts would have been expected from a violent thrust through glass. Others interviewed on the program disputed the likelihood of suicide from a closed window with the shade drawn, and in fact Olson has spoken calmly to his wife on the telephone a few hours before. But why would a quiet scientist like Frank Olson be murdered?
In the spring of 2000 Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, called me in my office at the University of Virginia. We talked about the standard account of his father’s death and he shared with me his theory, one that will be tested by the New York district attorney. According to Eric Olson, his father was eliminated because he posed a threat to the agency’s top secret drug experiments, including some that may have been conducted abroad. Frank Olson, it seems, was not only an experimental subject but also engaged as a researcher in the CIA’s Special Operations Division. As a researcher Olson himself used animals in experiments and perhaps witnessed the use of humans as well. Whatever he saw, perhaps in U.S.-occupied West Germany, seems to have greatly disturbed him. As it happens, Eric Olson told me, the CIA’s declassified assassination manual for 1953 specifies a faked suicidal jump as a preferred means of elimination.
I asked Eric Olson for the image that came to his mind after nearly five decades of life with one of the greatest burdens a person can have, the unsolved mystery of his father’s death. “I have long thought that accounts of my father’s death are very like H.C. Andersen’s story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ Olson said. “After the perceptual cloud is punctured and the emperor is seen to be stark naked one wonders how the illusion of fine garb could have been sustained so long.” Olson continued:
“Neither version of the story of my father’s ‘suicide’— neither the one from 1953 in which he ‘fell or jumped’ out a hotel room window for no reason, nor the 1975 version in which he dives through a closed window in a nine-day delayed LSD flashback while his hapless CIA escort either looks on in dismay or is suddenly awakened by the sound of crashing glass (both versions were peddled) — made any sense. On the other hand both versions deflected attention from the most troubling issue inherent in the conduct of the kind of BW and mind-control research in which my father and his colleagues were engaged.
“The moral of my father’s murder is that a post-Nuremberg world places the experimenters as well as the research subjects (my father was both simultaneously) at risk in a new way, particularly in countries that claim the moral high ground. Maintenance of absolute secrecy in the new ethical context implies that potential whistle blowers can neither be automatically discredited nor brought to trial for treason. Nor can casualties arising from experiments with unacknowledged weapons be publicly displayed. The only remaining option is some form of ‘disposal.’ This places the architects of such experiments in a position more like that of Mafia dons than traditional administrators of military research. The only organizational exit is a horizontal one. In the face of this implication the CIA enforcers of the early 1950’s did not flinch, though historians along with the general public have continued to see the state in all its finery.”
My conversations with Eric Olson were one of two experiences that brought his father’s case home and the CIA’s decades-old experiments home to me after Undue Risk was first published. A history devoted specifically to American biological weapons program, The Biology of Doom, also appeared for the first time in 1999. Its author, Ed Regis, is like me a former philosophy professor. Reading Regis’ book I learned that Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA spymaster responsible for their chemical warfare program, including the LSD experiments, died at the University of Virginia Hospital. His death occurred while I was putting the finishing touches on Undue Risk, and his deathbed was steps from my office in the medical school.
Later a second irony occurred to me. Gottlieb’s privacy was scrupulously protected by my physician colleagues, his doctors, as it should have been. They afforded him the moral consideration and human dignity that he seems not to have granted those who were unfortunate enough to be unwitting participants in his experiments. Yet I am more hopeful than ever that efforts to quash the truth about some of the most closely held secrets of cold war experiments, including the circumstances surrounding Frank Olson’s death, will ultimately fail. The only way to be sure is to demand that federal officials open the files on biological and chemical experiments, just as they did on radiation experiments. The New York district attorney’s handling of the Olson case can light the way for the rest of government, but only if all of us refuse to forget the victims of undue risk.
Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Biomedical Ethics
Box 348 Health Sciences Center
Charlottesville, Va. 22908
§ Why was Robeson’s health such a concern to the government, and why is the FBI’s information on it still being withheld?
§ Was the CIA implicated in my father’s 1961 “suicide attempt”?
§ Did the CIA, in collusion with the British intelligence service, orchestrate his subjection to “mind depatterning”?
THE CIA’S ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST
By Tad Szulc
What was in the minds of the men who for two decades pursued the dream of a mind-control drug? And how did they see the practical and ethical issues?
“LSD -25 is the most potent psychoagent available at the present time. Trace quantities of LSD-25 create serious mental confusion of the manic and schizophrenic type and render the mind temporarily susceptible to suggestion. … But there are as yet insufficient data to confirm or deny its usefulness for eliciting true and accurate statements from subjects under its influence. Because LSD-25 is colorless, odorless and tasteless, it could possibly be used clandestinely for the contamination of food and water, although the data on its stability in solution are conflicting. Since the effect of the drug is temporary in contrast to the fatal nerve agents, there are important strategic advantages for its use in certain operations…. Of the other known psychogenic drugs, mescaline produces reactions that are the most similar to those of LSD-25…. Although no Soviet data are available on LSD-25, it must be assumed that the scientists of the USSR are thoroughly cognizant of the strategic importance of this powerful drug and are capable of producing it at any time.”
For a change, the Central Intelligence Agency was onto something before most of the rest of the world had discovered it. The year was 1955 and the analysis was from a report of the agency’s Office of Scientific Intelligence titled “Strategic Medical Significance of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25).”
Some researchers had already begun to experiment with LSD on their own in those days, without any help from the CIA. But the drug cult of the 1960s was far in the future, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were only a couple of struggling young assistant professors. Supplies of the powerful hallucinogen were not even available on the U.S. market, and little was known about its effects on personality and behavior (see box, page 101). Indeed, it’s not unreasonable to speculate that the CIA-sponsored research with LSD during the 1950s in private institutions and hospitals contributed in some modest way to the drug culture-by turning many people on to the drug. As described in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Ken Kesey first took the drug in 1959 as an experimental subject at the Stanford University Medical School-one of the institutions recently notified by the CIA that it was a site for research associated with the mind-control program.
America’s intelligence chiefs were interested in some kind of “truth drug” as far back as 1943, when the wartime Office of Strategic Services ~OSS~ experimented with marijuana. But the CIA’s interest in drugs and behavioral research was, during the 1950s, awakened by reports that the Soviet Union had made giant strides in developing chemical compounds for brainwashing. Government officials had been impressed by the “confessions” of Hungary’s late Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty during his trial in 1949—CIA specialists were convinced he had been brainwashed with drugs—and with the apparent brainwashing of American prisoners of war in North Korea.
Bad trip: Artist’s portrayal of the suicide of biochemist Frank Olson, who jumped from a New York hotel room at 2:30 A.M. on November 28, 1953, nine days after the CIA gave him LSD. Foreground, Dr. Robert Lashbrook, the CIA scientist who brought Olson to New York to seek treatment. (Illustrations by Haruo Miyauchi)
Under the circumstances, the agency was fearful that its own agents could be brainwashed, and in 1950, it embarked on “defensive” research to find ways of protecting them. What CIA scientists eagerly sought at the outset was a drug that might neutralize the suspected Russian compounds and prevent agents from revealing information. Taking shape as it did in the early 1950s, when the Cold War was the central concern of U.S. foreign policy, the “defensive” research was expanded almost overnight to encompass “offensive” work as well-the testing and development of drugs such as LSD that the CIA could use for its interrogations of enemy personnel.
During almost a quarter of a century, the CIA conducted or sponsored at least 419 secret drug- testing projects. The ex-periments were part of a broader pro-gram that also explored other means ofmind and behavior control, such as hyp-nosis and even implantation of electrodes in the brain. Although the agency tested compounds ranging from mes-caline to extracts from poisonous mushrooms, the key drug was LSD-25, a synthetic variation on a c ompound found in a fungus. The tests were con-ducted at a cost of at least $25 million at 86 United States and Canadian hospi-tals, prisons, universities, and military installations, as well as the agency’s own “safe houses” in Washington, New York, and San Francisco.
The subjects of the test were, at first, largely CIA volunteers-and, indeed, some of the agency’s top scientists took LSD to see how it aff ected their intellectual faculties. But eventually the agency found other subjects among narcotics addicts under treatment, federal prisoners, terminal-cancer patients in charity wards, college students, and fun-seeking “johns” entrapped at $100 a head by CIA-controlled prostitutes. just how much they were all told about LSD before they were given the drug remains unclear, but, by the agency’s own admission, many were “unwitting” subjects. Although ethical standards for such experiments were considerably murkier then than they are now, the CIA launched its LSD research on unwitting subjects even though the U.S. was a party to an international understanding that, in effect, banned such activities. The understanding known as the Nuremberg Principles was approved by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1946-with the U.S. voting in favor-as a formal condemnation of war crimes that included the medical experiments performed by Nazi doctors on human prisoners.
“War room”: In the years of projects BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the planners met in what was known as the war room. The program was the creation of gung-ho young operatives who later rose to top positions, among them Richard Helms (lower right), who became CIA director.
Before Richard Helms left his post as CIA director in 1973, a large portion of the agency’s records of its mindcontrol program was ordered destroyed But a good deal of the story is detailed in Congressional testimony and thousands of pages of documents released in recent months under the Freedom of Information Act. While the general outlines of the program are by now generally known, the documents-which include descriptions of the tests themselves, memos from top CIA officials tracing the evolution of the projects, evaluations of the results-provide an interesting, close-up look at just what the CIA wanted to find out and to accomplish, andhow a defensive program turned into an offensive one that used many innocent citizens as guinea pigs.
Most important, the story raises ethical questions that are important today. One-fourth of the American scientists who were approached by the CIA agreed to work for it, according to one of the agency’s documents. While some were no doubt pursuing harmless research, others were working on projects that Could have been used for manipulative purposes, with top-secret security clearances and under the cover of “pure medical research.” What does their complicity tell us about the ethical standards of American scientists?
The Birth of BLUEBIRD
The man whom the CIA documents credit with inspiring the program is Dr. L. Wilson Greene of the Army Chemical Corps, who had long urged the United States to embark upon psychochemical warfare. The basic program, called BLUEBIRD,and soon renamed ARTICHOKE (the code names have no known significance), was the creation of a small group of young, gung-ho CIA operators, former members of the OSS, whom time rose to key positions in the, agency. One of these was Richard Helms, then special assistant for clandestine operations to CIA director Walter Bedell Smith. Another was James Angleton, then chief of the agency’s “Staff A,” the forerunner of the Counterintelligence Staff that he ran until his forced retirement in 1974.Among CIA officials with a scientific background present at the birth of BLUEBIRD were Dr. Marshall Chadwell, assistant director for scientific intelligence, Colonel James H. Drum, deputy chief of the Technical Services Staff, and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a biochemist who was to become th e central figure in all the subsequent CIA mind- and-behavior-modifi cation endeavors.
Established by the CIA on April 2, 1951, Project BLUEBIRD Was supposed to invent techniques for what became known as “special interrogations.” By mid-year, however, BLUEBIRD had begun to spread its wings. A document issued on June 11 described the essential elements in the program as “physiological research leading to a better understanding of the constituent factors in human behavior” and “physiological and pharmacological research leading to a better understanding of the action or effectiveness of various agents used in connection with efforts to control human behavior.”
Soon a list of 37 “physiological agents” was drawn up for possible use in interrogations. It ranged from amphetamines and cocaine, to cannabis, mescaline, morphine, pentobarbital, and scopolamine. Although lysergic acid had been discovered in 1938, and the effects of LSD on the mind were first observed in 1943, the CIA seemed unaware of it in 1951: it did not make the BLUEBIRD list.
Shortly thereafter, however, BLUEBIRD acquired a new aim: a memo on the program’s goals from Dr. Sidney Gottlieb spoke vaguely about the possibilities of “inducing a person to perform acts (short or long term) which he normally could not be expected to perform.” The CIA had begun to think seriously about behavior control,
BLUEBIRD became ARTICHOKE on August 20,1951, and a few months later an internal memo of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence suggested a more specific aim for the program. At this point, the agency seemed to be looking for a method of inducing amnesia in persons from whom information had been obtained under the effect of special drugs or hypnotism. The idea was that foreign agents should never remember that they had talked to CIA interrogators. “It remains the dream of the interested agencies,” the memo of January 25, 1952, said, “that a drug is forthcoming that can be given to a person orall , without his knowledge, that will result in his revealing anything the interested party would like to know, and the person would have complete amnesia for the event.”
In the same report, the agency expressed interest in hypnotism as a related tool, observing that “there is ample evidence that unethical actions can be accomplished through the use of hypnosis in our controlled situations.” It recommended the recruitment of a New York hypnotist who “tends toward unscrupulous use of this technique.” It declared that “it has been proven… that a hypnotized person can be made to lie to the polygraph through direct hypnotic control or through posthypnotic suggestion,” (Most professionals experienced in hypnotism would deny there is any evidence it has these powers.)
The report also complained that the CIA Security Office was being too strict with ARTICHOKE operators, denying, for example, the permission to use federal prisoners for their experiments on the grounds that “criticism of the government interest in such activities might, if discovered, result in irreparable political repercussions.”
In February, the new coordinator of ARTICHOKE, Dr. Marshall Chadwell, proposed the establishment of “an integrated CIA program for the development of special interrogations or other techniques for the purpose of controlling an individual without his knowledge.” CIA director Smith accepted Dr. Chadwell’s proposal, and a month later, the CIA set up a “small testing facility” at its downtown headquarters in Washington, D.C. Sometime in 1952, the agency began testing LSD on individuals, presumably CIA volunteers. But a new ARTICHOKE report was not promising as far as LSD was concerned. It noted that “while definite results have been achieved in producing confusion among subjects treated with minute quantities, these items have not yet shown usefulness for interrogation purposes.”
LSD was not yet ready for testing in interrogations, but the agency did report some success in causing amnesia after interrogations, through a combination of hypnosis and sodium pentathol. In June, ARTICHOKE dispatched a team to West Germany to test new interrogation methods on two Soviet intelligence agents suspected of “being doubled,” that is, pretending to defect while actually working for the KGB. The two agents, who claimed to be working for the West, were examined under a “psychiatric-medical cover” that is, they were given a trumped-up excuse for the interrogations.
With medication and hypnosis, one agent was put in a trance that he held for about One hour and 40 minutes; subsequently, the documents say, total amnesia was produced by posthypnotic suggestion. The second agent went into a deep hypnotic trance with only light medication and was interrogated for well over an hour. The ARTICHOKE report says only a partial amnesia was achieved. But in a second test on the agent, in which “the ARTICHOKE technique of using straight medication” was employed, the agency obtained highly successful results during a two-hour and-15-minute interrogation which included a “remarkable regression.” During this regression, the subject evidently relived certain events in his life, some dating back 15 years, while totally accepting the case officer and interpreter “as an old, trusted and beloved personal friend whom the subject had known in years past in Georgia, USSR.” The report goes on to say that total amnesia was apparently achieved for the second test. (It does not disclose whether the CIA ever learned if the two Russians were double agents or not.)
The drugs used in the interrogation were sodium pentathol alone, or sodium pentathol together with Desoxyn, a stimulant. The team reported that the tests “demonstrated conclusively the effectiveness of the combined chemical-hypnotic technique” Now the way was opened for the use of LSD in interrogations.
MK-ULTRA-A Turning Point
Meanwhile, a CIA scientist, working under deep cover, had returned from a trip to Europe in July 1952 with a recommendation that the drug be employed in chemical warfare against entire populations. The scientist wrote that “our own current work contains the strong suggestion that LSD-25 will produce mass hysteria (unaccountable laughter, anxiety, eth.). While our studies so far have been carried out in isolated individuals, one at a time, it is well known that hysteria is compounded when several vulnerable individuals are together. The lysergic-acid derivative can produce a temporary state of severe imbalance, hysteria, insanity…. Conceivably, this might be an unusually merciful agent of warfare: temporarily nullifying the individual’s effectiveness, but not permanently damaging him.”
With all this in mind, the CIA decided to broaden ARTICHOKE. A memorandum circulated in September 1952 announced that the scope of the project was “research and testing to arrive at, means of control rather than the more limited concept embodied in ‘special interrogations.”’ At a subsequent meeting of the ARTICHOKE steering committee, much time was taken up with discussions of LSD and on the possibility of concentrating on “certain facilities in the United States as testing grounds for new ideas, experiments, etc., particularly using criminals and the criminally insane.”
But the great turning point in the history of the CIA program came in April 1953 with the launching of the equally top-secret Project MK-ULTRA, which was apparently intended as a parallel funding mechanism for ARTICHOKE. In its subsequent attempts at reconstructing All these events, the agency was unable to explain why exactly MK-ULTRA was created; it became completely intertwined with ARTICHOKE, although it very quickly came up with some very extraordinary ideas of its own.
The guiding force behind MK-ULTRA was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who had just become chief of the Chemical Division of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff. Remembered by his colleagues for his forcefulness as well as for his marked stuttering while excited, Gottlieb came closest to the image of the sinister scientist in the whole strange cast of agency characters. He played this role for 20 years, until his forced resignation and a two-year disappearance in Australia after CIA scandals began breaking out in 1973.
The bespectacled researcher was a passionate believer in psychochemical warfare and dedicated his time to LSD testing, highly sophisticated experiments in hypnosis, and the search for hallucinatory materials in exotic mushrooms and flowers. When the agency plotted the assassination of Congo leftist Patrice Lumumba in 1960, it was Gottlieb who personally carried the poison to the Congo and hand-delivered it to the agency’s chief of station.
No sooner had MK-ULTRA been established than Gottlieb proceeded to organize 13 subprojects that called for the support of LSD research for the purposes of disturbance of memory, discrediting by aberrant behavior, altering sex patterns, eliciting information, enhancing suggestibility, and creating dependence. He ordered the preparation of an operational field manual on the uses of LSD. He personally handled contracts with outside institutions, approving every payment, no matter how small.
He even recruited a well-known New York magician, the late John Mulholland, to prepare a top-secret manual on techniques for surreptitiously slipping LSD and other drugs into the drinks of unsuspecting persons. The idea occurred to Gottlieb after his field agents reported difficulties in handling LSD without detection. He agreed to pay Mulholland $3,000 for his efforts, and was greatly pleased with his discovery of the magician. But while Mulholland prepared a detailed memo on what the manual would cover, there’s no evidence in the CIA documents that he ever turned it in.
Sleight of hand: When its field agents reported problems in handling LSD for secret tests, the CIA hired a New York magician, John Mulholland, for advice on how to I . improve their skills, He was to prepare a manual of tricks for slipping drugs into the drinks of unsuspecting test subjects.
Another Gottlieb subproject under MK-ULTRA conducted experiments with LAE, a lysergic-acid derivative, for the purpose of inducing depersonalization and a schizophrenia-like condition in test subjects. Gottlieb referred to the result in these cases as “reversible chemical lobotomy”—suggesting that the effects wear off. There were 429 tests of this type reported on normal and psychotic individuals in the first year of MK-ULTRA. (As in other such tests mentioned in the CIA documents, there was no indication of where the test subjects came from and whether they were “witting” or “unwitting.”) Still another MKULTRA subproject called for a psychological analysis of the effects of LSD on 220 college students who were tested in 1953.
Only one problem seemed to slow down Gottlieb’s ambitious drug experiments: the agency couldn’t get enough LSD. The drug was manufactured only by the Sandoz company in Switzerland. The CIA was able to secretly buy small amounts from Sandoz, but this was not considered sufficient. The agency kept worrying, moreover, that the Swiss were also exporting the drug to the Sovier Union.
Gottlieb therefore set up another subproject to search for new supplies of LSD and other rare drugs in theU.S. and abroad. A Gottlieb memo in 1953 stated that MK-ULTRA Subproject 6 “is designed to develop a reliable source of lysergic acid derivatives within the U.S., as opposed to our present complete depen upon [DELETED I sources, and in addition, it aims to extend the isolation and testing program of the hypnoti c nat- products from the Rivea species of plants obtained from [DELETED].”
Gottlieb failed to explain it in his memo, but seeds of the Rivea plant (its full name is Rivea corymbosa), when ingested in quantity, produce nausea, digestive upset, hallucinations, loss of motor control, and, finally, coma. He obviously knew, however, that lysergic acid monoethylamide can be isolated from Rivea seeds and turned into LSD.
CIA “Guinea Pigs”
While Gottlieb was looking for better sources of LSD, the CIA’s ARTICHOKE committee developed concern that for-agency personnel might, Lill &I t h e influence of drugs, reveal top-secret information to outsiders. According to the minutes of a committee meeting held in July 1953, one of the participants stated that “some individuals in the Agency had to know tremendous amounts of information and if any way could be found to produce amnesias for this type of information-for instance, after the individual had left the Agency-it would be a remarkable thing.”
The speaker then stated that “the need for amnesias was particularly great in operations work.” He was assured by two of his colleagues that work was continually being done in an effort to produce controlled amnesias by various means.
One series of tests on CIA employees was designed to see whether LSD could i break the so-called “pentathol block.” During interrogations, captured agents were often given sodium pentathol-or “truth serum” sometimes combined with hypnosis, as in the case of the Soviet “double agents,” in an effort to get them to disclose secrets. But intelligence services discovered that they could “condition” their agents against revealing information under the influence of the drug by giving them doses of it themselves.
A former CIA official reported in an interview that he was given LSD 21 times for this purpose at one of the agency’s cover facilities in Washington. Tic was never given a psychiatri c examination, and after the last test, he suffered within 24 hours what he described as an LSD “relapse,” Driving his car i that day, he experienced a major “loss of coherence.” He lost all control and found himself in the wreckage of the vehicle after it turned over several times on a Washington parkway.
But the greatest shock in these LSD experiments came when the CIA learned that one of its subjects committed suicide nine days after ingesting the drug. The victim was Dr. Frank R. Olson, a 43-year-old civilian biochemist employed by the Army Medical Corps a tFort Detrick, Maryland. According to a report by Colonel Sheffield Edwards Olson had participated in an LSD-test’ ing session on the evening of November 19, 1953. Also present were Gottlieb, 1 two CIA scientists-a man named Hughes and Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook and four members of the Army’s Chemi cal Corps Special Operations team.
Gottlieb and Lashbrook took the drug thernselves. Colonel Edwards reported that the men had assembled at a twostory log cabin in the Deer Creek Lake area of Fort Detrick. He wrote that “on Thursday evening, it was decided to experiment with the drug LSD, and for the members present to administer the drug to themselves to ascertain the effect a clandestine application would have on a meeting or conference.” The report asserted that “Gottlieb stated a ‘very small dose’ of LSD was placed in a bottle of Cointreau,” and that afterward the group was “boisterous and laughing, and they could not continue the meeting or engage in sensible conversation.”
Olson was told that he had swallowed LSD about 20 minutes after drinking some Cointreau. He killed himself nine days later by jumping out the window of New York’s Starlet Hotel at 2:30 A.M. on Saturday, November 28. He had been brought to New York by Lashbrook to be treated for an alleged psychiatric disturbance by the CIA’s principal secret LSD consultant, Dr. Harold A. Abramson, a highly respected physician who was then head of the Allergy Clinic at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York.
It remains unclear why Olson was the only one to be seriously affected by the LSD dose. Subsequent CIA memos claimed that he had previously suffered from “suicidal tendencies” and that LSD had simply triggered his suicide. Colonel Edwards reported that “Gottlieb reiterated many times that outside of the boisterous effect and the inability to think properly, LSD has no harmful or permanently injurious effects.”
Outside Contractors
None of the men in the log cabin had undergone medical or psychiatric examinations before taking the drug, and Gottlieb was reprimanded by the new ClA director, Allen Dulles, for failure to take precautions. For a while, indeed, it looked as if the CIA flirtation with LSD was over. According to an official reI port, Gottlieb’s immediate supervisor, Dr. Willis Gibbons, chief of the Technical Services Staff, had impounded all LSD material at CIA headquarters and locked it in a safe next to his own desk. The report added that “Dr. Gibbons stated that he is stopping any LSD tests which may have been instituted under CIA auspices.”
Although all outside contractors I were to be notified of Gibbons’ ban, the testing nonetheless went on. This was particularly true at the Addiction Research Center at the U.S. Public Health Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, whose director, Dr. Harris Isbell, had been experimenting with LSD on federal prisoners and his patients, with secret CIA sponsorship, for nearly two years before Olson died.
Dr. Isbell was among the group of distinguished American scientists who had enthusiastically embarked on studies under CIA contracts. His principal responsibilities had been research to find a synthetic substitute for codeine (the government feared the U.S. might be cut off from all its usual sources of opium). But Dr. Isbell’s report for the first quarter of 1954 noted that clinical studies at his center were also concerned with “intoxication with diethylamide of lysergic acid.” In his quarterly report to the CIA, he claimed new insights, including an evaluation of whether the drug’s effects varied according to race, age, and social and economic status: “We have now studied the subjective changes induced by LSD-25 in more than 50 former narcotic addicts. The symptoms observed appear to be identical with those observed in groups of non-addicts or for different composition with respect to race, age, social and economic status, and personality types…. The effects of LSD-25 appear to be specific and are not related to any of the factors mentioned above. This is a matter of great interest, since the subjective effects induced by LSD-25 have been studied more intensively and more thoroughly in a greater diversity of populations than any other drug with which we are familiar, including morphine and alcohol.”
LSD, it appears from CIA documents, was also given at about the same time to cancer patients and diabetics at a Washington hospital under an agency contract. This was one of Gottlieb’s MK-ULTRA subprojects and it was concerned with “toxic delirium, uremic coma and cerebral toxicity from poisoning.” Cancer and diabetic patients were given “chemical compounds” in order to “study the eff ect on mental function of large doses of the compound.” The document, which has heavy deletions, does not specifically mention LSD as the drug in these tests, but a former CIA official familiar with this particular program said privately that “it couldn’t have been anything else.”
Of course, we do not know if LSD had adverse effects on these patients; indeed, some dying patients today take LSD voluntarily, to experience the powerful visions that it stimulates in their final days. No doubt, Isbell’s prisoners and addicts were “volunteers,” but the documents do not tell us anything about what they were told before the experiments and whether they were given psychiatric examinations. Isbell has not made himself available for questioning on these and other points.
LSD Breakthrough
Whatever restraints on LSD tests had been imposed by the Olson death seem to have been abandoned when the agency received the electrifying news, in October 1954, that Eli Lilly & Company had succeeded in synthesizing the drug in its laboratories. This was the breakthrough the agency had been awaiting for three years; now it had access to all the LSD money could buy.
It was judged to be so important that a special memorandum on the subject was rushed to CIA director Dulles on October 26. The CIA clandestine services had immediately concluded that now LSD could be employed not only in testing but also in actual intelligence operations, for reasons given in the memo to Dulles: “Hitherto, LSD could not be considered seriously as a candidate Chemical Warfare agent for overt use. This was due to two factors: a) until recently only volatile liquids could be disseminated in a suitable fashion in bulk. LSD is a solid. LSD can now be produced in quantity and recent technical developments make it possible to disseminate solids in an effective manner.”
At this point, the matter was considered so important that the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence prepared its bulky top-secret study, “Strategic Medical Significance of Lysergic Acid Diethylamidc (LSD-25),” which was circulated to only seven senior officials besides Dulles. The study offered the best rationale to date for tests on humans. The drug had important strategic advantages. It was assumed that Russian scientists were aware of it. National security might be at stake.
As far back as April 1953, for example, a special CIA committee running the secret drug program had requested a “large number of bodies” for testing mind-affecting compounds, expressing the belief that a great many American scientists would be willing and anxious to carry out the experiments. In 1955, the CIA concluded that tests in a controlled environment-at the agency and in hospitals and prisons-were no longer sufficient, and, to make sense, they had to be conducted in “normal social situations.”
All along, Gottlieb had been trying to persuade his CIA superiors that experiments on unwitting subjects were necessary. He explained it thus: “One of the difficulties of determining explicitly the effect of the drug itself is that the subject and the observer are both conscious of the fact that an experiment is being performed. It is hoped in the next year that subjects… who are essentially normal from a psychiatric point of view will be given unwitting doses of the drug…. In this way more valuable experiments will probably be carried out in spite of hospital conditions. Attempts are being made at present to set up projects with collaborating organizations on the effect of LSD-25 on brain metabolism, on the metabolic activities of nerves and on enzyme reactions.”
The CIA had learned a great deal about LSD during its first four years of experiments, but it was also aware of wide gaps in its knowledge. After reading the strategic study, therefore, CIA director Dulles said in a 1955 memo to the secretary of defense that “it would appear to be important that field trials be made to determine the effects on groups of people or on individuals engaged in group activities.” This was the official green light for the CIA’s indiscriminate testing of LSD on unsuspecting Americans, and from 1955 onward, there’s evidence that more Such subjects were involved as the CIA kept expanding its quest for a dream drug without interference by agency directors or Presidents.
The drug programs were phased out in 1967 during the Johnson administration, but some projects were continued until 1973, when the new director, James R. Schlesinger, canceled a large number of questionable operations. What, then, had the CIA accomplished?
A 1975 report by the CIA’s inspectorgeneral summed it up: “The program had explored avenues of control of human behavior involving such subjects as radiation, electroshock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials. … The TSD [Technical Services Division of the CIA] doctrine was described as being to the effect that testing of materials under accepted scientific procedures does not disclose the full pattern of reactions that may occur in operational situations, leading to TSD’s initiating a program in 1955 of covert testing of materials on unwitting U.S. citizens …. In a number of instances the test subject became ill for hours or days, including hospitalization in at least one case. While evaluations indicated some operational value in the tests, it was noted that scientific controls were ab-in addition to the basic ethical problem.”
Here, then, is the CIA’s own admission of failure. In 25 years of research into controlling human behavior, the agency had found little of value to its operations. But the report is also a selfindictment on moral and ethical grounds. And, by extension, it is an indictment of those scientists and academic and medical institutions who joined in these experiments in the name of a strange perception of national security.
To be sure, men such as Dr. Isbell of the Addiction Research Center were perhaps looking only for funding f or their work and might have opposed its use for mind control. “From my reading of the documents, it sounds as if Isbell’s research could just as easily have been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health,” says Dr. Sidney Cohen of UCLA, a respected LSD researcher. “The only thing Isbell was ‘guilty’ of was getting money from the CIA.”
It is true that the climate of the times was different. “Before World War 11, few medical researchers seemed consciously concerned with ethical problems,” says Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist who writes about bioethical problems. “But with the postwar revelations of Nazi atrocities in the name of science, the need for formal ethical guidelines became painfully clear, The Nuremberg code was the most important document of this period. Still, the 1950s were a period of transition, and the Nuremberg Principles may have seemed to apply more directly to medical procedures than to behavioral research. It is only in the last decade or so that formal codes of ethics have become widely accepted in the psychiatric community.”
The number of scientists who de to participate in the CIA prograrn suggests the agency must have known from the start that its program would be viewed as shocking in many academic quarters. In fact, a former CIA staff psychiatrist, now in private practice in Arlington, Virginia, says that he had warned his agency colleagues at the inception of the LSD program that in his opinion, it was a “useless and dangerous pursuit.” He himself refused to be drawn into it.
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychiatry at Yale and an expert on brainwashing, takes the view that the CIA’s mind-control experiments were “the product of a lurid imagination,” leading to “destructive processes in the name of science.” Dr. Lifton, whom the CIA tried unsuccessfully to recruit in the early 1960s to work on the psychological breakdown of captured enemy guerrillas, said that all these events showed “how our profession can be drawn into corruption.” Quite aside from the moral issues, Lifton believes that the CIA research was not a serious professional effort, for it lacked the nccessary scientific standards. Carried out as a secret operation, Lifton points out, this work was deprived of exposure and critical evaluation by others.
He also believes that it was a violation of the Nuremberg Principles. It remains unclear, however, whether in the strictest legal sense the CIA was guilty of violating international law by conducting its mind-control tests. But whether the Nuremberg Principles were binding or not on the U.S., many Americans would consider the research dangerous from both an ethical and political viewpoint. Most frightening is the prospect that unless such research is strictly controlled, a government with vast powers could one day use it to manipulate its own citizenry. Recent experience strongly suggests, moreover, that such top-secret work fosters ever more lurid schemes. As one former CIA doctor put it: “We lived in a nevernever land of ‘eyes-only’ memos and unceasing experimentation.”
The final report of Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee on intelligence in 1976 summed it LIP this way: “The research and development program, and particularly the covert testing program, resulted in massive abridgements of the rights of American citizens, sometimes with tragic conscquences. The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing program may still suffer from the residual effects.”*
Most of the men who conceived and directed the CIA’s rnind-control program are dead. The one scientist who probably knows the full history, Sidney Gottlieb, revealed little in an appearance before Senator Edward Kennedy’s Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research in September. Gottlieb testified in a private session with the senators because of ill health (his voice was piped via loudspeakers to reporters in another room) and under a grant of immunity from prosecution.
Gottlieb said that the CIA in the 1950s knew of “well-documented instances of covert drug administration against Americans.” Only from 20 to 50 Americans were unknowing subjects of drug tests at CIA safe houses in New York and San Francisco; “Harsh as it may seem in retrospect,” he said, “such a procedure and such a risk” were believed reasonable in view of the threat to “national survival.” The whitehaired witness admitted he had destroyed the records of these experi en ts. Gottlieb’s appearance, moreover, revealed little about the standards and procedures used in experiments by the CIAs private contractors.
We may never know the full truth about projects ARTICHOKE and MK-ULTRA, and, if we do, it probably won’t come from Gottlieb. As he discovered himself-along with the CIA-it is not easy to unlock men’s minds and wrest the secrets from them.
Tad Szulc is a Washington-based writer on national security matters. He is a former foreign correspondent of the New York Times and also covered the CIA in Washington for the Times. His books include one on E. Howard Hunt, Jr., Compulsive Spy (Viking), and a study of Nixon’s foreign policy to appear in January, The Illusion of Peace (Viking)
LSD: YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW
LSD-25 was the 25th in a series of compounds derived from the rye fungus ergot in routine research at Switzerland’s Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories. In 1943, five years after it was synthesized, Dr. Albert Hofmann, one of the codiscoverers, accidentally became aware of its odd effects on the human brain. In his account of history’s first acid trip, Dr. Hofmann wrote, “My field of vision swayed before me like the reflections in an amusement-park mirror. Occasionally, I felt as if I were out of my body.”
When other-people who ingested the drug reported similar effects, the chemical became something of a pharmaceutical curiosity: a mysterious drug searching for something to cure. Because of the resemblance between an LSD trip and psychosis, much of the early research was focused on mental illness. Wholesale experimentation with the drug was launched in the early 1950s. Neurotics, psychotics, depressives, alcoholics, epileptics, and even terminal-cancer patients were given LSD.
LSD never did find a disease to cure. But, by 1965, about 2,000 studies of the drug had been published: Conservative estimates suggest that over 30,000 psychiatric patients and several thousand normal volunteers had been given LSD during this period.
Around 1954, Eli Lilly & Company published the details of a new process they had developed for synthesizing lysergic acid (the parent molecule of the ergot alkaloids) cheaply and in bulk. The immediate effect of this breakthrough was to keep down the price of ergot alkaloids, which tip to then had been distributed only by Sandoz. But there were other unanticipated results as well. Vast quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, could now be produced with reasonable ease in any sophisticated chemistry laboratory.At about the same time, a subculture of researchers began to experiment on themselves. Some wanted to experience madness firsthand; others sought a mystical union with the beyond. Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were discovered by the media in 1962, and the craze was on. Only researchers had access to LSD through legitimate channels, but when publicity created a demand for LSD, hip chemists rushed to create a supply. An enterprising Californian called Owsley, for example, is said to have produced more than a million doses of LSD over the next few years. (At 25 micrograms per dose, a million doses of LSD would weigh only nine ounces.) Owsley acid became world famous for its high quality. But when Owsley’s factory in Berkeley, California, was raided in February 1965, the case was thrown out of court since California law did not specifically regulate LSD.
This oversight was soon to be corrected. As the numbers of people using LSD multiplied, so did sensationalized accounts of its effects. Alarmed by these horror stories, federal and state authorities moved to ban the drug. California passed its anti-LSD laws in October 1966. By the end of the 1960s, LSD was illegal. But, by 1973, according to the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, almost 5 percent of adult Americans had tried LSD or a similar hallucinogen at least once.
It is now clear that, tinder controlled conditions, LSD is a relatively harmless drug. In 1960, UCLA psychiatrist Sidney Cohen reviewed studies of 5,000 persons who had taken LSD a total of 25,000 times. He reported that for every 1,000 persons taking LSD under medical supervision, there were 0.8 psychotic reactions lasting more than a day, and no attempted or com suicides. These figures compare quite favorably with Cohen’s estimates for patients in psychotherapy: 1.8 psychotic episodes per thousand patients, and 1.2 attempted suicides and 0.4 completed suicides per thousand.
Thus, psychotic episodes, attempted suicide, and actual suicide were more common among psychotherapy patients than among persons taking LSD under medical supervision. This is particularly impressive since so many LSD recipients actually received the drug in psychotherapy.
A similar survey in 1969 by Dr. Nicholas Malleson of 4,303 British patients who had taken a total of more than 50,000 doses of LSD came to much the same conclusion. Interestingly, the Malleson study also noted that those physicians who had the greatest experience with LSD therapy were least likely to observe adverse reactions. That is, the patients of inexperienced LSD therapists were more likely to have bad trips. These data stress the point that LSD is safe only when it is taken under adequate medical supervision. The personality of the LSD user, his expectations for the experience, the setting in which the drug is consumed-all are factors in the complicated equation that determines LSD’s effects.
According to the most recent surveys of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, LSD still has a following. As large a percentage of the population took the drug in 1976 as in 1972. Dr. loan Rittenhouse, supervisory research psychologist at the National Institute, believes that LSD’s failure to achieve wider popularity stems from newspaper reports that the drug produces chromosome damage. Although the belief that LSD causes birth defects is quite controversial in scientific circles, it seems to be widely accepted by the public.
—James Hassett
By John Jacobs, Washington Post Staff Writer;
Free-Lance reporter Paul Avery contributed to this article.
September 5, 1977;
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 4, 1977 – He was a “rock-em, sock-em cop not overly carried away with playing spook,” according to a friend who knew him at the time. But the diaries and personal papers of the Central Intelligence Agency operative who ran “safe houses” in San Francisco and New York in which drug-addicted prostitutes gave LSD and other drugs to unsuspecting visitors tell a different story.
The diaries were kept by Col. George H. White, Alias Morgan Hall, a colorful federal narcotics agent and CIA “consultant” who died two years ago. They reveal new details, including names and dates, about the safe house project, dubbed “Operation Midnight Climax,” which was part of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program in the 1950s and 1960s to manipulate human behavior. Curiously, White’s widow donated his papers to the Electronics Museum at Foothill Junior College, a two-year school set amidst the rolling Los Altes hills 40 miles south of San Francisco. The papers are a rare find for anyone interested in the espionage business and show White dashing about the world, busting up narcotics rings in South America, Texas and San Francisco’s Chinatown.
They also provide documentary evidence that White met to discuss drugs and safe houses with such CIA luminaries as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Division and the man who ran MK-ULTRA, and Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook, a CIA chemist who worked with LSD. Other high-ranking CIA officials mentioned prominently include Jame Angleton, C. P. Cabell and Stanley Lovell. Gottleib and Lashbrook have been subpoenaed to testify Sept. 20 before a Senate subcommittee investigating the MK-ULTRA project.
“Gottlieb proposes I be CIA consultant and I agree.” White wrote in his diary June 9, 1952. A year later it was confirmed: “CIA – got final clearance and sign contract as ‘consultant’ – met Gottlieb . . . lunch Napeleon’s – met Anslinger.”
Harry C. Anslinger was White’s boss and the No. 1 man in the Federal Bureau fo Narcotics. It could not be learned from the diaries whether Anslinger knew that one of his top narcotics agents also was working for the CIA, in fact, was tape-recording and observing men to whom prostitutes gave drugs after picking them up in bars. But a July 20, 1953, entry by White strongly suggests Anslinger knew: “Arrive Wash. – confer Anslinger and Gottlieb re CIA reimbursement for 3 men’s services.”
These entries fit in with a 1963 internal report by then-CIA Inspector General Lyman B. Kirkpatrick about the MK-ULTRA project. That report, made public in 1975, discussed the safe house operations and the connection to the Bureau of Narcotics:
“TSD (Technical Services Division) entered into an informal arrangement with certain cleared and witting individuals in the Bureau of Narcotics in 1955 which provided for the release of MK-ULTRA materials for such testing as those individuals deemed desirable and feasible.”
The report added that while “covert testing” was being transferred to the bureau, its chief would disclaim any knowledge of it.
“The effectiveness of the substances on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign,” Kirkpatrick wrote, “is of great significance, and testing has been performed on a variety of individuals within these categories.”
In 1953, White rented a house at 81 Bedford St. in New York City’s Greenwich Village under the name of Morgan Hall, the same one he used serveral years later to set up the Telegraph Hill apartment at 225 Chestnut St. in San Francisco.
His diaries show that Gottlieb and Lashbrook met him at the Bedford Street apartment. A June 8, 1953, entry said: “Gottlieb brings $4,123.27 for ‘Hall’ – Deposit $3,400.” A Sept. 16 entry added: “Lashbrook at 81 Bedford – Owen Winkle and LSD surprise – can wash.”
In 1955, White moved the safe house to San Francisco, and he took over as regional head of tha Bueau of Narcotics. Apparently, the Chestnut Street duplex also was used by the bureau to lure narcotics dealers and then arrest them. In 1956, White and narcotics agent Ira C. Feldman, who posed as an East Cost mobster, arrested seven San. Franciscans as part of a heroin ring.
Leo Jones, a friend of White, owned the company that installed the bugging equipment at the apartment. The equipment included four DD4 microphones disguised as wall outlets. These were hooked up to two model F-301 tape recorders monitored by agents in a “listening post” adjacent to the apartment. Jones also sold White a “portable toilet for observation post.”
It was an L-shaped apartment with a beautiful view of San Francisco Bay, and White, who kept pitchers of chilled martinis in the refrigerator, also had photos of manacled women being tortured and whipped.
“We were contacted by George White,” Jones said in an interview. “It was a combined project of the CIA and Bureau of Narcotics . . . It was always referred to as the pad, never the apartment, and was modeled after Playboy magazine, 1955 . . . I heard about prostitutes. Feldman had acquired three or four to set himself up with cover.”
White’s diaries indicate that Gottlieb continued to visit, flying out from Washington several times a year at least until 1961. Another visitor was John Gittinger, a CIA psychologist who testified last month before Senate investigative committees that he met with “Morgan Hall” on numerous occasions to interview prostitutes about their drug and sex habits.
White retired from the bureau in 1965 and became the fire marshal at Stinson Beach, a resort area in Marin County, north of San Francisco. Among his papers is a Sept. 30, 1970, letter to Dr. Harvey Powelson, then chief of the department of psychiatry at the University of California at Berkeley. He told Powelson that he had worked for a “rather obscure department of the government (that would like to remain obscure).”
That obscure department. White wrote, “was then interested in obtaining some factual information and data on the use and effect of various hallucinogens, including marijuana tetrahydrocannabinol and the then brandnew LSD. Tests were made under both clinical and nonclinical conditions on both witting and unwitting subjects.”
White said in the letter to Powelson he was interested enough to try the drugs himself. “So far as I was concerned, ‘clear thinking’ was nonexistent while under the influence of any of these drugs,” he wrote. “I did feel at times that I was having a ‘mind-expanding experience,’ but this vanished like a dream immediately after the session.” He said the tests were observed by psychiatrists, psychologists and pharmacologists.
Not all of White’s diary entries involved clandestine meetings with narcoties or CIA agents – or addicts and prostitutes, for that matter. He duly recorded that Eisenhower and Nixon won in 1952 and that the Brooklyn Dodgers took the National League baseball pennant in 1955.
And when his pet bird died, it hurt, he wrote. “Poor little bastard just couldn’t make it,” a 1952 entry says. “Tried hard. I don’t know if I’ll ever get another bird or pet. It’s tough on everyone when they die.”
White, born in 1906, started out as an itinerant journalist, working for newspapers in San Francisco and Los Angeles before becoming a narcotics aent in the early 1930s. During World War II he was in the Office of strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. where he acquired the rank of lieutenant colonel and made future contacts. After that, he went back to his narcotics work, interrupting it in the early 1950s to become an investigator for the Serate committee headed by Sen. Estes Kefauver that looked into organized crime.
One interesting detail links White to the 1953 case of Dr. Frank Olson, and Army employee who was working with the CIA at Camp Detrick, Md. Olson had been given LSD without being told, and 10 days later jumped to his death from the 10th floor of a New York City hotel. At the time, Lashbrook was in the room with Olson, who had gone to New York to be treated by Dr. Harrold Abramson, a psychiatrist who had worked for the CIA.According to CIA documents, Lashbrook called Gottlieb, his supervisor at the time, and then went to the police station to identify the body. He was asked to “turn out his pockets.”
He had written on a piece of white paper the initials “G. W.” and “M.H.” Lashbrook was asked to identify whose initials they were, but expunged CIA documents said he could not for security reasons. However, knowledgeable sources who have seen the CIA documents said Lashbrook identified “G. W.” as George White and “M. H.” as Morgan Hall, White’s undercover name. The piece of paper also contained the address 81 Bedford St. which White’s diary shows to be the New York safe house.
White apparently knew Abramson, because a Sept. 20, 1954, diary entry contained a reference to Gottlieb and Abramson. Return to Search Results.
CIAcid Trip
Chapter One of:
The Seventy Greatest Conspiracies of All Time:
History’s Biggest Mysteries, Coverups, and Cabals
Published by Carol Pubishing Group
LSD was invented in Switzerland by Albert Hofmann, a researcher for Sandoz pharmaceuticals. It did not spontaneously appear among the youth of the Western world as a gift from the God of Gettin’ High. The CIA was on to acid long before the flower children.
So, for that matter, were upstanding citizens like Time-Life magnate Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, who openly sang the praises of their magical mystery tours during the early sixties. Henry, a staunch conservative with close connections to the CIA, once dropped acid on the golf course and then claimed he had enjoyed a little chat with God.
While the cognoscenti had the benefit of tuned-in physicians, other psychedelic pioneers took their first trips as part of CIA-controlled research studies.
At least one person committed suicide after becoming an unwitting subject of a CIA LSD test, crashing through a highstory plate-glass window in a New York hotel as his Agency guardian watched. (Or perhaps the guardian did more than watch. In June 1994 the victim’s family had his thirty-year-old corpse exhumed to check for signs that he may have been thrown out that window.) Numerous others lost their grip on reality.
MK-ULTRA was the code name the CIA used for its program directed at gaining control over human behavior through “covert use of chemical and biological materials,” as proposed by Richard Helms. The name itself was a variation on ULTRA, the U.S. intelligence program behind Nazi lines in World War 11, of which the CIA’s veteran spies were justly proud.
Helms later became CIA director and gained a measure of notoriety for his ‘Watergate “lying to Congress” conviction and a touch of immortality in Thomas Powers’s aptly named biography, The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Helms founded the MK-ULTRA program and justified its notably unethical aspects with the rationale, “We are not Boy Scouts.”
At the time, the spook scientists suspected that LSD had the potential to reprogram the human personality. In retrospect, they were probably right-Timothy Leary spoke in similar terms, though he saw unlimited potential for self-improvement in this “reprogramming.” The CIA and the military simply couldn’t figure out how to harness the drug’s power. Thank goodness. Their idea was not to open “the doors of perception” but to convert otherwise free human beings into automatons.
“ ‘We must remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD”, spoke no less an authority figure on matters psychedelic than John Lennon. “They invented LSD to control people and what it did was give us freedom.”
Or did it? The acid-tripping intersection between the CIA and the counterculture is one of the areas where the on-the-record facts about MK-ULTRA meld into the foggy region of conspiracy theory. It has been suggested, even by prominent participants in the counterculture, that with LSD the CIA found the ultimate weapon against the youth movement.
Officially, the MK-ULTRA program ran from 1953 to 1964, at which time it was renamed MK-SEARCH and continued until 1973. However, U.S. intelligence and military operations with the same purpose had been ongoing at least since World War 11 and likely chugged ahead for many years after MK- publicly stated conclusion. MK-ULTRA encompassed an undetermined number of bizarre and often grotesque experiments. In one, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron received CIA funding to test a procedure he called “depatterning.” This technique, Cameron explained when he applied for his CIA grant (through a front group called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology), involved the “breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient’s behavior by means of particularly intensive elec- in addition to LSD. Some of his subjects suffered brain damage and other debilitations. One sued the government and won an out-of-court settlement in 1988.
Then there was operation “Midnight Climax,” in which prostitutes lured unsuspecting johns to a CIA bordello in San Francisco. There they slipped their clients an LSD mickey while Agency researchers savored the “scientific” action from behind a two-way mirror, a pitcher of martinis at the ready.
Author John Marks, whose The Search for the Manchurian Candidate is one of the most thoroughgoing volumes yet assembled on U.S. government mind-control research, readily admits that all of his source material comprised but ten boxes of documents—but those took him a year to comprehend despite the aid of a research staff.
Marks writes that he sought access to records of a branch of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, the Office of Research and Development (ORD), which took over behavioral (i.e., mind control) research after MK-ULTRA’s staff dispersed.
Marks was told that ORD’s files contained 130 boxes of documents relating to behavioral research. Even if they were all released, their sheer bulk is sufficient to fend off even the most dedicated—or obsessed—investigator. To generate such an intimidating volume of paper must have taken considerable time and effort. Yet curiously, the CIA has always claimed that its attempts to create real-life incarnations of Richard Condon’s unfortunate protagonist Raymond Shaw—the hypnotically programmed assassin of The Manchurian Candidate—were a complete bust.
If their demurrals are to be trusted, then this particular program constitutes one of the least cost-effective deployments of taxpayer dollars in the history of the U.S. government, which is rife with non-cost-effective dollar deployments.
The CIA’s most effective line of defense against exposure of their mind-control operations (or any of their operations, for that matter) has always been self-effacement. The agency portrays its agents as incompetent stooges, encouraging the public to laugh at their wacky attempts to formulate cancer potions and knock off foreign leaders.
Under this cover story, MK-ULTR’’s research team was nothing but a bunch of ineffectual eccentrics. “We are sufficiently ineffective so our findings can be published,” quipped one MK-ULTRA consultant.
Despite the findings of a Senate committee headed by Ted Kennedy that U.S. mind-control research was a big silly failure, and even though Marks—whose approach is fairly conservative—acknowledges that he found no record to prove it, the project may have indeed succeeded.
“I cannot be positive that they never found a technique to control people,” Marks writes, “despite my definite bias in favor of the idea that the human spirit defeated the manipulators.”
A sunny view of human nature, that. And indeed a consoling one. But the human spirit, history sadly proves, is far from indomitable. The clandestine researchers explored every possible means of manipulating the human mind. The CIA’s experiments with LSD are the most famous MK-ULTRA undertakings, but acid was not even the most potent drug investigated by intelligence and military agencies. Nor did they limit their inquiries to drugs. Hypnosis, electronic brain implants, microwave transmissions, and parapsychology also received intense scrutiny. Marks, Kennedy, and many others apparently believe that the U.S. government failed where alltoo-many far less sophisticated operations—from the Moonies to Scientology to EST—have scored resounding triumphs. Brainwashing is commonplace among “cults,” but not with the multimillion-dollar resources of the United States government’s military and intelligence operations?
For that matter, the (supposed) impetus for the program was the reported success of communist countries in “brainwashing.” The word itself originally applied to several soldiers who’d fought in the Korean War who exhibited strange behavior and had large blank spots in their memories—particularly when it came to their travels through regions of Manchuria. Those incidents were the inspiration for Condon’s novel, in which a group of American soldiers are hypnotically brainwashed by the Korean and Chinese communists and one is programmed to kill a presidential candidate.
Interestingly, the belief that one’s psyche is being invaded by radio transmissions or electrical implants is considered a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. But there is no doubt that the CIA contemplated using those methods and carried out such experiments on animals, and the way these things go it would require the willful naivete of, say, a Senate subcommittee to maintain that they stopped there. Even Marks, who exercises the journalistic wisdom to stick only to what he can back up with hard documentation, readily acknowledges that the clandestine researchers “probably” planted electrodes in the brains of men. Marks points out that the electrode experiments “went far beyond giving monkeys orgasms,” one of the researchers’ early achievements.
The ultimate goal of mind control would have been to produce a Manchurian Candidate assassin, an agent who didn’t know he (or she) was an agent—brainwashed and programmed to carry out that most sensitive of missions. Whether the program’s accomplishments reached that peak will probably never be public knowledge. So we are left to guess whether certain humans have been ”programmed to kill.” In 1967, Luis Castillo, a Puerto Rican arrested in the Philippines for planning to bump off Ferdinand Marcos, claimed (while in a hypnotic trance) that he had been implanted with a posthypnotic suggestion to carry out the assassination. Sirhan Sirhan, convicted as the assassin of Robert F Kennedy, showed unmistakable symptoms of hypnosis. A psychiatrist testifying in Sirhan’s defense said that the accused assassin was in a trance when he shot Kennedy, albeit a self-induced one. Author Robert Kaiser echoed that doctor’s conclusions in his book RFK Must Die! Others, of course, have offered darker conjectures regarding the origins of Sirhan’s symptoms.
James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King, also had a known fascination with hypnosis, and, more recently, British lawyer Fenton Bressler has assembled circumstantial evidence to support a theory that Mark David Chapman, slayer of John Lennon, was subject to CIA mind control. Way back in 1967, a book titled Were We Controlled?, whose unknown author used the pseudonym Lincoln Lawrence, stated that both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were under mind control of some kind. The book may have had at least a trace of validity: Something in the book convinced Oswald’s mother that the author was personally acquainted with her son.
Did MK-ULTRA spin off a wave of history-altering assassinations—it whelp a brood of hypnoprogrammed killers? The definitive answer to that question will certainly never reach the public. We are left, with John Marks, to hope on faith alone that it did not, but always with the uneasy knowledge that it could have.
Perhaps not through assassinations, and perhaps not even intentionally, MK-ULTRA definitely altered a generation. John Lennon was far from the only sixties acid-hero to make the connection between the mood of the streets and the secret CIA labs. “A surprising number of counterculture veterans endorsed the notion that the CIA disseminated street acid en masse to deflate the political potency of the youth rebellion,” write Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain in Acid Dreams, their chronicle of both the clandestine and countercultural sides of the LSD revolution.
”By magnifying the impulse toward revolutionism out of context, acid sped up the process by which the Movement became unglued,” the authors continue. “The use of LSD among young people in the U.S. reached a peak in the late 1960s, shortly after the CIA initiated a series of covert operations designed to disrupt, discredit, and neutralize the New Left. Was this merely a historical coincidence, or did the Agency actually take steps to promote the illicit acid trade?”
The tale of Ronald Stark, told by Lee and Shlain, may provide the connection between the CIA and the Left. Stark was a leading distributor of LSD in the late 1960s-the same time acid use was at its heaviest-and apparently a CIA operative. The Agency has never admitted this, but an Italian judge deciding in 1979 whether to try Stark for “armed banditry” in relation to Stark’s many contacts with terrorists (among other things, Stark accurately predicted the assassination of Aldo Moro) released the drug dealer after finding “an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs” that Stark had worked for the CIA “from 1960 onward.”
“It could have been,” mused Tim Scully, the chief of Stark’s major LSD-brewing outfit (a group of idealistic radicals called the Brotherhood who grew to feel exploited by Stark), ”that he was employed by an American intelligence agency that wanted to see more psychedelic drugs on the street.” But Lee and Shlain leave open the possibility that Stark may have been simply one of the world’s most ingenious con artists—a possibility acknowledged by most everyone to come in contact with Stark.
The CIA’s original ”acid dream” was that LSD would open the mind to suggestion, but they found the drug too potent to manage. Sometime around 1973, right before MK-ULTRA founder and, by then, CIA director Richard Helms hung up his trenchcoat and stepped down from the CIA’s top post, he ordered the majority of secret MK-ULTRA documents destroyed due to ”a burgeoning paper problem.” Among the eradicated material, Lee and Shlain report, were ”all existing copies of a classified CIA manual titled LSD: Some UnPsycbedelic Implications.”
There exists today no on-paper evidence (that anyone has yet uncovered) that MK-ULTRA was the progenitor of either a conspiracy to unleash remote-controlled lethal human robots or to emasculate an entire generation by oversaturating it with a mind-frying drug. But MK-ULTRA was very real and the danger of a secret government program to control the thoughts of its citizens, even just a few of them at a time, needs no elaboration.
Budiansky, Stephen, Erica E. Goode, and Ted Gest. “The Cold War
Experiments.” U.S. News & World Report. 24 January 1994.
Lee, Martin, and Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams. New York: Grove Press,
Marks, John. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. New York:
Dell, 1979.
“Frank Olson: The CIA’s Bad Trip.”
By Melissa Roth
George Magazine, October 1977
“CIA Under Suspicion:
‘Suicide’ of LSD guinea pig probed.”
By John O’Mahony,
New York Post, Sept. 21, 1997
Buried secrets of biowarfare
Baltimore Sun, page one
Wallace Pannier
During the Cold War, top Army scientists toiled stealthily in rural Maryland to make covert weapons coveted by new enemies.
For years, in total secrecy, they studied the black art of bioterrorism.
They designed deadly, silent biological dart guns and hid them in fountain pens and walking sticks. They crunched lethal bacteria into suit buttons that could be worn unnoticed across borders. They rigged light fixtures and car tailpipes to loose an invisible spray of anthrax.
They practiced germ attacks in airports and on the New York subway, tracking air currents and calculating the potential death toll.
But they weren’t a band of al-Qaida fanatics — or enemies of any kind. They were biowarriors in the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick.
From 1949 to 1969, at the jittery height of the Cold War, the division tested the nation’s vulnerability to covert germ warfare — and devised weapons for secret biological attacks if the United States chose to mount them.
A few years ago, its story — never before told in detail — would have seemed a macabre footnote to U.S. history.
Now, after the Sept. 11 attacks, the anthrax mailings and a steady stream of government warnings on terrorism, the fears of the 1950s have returned — and the experiments of Fort Detrick’s covert bioweapons makers suddenly resonate in a new era. In the biological realm, there is little that any terrorist group could concoct that Fort Detrick’s “dirty tricks department,” as veterans call it, didn’t think up decades ago.
But because of the division’s scant recordkeeping and the fast-disappearing ranks of its aged scientist-warriors, the knowledge it acquired is being lost to history.
One of the few survivors is Wallace Pannier, 76, who remembers standing in a Frederick County field watching sheep shot with what the Army called a “nondiscernible bioinoculator” — a dart gun. The bosses demanded a dart so fine that it could penetrate clothing and skin unnoticed, then dissolve, leaving no trace in an autopsy.
“If the sheep jumped, that meant people were going to jump, too,” said Pannier, now living a quiet life tending his flowers and shrubs in Frederick.
Once perfected, the dart gun astonished those who saw it in action. Charles Baronian, a retired Army weapons official, recalls a demonstration at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
“Twenty-five seconds after it was shot, the sheep just fell to the ground,” said Baronian, 73. “It didn’t bleat. It didn’t move. It just fell dead. You couldn’t help but be impressed.”
The rest of the Army’s offensive biological weapons program thought big: 500-pound anthrax bombs that could contaminate entire cities. But the Special Operations Division — known at Fort Detrick by its initials, SO — studied biowarfare on a more intimate scale, figuring ways to kill an individual, disable a roomful of people or touch off an epidemic.
‘Army has no records’
The existence of the SO Division was revealed only six years after it shut down, in a 1975 Senate investigation into CIA abuses. Senators wanted to know why the CIA had retained a lethal stock of shellfish toxin and cobra venom after President Richard M. Nixon’s 1969 order to destroy all biological weapons stocks. They found that the poisons had come from the SO Division under a CIA-Army project code-named MKNAOMI.
But records show that even CIA bosses were stymied as they tried to get the facts on the SO Division. “The practice of keeping little or no record of the activity was standard MKNAOMI procedure,” a CIA investigator wrote. The military offered little help, he added: “The Army has no records on MKNAOMI or on the Special Operations Division.”
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Sun, the Army said no records of the Special Operations Division could be found. Nor is there any mention at the National Archives, which reclassified Fort Detrick’s old biowarfare records after the Bush administration ordered agencies to withhold anything that might aid terrorists.
Few SO Division veterans are still alive. Fewer still are willing to describe their work. They are not sure what is still classified and don’t relish leaving biological horror tales for their grandchildren.
“I just don’t give interviews on that subject,” said Andrew M. Cowan Jr., 74, the division’s last chief, who is retired and living near Seattle. “It should still be classified — if nothing else, to keep the information the division developed out of the hands of some nut.”
But it is possible to assemble a patchwork portrait from documents obtained by The Sun under the Freedom of Information Act, Senate investigative files and private document collections, including the National Security Archive in Washington and even the Church of Scientology, which long collected material on government mind-control research.
And a few Detrick retirees who worked in the SO Division or collaborated with it spoke sparingly about what they know. Most are proud of their work, pointing out that the Soviet biological program was much larger and also developed assassination tools.
Unsuccessful attacks
The veterans still slip into biowarrior-speak, in which “good” means good-and-lethal. “It made a real nice aerosol,” they’ll say, or “That would give you real good coverage.”
All say that if the biological devices they made were used against humans, they never learned about it. But it is impossible to be certain, they say, because the program was strictly compartmented: One worker didn’t know what another was doing, let alone what CIA or Special Forces did with the bioweapons.
The 1975 Senate investigation revealed that the SO Division supplied biological materials for several planned CIA attacks, none of which were successful.
In 1960, the CIA’s main contact with the SO Division, Sidney Gottlieb, carried a tube of toxin-laced toothpaste to Africa in a plot to kill Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. But the CIA station chief balked and pitched the poison into a river, a congressional investigation later revealed.
Records suggest, though they do not prove, that the SO Division also supplied germs for CIA schemes to kill or sicken Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and that it came up with the poisoned handkerchief that the agency’s drolly-named Health Alteration Committee sent to Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim in 1963. (He survived.)
Army Special Forces also asked the SO Division to design biological assassination weapons. Fort Detrick’s engineers delivered five devices — including the dart gun — collectively known as the “Big Five.” But records of what Special Forces did with the weapons remain classified, said Fort Bragg archivist Cynthia Hayden.
If the work sounds sinister today, there were doubters at the time, too. A 1954 Army document says high-ranking officials — including George W. Merck, the pharmaceutical executive and top government adviser on biowarfare — wanted to shut down the SO Division because they considered it “un-American.”
But Fort Detrick’s rank and file rarely voiced such doubts. “We did not sit around talking about the moral implications of what we were doing,” said William C. Patrick III, a Fort Detrick veteran who worked closely with the SO Division. “We were problem-solving.”
And if the orders came to unleash the weapons, Fort Detrick’s biowarriors were ready.
During the Vietnam War, William P. Walter, who supervised anthrax production at Fort Detrick and worked with the SO Division on projects, asked British intelligence agents for blueprints of the office occupied by North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Plotting a covert germ assault is easier if the room’s cubic footage and ventilation system are known, he says.
“We thought if the president of the United States wants to kill somebody, we want to be able to do it,” said Walter, now 78 and retired in Florida.
Opening of the division
A gun or a bomb leaves no doubt that a deliberate attack has occurred. But if someone is stricken with a sudden, fatal illness — or an epidemic slashes across a crowded city — there is no way of knowing whether anyone attacked, much less who.
That was the key conclusion of the Pentagon’s Committee on Biological Warfare in a secret October 1948 report on covert biowarfare.
At the time, the United States feared a shadowy global enemy, organized in secret cells overseas and on U.S. soil –Communists. Echoing today’s fears, the report said the United States “is particularly vulnerable” to covert germ attack because enemy agents “are present already in this country [and] there is no control exercised over the movements of people.”
Although it emphasized the threat to America, the report called for offensive capability. “Biological agents would appear to be well adapted to subversive use since very small amounts of such agents can be effective,” the report said. “A significant portion of the human population within selected target areas may be killed or incapacitated.”
Setting an imaginative tone for what would follow, the report listed potential targets: “ventilating systems, subway systems, water supply systems … stamps, envelopes, money, biologicals and cosmetics … contamination of food and beverages.”
Seven months later, in May 1949, the Special Operations Division quietly opened at Fort Detrick.
The other divisions there, created during and after World War II, focused on large-scale biological attack, said Walter, who completed a quadruple major at Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmittsburg and went to work at Fort Detrick in 1951.
At the time, planners regarded bioweapons as a valuable military option — more devastating than chemical weapons, but more selective than a nuclear attack.
“Biological agents can really cover more territory than nuclear weapons,” Walter said. “Biological’s better than nuclear because it doesn’t destroy the buildings.”
Shrouded in secrecy
Fort Detrick’s other divisions had diabolical tricks of their own. For instance, Walter said, their scientists bred antibiotic-resistant bacteria to make standard Soviet and Chinese treatments useless against U.S. weapons.
Still, the veterans say, Special Operations stood apart. You didn’t apply for SO, you were chosen. And even within the tight-lipped world of Fort Detrick, the SO Division’s secrecy was extraordinary.
“Most of the people [at Fort Detrick] didn’t know what was going on in SO,” Pannier said. “And they got angry because you wouldn’t tell ’em what was going on.”
When Pannier hitchhiked to Fort Detrick to take up his new assignment in 1946, he saw so many guard towers that he thought he had been sent to a prison. After three years there, he went home to Utah and completed a degree in bacteriology. When he returned, his former boss recommended him to the SO Division, “sort of a little Detrick within Detrick.”
SO Division personnel — about 75 at the unit’s peak — didn’t get the usual parking stickers. They had metal tags that could be removed from their cars when they traveled undercover.
Pannier spent a night on the roof of the Pentagon taking air samples to rule out a bioattack before a visit by President John F. Kennedy.
He was also assigned to see what germs were leaking from a Merck pharmaceutical plant on the Susquehanna River, observations that would be crucial to U.S. spies trying to identify Soviet bioweapons facilities. Pannier posed variously as a fisherman, an air-quality tester and a driver with a broken-down car.
When East Bloc officials who were suspected of working in biowarfare labs traveled abroad, U.S. agents secretly swabbed their clothes so the SO Division could test for germs.
Fanning out across the country, SO Division officers also played the role of bioterrorists in an era before the word had even been coined. Their usual mock weapons were two forms of bacteria, Bacillus globigii (BG) and Serratia marcescens (SM).
Scientists thought both were harmless, though later research found that SM could cause illness or death in people with weakened immune systems.
In an elaborate 1965 attempt to assess how travelers might be used to spread smallpox, SO Division officers loosed BG in the air at Washington National Airport and at bus stations in Washington, Chicago and San Francisco, then tracked its movement using air samplers disguised as suitcases.
Tracking travelers’ routes, Fort Detrick scientists plotted on a U.S. map the smallpox cases that would result from a real release.
The germ-spreaders were never challenged, the report noted: “No terminal employee, passenger or visitor gave any outward indication of suspicion that something unusual was taking place.”
The next year, without alerting local officials, SO Division agents staged a mock attack on the New York subway, shattering light bulbs packed with BG powder on the tracks.
“People could carry a brown bag with light bulbs in it and nobody would be suspicious,” Pannier said. “But when [a bulb] would break, it would burst. … The trains swishing by would get it airborne.”
The SO Division’s report concluded that “similar covert attacks with a pathogenic agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death.”
Understanding U.S. vulnerability may have been the main purpose of such experiments. But defensive findings had offensive implications. No one had to tell experimenters that Moscow, too, had a subway.
‘Big Five’ arsenal
If the subway tests could be explained as defensive, there was no such ambiguity in the SO Division’s development of covert biological weapons.
Mysterious characters from Fort Bragg and the CIA came and went at the SO Division, leaving wish-lists and checking progress. For cover, CIA visitors often wore military uniforms and said they worked for “Staff Support Group.” No one mentioned aloud the name of the agency financing so much of the division’s work.
“It was never really said, except that probably by the middle ’60s it became obvious,” Pannier said. Army bosses “would ask: ‘Are you keeping them happy?'”
Most CIA records on the SO Division were apparently destroyed in 1973 by Gottlieb, the agency’s liaison to Fort Detrick. But declassified invoices the division submitted to the CIA give a sense of the work.
Germ dispensers could be concealed in many objects, such as the exhaust system on a 1953 Mercury. (“It might look like a smoky, oil-burning car,” Pannier said.) There were invoices for fountain pens, even “1 Toy Dog, 98 cents.”
There are receipts for books with suggestive titles: The Assassins, The Enemy Within, Dictionary of Poisons. There are rent bills for cabins at state parks — a favorite site for secret meetings.
And there is much ado about dogs, including supplies for a “Buster Project.” One plan for the dart guns was to knock out guard dogs so U.S. agents could sneak into foreign facilities.
But dogs were not the primary target of the SO Division’s creative efforts. “The requirements of the Army Special Forces were the driving force defining SOD activities, and … Special Forces’ interest included a number of weird things, definitely among which was assassination,” a CIA retiree told an agency investigator in 1975, according to a declassified report.
The former CIA man referred to the arsenal that came to be called the Big Five. “The Big Five program was devoted to assassination,” said Patrick, who worked closely with the SO Division as chief of product development at Fort Detrick. He calls it “the most sensitive program we ever created at Detrick,” and says its details should still be kept secret because they might be useful to terrorists and “embarrassing to the United States.”
Walter, the former Detrick anthrax maker, calls the Big Five “hair-raising. We really kept that thing hush-hush,” he said.
Detailed descriptions of the Big Five remain classified. But documents show that they included at least one version of the biological dart, dipped in shellfish toxin and fired from a rifle using a pressurized air cartridge.
Walter recalled that colleagues were sent overseas to collect the mussels that produced the poison, into which the darts would be dipped. Tiny grooves guided the dose: “You could time a death by the load [of toxin] you shot,” he said.
Among the other Big Five weapons: a 7.62 mm rifle cartridge packed with anthrax or botulinum toxin that would disperse in the air on impact; a time-delay bomblet that would release a cloud of bacteria when a train or truck convoy passed; and a pressurized can that sprayed an aerosol of germs. The fifth is described in unclassified documents only as an “E-41 disseminator.”
Walter recalls an effort to package the spray device in a food can for smuggling into the Soviet Union and planting in a target’s office or apartment.
“We had a hell of a time with that because we had to get Russian cans,” he said. “It had to look exactly like an ordinary can.”
‘Nothing has changed’
Of all the old bioweaponeers, Patrick is the only one who still has ties to U.S. biodefense programs, working as a consultant and trainer. But he said the government has made little effort to learn from the work of the Special Operations Division and the larger biowarfare program.
Although bioengineering today could produce more virulent pathogens, “nothing has changed” in the most challenging part of covert biological attack: delivering germs so that they infect people, Patrick said.
“The problem today is there’s a huge disconnect between what us old fossils know and what the current generation knows,” Patrick said. “The good doctors at CDC [the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] don’t have a clue about aerosol dissemination, and the military is not much better.”
Walter, in Florida, agreed with Patrick’s diagnosis. But he said it’s fine with him if the dark lessons of Fort Detrick’s early days are lost forever.
“When we all die off, that’s it,” he said. “If anybody with bad intentions got hold of the things we had, it would be disastrous.”
Suicide Revealed:
CIA Infiltrated 17 Area Groups, Gave Out LSD
By Thomas O’Tooole
Washington Post Staff Writer
This is the paper in which the first news about the death of Frank Olson arrived, twenty-two years late. The Frank Olson story, “Suicide Revealed,” is on the left side, about half-way down. The word “revealed” in the headline is ironic in that no name is provided.
The Rockefeller commission report on domestic CIA activities said it did not know how many Americans were given “behavior influencing” drugs by the CIA, declaring that “all persons directly involved in the early phases of the program were either out of the country and not available for interview or were deceased.”
Drugs also were tested on volunteers and were part of a “much larger” program to study ways of controlling human behavior. Other studies “explored the effects of radiation, electric shock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and harassment substances.
The commission report said that all the drug program “records were ordered destroyed in 1973, including a total of 152 separate files.”
The commission did not say who ordered the files destroyed or why such an order was given. A commission spokesman said that all documented evidence for the drug tests was turned over to the White House, where it will remain indefinitely.
How widespread the practice was of testing new listening devices on unsuspecting people also will remain a mystery. The commission said only that “in the process of this testing, private communications, presumably between United States citizens, have sometimes been overheard.”
The commission said that some conversations were recorded, then destroyed when the listening devices were fully tested. It said there was never any evidence that the tests or recordings were used against the people whose conversations were listened to or recorded.
Also mentioned by the commission was the CIA practice of forging documents, such as Social Security cards, bank cards, library cards and club cards.
Only the Social Security Administration was told of this practice, which was recently scaled down to almost eliminate the manufacture of false credit cards, drivers licenses and birth certificates.
The commission found all three practices unsavory, but reserved its harshest language for the drug tests.
“It was clearly illegal to test potentially dangerous drugs on unsuspecting United States citizens.”
The only drug mentioned is LSD, which the CIA began to use on test subjects as long as 25 years ago. The commission said the CIA began its drug tests because of reports that the Soviet Union was using drugs to elicit confessions by political criminals, and expanded them when North Korea began brainwashing U.S. prisoners.
Four tests were begun on unsuspecting persons in 1953, then expanded two years later under what the commission called “an unfortunate arrangement” with the federal Bureau of Dug Abuse Control. Presumably, the commission means the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Narcotics since the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control was not established until 1965.
Memo from Stephen Endicott
Professor of History – York University
analyzing the documents obtained by the Olson family from CIA Director William Colby in June 1975
Link to Stephen Endicott website
Co-author with Edward Hagerman of:
The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea
Here are my comments on twenty-five pages from the package of documents which I understand that the Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby, gave to the Olson family some years after the tragic death of Frank Olson. I’ve read them through twice, and about all I can do is summarize the impression that they leave on my mind.
I can see why the Olson family feel so dissatisfied with the official verdict of suicide as the cause of his death. At the same time it seems clear that Mr. Colby would not have given them the papers had he thought there was anything contained in them that might make possible a challenge and reversal of the official verdict. (One paragraph of the CIA report on Mr. Olson’s death is blanked out by a censor) Perhaps Colby didn’t pay close attention, because there are certainly some disquieting matters in the conduct and reported conversations of Frank Olson’s colleague, Robert Lashbrook, and the New York allergist, Dr. Harold Abramson, in the hours after Mr. Olson’s death.
Here is a summary of the scenario as formed in my mind:
Frank Olson, Ph.D, a biologist by profession, was a disturbed man in 1953. He had been working in the Biological Laboratory of the Special Operations Division, of the U. S. Army Chemical Corps (formerly known as the Chemical Warfare Service) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, for about ten years without any problem. According to his colleagues he had always been a popular, extroverted person and his professional, scientific work was considered to be outstanding. He was a branch chief and in October 1952 the confidence which his superiors had in him was reflected in the fact that they promoted him to be Acting Chief of the entire Special Operations Division.
After six months, in March 1953, Olson reverted back to his former position at his own request. It was also in March 1953 that he became mentally and emotionally disturbed. According to his wife, Alice, he could no longer sleep at nights, and she urged him to consult a psychiatrist. The cause of his disturbance is not made clear in the documents at hand, but it is said that he had begun to feel guilty about something. Was it from overwork and worry caused by the burdens of heading up the whole Division? It might have been, but by now he had been relieved of that burden. Another answer is suggested by a colleague: “It is well known,” wrote Dr. Howard Abramson after Olson’s death, “that it is an occupational hazard to mental stability to be doing the type of work connected with his [Olson’s] duties. Guilt feelings are well known to occur to a greater or less extent.” (Colby Pg. 38)
What was the nature of Olson’s duties? Stripped of technical language and put bluntly, they were to use his knowledge of biological and medical science to perfect secret ways to kill or incapacitate other humans, animals and plants.
The Special Operations Division of Fort Detrick was the most secret of secret places in the biological warfare program and only people with the highest security clearance could work there or gain admission to its grounds. Frank Olson counted himself in this number. It was the centre of covert biological warfare and as such the record of its activities are deeply buried. But it is known that the SOD was considered to be very effective, receiving commendation on “the originality, imagination and aggressiveness it has displayed in devising means and mechanisms for the covert dissemination of bacteriological warfare agents.” (Our BW book, pg 70.) When William Colby appeared before a Senate Committee in 1975 to explain the Agency’s involvement in biological warfare he remarked that from the outset this activity “was characterized by extreme compartmentation” [sic] and “a high degree of secrecy within CIA itself.”
Only two or three Agency officers at any time were cleared for access to Fort Detrick activities. (Senate hearings, pg 6). Frank Olson was one of these. But because of the compartmentalization it is unlikely that Frank Olson had much idea of what took place at Detrick beyond his work bench until he was promoted to be acting chief of the Special Operations Division. Even then he would have no knowledge of what happened to the products of Detrick when they left the encampment and he certainly had no idea that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had an offensive, first use policy for biological weapons applicable to the Korean War then in progress. He was working as a pure research scientist, solving technical problems surrounding the cultivation and spread of bacteria.
In late February and early March 1953 something happened which would have raised the profile of the Korean War sharply in Frank Olson’s mind. Two high ranking officers of the United States Marine Corps, who had been taken prisoner by the Chinese army in Korea, made lengthy, detailed confessions about the U. S. military forces using biological weapons in Korea and China. The Chinese broadcast their statements around the world. A glance at The New York TimesIndex for 1953 (pg 573) under the heading “Germ Warfare” shows the large number of articles on the subject day after day, and charges about the use of biological warfare as a crime against humanity.
Even though U. S. officials denied the Chinese claims, Frank Olson would have faced the stark possibility that his work was no longer “pure research.” It was at this time that his feelings of guilt arose, and according to his wife, he began to have sleepless nights.
How would the CIA cope with a man who is beginning to have doubts and who is in a position to reveal the most secret of its secrets?
In his early years at the biological warfare laboratory, during World War II, one of Frank Olson’s close colleagues there had been Dr. HAROLD ABRAMSON who was a specialist in immunology and allergies and who initiated the breakthrough therapy of penicillin aerosol for infected lungs. More recently his colleagues at the laboratory included DR. SID GOTTLEIB, who was chief of the Technical Services Division, and ROBERT V. LASHBROOK, Ph.D, who joined the organization only in 1952. Olson, Lashbrook and possibly Gottlieb were also members of the CIA group at Detrick. The chief of the Special Operations Division was VINCENT L. RUWET, a Lt. Colonel in the Chemical Corps and a man who described himself as a close personal friend of the Olson family. These men interacted with, one might say surrounded, Frank Olson in his last days before he either committed suicide, or as some suspect, was murdered.
In the autumn of 1953 Olson’s psychological state of mind worsened. This worsening coincided with considerable publicity in the press about the return to the United States of twenty-five airmen who had made confessions of using biological warfare in Korea. U. S. authorities claimed that the Chinese had “brainwashed” their prisoners, cleaned out their minds and inserted the false information. It was an absurd idea, a caricature of how the Chinese had induced their prisoners to write elaborate confessions, nevertheless, there was much discussion of the question at the United Nations and in the newspapers. (See New York Times Index, ibid.)
Meanwhile the CIA had become interested in the possibilities of “brainwashing.” Proof of this, which came to light many years later, was the contract it made with a Canadian psychiatrist in Montreal, Dr Ewen Cameron, to experiment illegally on his patients with LSD and possibly other drugs for such purposes.
One way, therefore, for the Agency to deal with its troubled member at Fort Detrick would be to have him forget all he knew about Special Operations, to clear out his mind by this supposed new technique of “brainwashing.” Then he could safely be allowed to retire from the service and return with his family to his home town in Wisconsin. Frank Olson himself believed “that the CIA group had been putting something like Benzedrine in his coffee at night to keep him awake.” (Colby Pg 37-38)
The Colby documents reveal that “an experiment” was tried on Olson, involving the use of some drug. The experiment appears to have been conducted with Olson’s consent and took place on Thursday, 19th November 1953. The experiment failed to work as intended. It did not clear his mind; it worsened his anxieties and nine days later Frank Olson was dead, having jumped or been pushed through a window on the tenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City.
Reporting on Frank Olson’s death in the Colby Papers proceeds on three levels.
At the first level there are the reports of the New York city policeman who came to the scene after a call from the Statler Hotel around 4 a.m. on 28th November as well as comments by two New York city detectives. These officers conclude that it was a case of suicide, although they toy with the idea that it might be a homicide because Robert Lashbrook had stayed in the same hotel room as Olson and because of his reluctance to answer certain questions.
At the second level are the reports of two Special Agents sent to question Lashbrook in New York City.
At the third level are memoranda by Dr. Howard Abramson and Lt. Colonel Vincent Ruwet giving their understandings about Frank Olson and About what happened in the last few days of his life.
The most striking information is that contained in the report of the two Special Agents who are identified only as “reporting agent for Case No 73317,” and “Walter P. T.,” which centres on the activities of Robert Lashbrook. The agency controlling these two agents is not identified in the documents. Are they also CIA? Or Department of Defense? The two agents, who did not seem to have any prior knowledge about Lashbrook (CIA agent) or his work unit, interviewed him intensively and followed him around all day following Olson’s death.
What follows are my comments on some ambiguities, coincidences and question marks that arise from the report of the two special agents on the death of Frank Olson:
Lashbrook said that Olson had jumped through the window shade and the window glass. What kind of window shade was it? Was it broken? If the window shade was Venetian blinds it would have been a virtually impossible scenario. Could it be that the window shade was lowered after the man went through the window?
The first call that Lashbrook made was not to the hotel management or the police, but to his superior, Dr. Sid Gottlieb, at his home in Virginia, to tell him what had happened. Then he reported to the hotel desk clerk and telephoned Dr. Abramson. He did not call Lt-Col Ruwet, the chief of the Special Operations Division, right away. Ruwet was a close friend of the Olson family, he had been in contact with Olson daily since June 1953 and had been with Lashbrook and Olson in New York until the previous day. Was there any significance to the sequence of these calls? [Gottlieb is mentioned by Colby in his testimony to the Senate Committee in September 1975, pg 22-23 as the person who destroyed CIA records on BW activities.]
Lashbrook told the police that Olson had come to New York on 24th November to seek help for mental illness. In view of Olson’s upset state of mind that was not unreasonable. But why had Olson been taken to see Dr Abramson who was not a psychiatrist at all but a skin allergist? Was it because Olson was suffering from some embarrassing aftermath of the drug ‘experiment’ of 19th November as well as from nervous disorder? Was it because Abramson, an old acquaintance of Olson’s in the Chemical Corps, could handle the situation without publicity? Lashbrook had also given Lt-Col Ruwet the impression that Olson was coming to New York to see a psychiatrist. (Colby, p. 46)
When Olson died there were no papers to identify him. Reportedly he himself had thrown away his papers, his identification badge and his wallet while walking around the city the previous day. As a result when reporters came to the police station they could get no information about the dead man’s identity and the story never hit the New York papers. This coincidence was extremely convenient for Lashbrook, the Chemical Corps and the CIA.
Lashbrook shared an apartment in Washington, D. C. with EDWIN SPOEHEL. Who was Edwin Spoehel?
The Reporting Agent notes that other than exhibiting fatigue, Lashbrook “appeared completely composed” throughout 28th November, the day Olson died. Robert Lashbrook must have been a hard-boiled type, nerves of steel.
Sid Gottlieb instructed Lashbrook to get a report from Dr. Abramson on Olson and bring it back to Washington with him. Lashbrook and special agent Walter P. T. Jr. went together to Abramson’s office at 9:15 in the evening of the 28th. Lashbrook asked agent Walter P. T. to remain in the reception room while he spoke to Dr. Abramson. While waiting in the outer office agent Walter P. T. was nevertheless able to overhear the conversation of the two men, which he records in his report. What transpired between Lashbrook and Abramson?
First they talked about security, and Abramson said to Lashbrook that he was worried about him. Did Lashbrook have something to worry about?
Lashbrook told Dr. Abramson something he should put in his report about Olson. The CIA agent dictated it to Dr. Abramson. First they both listened to portions of a tape recording of a conversation between “a physician or psychiatrist and the SUBJECT.” Then Lashbrook dictated to Abramson on the SUBJEC’’S behaviour prior to his demise. Since Abramson had attended Olson several times on the days previous to his death, why was it not sufficient that Abramson, a medical doctor, write up his own report?
It seems that the CIA wanted to make sure certain things were in a report that might become the basis of a claim to the Bureau of Employees Compensation. [ From reading Dr. Abramson’s report it is not readily evident what the CIA wanted in particular to have in it.] C. Lashbrook and Abramson adjourned their discussion and moved into another room apparently relaxing with a drink. Agent Walter P. T. heard Abramson remark to Lashbrook that he “was worried as to whether or not the deal was in jeopardy” and he thought “the operation was dangerous and the whole deal should be reanalyzed.” What was the “deal” which both Dr. Abramson and CIA Agent Lashbrook knew about?
What “operation” was dangerous? Was this conversation still relating to the Olson case? After all these years there may be no possibility of following up to find answers to these elusive and sometimes disturbing questions. Without knowing something more about them, especially about the shadowy figure of Robert Lashbrook, it would be difficult to determine with greater certainty how Frank Olson met his death. I hope that my speculations, and they are nothing more than that, may be of some interest and modest help to you.
Stephen Endicott
June 6, 2001:
Dear Steve and Ned,
After studying your remarkable book more carefully it occurs to me to ask you about one of the most mysterious details in the documents I received from William Colby in 1975. I wonder if this will mean anything to you.
I refer to a two-page document entitled:
“MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD” SUBJECT: Project ARTICHOKE
The memorandum is dated 3 February 1975.
Both pages of the document are totally whited-out with the exception of a paragraph near the bottom of the second page. This reads as follows:
7. Little information pertaining to the suicide of Frank OLSON was found in the collection of materials made available by DDS&T. However, one brief memorandum dated 14 December 1953 mentioned the OLSON incident. The memorandum stated in part “LOVELL reported that QUARLES and George MERCK were about to kill the Schwab activity at Detrick as “un-American.” The memorandum later continued “LOVELL knew of Frank R. OLSON.”
Dr. John Schwab, whom I knew, was the founder and first director of Special Operations at Detrick.
I wonder what other light you might be able to shed on this, particularly on what “the Schwab activity” might refer to.
The other thing that has occurred to me on re-reading your book and considering the role of the CIA in BW in Korea is the very likely possibility that my father was the CIA’s man at Detrick, whose job may well have been that of linking Detrick’s resources with the CIA’s task of administering the secret deployment of BW in cooperation with the Air Force. This impression is strengthened by information we now have that proves that the purpose of Presidential “apology” our family received in 1975 was to deflect our intention to sue, which might have led to our discovering the true nature of my father’s job. It was not only the cover-up of his “bizarre death” (as this information refers to it) that was in question, but the nature of his work.
Best regards, – Eric
Dear Eric,
The meaning of “Schwab activity” is not apparent from the documents you have. I have a speculation about it though. It is related to that part of Special Operations which was said to be was one of Gottleib’s specialities: creating means (darts, toxins etc.) to assassinate particular individuals. I suppose that to people like George Merck this might seem to be an “un-American” activity. Merck, as you know, was one of the strongest promoters of the idea of using biological weapons in war, therefore he obviously wouldn’t have considered BW as such to be “un-American.” But individual acts of terror might have been in a different, troubling category in their minds. It’s just a thought.
I was reading your website yesterday and was quite amazed to find out about the circumstances of Colby’s death on the eve of being called up to testify before a Grand Jury! Did that Grand Jury meet and mark recommendations about investigating your father’s death?
Best, Steve
U.S. Knew in 1953 North Koreans Held American POW’s
By PHILIP SHENON
September 17, 1996, Tuesday
Newly declassified documents show that the United States knew immediately after the Korean War that North Korea had failed to turn over hundreds of American prisoners known to be alive at the end of the war, adding to growing speculation that American prisoners might still be alive and in custody there.
…experiments in which American prisoners were drugged in a program to ‘develop comprehensive interrogation techniques, involving medical, psychological and drug-induced behavior modification.’… At the end of the testing, the Americans were reportedly executed.
The documents, obtained from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and other Government depositories by a Congressional committee, show that the Pentagon knew in December 1953 that more than 900 American troops were alive at the end of the war but were never released by the North Koreans.
The documents may only deepen the mystery over the fate of Americans still considered missing from the Korean War. In June a Defense Department intelligence analyst testified that on the basis of ”a recent flurry” of ”very compelling reports,” he believed that as many as 15 Americans were still being held prisoner in North Korea.
While not dismissing the analyst’s report entirely, the Defense Department has said it has no clear evidence that any Americans are being held against their will in North Korea, although it has pledged to continue to investigate accounts of defectors and others who say they have seen American prisoners there.
The North Korean Government has said it is not holding any Americans. A handful of American defectors are known to live in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and some are believed to have appeared in North Korean propaganda films.
The documents were obtained by the House National Security subcommittee on military personnel. Congressional investigators said much of the information was confirmed by a former military aide to President Eisenhower, Col. Phillip Corso.
In a statement prepared for delivery before the House panel on Tuesday, Colonel Corso, who is retired, said, ”In the past I have tried to tell Congress the fact that in 1953, 500 sick and wounded American prisoners were within 10 miles of the prisoner exchange point at Panmunjom but were never exchanged.” Panmunjom was the site of peace negotiations between the United States and North Korea that ended with an armistice on July 27, 1953.
One of the documents obtained by the House subcommittee, a December 1953 memo that had been on file at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan., shows that the Army believed at that time that 610 ”Army people” and 300 Air Force personnel were still being held prisoners by the North Koreans, five months after a prisoner exchange between the United States and North Korea.
The memo said that President Eisenhower was ”intensely interested” in the fate of ”the missing P.O.W.’s,” and that he had wanted to make sure ”everybody was doing all they could about it.”
Al Santoli, a Congressional investigator who helped gather the documents, said the House subcommittee would explore the possibility that some of the American prisoners reported missing in 1953 were the same Americans reportedly sighted in recent years in North Korea.
He said that the intelligence information released by the Eisenhower Library had been declassified at the request of the subcommittee, and that it showed that the Eisenhower Administration ”was trying to do what it could to get the prisoners back” short of war.
Historians of the Korean War have suggested that the Eisenhower Administration chose not to make public much of its intelligence on the issue of missing Americans for fearing of whipping up a war hysteria among Americans who would have demanded that the prisoners be returned home.
”In a nuclear age, Eisenhower could not risk telling the Russians or the Chinese that we’re willing to go to all-out war to get our prisoners back,” Mr. Santoli said.
The hearing Tuesday of the subcommittee will include potentially explosive testimony from a Czech defector, Jan Sejna, who now works for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Sejna, a former Czech defense official, had access to information about medical experiments carried out on American prisoners of war by Russian and Czech personnel in a hospital in North Korea during the war. Mr. Sejna had described experiments in which American prisoners were drugged in a program to ”develop comprehensive interrogation techniques, involving medical, psychological and drug-induced behavior modification.”
At the end of the testing, the Americans were reportedly executed.
A STUDY OF ASSASSINATION
Assassination is a term thought to be derived from “Hashish,” a drug similar to marijuana, said to have been used by Hasan-Dan-Sabah to induce motivation in his followers, who were assigned to carry out political and other murders, usually at the cost of their lives.
It is here used to describe the planned killing of a person who is not under the legal jurisdiction of the killer, who is not physically in the hands of the killer, who has been selected by a resistance organization for death, and whose death provides positive advantages to that organization.
Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations. It should be assumed that it will never be ordered or authorized by any U.S. Headquarters, though the latter may in rare instances agree to its execution by members of an associated foreign service. This reticence is partly due to the necessity of committing communications to paper. No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made, but usually the act will be properly covered by normal news services, whose output is available to all concerned.
Murder is not morally justifiable. Self-defense may be argued if the victim has knowledge which may destroy the resistance organization if divulged. Assassination of persons responsible for atrocities or reprisals may be regarded as just punishment. Killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary.
But assassination can seldom be employed with a clear conscience. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.
The techniques employed will vary according to whether the subject is unaware of his danger, aware but unguarded, or guarded. They will also be affected by whether or not the assassin is to be killed with the subject. Hereafter, assassinations in which the subject is unaware will be termed “simple”; those where the subject is aware but unguarded will be termed “chase”; those where the victim is guarded will be termed “guarded.”
If the assassin is to die with the subject, the act will be called “lost.” If the assassin is to escape, the adjective will be “safe.” It should be noted that no compromises should exist here. The assassin must not fall into enemy hands.
A further type division is caused by the need to conceal the fact that the subject was actually the victim of assassination, rather than an accident or natural causes. If such concealment is desirable the operation will be called “secret”; if concealment is immaterial, the act will be called open”; while if the assassination requires publicity to be effective it will be termed “terroristic.”
Following these definitions, the assassination of Julius Caesar was safe, simple, and terroristic, while that of Huey Long was lost, guarded and open. Obviously, successful secret assassinations are not recorded as assassination at all. [Illeg] of Thailand and Augustus Caesar may have been the victims of safe, guarded and secret assassination. Chase assassinations usually involve clandestine agents or members of criminal organizations.
In safe assassinations, the assassin needs the usual qualities of a clandestine agent. He should be determined, courageous, intelligent, resourceful, and physically active. If special equipment is to be used, such as firearms or drugs, it is clear that he must have outstanding skill with such equipment.
Except in terroristic assassinations, it is desirable that the assassin be transient in the area. He should have an absolute minimum of contact with the rest of the organization and his instructions should be given orally by one person only. His safe evacuation after the act is absolutely essential, but here again contact should be as limited as possible. It is preferable that the person issuing instructions also conduct any withdrawal or covering action which may be necessary.
In lost assassination, the assassin must be a fanatic of some sort. Politics, religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives. Since a fanatic is unstable psychologically, he must be handled with extreme care. He must not know the identities of the other members of the organization, for although it is intended that he die in the act, something may go wrong. Will the Assassin of Trotsky has never revealed any significant information, it was unsound to depend on this when the act was planned.
When the decision to assassinate has been reached, the tactics of the operation must be planned, based upon an estimate of the situation similar to that used in military operations. The preliminary estimate will reveal gaps in information and possible indicate a need for special equipment which must be procured or constructed. When all necessary data has been collected, an effective tactical plan can be prepared. All planning must be mental; no papers should ever contain evidence of the operation.
In resistance situations, assassination may be used as a counter-reprisal. Since this requires advertising to be effective, the resistance organization must be in a position to warn high officials publicly that their lives will be the price of reprisal action against innocent people. Such a threat is of no value unless it can be carried out, so it may be necessary to plan the assassination of various responsible officers of the oppressive regime and hold such plans in readiness to be used only if provoked by excessive brutality. Such plans must be modified frequently to meet changes in the tactical situation.
The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject. A human being may be killed in many ways but sureness is often overlooked by those who may be emotionally unstrung by the seriousness of this act they intend to commit. The specific technique employed will depend upon a large number of variables, but should be constant in one point: Death must be absolutely certain. The attempt on Hitler’s life failed because the conspiracy did not give this matter proper attention.
It is possible to kill a man with bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well. Even a highly trained Judo expert will hesitate to risk killing by hand unless he has absolutely no alternative. However, the simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice. A length of rope or wire or a belt will do if the assassin is strong and agile. All such improvised weapons have the important advantage of availability and apparent innocence. The obviously lethal machine gun failed to kill Trotsky where an item of sporting goods succeeded.
In all safe cases where the assassin may be subject to search, either before or after the act, specialized weapons should not be used. Even in the lost case, the assassin may accidentally be searched before the act and should not carry an incriminating device if any sort of lethal weapon can be improvised at or near the site. If the assassin normally carries weapons because of the nature of his job, it may still be desirable to improvise and implement at the scene to avoid disclosure of his identity.
For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.
The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly-cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.
Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. It will be more reliable if the assassin can arrange to attempt rescue, as he can thus be sure of the subject’s death and at the same time establish a workable alibi.
Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.
Automobile accidents are a less satisfactory means of assassination. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. If the subject’s car is tampered with, reliability is very low. The subject may be stunned or drugged and then place in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation.
Arson can cause accidental death if the subject is drugged and left in a burning building. Reliability is not satisfactory unless the building is isolated and highly combustible.
In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If no, two grains will suffice.
If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.
Specific poisons, such as arsenic or strychnine, are effective but their possession or procurement is incriminating, and accurate dosage is problematical. Poison was used unsuccessfully in the assassination or Rasputin and Kolohan, though the latter case is more accurately described as a murder.
4. Edge weapons
Any locally obtained edge device may be successfully employed. A certain minimum of anatomical knowledge is needed for reliability.
Puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. The heart is protected by the rib cage and is not always easy to locate.
Abdominal wounds were once nearly always mortal, but modern medical treatment has made this no longer true.
Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region. This can be done with the point of a knife or a light blow of an axe or hatchet.
Another reliable method is the severing of both jugular and carotid blood vessels on both sides of the windpipe.
If the subject has been rendered unconscious by other wounds or drugs, either of the above methods can be used to insure death.
As with edge weapons, blunt weapons require some anatomical knowledge for effective use. Their main advantage is their universal availability. A hammer may be picked up almost anywhere in the world. Baseball and [illeg] bats are very widely distributed. Even a rock or a heavy stick will do, and nothing resembling a weapon need be procured, carried or subsequently disposed of.
Blows should be directed to the temple, the area just below and behind the ear, and the lower, rear portion of the skull. Of course, if the blow is very heavy, any portion of the upper skull will do. The lower frontal portion of the head, from the eyes to the throat, can withstand enormous blows without fatal consequences.
6. Firearms
Firearms are often used in assassination, often very ineffectively. The assassin usually has insufficient technical knowledge of the limitations of weapons, and expects more range, accuracy and killing power than can be provided with reliability. Since certainty of death is the major requirement, firearms should be used which can provide destructive power at least 100% in excess of that thought to be necessary, and ranges should be half that considered practical for the weapon.
Firearms have other drawbacks. Their possession is often incriminating. They may be difficult to obtain. They require a degree of experience from the user. They [illeg] is consistently over-rated.
However, there are many cases in which firearms are probably more efficient than any other means. These cases usually involve distance betweeen the assassin and the subject, or comparative physical weakness of the assassin, as with a woman.
(a) The precision rifle.
In guarded assassination, a good hunting or target rifle should always be considered as a possibility. Absolute reliability can nearly always be achieved at a distance of one hundred yards. In ideal circumastances, the range may be extended to 250 yards. The rifle shold be a wll made bolt or falling block action type, handling a powerful long-range cartirdge. The .300 F.A.B. Magnum is probably the best cartridge readily available. other excellent calibers are .375 M.[illeg]. Magnum, .270 Winchester, .30 – 106 p.s., 8 x 60 MM Magnum, 9.3 X 62 KK and others of this type. These are preferable to ordinary military calibers, since ammunition available for them is usually of the expanding bullet type, whereas most ammunition for military refles is full jacketed and hence not sufficiently lethal. Military ammunition should not be altered by filing or drilling bullets, as this will adversely affect accuracy.
The rifle may be of the “bull gun” variety, with extra heavy barrel and set triggers, but in any case should be able to group in one inch at one hundred yards, but 2 1/2″ groups are adequate. The sight shold be telescopic, not only for accuracy, but because such a sight is much better in dim light or near darkness. As long as the bare outline of the target is discernable, a telescope sight will work, even if the rifle and shooter are in total darkness.
An expanding, hunting bullet of such calibers as described above will produce extravagant laceration and shock at short or mid-range. if a man is struck just once in the body cavity, his death is almost entirely certain.
Public figures or guarded officials may be killed withgreat reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion. The propaganda value of this system may be very high.
(b) The machine gun.
Machine guns may be used in most cases where the precision rifle is applicable. Usually this will require the subversion of a unit of an official guard at a ceremony, though a skillful and determined team might conceivably dispose of a loyal gun crow without commotion and take over the gun at the critical time.
The area fire capacity of the machine gun should not be used to search out a concealed subject. This was tried with predictable lack of success on Trotsky. The automatic feature of the machine gun should rather be used to increase reliability by placing a 5 second burst on the subject. Even with full jacket ammunition, this will be absolute lethal is the burst pattern is no larger than a man. This can be accomplished at about 150 yards. In ideal circumstances, a properly padded and targeted machine gun can do it at 850 yards. The major difficulty is placing the first burst exactly on the target, as most machine gunners are trained to spot their fire on target by observation of strike. This will not do in assassination as the subject will not wait.
(c) The Submachine Gun.
This weapon, known as the “machine-pistol” by the Russians and Germans and “machine-carbide” by the British, is occasionally useful in assassination. Unlike the rifle and machine gun, this is a short range weapon and since it fires pistol ammunition, much less powerful. To be reliable, it should deliver at least 5 rounds into the subject’s chest, though the .45 caliber U.S. weaponshave a much larger margin of killing efficiency than the 9 mm European arms.
The assassination range of the sub-machine gun is point blank. While accurate single rounds can be delivered by sub-machine gunners at 50 yards or more, this is not certain enough for assassination. Under ordinary circumstances, the 5MG shold be used as a fully automatic weapon. In the hands of a capable gunner, a high cyclic rate is a distinct advantage, as speed of execution is most desirable, particularly in the case of multiple subjects.
The sub-machine gun is especially adapted to indoor work when more than one subject is to be assassinated. An effective technique has been devised for the use of a pair of sub-machine gunners, by which a room contailning as many as a dozen subjectgs can be “purifico” in about twenty seconds with little or no risk to the gunners. It is illustratrated below.
While the U.S. sub-machine guns fire the most lethal cartridges, the higher cyclic rate of some foreigh weapons enable the gunner to cover a target quicker with acceptable pattern density. The Bergmann Model 1934 is particularly good in this way. The Danish Madman? SMG has a moderately good cyclic rate and is admirably compact and concealable. The Russian SHG’s have a good cyclic rate, but are handicapped by a small, light protective which requires more kits for equivalent killing effect.
Shutting off curiosity:
Notes on Evan Thomas’ book,
The Very Best Men—Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA
Diary entry
“This is a story that no one wants to know.”
— Harry Huge, Esq., 1994
I was talking with a friend tonight about my father’s death. My friend said he saw an analogy between my father’s murder and the order given to Francis Gary Powers to kill himself rather than allow himself to be captured by the enemy. The analogy my friend saw lay in the similarity between a national security murder on the one hand, and the order to kill oneself for security on the other hand–the only difference being in whether one’s death comes at the hand of another or at one’s own.
I later realized that the analogy goes further, because the pill Powers was supposed to have taken was concocted by the ubiquitous Sidney Gottlieb, and also because the U2 plane Powers was piloting was the brain child of Richard Bissell who (according to Evan Thomas in The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA) gave considerable thought to the problem of how to murder someone for security reasons while doing so in a way that would seem to be a natural death and would not arouse undue curiosity.
Evan Thomas writes as follows:
Bissell, on the other hand, was “more open-minded,” said Gottlieb. He had, of course, worked closely with the Technical Services Staff developing the U-2. When he became DD/P [Deputy Director of Plans, i.e. covert operations] in 1959, “he was very interested in MKULTRA,” said Gottlieb. “He fancied himself a technological promoter and entrepreneur. He wanted to understand what the farthest reach could be. He wanted to know, could you assassinate someone without anyone every finding out about it?”
At first it was all “speculative,” recalled Bissell. But the concept interested him. If one of the obstacles to assassination was what agency officials called blowback, perhaps there was a technical solution. “I wanted to see if there was a way to make it look like a natural occurrence. This would be the best way to preserve security. You’d shut off curiosity.” (paperback edition, p. 212)
The interesting thing, the amazing thing really about this quote is that it occurs on the very same page (p. 212) where—just eight lines earlier—Thomas tells the story of the death of Frank Olson, who, Thomas says, “worked with Gottlieb, also experimented with LSD and fell to his death from the window of a New York hotel in 1953.”
But Thomas never connects the two subjects. Talk about shutting off curiosity!!!
This example is so good it could be used in literary theory as a case of unconscious reflexivity: inadvertently performing the very thing one is explaining.
It all reminds me a bit of the collage work too. Sometimes a collage-maker will place two images in very close proximity and then, pointing first at one image and then at the other, insists that “This has nothing to do with that.”
Of course one can’t contemplate Bissell’s recommendations for “shutting off curiosity” without being reminded of the CIA’s Assassination Manual of late 1953, where the device of the “contrived accident” is the recommended method for disguising a murder as a suicide:
The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface…
If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.
And of course one can’t read these passages without thinking of this exchange from the Elmore Leonard novel, BE COOL:
“I know a way,” Elliot said. “Throw him out a window and make it look like he committed suicide.”
Raji said, “Elliot” –like, are you stupid or something? –“the windows in the office don’t open.”
Elliot said, “I don’t mean in the office.”
Raji heard him, but Raji was the boss. Once he said Elliot was wrong or stupid Raji would keep going, have his say.
“Man’s gonna commit suicide. So what he does is run across the room and throw himself through[italics in the original] the window? Breaks the glass? Cuts himself all up?”
Elliot didn’t mean that at all. What he had in mind, take the man to a hotel room like in the Roosevelt and pitch him out from the top floor. But Raji was still talking.
“Nicky leave a suicide note? ‘I can’t take no more of this shit life is handing me, so I’m gonna throw myself through the fuckin window?’ You did it to the man in Haiwa-ya and you think, year, that’s it, that’s how to do it. Man, it’s the dumbest idea I ever heard of.”
(Elmore Leonard,
BE COOL, Dell, 1999, p. 233)
The startling similarity of this quote to my father’s story is very likely not entirely coincidental. I met Elmore Leonard in 1996 at a book signing at a bookshop called Killer Books in Washington, together with his friend James Grady who wrote “6 Days of the Condor” (changed to “3 Days of the Condor” for the movie). Grady was very familiar with the Olson story—he had interviewed my sister in 1975 for a Jack Anderson column. I don’t know whether Leonard had known the story before or not, but he followed the exchange between me and Grady with considerable interest.
The remarkable example of Evan Thomas’ failure to see what he himself placed in front of his own eyes on page 212 of The Very Best Men is not the only case where an author has blinked when faced with the Frank Olson story. In some ways an even more startling example is to be found in Ed Regis’ history of Fort Detrick, The Biology of Doom. Regis scatters the Olson story through a number of chapters of his book, which enables him to make it almost a leit motif of his narrative while divesting him of the responsibility to confront the story head on. On page 157 (hardback edition) Regis describes the Tuesday morning when, for the second time after the Deep Creek drugging, Olson arrived at work:
Ruwet now decided that this was far more serious than he’d realized at first. Outside intervention was clearly advisable, not only for Frank Olson’s sake, but for the sake of Camp Detrick and the biological warfare program, and in particular for the overall security of the SO Division. Everyone’s worst nightmare had always been of someone’s flipping out and running amok, and spilling all the family secrets. (p 157-168)
So there it is: the elephant in the room finally named, even if its features remain entirely unexplored. What sorts of contingency plans did Detrick (or any other Cold War facility) have for a situation where a key scientist threatens to pose a security risk? And what if that scientist has been drugged — destabilized — by his own colleagues?
This is the only example of which I am aware where the obvious problem of security in the wake of some kind of psychological breakdown is stated clearly. This was obviously a huge problem in many areas of Cold War research and industry, one which in many cases would have posed horrendous dilemmas for a democracy which did not have the equivalent of a Gulag prison system in which to dispose of people. I know of no work in which any any historian has explored this issue. This makes Regis’ next narrative move all the more interesting.
This is how Regis tells the story of Olson’s death in New York three days later:
Just in case Olson should try to leave the room and wander about the neighborhood as he’d done two nights earlier, Lashbrook took the bed next to the door.
Now, around midnight, they went to bed.
Only ten days previously, Frank Rudolph Olson, Ph.D., had been a branch chief in the Special Operations Division, a trusted employee of the U.S. Government’s secret germ warfare installation at Camp Detrick. Now he was hearing voices, having delusions, and on his way to the crazy house.
He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stay asleep.
At about 3 A.M., with Lashbrook asleep, Frank Olson crashed through the closed window of room 1018A and disappeared below the ledge. (p. 161)
“Disappeared below the ledge”…! The drugged guinea pig — out of control and “on his way to the crazy house” — now disappears below the ledge!
How should we read the word “disappeared”? Should the verb “disappeared” be taken to mean “jumped”? Or should we perhaps take the word “disappeared” in the meaning it has acquired in Latin America, where it is used as a past participle: i.e., the dissidents “were disappeared”?
Regis makes no mention of the fact that this extremely unlikely story derives only from the CIA’s uncorroborated version of events. (See my notes on the interview with Dr. Robert Gibson for one example on a contradictory story, and the new Afterword to Jonathan Moreno’s Undue Risk for a more general discussion.)
Most alarming of all, Regis does not mention that this “disappearance below the ledge“ was, at the very least, extremely convenient for Olson’s caretakers, charged as they were with the security of a high level scientist doing top secret work and now (according to the standard version of the story) completely out of control. What, in fact, would these “caretakers” have done if this scientist — privy to a whole network of secrets involving everything from terminal experiments on human subjects, assassination materials research, mind control experiments, the use of biological weapons in Korea — what would they have done, what could they have done, if Olson had not “disappeared below the ledge” on the very day when he was scheduled to be placed in an open psychiatric hospital with no provision for maintaining security, and with open access to family and friends?
But of course one does not ask questions that lead in the direction of issues that one does not wish to face. In the Agency’s terminology, the ideal tactic is to intercept a question before it has a chance to be stated, thereby “shutting off curiosity” before a direction of thought can be formulated, articulated, and acquire momentum.
This strategy has been remarkably effective. The whole issue of what one might call “Cold War homicides” or “national security murders” has (so far as I am aware) never been raised as a ‘problem of democracy,’ (as my high school civics teacher might has put it). (For an article that raises this issue empirically, though not philosophically, “Mid-century deaths all linked to CIA? New evidence in Olson case suggests similarities with other incidents” by H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly.) The most candid discussion I have seen of this general problem with reference to the values of a democracy (though murder of a fellow citizen is not mentioned) occurs between two CIA officers in William Buckley’s novel Spytime:
Esterhazy was solemn in his reflection. “Lincoln asked himself a related question, I remember. Along the lines of, Does it further the aims of the Constitution to abide by it when doing so endangers, well, endangers the whole thing–”
“Here are his words exactly. You can understand why I have committed them to memory. Lincoln said, ‘Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?’… Well, Hugo, there’s a good case to be made for declining even to talk about quandaries like that. It’s best left that although the truth may make you free, something less than the whole truth, in some situations, is necessary in order to keep the fire lit.”
(William F. Buckley, Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton (New York: Harcourt, 2000)
Perhaps the most disturbing example of what we might call the phenomenon of ‘the spatially proximate but discursively unconnected’ in the treatment of the death of Frank Olson occurs in Christopher Simpson’s impressive book, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War. It is often more instructive to notice where the story of Frank Olson’s death is told than exactly what is said (the story is usually virtually identical); one frequently has the impression that in choosing the narrative context in which to insert this story an author is implicitly making connections that he has not yet explicitly formulated. To put this differently, an author may know more than he realizes he knows, or, in some cases, more than he wants to know, and, as in a collage, he may convey this knowledge implicitly in choices concerning spatial positioning.
Chapter Eleven of Simpson’s book, “Guerrillas for World War III,” deals with the recruitment of former Nazis to carry out American-ordered assassinations in Europe in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. On pages 149-150 of the paperback edition Simpson writes as follows:
Former Nazi collaborators made excellent executioners in such instances, because of both their wartime training and the fact that the U.S. government could plausibly deny any knowledge of their activities. Suspected double agents were the most common targets for execution. “In the international clandestine operations business, it was part of the code that the one and only remedy for the unfrocked double agent was to kill him” (emphasis added [by Simpson]), the CIA’s director of operations planning during the Truman administration testified before Congress in 1976, “and all double agents knew that. That was part of the occupational hazard of the job.” The former director, whom the government declines to identify, also claimed, however, that he didn’t recall any executions of double agents actually occurring during his tenure there. It is understandable that he might fail to remember any executions; for admitting a role in such killings could well lead to arrest and prosecution for conspiracy to commit murder in Europe, if not in the United States itself.*
The asterisk at the end of this paragraph directs us to a footnote at the bottom of the page — and here it comes: the Frank Olson story as a footnote to assassinations in Europe!
*Unfrocked double agents were also tortured — there is no other word for it — in so-called terminal medical experiments sponsored by the army, navy, and the CIA. These tests fed massive quantities of convulsant and psychedelic drugs to foreign prisoners in an attempt to make them talk, according to CIA records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by author John Marks. The CIA also explored use of psychosurgery and repeated electric shocks directly into the brain.
Then CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all records of these “experiments” in the midst of Watergate and congressional investigations that threatened to bring to light the agency’s practices in this field. A cache of papers that he accidentally missed was found some years later, however, and the agency has since been forced to make public sanitized versions of some of those records. It is now known that similar agency tests with LSD led to the suicide of an army employee, Frank Olson, and are alleged to have permanently damaged a group of unsuspecting psychiatric patients at a Canadian clinic whose director was working under CIA contract. The agency unit that administered this program was the same Directorate of Scientific Research that developed the exotic poisons used in attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba.
So close, and yet so far. How differently the above account reads if one keeps in mind the following facts: (1) Frank Olson was not an army employee; according to the CIA’s own file (the one that Helms “accidentally missed” and therefore did not destroy, and also according to William Colby’s autobiography) Olson was not an army employee; he was, in fact, a “CIA employee;” (2) the Special Operations Division for which Olson worked was closely allied with the CIA, and with the CIA’s efforts to develop methods for “special interrogation;” (3) the CIA officer in charge of the “experiment” in which Olson was drugged (Sidney Gottlieb) was the same man who developed the “exotic poisons” for use in the attempted assassinations of Castro and Lumumba; (4) Gottlieb has testified that the poison for use in the attempted assassination of Lumumba came from the laboratory (Detrick) in which Frank Olson worked; (5) Frank Olson had made a trip to Europe and specifically to Germany on Special Operations business in the summer of 1953 before he was killed in November of that year.
I find it remarkable that the notion of a file being “accidentally missed” finds its way into this account, especially when one considers how many things about the death of Frank Olson the CIA has claimed were “accidents.” To wit: in 1953 the Olson family was told that the death of Frank Olson was an “accident;” when other materials were being shredded in 1973 the file on Frank Olson was “accidentally” not destroyed; when the Rockefeller Commission investigators were gathering materials at the CIA an Agency secretary “accidentally” gave them the Olson file, which was not supposed to be released (this explanation provided to the Olson family by Seymour Hersh); when the Rockefeller Commission came into possession of the Olson file in 1975 they “accidentally” forgot to notify the Olson family that the story of the death of their husband-father, kept secret for twenty-two years, was about to come to light; the CIA also “accidentally” failed to notify the Olson family when they came to know that the Olson story was about to be anonymously disseminated both in the Rockefeller Commission’s report and in the press; the story of Frank Olson’s death as it was described in the notoriously missing file which was “accidentally” not destroyed was that Olson had been “accidentally” kept on a high floor of a hotel during his stay in New York for psychiatric consultation because of an “accidental” failure of judgment in which the severity of his disturbance was underestimated; Sidney Gottlieb told the Olson family in 1984 that he had had no idea that LSD could cause the sort of effects it caused in Olson’s case, and that in that sense the drugging of Olson was a mistake and an “accident.”
What remains striking in Simpson’s account is the placement of the Olson “suicide” story in such close spatial proximity to the accounts of terminal experiments and assassinations in Europe. In this context the memo provided by Gordon Thomas takes on special significance.
The Agency has deflected the question of national security homicides in a double maneuver. On the one hand the CIA has admitted to unsuccessful (and ill-advised) attempts at assassinating foreign leaders, while, on the other hand, the notion of domestic involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy has been effectively marginalized as “conspiracy theory” (i.e., lunacy). The result is that the issue of the vast territory that falls between the poles of these extreme cases, what we might call ‘plain old everyday national security terminations,’ has been effectively omitted from the discourse of Cold War history (except of course in Stalin’s Russia where “the end justified the means.”) From the perspective of analyses like that of Michel Foucault one might ask not only about the occasional necessity for such acts, but also about the role such terminations would have played in “disciplining” a democratic population for fighting a Cold War in which covert operations and plausible deniability were the key weapons.
The Evan Thomas-Ed Regis examples are valuable, though, not only from the perspective of questions they raise for political theory but also for the quite complex psychological issues they embody. How do the mechanisms of perception enable the mind to posit a connection and yet avoid seeing it? In order not to see what one does not wish to see how does the mind first recognize a dangerous object precisely in order to intercept and block it? And what is the remedy? How is the mechanism of perception refreshed; how are the mechanisms of internal censorship and repression modified so that inconvenient objects can be perceived and held in mind, awkward questions can be raised?
A few thoughts on the many questions this raises:
The idea of placing one thing near another and then asserting (explicitly or implicitly) that “the one has nothing to do with the other” of course suggests Freud’s comments about negation, where, due to the fact that the unconscious cannot represent a negative relationship, denial always implies affirmation. Even if true, however, this approach conveys little about how the mechanism might actually work, and particularly how it works not only in verbal exchange but in the more primary register of perception.
The most useful line of thought on this problem comes, I think, from philosopher Susanne Langer who in her multivolume study Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling emphasizes that perception is a complex act which consists of many components or phases, not all of which are synchronized and integrated with each other. The early phases of the perceptual act often serve to register the emotional value of the stimulus precisely in order to steer subsequent perceptual phases away from the stimulus or from some aspects of it.
In her explanation of this phenomenon Langer emphasizes the idea that the early phases serve to adumbrate value. She writes:
[…in acts of recognition, motivation and feeling] value may be adumbrated before the perception of forms is complete.
(Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol. 1, 1967)
The phenomenon that Langer is seeking to account for here is the seemingly paradoxical fact that one can’t avoid something unless one first recognizes it: one can’t resist seeing something unless one has first seen it. This phenomenon is a familiar one in psychoanalytic experience. As one psychoanalyst (Roy Schafer) put it, the mystery of how the repressed makes its appearance in the psychoanalytic dialogue is that patient “refers to what he is passing over as he passes over it.” The reciprocal task of the psychoanalyst, therefore, becomes that of hearing the alienated voice of the other within the rhythms of the patient’s multivocal speech. This textual nature of this task is one reason why literary theory and psychoanalysis have had such a rich cross-fertilization in recent decades.
But what about the social manifestation of this mechanism in the form of learning to ignore that which (perhaps despite its strangeness) has been made to appear normal or usual? Habituation to that which was in fact quite bizarre was the common experience in my own family, where my father’s death acquired a pseudo-familiarity that served to remove it from the reach of curiosity and thought.
The phenomenon of the dulling of perception through habituation has received a great deal of attention in literary theory, particularly from the Russian formalists who thought that the artist’s challenge was then to regrasp the strangeness of the familiar: the process that has been called “making strange”:
“People living at the seashore,” wrote Shlovskij, “grow so accustomed to the murmur of waves that they never hear it. By the same token, we scarcely ever hear the words which we utter.… We look at each other, but we do not see each other any more. Our perception of the world has withered away, what has remained is mere recognition.”…
The poetic image makes strange the habitual and… its linguistic devices, to use the favorite Formalist expression, are “laid bare.”
(Victor Erlich,
Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, 1981)
Brecht’s epic theater … is a theater that is in certain ways conscious of itself as signifying practice, and that draws attention to its own means of production, its own processes of representation. This quality of self-reflexivity largely derives from the devices of distanciation or alienation… [The] means of representation are foregrounded.… This foregrounding of devices, however, is not so much designed to produce a sense of aesthetic “play”… [as] to offer the audience a place from which it can develop its own criticism of and judgment upon the actions represented.…
…“the individual episodes have to be knotted together in such a way that the knots are easily noticed.”…
This process of “noticing the knots” or of foregrounding the means of representation has been a familiar one in modernist theory and practice since the time of the cubists.
(Sylvia Harvey,
Quoting B. Brecht, in “Whose Brecht? Memories of the Eighties,” Screen, 1982)
This long trajectory through the notions of “shutting off curiosity,” motivated perceptual blindness, habituation, and “making strange” brings us, finally, to collage, and to the remarkable observations of German art theorist Franz Mon on the social relevance of this medium:
Collage offers an opportunity for accelerated insight into what happens to us in our reality. In the multiplicity of collage working techniques — ranging from tearing, to burning, cutting, crumpling, ripping, rubbing — one finds analogues to society’s socializing processes and events. In the renderings of collage is disclosed that which social ideology tends to pass over.
Using the material of a given reality collage brings forth, through transposition, ‘another’ reality, which reveals the inner essence of that which has become dulled through habituation. By relieving reality of its rules of the game, collage presents designs for experimentation — patterns which are new, unused, and possibly valid only for the moment.
(Franz Mon
Prinzip Collage, 1968)
Books referred to in this note:
Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA.
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995; paperback 1996).
Elmore Leonard, BE COOL.
(New York: Dell, 1999).
Ed Regis, The Biology of Doom: The History of America’s Secret Germ Warfare Project
(New York: Henry Holt, 1999; paperback 2000).
William Buckley, Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton.
(New York: Harcourt, 2000; paperback, 2001).
Susanne Langer. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (3 Vols.) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967-82).
Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Widenfeld & Nicolson, 1988).
Only The Shadow Knows
Notes on my meeting with Dr. Robert Gibson
When last-minute plans were being made on the afternoon of November 27, 1953 to hospitalize Frank Olson a call was placed to a young admitting psychiatrist in Maryland named Robert Gibson. (Gibson went on to a very distinguished career in medicine: he became director of Shepherd-Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, and President of the American Psychiatric Association.) The Olson family had never heard this name, and would not learn of Dr. Gibson’s role until 1994. When Dr. Gibson read about the exhumation of Frank Olson’s body he contacted Professor James Starrs, director of the forensic team, to tell his side of the story. This was reported in a January 19, 1995 AP story by reporter Deb Riechmann, the same reporter who had also found a mysterious document in Olson’s personnel file. James Starrs interviewed Dr. Gibson in 1994, and in 1999 I finally decided I should meet him too. The AP story appears below, followed by my notes on that meeting.
I met Dr. Gibson at his home north of Baltimore just after 2:00 p.m. on a rainy Monday afternoon, Dec 20, 1999. Dr. Gibson greeted me at the door together with his two large brown dogs. He then showed me around the ground floor of his large wooden house, which is set in the woods overlooking a large reservoir. Then we settled down, Dr. Gibson on the sofa and me in a large comfortable chair, to begin what became a five-hour conversation.
I told Dr. Gibson that I had re-read the transcript of the conversation he had had with Jim Starrs almost exactly five years earlier, on Dec 21, 1994. {As I mentioned this I was aware for a moment of the almost Proustian expanse of time that has been devoted to solving my father’s murder.] On the low table facing us Dr. Gibson had spread out the materials I had sent him, which included the chronology of this long affair. He directed my attention to an ambiguity in the way I had described what he had said during the meeting he had had with Jim Starrs Gibson pointed out that my description could be read as implying that he had had some sort of affiliation or relation with the CIA, or had access to special information from that source. Dr. Gibson wanted me to understand that this was not and had never been the case.
Dr. Gibson has had a remarkably distinguished career. He was director of Shepherd Pratt Hospital for twenty years, where a building there bears his name. As we turned toward the matter of the CIA Dr. Gibson began by telling me about an event that had occurred when he was president of the American Psychiatric Association. A letter he had sent to the CIA declining cooperation with a study had turned up in the hands of the Scientology Church. How had this occurred? The explanation turned out to be that a member of the Scientology Church had gotten a short term job in Dr. Gibson’s organization just prior to this affair and had had access to office files. I said that I had heard that the Scientology Church reputedly has large files on the CIA’s mind control projects. Dr. Gibson said he found this very believable.
I gave Dr. Gibson a copy of Paul Robeson Jr.’s Nation article, in which Robeson links his father’s drug-manipulated suicide-attempt to my father’s murder, which was disguised as an LSD suicide. Dr. Gibson said he remembered having seen Paul Robeson Jr. play football for Cornell in a game against Penn, where Dr. Gibson had studied.
We then turned to a detailed discussion of the contact that Dr. Gibson had had with one of my father’s caretakers, the “caretaker” who apparently was Robert Lashbrook though Gibson does not remember the name.
In November 1953 Dr. Gibson, then a young doctor of twenty-five, was working as an admitting psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland. He said he received a call late one afternoon—about four P.M. he thinks— inquiring about the possibility of an admission for Dr. Olson. This call was received the day before a second call on the day of Olson’s death informing Gibson that Dr. Olson would not be coming. This means that the first call was received on Nov. 27, 1953, at about 4:00 P.M.
The caller identified himself as a doctor, and Gibson took this to mean that he was a medical doctor. [I do not know whether Dr. Gibson is able to be specific as to whether names were given, either of the caller or the friend. I must ask about this.] The caller said that he was calling from New York where he was with “a friend” who had “been acting strangely” and appeared to require hospitalization. This terse description of Olson’s condition was apparently the only explanation given for requiring hospitalization. Dr. Gibson is certain that he then asked whether the friend to be admitted was currently under the care of a physician, or was receiving any sort of treatment. Dr. Gibson says he can be certain that he asked these questions both because he remembers having done so, and also because he would have routinely asked this.
The answer given by the caller was that Dr. Olson was not currently in treatment and was not under the care of a doctor.
Dr. Gibson then explained that based on this limited information he could not arrange for an admission immediately, but that the patient could be brought in for an examination and that then a recommendation (which might be either an admission or a referral) could be made. The caller then inquired about bringing the patient in that same night. In the discussion that ensued, however, it became clear that the time required to travel from New York to Washington by train and then to come all the way to Rockville would make the arrival very late at night. It would be difficult even to find Chestnut Lodge. It was agreed that the trip should be made the following day.
[I now recall that this explanation for the delay based upon the lateness of the hour contradicts the explanation given in the Colby documents, I think by Lashbrook. There the explanation for coming on Saturday is that the weather in New York was bad and that flights were not departing, the assumption being that Lashbrook and Olson would travel by plane, not by train. I must check this. I have checked the weather for the 27th and 28th, and found that in fact, contarary to what was claimed, the weather was good for flying.]
Dr. Gibson said that normally an immediate hospitalization at Chestnut Lodge would have been impossible, due to the long waiting list which usually required a one year wait. However, on this particular day Dr. Gibson checked the waiting list and found that all those on it had removed their names, so that one bed was in fact available.
The next morning Dr. Gibson arrived about 8:00 a.m. He explained to me that he sometimes did work on Saturdays, so that it is plausible that he would have been at the hospital on Saturday November 28. On his arrival the secretary informed him that a call had just come in concerning the admission he had discussed the previous day. Dr. Gibson then went into his office to take the call.
The caller was the same man with whom Gibson has spoken the day before. The caller said that his friend would not be coming. Hearing this, Dr. Gibson inquired about the reason, asking whether the plans had been changed. The caller explained that the reason was that his friend had died during the night. He then described what had happened. Dr. Gibson said he cannot remember all the words that were used in the explanation, but that was what was told to him had formed an image in his mind of what the situation had been, and this image he remembers very clearly.
The caller said that he had awakened in the middle of the night, whereupon he saw his friend standing in the middle of the room. The caller tried to speak to his friend, but this apparently startled the friend, who then started running and hurled himself through the window. Crashing glass was part of the image that Dr. Gibson remembers. The caller said he had known his friend was dead because “the window was on a high floor of the hotel.”
Dr. Gibson remembers being concerned for the caller, who had apparently witnessed the horrifying death of a friend. Gibson made some inquiries along these lines but doesn’t remember eliciting any particular response.
After recounting this story Dr. Gibson and I discussed a number of questions that naturally arise. One question is why Lashbrook (or Abramson if that was who the caller was) would have called to arrange hospitalization, possibly to begin as early as that same night, if the intention was to kill the patient. A second question is whether, if the hospitalization had occurred, it would have been possible to guarantee a level of security adequate to the concerns of the Agency. A third question is why in 1994, when he was informed of Dr. Gibson’s version of these events, Lashbrook would have responded by saying, “Dr. Gibson must be dreaming.”
As for the first question—why would hospitalization have been arranged for a patient who was slated to be killed?—two answers occurred to us. The first is that some event or chain of events might have occurred after the call was made that resulted in a new decision about what to do with Frank. One element in this may have been the realization that security at the hospital would indeed have posed unsolvable problems. Dr. Abramson, for example, would inevitably have been drawn into the situation, either during the admission process or during treatment. Dr. Abramson makes clear in the Colby documents that he wanted “to be kept out of it.” This is merely the first of a whole series of security problems that would have arisen. Dr. Gibson explained that Chestnut Lodge did not have security-cleared psychiatrists on its staff at that time, and that security would indeed have been a problem had psychotherapeutic treatment begun at Chestnut Lodge.
But, if security was a concern, as it would have had to have been, then the question arises as to why the Agency’s secure mental health facility in Massachusetts was not considered. The obvious answer is that termination, not a secured facility was the course chose. This answer also explains why Lashbrook and Olson stayed in the Statler Hotel, rather than in the safehouse that was available to them in Greenwich Village, ten minutes away by taxi.
A second explanation for arranging hospitalization is that an alibi would have been needed. If Olson’s death was to be explained as a suicide, and if there were numerous signs that he had in fact been suicidal during the days in New York, then it would have appeared suspicious in the extreme if the death had occurred in the absence of any plans for further treatment. This is especially true given that the alleged reason for being in New York to begin with was to receive treatment from Dr. Abramson (which of course was not acknowledged in the call to Gibson). If at the end of three days of consultation with Abramson the patient killed himself (as the story was to be told) then it had to be as an unfortunate event happening before the hospitalization that had been arranged could be put into effect. The impression given was to be, “We did our best, but unfortunately we didn’t quite make it to the hospital.” That was the myth with which I grew up as a child. “Yes they tried to take care of our father,” my brother and sister and I always thought. “But he fell out the window the night before they could get him to a hospital.”
This rationale has the ring of plausibility, and it explains another aspect of the story that otherwise is a gaping hole. This is the question of timing: why were arrangements for hospitalization made so late in the week, and so late in the day? If Abramson’s reports in the Colby documents are to be believed, Abramson had had ample reason to have come to the conclusion early on that Olson required hospitalization. In fact, given his reports the astounding thing is that Olson was permitted to reside on a high floor of a hotel at all during the New York stay.
From the perspective at which we have arrived here, however, one can suspect that a decision to kill Olson would have to have been accompanied by a decision to arrange a spurious hospitalization for him. Both decisions must have been reached some time Friday. By calling Chestnut Lodge so late in the day it was possible to give the impression that immediate care was needed, leaving it to Dr. Gibson to take the responsibility for delaying the arrival for a day. This would create the desired impression of concern, while at the same time avoiding the possibility that Olson would indeed land in a hospital that same night and out of the reach of his CIA “caretakers.” It’s a bit like the story my mother used to tell about my father before he was married. When he knew a woman already had a date for a particular night he would call her up and ask her out. That way he could get credit for being interested and for trying without actually having to spend any money.
This interpretation is given support by another anomaly in the story. Just hours after the arrangement was made to take Frank to Chestnut Lodge the following day he had a phone call with my mother in which he said he would be home that same following day. Had Frank himself not been told of the hospitalization plans, or were these plans bogus—made disingenuously, without serious intent to carry them out? The latter seems overwhelmingly likely.
As for the question of whether security could have been guaranteed at Chestnut Lodge, Dr. Gibson gives a clear negative response. He told me that neither he nor his colleagues had clearances to deal with secret information, and said that the process of psychotherapy would have exposed the whole scenario in which my father was caught.
The third question—why did Lashbrook say what he did in 1994—was raised by Dr. Gibson in response to what he considered to be a strange response by Lashbrook to Gibson’s recounting of the call he received. Dr. Gibson said that the more natural response would not have been “Dr. Gibson must be dreaming,” but, rather, a suggestion that either Lashbrook had spoken to someone else (not Gibson) or that someone else (not Lashbrook) had spoken to Gibson. A call from someone was definitely received by Dr. Gibson, and certainly a call from someone in the Agency to someone at Chestnut Lodge would have to have been made. In either case it seems obvious that if hospitalization had been arranged, as is claimed in the Colby documents and as the family was informed after the death in 1953, then someone must have called the hospital to inform them of the new situation. It is curious that nowhere in the Colby documents is there any mention of a call being made by anyone to Chestnut Lodge to arrange hospitalization, or a call by anyone to cancel the arrangements once made.
But here too an explanation suggests itself. Apparently the cover story was changed later on Saturday morning, after the call to Gibson had been made. The idea that Lashbrook saw the exit through the window was clearly problematic. It must have been decided that the story would be that Lashbrook saw nothing, that he was awakened by the sound of crashing glass, and that by the time he opened his eyes Olson was gone. This story is obviously preferable to one in which Lashbrook sees Olson plunge through the window, which must have been a sort of first rough draft of a cover story. Perhaps Lashbrook, Gottlieb, and or Agency the security officers who were called in subsequently checked their own assassination manual and discovered that the best alibi of choice is one in which it is claimed that the assassination/witness saw nothing. When he looked around the subject was gone.
By the time a satisfactory cover story was decided upon a first draft had apparently already been conveyed to Gibson during the call in which the hospitalization was cancelled. This realization that this was the case must have been an awkward moment. I suspect that Lashbrook and company would have concluded, however that this storm could be weather. If Gibson’s name were kept out of the record nobody would ever hear his version anyway. Nobody would think to call Chestnut Lodge, and Chestnut Lodge would not think to get involved as they would never hear the new version of the story. The contradictions in the cover story would be unlikely to surface.
Were it not for “The Shadow” all that might have been true.
As we were discussing the scenario in New York I mentioned the very strange business involving Frank’s visit to a magician, Dr. Mullholland.
“Oh I met him,” Dr. Gibson said. “My father was a friend of his.”
Stunned by this I pressed Gibson for an explanation.
“My father was a writer and magician,” Dr. Gibson said. He knew all the greatest magicians of the day, Houdini, Blackstone, and Mullholland. He was also a novelist. Have you heard of “The Shadow” novels? He wrote all of those, more than three hundred “Shadow” novels in all.
Then Dr. Gibson’s wife appeared. Turning to her husband she [Diane] said, “If it weren’t for ‘The Shadow’ you might never have contacted Dr. Starrs.”
By this point I was starting to experience a hot flash. Dr. Gibson had met Mullholland! Dr. Gibson’s father the author of “The Shadow”! Not the psychologist Carl Jung’s shadow as the unacknowledged part of the personality, but The Shadow! Had I once again passed through the looking glass? Could the circle of psychiatrists and magicians in this story really be so small that the doctor who was to have admitted my father to the hospital have met the magician who had taught the CIA how to drug my father and whom my father was taken to see during that last fateful week in New York? And, in the context of this endlessly dark story, could the father of the doctor to whom I was now speaking really be the author of the line, “The Shadow knows?” Apparently so.
Dr. Gibson went to the bookshelf and pulled out an an old and cracking volume, a biography of his father William Gibson called “The Man of Magic and Mystery.” Page after page, probably at least sixty pages of this book, were devoted to merely listing the books William Gibson had written, over seven hundred in all. “Yes,” Dr. Gibson said, “my father would go into his study after dinner and start typing on an old Smith Corona typewriter. We would find him in exactly the same position the next morning. By then he would have written over a hundred pages. He never corrected them at all. They went directly to the publisher.”
The rest of the evening with Dr. Gibson was spent discussing the glory days of Chestnut Lodge where in the 1950’s and ’60’s an internationally famous group of psychiatrists was pioneering the treatment of schizophrenia. One of these, Harold Searles, authored a book, “Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects” that is one of the great classics of psychotherapeutic literature, and which I read with enormous profit while treating a schizophrenic patient in Sweden. Dr. Gibson also told me about research he had done using hypnosis to create very precise age regressions in a patient. He also described a book he is currently writing together with a former suicidal patient in which they are exploring the motivations that lead to suicide.
But then the most astounding question occurred to me. Given these connections among LSD, hypnosis schizophrenia, psychiatry, magic, and mystery, could mere chance explain the fact that the Lashbrook-Gottlieb team had somehow contacted Dr. Gibson? Given Gottlieb’s intellectual perspicacity (he had been familiar with the work of the professors with whom I worked in graduate school and even claimed to have financed Robert Lifton’s early work) I found this hard to believe. And yet some things in this tightly woven tale that led to my father’s death must have occurred by mere chance. My old Harvard mentor Henry Murray (who assessed Hitler’s personality for the OSS) used to tell me, “Chance, love, and logic. Can’t be all chance.”
But some of it must be.
“Only The Shadow knows.”
THE SPHINX AND THE SPY
The Clandestine World of John Mulholland
By Michael Edwards
Copyright 2001 by The Genii Corporation.
All Rights Reserved. Reproduced by Permission.
The Conjuror’s Magazine
At mid-century The Sphinx stood as America’s oldest and most prestigious magic magazine. Over its five-decade history, it had become part of the lifeblood of the conjuring world. Then, on June 29, 1953, John Mulholland wrote a letter to journal’s subscribers. “This is to inform you that as of June 1, 1953, the publication of The Sphinx has been suspended. The immediate cause is that my health does not permit me to do the necessary work. My Doctor orders me to confine my efforts at this time to the shows by which I earn my living.”
It was true that Mulholland’s health was not good. An inveterate smoker, he suffered from ulcers, stomach disorders and arthritis. Editing The Sphinxfor twenty-three years had taken a physical and financial toll. But rather than limiting his activities to his live performances, Mulholland had actually embarked on a new endeavor…an endeavor far more secretive than anything in the realm of conjuring. He had entered a world of covert operations, espionage, mind control, drugs, and even death. John Mulholland had gone to work for the CIA.
At the time, John Mulholland was one of America’s most highly regarded magicians. An outstanding stage as well as close-up performer, he had become a noted author, lecturer, historian, collector, editor, and world traveler. In many ways, he had helped make magic intellectually respectable.
Mulholland was born in Chicago, Illinois, on June 9, 1898. As a five-year old, he sat enthralled by a performance of Harry Kellar’s. It would begin a lifelong love of conjuring. His family moved to New York when he was quite young and it was there that he began to learn the techniques of the craft. At age 13 Mulholland began taking magic lessons from John William Sargent at $5 an hour. Known as “The Merry Wizard,” the gray-haired, goatee’d Sargent had been President of the Society of American Magicians in 1905-6 and would later serve as Harry Houdini’s secretary from 1918 until 1920. He was a true mentor to young Mulholland and instilled in him not only an appreciation of the art of magic but of its theory, history, and literature.
Mulholland learned his lessons well. He made his debut as a performer when he was 15. While he would be later regarded as one of magic’s great scholars, his academic achievements were somewhat limited. He took a number of courses at both Columbia University and at New York’s City College, but did not attain a degree. From 1918 to 1924, he taught industrial arts at the Horace Mann School in New York. He sold books for a while and then taught at Columbia University before embarking on a career as a full time professional magician.
Over the years, Mulholland developed an enormous range of presentations. He was equally at home performing close-up magic, entertaining a society dinner, or working the mammoth stage at Radio City Music Hall. In 1927 Mulholland gave a lecture in Boston about the magicians of the world, illustrating each vignette with a trick from that nation. It added a new genre for him and for the profession: the magician as lecturer.
After the death of Dr. A. M. Wilson in April of 1930, he took over editorship of The Sphinx. For the next 23 years he would oversee magic’s most influential periodical. He was a prolific writer. Aside from the vast number of articles he penned, he authored such books as Magic in the Making (with Milton M. Smith in 1925), Quicker than the Eye (1932), The Magic and Magicians of the World(1932), The Story of Magic (1935), Beware Familiar Spirits (1938), The Art of Illusion, (1944) reprinted as Magic for Entertaining, The Early Magic Shows (1945), John Mulholland’s Book of Magic (1963), Magic of the World (1965) and The Magical Mind — Key to Successful Communication (with George Gordon in 1967). He had also co-wrote a 1939 magic-detective novel, The Girl in the Cage, with Cortland Fitzsimmons.
Over the years, he amassed one of the world’s finest collections of magic books and memorabilia. His library housed some 4,000 volumes related to conjuring.
His knowledge of tricks seemed inexhaustible, as was his familiarity with the performance, theory, psychology, history, and literature of magic. He served as the consultant on conjuring to the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Merriam-Webster dictionary and at one time was the only magician listed in Who’s Who in America.
As America entered the 1950’s, the world around John Mulholland was changing. The Cold War was at its height. U.S. foreign policy had gone from trust to terror. In June of 1950, over one hundred thousand soldiers from Communist North Korea crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, invading the republic to the South. The previous year, Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb. The stakes had become enormous. The consequences of military confrontation could well be global thermonuclear war.
American policy-makers decided that other means – covert means — would have to be instituted to stop the expansion of communism. As a secret study commission under former President Hoover put it:
“It is now clear we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable longstanding concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.”
The vehicle for this effort was the Central Intelligence Agency.
Within the Agency, there was a concern – almost a panic – that the Russians had developed a frightening new weapon: a drug or technology for controlling men’s minds. A new term had entered the lexicon: “brainwashing.” At show trials in Eastern Europe, dazed defendants had admitted to crimes they hadn’t committed. American prisoners of war, paraded before the press by their North Korean captors, “confessed” in Zombie-like fashion that the US was using chemical and biological warfare against them. When George Kennan, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, made some inexplicably undiplomatic remarks at a press conference and was declared persona non grata by the Kremlin, American intelligence officials wondered if he had been hypnotized or drugged.
The CIA leadership feared a “mind control gap.”
The Search for a Manchurian Candidate
In early April of 1953, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles outlined to a Princeton audience the urgency of the situation. Describing “how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in Soviet hands,” Dulles revealed that the Russians had developed “brain perversion techniques” which must be countered at any price.
The CIA had already begun crafting this counter. On April 3, 1953 Richard Helms, the Agency’s Acting Deputy Director, had proposed an “ultra-sensitive” program of research and development in clandestine chemical and biological warfare.
The goal, Helms wrote, was “to develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials. This area includes the production of various physiological conditions which could support present or future clandestine operations. Aside from the offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in this field of covert chemical and biological warfare gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemies theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are. For example: we intend to investigate the development of a chemical material which causes a reversible non-toxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well predicted for each individual. This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, implanting suggestion and other forms of mental control.” [2]
The “offensive potential” was unstated, but the aim was clear: to create what later would be known as a “Manchurian Candidate.” The term would come from the title of Richard Condon’s 1959 best seller about a plot to take an American soldier captured in Korea, condition him at a special brainwashing center in Manchuria, and create a remote-controlled assassin programmed to kill the President of the United States. Condon’s book was fiction; the Helm’s plan was not.
In fact, the CIA had already begun exploring the use of chemicals to influence thought and action as well as to incapacitate and even kill. Of particular interest to the Agency was the potential the hallucinogen LSD had in this arena.
Discovered by Dr. Albert Hoffman on April 16, 1943, d-lysergic acid diethylamide — or LSD as it would become known — seemed to be a drug custom-made for the intelligence community. Its intense potency in even miniscule amounts would make it easy to administer covertly. The sense of euphoria and hallucinations that accompanied it might well lead those under interrogation to drop their guard and inhibitions, enabling a free flow of information. Some believed the chemical might even be used to alter the state of a persons being — to convert an enemy agent, to dishearten idealistic adversaries, to reprogram a person’s memory or thoughts, to get an individual to do something he or she otherwise would never do.
The proposed CIA work on drugs and mind manipulation was to remain one of the Agency’s deepest secrets. “Even internally in the CIA, as few individuals as possible should be aware of our interest in these fields and of the identity of those who are working for us.” [3]
On April 13, 1953 Allen Dulles approved the project. The program was to be known as “Project MKULTRA. [4] The “ULTRA” hearkened back to the most closely guarded American-British secret of the Second World War: the breaking of Germany’s military codes. The “M-K” identified the initiative as a CIA Technical Services Staff (TSS) project. This was the division within the Agency responsible for such things as weapons, forgeries, disguises, surveillance equipment and the kindred tools of the espionage trade. Within the TSS, MKULTRA was assigned to the Chemical Division (TSS/CD), a component with functions few others – even within the Technical Services Staff – knew about.
This unit was headed by Sidney Gottlieb, then a 34-year old Bronx native with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. A brilliant biochemist, Gottlieb was a remarkable, albeit eccentric, man. A socialist in his youth and a Buddhist as an adult, he was on a constant search for meaning in his life. He found some of it in an unrelenting passion for his clandestine labors. He did not appear to be the least bit troubled by the moral ambiguities of intelligence work. He would do virtually anything if he believed it to be in the American interest. Overcoming a pronounced stutter and a clubfoot to rise through the ranks of the CIA, he would later describe himself as the Agency’s “Dr. Strangelove.” Others were less kind. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair termed him America’s “official poisoner.” [5]
The very same day that Allen Dulles approved Project MKULTRA, Sidney Gottlieb went to see John Mulholland.
Gottlieb knew how to mix the potions. The question was how to deliver them secretly.
Mulholland agreed to help.
A Magician Among the Spies
Gottlieb wanted Mulholland to teach intelligence operatives how to use the tools of the magician’s trade – sleight of hand and misdirection – to covertly administer drugs, chemicals and biological agents to unsuspecting victims.
Why Mulholland decided to do this is a matter of some conjecture. The world was a far different and more dangerous place in the early months of 1953 than it is today. The war raged in Korea. The bloody battles of Pork Chop Hill, Eerie and Old Baldy were headline news. Some 50,000 American servicemen had already lost their lives in the conflict and more than 7,000 were prisoners of war. Stalin’s death in March raised tremendous concern about stability in the Kremlin. In the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade was raging. The prevailing mood was one fear, perhaps even paranoia.
“John did not have a political agenda,” says George Gordon, a close friend with whom Mulholland would later write The Magical Mind. “He said ‘yes’ because his government asked him to.”
Mulholland had an enormous sense of public duty. He took great pride in his contributions, however small. That a special edition of his book The Art of Illusion had been printed in a format so that its 160 page text could fit into the shirtpockets of World War II servicemen gave him great satisfaction.
He was very aware of the role other magicians had played in aiding their countries in times of trouble. He had written and lectured about Robert-Houdin’s 1856 mission on behalf of Napoleon III to help quell the Mirabout-led uprising in Algeria. And he was very familiar with the camouflage work Jasper Maskelyne had done for the British government during the Second World War.
Furthermore, the leaders of America’s intelligence community were the kind of men Mulholland could easily like and admire. General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, America’s World war II spy agency liked to hire Wall Street lawyers and Ivy League academics to commit espionage. He filled the secret service with confident, intelligent, often daring young men from leading eastern colleges. By the time the CIA was established in 1947, these were the people who ran America’s covert operations. Within the inner circles of American government, they were regarded as the best and the brightest. They planned and acted to keep the country out of war by their stealth and cunning – two qualities Mulholland long admired.
They were also America’s elite. Steward Alsop noted they were called “the Ivy Leaguers, the Socialites, the Establishmentarians.” He himself coined an alternative epithet: “the Bold Easterners.” The CIA, he said, was “positively riddled with Old Grotonians.” [6]
The men heading the CIA effort that Mulholland had been asked to join certainly fit this picture. The Princeton-educated Allen Dulles had been associated with the prestigious Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. His grandfather John W. Foster had been Secretary of State as had been his uncle-by-marriage Robert Lansing. A secret agent in both world wars, Dulles looked like an avuncular professor with his white brush moustache, his tweed suits, and his ever-present pipe. But behind the jovial exterior was a hard and determined leader. His brother John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State on January 31, 1953. Allen took up the CIA post twenty-six days later.
His deputy, Richard Helms, had a different personality but similar roots. His education had included a year at an exclusive Swiss boarding school and another year in Germany. A Williams graduate, he tried his hand at journalism before joining the OSS. He served with Dulles in Germany and stayed within the intelligence community after the war. This prudent, professional spy – the chief of operations of the clandestine services — could be seen playing tennis at the Chevy Chase Club on Sunday mornings clad in long white flannel trousers.
It may not be surprising that John Mulholland, who spent much of his career among in New York’s fashionable society, would find such men fascinating. As Jean Hugard wrote to Orville Meyer: “I believe in reality he (Mulholland) has an inferiority complex. He doesn’t mix with us poor mortals.” [7]
If “The Very Best Men” who made up the CIA were to the magician’s liking, the converse was also true. John Mulholland was precisely kind of person the Agency wanted and needed. Here was a man with a remarkable knowledge of the art of deception – its tools, its techniques, its psychology. And he knew how to keep a secret. Not only had Mulholland made a living from the execution of these skills, he had gained a reputation as conjuring’s most accomplished teacher. By look and demeanor, the magician fit the Agency mold. While his roots were not really Eastern establishment, the tall, slender Mulholland with his prominent nose and thatch of gray hair certainly looked the part. He had entrée to a wide circle of business, governmental, social, academic, and entertainment leaders. A world traveler, he was equally at home on the New York City subway system or entertaining the Sultan of Sulu or the King of Romania.
How and when Mulholland came in first contact with the CIA remains unknown. Evidence suggests that it was in 1952, perhaps earlier. By March of 1953, he was certainly consulting for the Agency and being paid for these “professional services.” Inasmuch as he was billing the government on a biweekly basis, it seems apparent that this was ongoing work with at least some of it related to development of Project MKULTRA. [8]
During their April 13 conversation, Sidney Gottlieb asked Mulholland to put together a proposal for an operations manual applying the magician’s art to clandestine activities. Mulholland summed up his suggestions as to what this covert guide would have to contain in a letter that he sent to Gottlieb the following week.
“I have given the subjects we discussed considerable thought,” Mulholland wrote. “Below is outlined what I believe is necessary adequately to cover instructions for the workers.
“1. Supplying…background facts in order that a complete novice in the subject can appreciate the underlying reasons for the procedures suggested. Part of this background would clarify the erroneous opinions commonly held by those who are familiar with (magician’s techniques). In this section would be given alternative procedures, or modifications, needed by different types of operators (differences in fact or assumed), as well as changes in procedure needed as situations and circumstances vary. The material is necessary in order for the operator to be able to learn how to do those things which are required…
“2. Detailed descriptions of (covert techniques) in all those operations outlined to me. Also variations of techniques according to whether material is in a solid, liquid or gaseous form. Included would be explanations of (the skills) required and how quickly to master such skills. It is understood that no manipulation will be suggested which requires (actions) not normally used, nor any necessitating long practice. To state this positively: all (covert techniques) described would be adaptations of acts usually performed for other purposes. Descriptions also would be given of simple mechanical aids, how to make them, and how to carry them about. Where needed, application of the data given in section 1 would be supplied. The time consuming part of writing this section will be in developing the adaptations and modifications of the best existing (methods) to fit new requirements.
“3. A variety of examples to show in detail how to make use of the (techniques) previously described. These examples would be given with varying situations and the ways to accommodate procedure to meet variations.
“If desired, I am prepared to start work on this project immediately. I believe I can complete the proposed writing in eighteen to twenty weeks. I understand, if I am given this assignment, that you, or your representative, would be willing to check my work at a conference approximately every two weeks.”
Mulholland estimated that the cost for him to do write the manual would be $3,000. [9]
The Secret Book of Secrets
Gottlieb was very enthusiastic about Mulholland’s approach and wanted to move ahead quickly. On May 4, he drafted a Memorandum for the Record spelling out what Mulholland was to do:
“1. The scope of this subproject is the collection, in the form of a concise manual, of as much pertinent information as possible in the fields of (magic as it relates to covert activities). The information collected will be pertinent to the problem of (surreptitiously administering) liquid, solid, or gaseous substances to (unknowing) subjects.
“2. The information will be collected principally from the previous studies made by Mr. Mulholland in connection with various problems he has considered. Mr. Mulholland seems well qualified to execute this study. He has been a successful (performer) of all forms of prestidigitation. He has made a careful and exhaustive study of the history of prestidigitation and is the possessor of an extensive library of old volumes in this field. He has further seriously studied the psychology of deception and has instructed graduate students…
“3. The period of time covered by this request covers six months from the date of commencement of work by Mr. Mulholland and the costs will not exceed $3,000.”
Mulholland’s proposal was approved that same day and $3,000 was set aside to cover its cost. It would become Project MKULTRA, Subproject 4. [10]
MKULTRA – and its component parts – had already become one of the Agency’s most secret operations. Mulholland’s work, along with that of others working on the project, was considered “ultra sensitive.” Consequently, there would be no formal documents that would associate CIA or the Government with the work in question. Instead, the Technical Services Staff was to reach “an understanding with the individuals who will perform the work as to the conditions under which the work will be performed and reimbursement arranged. No standard contract will be signed.” [11]
On May 5, Gottlieb, in accordance with this procedure, wrote the magician that “The project outlined in your letter of April 20 has been approved by us, and you are hereby authorized to spend up to $3,000 in the next six months in the execution of this work.” No contract or formal agreement was enclosed or ever signed per CIA policy. However, the letter did include a check for $150 to cover Mulholland’s latest work for the agency (March 18th – April 13th). In terms of when Gottlieb and Mulholland could next meet, the chemist noted “A very crowded schedule of travel makes it necessary for us to delay until June 8thour next visit with you. An effective alternative to this would be for you to come..on May, 13, 14, or 15 to discuss the current status of the work. Is this possible?” [12]
Mulholland wrote Gottlieb back on May 11. “Thank you for the notification that my project has been approved. I understand the stipulations. I am resuming work today.” Enclosed was a signed receipt for the check and a notation that Gottlieb’s missive had taken longer than expected to reach him. “Due to the fact that your letter was addressed to (a former address), it was delayed in reaching me. That was an apartment from which I moved …years ago. The fact that the letter did reach me shows the cordial relationship I have with my local Post Office. My present address is above.” [13] He made no comment on how such an error could occur on such a confidential issue.
Mulholland was keenly aware of the project’s sensitivity. Among the stipulations was a commitment to total secrecy. Even the manuscript itself would have to be written in a manner that protected the Agency should it fall into the wrong hands. There would be no references to “agents” or “operatives.” Instead, covert workers would be called “performers;” covert actions would simply be labeled “tricks.”
Mulholland immediately set about the task of researching and writing the manual. While he continued his performance schedule, he cleared his calendar of other commitments. He stopped giving magic lessons, put off work on other writing assignments, and suspended publication of The Sphinx.
Ending The Sphinx was a major step for Mulholland and for the magic community. Begun in Chicago in March of 1902 and subsequently housed in Kansas City and finally New York, this staid yet controversial periodical had become the most influential of magic journals. Mulholland had taken over the publication with Volume 29 Number 3 in May of 1930. [14] It was a source of great joy for him. It was also a tremendous burden.
“For 23 years, I have edited The Sphinx as a labor of love and without financial reward. Each of these years I have spent a great amount of time, and considerable money, to produce a magazine of service to the professional magician and to the serious student of magic. The magazine has been a professional publication and never has catered to those who look on magic as a sort of game. I realized I could not go on forever and for the past several years I have been searching for some individual, or group, qualified to take over the editing and publication of The Sphinxand maintain its standards. I found no such person, or persons, and until such is, or are, found the publication of the magazine will be suspended.
“I wish to express my appreciation to the many loyal readers, and above all to the contributors who made my editorship such a rewarding endeavor. It has been a source of deep personal gratification to know how well The Sphinx has been received during the years.” [15] The final issue, the 597th, was Volume 52, #1, dated March 1953.
For the next several months, he worked continuously on the MKULTRA project. [16] He soon found, however, that if it were to meet the CIA’s expectations, his manual would have to be far more than a hypothetical extension of existing magic tricks, principles and methods to covert activities. He was going to have to create real world solutions to real world problems. He and Gottlieb discussed the challenge.
On August 3, Gottlieb set up a new subproject (Subproject 15) in order “to expand the original provisions of subproject 4 to include an allowance for travel for Mr. Mulholland and for operational supplies used in the course of this project.” Mulholland and the Agency, Gottlieb wrote, needed to meet more frequently in order to consult on the details of the manual and the travel allowance would facilitate Mulholland’s coming to Washington for some of these discussions. Furthermore, he noted, “Certain portions of subproject 4 require experimental verification by Mr. Mulholland. The item for operational supplies is intended to provide for the purchase of supplies used to test or verify ideas. The cost estimate for subproject 15 is $700.00 for a period of six months.”[17]
Even with these additional resources, Mulholland found the project a greater challenge than he expected. Getting it right was imperative. The consequences of a magic trick going wrong might be embarrassment or a decline in bookings; a covert operation going bad could cost an agent his or her life. He met with Gottlieb in late summer to discuss the matter. Gottlieb agreed to consider extending the time to meet this need.
On September 18, Gottlieb filed an amendment to the MKULTRA Project Records that noted “The time period for the original proposal by Mr. Mulholland was six months, which would expire about 11 October 1953. The unusual nature of this manual demands that it be a creative project… rather than a mere compilation of already existing knowledge. For this reason the time estimates are difficult to make in advance and it is apparent at this time that the estimate was too short for the adequate preparation of this manual. It is in the best interests of the Agency to extend this time limit and obtain the best possible manual rather than hold Mr. Mulholland to the six-month period. It is requested that the original six month time period be extended an additional six months. There is no change in the original cost estimate or the original agenda.” [18]
That same day, Gottlieb wrote to Mulholland: “This is at least a partial answer to the questions you asked the last time I saw you. According to my records, your initial estimate was six months, which would expire about October 11, I am initiating a six month extension of the original estimate, which should more than take care of the time factor. The original cost was $3,000.00, of which $1,500.00 is remaining as of now. [19]
Mulholland devoted his energies to the project and by November his first draft was complete. But neither the magician nor the Agency were completely satisfied with the product. As Mulholland wrote Gottlieb on November 11:
“The manual as it now stands consists of the following five sections:
“1. Underlying bases for the successful performance of tricks and the background of the psychological principles by which they operate.
“2. Tricks with pills.
“3. Tricks with loose solids.
“4. Tricks with liquids.
“5. Tricks by which small objects may be obtained secretly. This section was not considered inmy original outline and was suggested subsequently to me. I was, however, able to add it without necessitating extension of the number of weeks requested for the writing. Another completed task not noted in the outline was making models of such equipment as has been described in the manual.”
“As sections 2,3,4, and 5 were written solely for use by men working alone the manual needs two further sections. One section would give modified, or different, tricks and techniques of performance so that the tricks could be performed by women. The other section would describe tricks suitable for two or more people working in collaboration. In both these proposed sections the tricks would differ considerably from those which have been described.
“I believe that properly to devise the required techniques and devices and to describe them in writing would require 12 working weeks to complete the two sections. However, I cannot now work on this project every week and would hesitate to promise completion prior to the first of May, 1954.” [20]
Mulholland estimated that it would cost $1800 to finish the project. [21]
Gottlieb, whose goal was an operational guide that would be of use to agents in the real world, shared Mulholland’s view that broadening its scope to include collaborative efforts by teams of operatives or by female agents was well worth the delay. On November 17, he authorized Mulholland to draft the two additional chapters and extended the timeline for completion of the book until May. This new work became MKULTRA Subproject 19. [22]
Impressed with Mulholland’s range of knowledge and analysis, the CIA was beginning to extend its relationship with the magician beyond just the preparation of the covert operations manual. By now, the Agency was utilizing more and more of his expert advice. His ongoing meetings with the TSS staff accelerated. In December 9, Gottlieb expanded MKULTRA’s Subproject 19 to increase the travel and operational supplies available to Mulholland and to provide for even more consultation between the conjuror and CD/TSS. At the same time, he was asked to take on yet another assignment: to work with the Agency “in connection with an investigation of claims in the general field of parapsychology…” [23]
The CIA was fascinated by the idea of mind reading and thought transmittal. If possible, such extrasensory abilities would be among the most potent weapons in their arsenal. It would revolutionize both the obtaining and the delivery of secret information. At one point, the Agency had been approached by a man claiming to be a “genuine mystic” who had developed a system for sending and receiving telepathic messages anywhere in the world. Mulholland’s task was to evaluate this and other claims of telepathy and clairvoyance.
Mulholland, a hard-nosed skeptic, was right at home investigating the paranormal. He had been lecturing on the topic since 1930, when he began exposing the means and methods of fortunetellers. He soon broadened this to debunk and denounce other forms of occultism. By 1938, he had written a book on the subject, Beware Familiar Spirits, which traced the history of modern spiritualism and described its techniques. He had no interest in letting the assertions of “mystics,” clairvoyants and mind readers go unchallenged.
With increasing frequency, someone inside the Agency would want an explanation for something they had seen or heard and Mulholland was asked to explain it. In virtually every case it would turn to have been accomplished through the stagecraft of magic. This would not stop the CIA – or other branches of the United States Government – from spending enormous resources over the next three decades to explore the possibilities of parapsychology and remote viewing.
With this additional work at hand, it was soon evident that Mulholland would not be able to have the manual finished as anticipated. “An extension of time is needed to give Mr. Mulholland more time to complete this task,” Gottlieb wrote. “The original estimated completion date was May 1, 1954. It is noted that the completion date estimate is now extended to November 1, 1954.” [24]
In the spring of 1954, Mulholland found himself facing an unforeseen problem. Much of his income for the previous year had come from the CIA for work that he knew was to be kept absolutely secret…even from other branches of the United States Government. But now it was time for him to prepare his taxes. Mulholland requested instructions from the Agency on how he was to report this income to the Internal Revenue Service and what he should do if he were audited or questioned by the IRS.
An internal CIA memo spelled out the problem: “Mr. Mulholland is a self employed magician whose normal income is derived from payment by various individuals and organizations for individual performances. Although not applying to calendar year 1953, other characteristic sources of income are from publishers of books, etc., and from individuals to whom he has given instructions in magic. When preparing his Federal Income Tax form, income is customarily listed by individual performances, etc., with the person or organization paying for the performance, the location of the performance, the amount received, and the deductions itemized for each performance or each source of funds, rather than for a standard deduction to be taken. As may or may not be characteristic with professional performers, these deductions are often questioned by the Internal Revenue people, and Mr. Mulholland is frequently called on to justify some of his deductions. For this reason, a detailed record book is kept of his income, with a separate page for each performance or source of income.”
While acknowledgement of the magician receiving payments from the Agency was not felt to be a breach of security in itself, the CIA believed that it was absolutely imperative that the nature of Mulholland’s work be kept from IRS scrutiny. “After several conferences with the Assistant General Counsel of the Agency, and the Security Officer for TSS, the following was recommended: Mr. Mulholland should report all funds received from CD/TSS except for funds for travel expenses, but no attempt should be made to itemize deductions based on these funds. Income tax should be paid on the entire amount reported. Mr. Mulholland should determine a conservative value for the amount of tax paid in excess of what would have been paid if reasonable deductions were made. The reason for this was the feeling that any questions by the Internal Revenue people concerning funds paid by CD/TSS would be prompted by questions on deductions made. It was recommended that the excess tax paid by Mr. Mulholland be refunded by the CD/TSS.” [25] This recommendation was immediately accepted “to protect the security of the Agency.” [26]
Mulholland followed the Agency’s instructions and was reimbursed by the CIA for the excess taxes that resulted from this approach [27]Subproject 15 was expanded to include this financial arrangement [28] and similar agreements were instituted for subsequent years in which he received remuneration from the Agency. [29]
Operational Applications of the Art of Deception
Mulholland continued work on the operational guide throughout the spring and summer. The text was completed by early fall. But the magician had one more task to do – to help prepare drawings, diagrams and photographs to illustrate the book’s proposed techniques. [30] By winter, the manuscript was finally complete. It was titled Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception.
“The purpose of this paper,” Mulholland wrote in the introduction, “is to instruct the reader so he may learn to perform a variety of acts secretly and indetectably. In short, here are instructions in deception.” [31]
The following eight chapters – illustrated with diagrams hand-drawn by Mulholland – ran over 100 pages and outlined how to apply the magician’s art to the needs of espionage and covert activity. It covered how to administer pills, liquids, gasses and loose solids surreptitiously. It discussed means of obtaining small objects secretly. It proposed strategies and tactics to fit the needs of female agents. And it put forth techniques that could be used by teams of men working in tandem. All this was set forth in language that adhered to the original stipulations put to Mulholland in April of 1953. The language of the manual had to sound like a simple magic text without any words or examples that would connect it to its true clandestine use.
But this was not some primer for amateur magicians to learn a few tricks. No matter how gentle the language, this was to be a guide for agents in the field to perform dangerous, provocative and even lethal acts. The solids, gases and liquids were not harmless substances. What Mulholland was teaching CIA operatives to do was surreptitiously administer mind-altering chemicals, biological agents, dangerous drugs, and lethal poisons in order to disorient, discredit, injure, and even kill people.
Today – five decades after it was written – the tricks and approaches set forth in this manual are still classified “top secret.”
Mulholland’s name appears nowhere on the document, but – consciously or not — he did leave a subtle trace: the illustrations he sketched detailing facial expressions look very much like self-portraits. This notwithstanding, Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception remains John Mulholland’s most secret book of secrets.
A Member of the Team
While the operational manual was now complete, John Mulholland’s work for the CIA was far from over. He had become part of the MKULTRA team and the Agency was already employing his knowledge and skills in a wide range of ways.
In October of 1954, Mulholland’s agreement with the CIA was extended to include his assistance in the “design of devices for the covert delivery of materials” as well as provide for “such other travel and services as may be desired from Mr. Mulholland at various times.” [32]
The following summer, the Agency asked the magician to undertake another assignment. The success of intelligence operations almost always rests on the ability to transmit information clandestinely. Theirs, after all, is a world of secrets. Mulholland’s manual had spelled out how to administer materials – notably pills, liquids, and loose solids – to unsuspecting victims through the tricks of the magician’s trade. He was also helping the Technical Services Staff design devices to carry this out. Now he was to show the intelligence community how to use the methods of magic to exchange information covertly with one another. Furthermore, he was to use his knowledge and creativity to fashion new methods that were unknown even to the conjuring community.
On August 25, Gottlieb outlined this new project “on the application of the magician’s art to the covert communication of information” in a confidential CIA memo. According to Gottlieb, “this would involve the application of techniques and principles employed by ‘magicians, ‘mind readers’ etc, to communicate information, and the development of new techniques. It is contemplated the above would provide a contribution to the general efforts in the area of non-electrical means of communication. Mr. Mulholland has agreed to undertake this task.” Mulholland’s compensation for this was raised from $150.00 per week to $200.00 per week. [33]
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Revealing the True Worth of 2016’s Limited Edition Super Cars
The major sports and supercar manufacturers have treated us with a veritable feast of special limited-edition variants over the past 12 months. These cars are not only stunning but are also becoming instant classics and attracting a significant premium as soon as they have been delivered.
Here we review five limited-edition models and give you some insight on the premiums over list price these cars are attracting.
Aston Martin Vanquish Zagato
The Vanquish Zagato, with a production run limited to 99 cars, is the fifth car to emerge from a collaboration that stretches back over five decades that has produced such classics as the DB4 GT Zagato racing car of 1960 – now valued at over £10 million – and the audaciously-styled V8 Vantage Zagato. Using a highly tuned version of Aston Martin’s renowned V12, the Vanquish Zagato generates close to 600bhp and sprints to 60mph in 3.5 seconds. Against the other cars reviewed here the Zagato probably wouldn’t win a track race, but it would get the most admiring glances when you pull up at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo.
No prices have been announced yet, but expect the Vanquish Zagato to cost in the region £500,000. Whilst none of these Zagatos have changed hands yet, given the strength of the market, the limited numbers and the strong increase in One-77 values recently, we expect you would need at least £600,000 to secure one.
Another option would be the gorgeous Aston Martin V12 Zagato launched at Villa D’Este in 2011. Production was limited to 150 and the V12 was priced at £396,000. These are now currently worth around £500,000.
Limited to a run of 799 cars, the F12tdf pays homage to the Tour de France, the legendary endurance road race that Ferrari dominated in the 1950s and ‘60s. The F12tdf’s phenomenal performance – 0 to 200km/h in under 8 seconds – is driven by a 769bhp naturally-aspirated V12 combined with the shedding of 110kg over the regular F12. The F12tdf introduces 4-wheel steering, but it’s also a car that has developed a reputation as being a challenging drive for those looking to get the absolute maximum out of it. Sounds exactly as it should be!
The list price of the Tdf was £339,000, so let’s say £370,000 with options. The market price is now £850,000 for a left hooker and £1,050,000 for RHD.
A more “affordable” alternative and highly desirable option would be a 458 Speciale Aperta, the last and best naturally aspirated V8 mid-engined supercar from Ferrari. The 499 lucky individuals high enough up Ferrari’s VIP list paid £250,000 new. They are now worth £550,000.
> See Ferrari finance examples here.
Lamborghini Aventador Roadster SV
Following in the footsteps of other legendary SV variants including the Miura P400SV, Lamborghini recently launched the Lamborghini Aventador SuperVeloce Roadster. The Aventador SV is like the regular Aventador on steroids – the ultimate macho expression of power. With 740bhp, 4-wheel drive and weighing under 1,600kg, the hardtop version has lapped the Nürburgring’s Nordschleife circuit just two seconds slower than a Porsche 918, so at a third of the current market price that sounds like a bargain! An added bonus of the Aventador is that it comes with a naturally aspirated V12 engine to trump the roar produced by the 918. 600 fixed roof SV variants were made and 500 roadsters.
The SV Roadster cost in the region of £400k new fully loaded, but they’re now fetching between £500k and £550k depending on colour, spec and mileage.
If the SV Roadster isn’t extreme enough then you might like to try the bank-busting Lamborghini Centenario. Only 40 are being made and for the £1.7m price tag you get 20bhp more than the SV, a further 50kg weight loss and even more extravagant styling. As an accountant, I’d stick with the SV.
> Here is all you need to know about Lamborghini finance.
McLaren 675LT Spider
The 675LT pays tribute to the F1 GTR “Long Tail” of 1997, the ultimate race version of the legendary McLaren supercar that finished first overall in the 1995 Le Mans 24-hour. Production of the 675LT is limited to 500 of each of the coupe and spider variants. The 675LT is a track focused version of the 650S with an extra 25bhp, 100kg less weight and a variety of suspension tweaks. The Spider allows you to better appreciate the glorious soundtrack provided by the twin-turbo V8 engine. Performance is phenomenal and the 675LT, in the right hands, can even give the P1 a good run for its money.
A 675LT Spider equipped with a number of carbon fibre options cost £300k new. Low mileage examples are now trading for £375k to £400k.
The alternative here has to be the full monty McLaren P1, the ultimate hypercar. Originally costing £900,000, black and volcano orange spec’d cars are now trading for around £1.4m to £1.5m.
> See more examples of McLaren models we finance.
Porsche 911R
The original Porsche 911R of 1967 was built specifically for motor racing, and now the name has been revived for a limited-edition run of just 991 units. It’s a car designed for out and out road driving pleasure by combining light weight, a powerful naturally-aspirated engine, a manual gearbox and suspension tuned for the road. Oh, and a cool paint job! Its obsessive lightweight construction includes front lid and wings in carbon-fibre reinforced plastic, a magnesium roof, rear screen and rear side windows in polycarbonate and ceramic brake discs, which all contribute to dry weight of just 1,370 kg. And sorry kids, but the 911’s rear seats also went out of the window. The lucky few who have driven this car rave about its connectedness and driver appeal – an instant classic!
With options, the 911R retails at around £170k, but examples are already being resold for £425k to £450k, a heady premium, and the Carrera GT at around £550k maybe the wiser purchase.
> All you need to know about Porsche finance.
All five of these cars are stunning, but which is best? Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and most of us would be very happy with any of them. A lucky few might want to have one of each and delight in the unique character of each car, and we at JBR are very happy to make those sort of dreams become reality. Thanks to our unique specialist knowledge and expertise we offer flexible, competitive finance tailored to clients’ individual needs – whether it’s a £1.7m Lamborghini or something a little more affordable.
We hope you enjoyed this feature, but let us know either way!
See how to finance your dream supercar
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In July 2007, the airline partnered with 20th Century Fox's film The Simpsons Movie to become the "Official Airline of Springfield".[26] In addition a contest was held in which the grand prize would be a trip on JetBlue to Los Angeles to attend the premiere of the film. The airline's website was also redecorated with characters and their favorite jetBlue destinations and the company was taken over by the show/film's businessman villain Montgomery Burns.[27]
Ladies and gentleman, she said YES!💍 👰🏼 Last Friday, on a flight from Huntington, WV to St. Petersburg, FL, Johnny Cooper got down on one knee and proposed to his (now) fiance Faith Robinette. He spent weeks coordinating the whole thing, working with our team to ensure everything went as planned for the perfect proposal. This is why we fly - to be a part of your special life moments. 💑
On April 10, 2008, Frontier filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in reaction to the intent of its credit card processor, First Data, to withhold significant proceeds from ticket sales.[23][better source needed] First Data decided that it would withhold 100% of the carrier's proceeds from ticket sales beginning May 1.[24] According to Frontier's press release, "This change in practice would have represented a material change to our cash forecasts and business plan. Unchecked, it would have put severe restraints on Frontier's liquidity..." Its operation continued uninterrupted, though, as Chapter 11 bankruptcy protected the corporation's assets and allowed restructuring to ensure long-term viability.[citation needed] After months of losses, Frontier Airlines reported that they made their first profit during the month of November 2008, reporting US$2.9 million in net income for the month.[25]
What makes them so good is the fact that they genuinely strive to give their guests all kinds of luxuries and an experience of leisure travel at unbelievably affordable prices. It has all the horse power that one can imagine a complete airline to have in the form of low fares, all-jet non-stop service to almost anywhere in America, Mexico and Canada and world-class travel partners. Ever since it was certified by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) as a “Scheduled Air Carrier” it has been operating as scheduled and chartered airlines much to the delight of its guests all over America.
Allegiant Air was founded in January 1997 by Mitch Allee (owner, CEO), Jim Patterson (president) and Dave Beadle (chief pilot), under the name WestJet Express.[1] After losing a trademark dispute with West Jet Air Center of Rapid City, South Dakota and recognizing the name's similarity to WestJet Airlines of Canada, the airline adopted the name Allegiant Air and received FAA and DOT certification for scheduled and charter domestic operations on June 19, 1998. The airline also has authority for charter service to Canada and Mexico.[8]
In March 2011, Allegiant took over charter service to Wendover Airport for Peppermill Casinos, Inc. to shuttle customers to Peppermill's three casinos in West Wendover, Nevada; the Montego Bay Resort, the Rainbow Wendover and the Peppermill Wendover.[45] Allegiant based one 150-seat, MD-80 series jet aircraft in Wendover and more than 20 employees, including maintenance, flight crews and stations personnel.[46]
Beginning in 2001, a new livery was introduced on the airline's new Airbus A319s, with large silver "FRONTIER" titles on the sides of the aircraft, and the airline's "Spirit of the West" slogan, later changed to "A whole different animal." The animal tails were retained, although only one image per aircraft was now used. Though the airline's Boeing 737s remained in the fleet until 2005, none were repainted into this livery.
Like Ryanair, the low-cost airline founded by the Ryan family of Ireland, who also have invested in Allegiant, the airline seeks ancillary revenue to supplement ticket revenue.[13] These ancillary fees include those for checking luggage, carrying on luggage (other than a small personal item), buying food and drinks on board, obtaining advance seat assignments, and more.[33][40][41] Allegiant CEO Maurice Gallagher said in 2009, "We collect $110 from you at the end of your trip. If I tried to charge you $110 up front, you wouldn't pay it. But if I sell you a $75 ticket and you self-select the rest, you will."[42]
Travelocity customer service number 1855 518 6111 Travelocity Support number 1855 518 6111 Travelocity customer service number 1855 518 6111 Travelocity toll free number 1855 518 6111 Travelocity airlines customer care number 1855 518 6111 Travelocity airlines email addressTravelocity airlines jfk phone number 1855 518 6111 Travelocity airlines 24 hour contact number 1855 518 6111 usa www.Kiwi Airlines arabiaTravelocity airlines toronto 1855 518 6111 Travelocity airlines customer service number 1855 518 6111 sv students care center Travelocity airlines 1855 518 6111
After booking a excursion in St Maarten that never happened as the companies website and phone number were taken down so no final arrangements could be made. Called travelocity twice and still can not seem to get it through their heads about the service not happening. They tried contacting the company....no luck then they asked me for the contact information I had.....are you kidding me it is your contracted service (IDIOTS)....anyway none of my contact info worked for the company why badger me.....just give me my refund. I will post followups as they happen
Allegiant also transports firefighters for the United States Forest Service as well as college basketball teams.[44] Allegiant had a contract to supply charter flights from Miami to four cities in Cuba beginning June 2009. One aircraft was committed to the contract.[44] The contract was for fixed-fee flying, meaning all the airline was required to do was provide the dry aircraft and the flight crew. The contractor was responsible for all other costs including fuel. However, Allegiant ended this service in August 2009.[47]
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Homepage > Archive > 2017 > Awards
The selection for the competition among Central and Eastern European directors making their debut is based on two criteria: a genuine approach to cinematic means of expression and the quest for self-identity. Only the first or second full-length feature films of the directors take part in the contest. Covering a wide range of themes and means of artistic expression, their films will compete for best film, best director, best actor and best actress awards.
The Last Family masterfully interweaves fiction and reality through the intimate portrait of an artist and his family life, inspired by his documentation. Despite being confined in a suburban apartment, the film conveys the zeitgeist of four decades.
The Last Family
Ostatnia rodzina
2016 / Poland / dir. Jan P. Matuszyński
BEST DIRECTORS
Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov (SLAVA / GLORY)
Grozeva and Valchanov tell us an emotional story with an energetic style and absurd humour, in which the political power abuses an honest worker and consumes the precious life of all its characters.
2016 / Bulgaria, Greece / dir. Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov
Marius Repšys (ŠVENTASIS / THE SAINT, director Andrius Blaževičius)
Marius Repšys creates the truthful portrait of a man in midlife crisis partly provoked by his unemployment and partly because of his marital disillusionment, using his own body as an instrument.
Šventasis
2016 / Lithuania, Poland / dir. Andrius Blaževičius
Mia Petričević (NE GLEDAJ MI U PIJAT / QUIT STARING AT MY PLATE, director Hana Jušić)
Mia Petričević reflects the dilemma of a young woman torn between traditional values and economical needs of her family, and her own suppressed desire for freedom and love with a perfectly balanced performance.
Quit Staring at My Plate
Ne gledaj mi u pijat
2016 / Croatia, Denmark / dir. Hana Jušić
Freddy Olsson
Producer, Festival programmer
Was born in 1952 in the South of Sweden. After first experiences as an actor in a TV series in 1983, Olsson found out that he was more interested in working behind the camera as producer. Since then he has been producing short films, documentaries and feature films. The most successful is The Mill and The Cross (2011) by Polish director Lech Majewski. From the second half of the 80s. Olsson has been working as a Programmer for the Göteborg Film Festival, the most important film festival in Northern Europe. Freddy is an Acquisitions Consultant for Folkets Bio, the leading arthouse distributor and exhibitor in Sweden with more than 20 theatres.
Alin Tasciyan
Film critic, cultural journalist
Born in Istanbul, Alin Tasciyan graduated from the University of Istanbul with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and public relations in 1991. She has worked as a cultural journalist, film critic and columnist for 25 years. Tasciyan is an advisor and programmer for Adana and Antalya international film festivals. She has also served in many national and international film festival juries. Tasciyan is currently a member of the European Film Academy and the President of FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics).
BORIS NELEPO
Film critic, festival programmer
A film critic and programmer based in Moscow. He works as the editor-in-chief of online film journal Kinote and a contributing editor at the film magazine Séance. Nelepo has curated several film festivals, including an overview of classic '60s British cinema and retrospectives of Bela Tarr, Seijun Suzuki and Philippe Garrel. He has also been published in Trafic, Cinema Scope, De Filmkrant and is the Russian film consultant for the Locarno International Film Festival.
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A celebration to
Experience Jon Henrik live at Scalateatern.
Anlita
Moder Jord
Jojk
“I'm passionate about issues that concern the environment and health and through my strong drive and my fighting spirit I want to inspire others to get involved. Together we can make a change.”
The 2022 Initiative
Fighting for our nature, for everyone's equal rights and for increased well-being feels obvious to me. In 2018, I was therefore named the Swedish 2022 Initiative's first goodwill ambassador. A fundraiser has been launched in favor of the global goals that link to my commitment to well-being and human rights, especially the rights of the Sami and indigenous peoples. In my music there are many links to the global goals and by paying attention to the Sami and the joik internationally, I want to improve the conditions for the indigenous peoples of the Earth.
Orange Day MC
Orange Day MC is a fantastic initiative! It's a manifestation where motorcyclists from all over the world stand up for a society free from violence against girls and women. The initiative encourages both civilians, governments and UN partners to fight for this important issue. Every year, we drive through Sweden to raise awareness for the problem and the 25th day of each month is named Orange MC Day. By participating, I lend my voice to this campaign and help spread the message.
© Jon Henrik Fjällgren. Made by Windh Digital.
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A Pharmacovigilance Approach for Post-Marketing in Japan Using the Japanese Adverse Drug Event Report (JADER) Database and Association Analysis
Masakazu Fujiwara ,
* E-mail: masakazu.fujiwara@shionogi.co.jp
Affiliations Department of Drug Evaluation & Informatics, Graduate school of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Shizuoka, Shizuoka, Japan, Department of Biostatistics, Shionogi Pharmaceutical Company, Osaka, Japan
Yohei Kawasaki,
Affiliation Department of Drug Evaluation & Informatics, Graduate school of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Shizuoka, Shizuoka, Japan
Hiroshi Yamada
Masakazu Fujiwara,
Masakazu Fujiwara Yohei Kawasaki Hiroshi Yamada
Rapid dissemination of information regarding adverse drug reactions is a key aspect for improving pharmacovigilance. There is a possibility that unknown adverse drug reactions will become apparent through post-marketing administration. Currently, although there have been studies evaluating the relationships between a drug and adverse drug reactions using the JADER database which collects reported spontaneous adverse drug reactions, an efficient approach to assess the association between adverse drug reactions of drugs with the same indications as well as the influence of demographics (e.g. gender) has not been proposed.
Methods and Findings
We utilized the REAC and DEMO tables from the May 2015 version of JADER for patients taking antidepressant drugs (SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA). We evaluated the associations using association analyses with an apriori algorithm. Support, confidence, lift, and conviction were used as indicators for associations. The highest score in adverse drug reactions for SSRI was obtained for "aspartate aminotransferase increased", "alanine aminotransferase increased", with values of 0.0059, 0.93, 135.5, and 13.9 for support, confidence, lift and conviction, respectively. For SNRI, "international normalized ratio increased", "drug interaction" were observed with 0.0064, 1.00, 71.9, and NA. For NaSSA, "anxiety", "irritability" were observed with 0.0058, 0.80, 49.9, and 4.9. For female taking SSRI, the highest support scores were observed in "twenties", "suicide attempt", whereas "thirties", "neuroleptic malignant syndrome" were observed for male. Second, for SNRI, "eighties", "inappropriate antidiuretic hormone secretion" were observed for female, whereas "interstitial lung disease" and "hepatitis fulminant" were for male. Finally, for NaSSA, "suicidal ideation" was for female, and "rhabdomyolysis" was for male.
Different combinations of adverse drug reactions were noted between the antidepressants. In addition, the reported adverse drug reactions differed by gender. This approach using a large database for examining the associations can improve safety monitoring during the post-marketing phase.
Citation: Fujiwara M, Kawasaki Y, Yamada H (2016) A Pharmacovigilance Approach for Post-Marketing in Japan Using the Japanese Adverse Drug Event Report (JADER) Database and Association Analysis. PLoS ONE 11(4): e0154425. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0154425
Editor: Yoshihiro Yamanishi, Kyushu University, JAPAN
Copyright: © 2016 Fujiwara et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: The Japanese authority, PMDA, which owns this data, does not permit sharing the data directly. So we do not own the JADER. It can be accessed directly here: http://www.info.pmda.go.jp/fukusayoudb/CsvDownload.jsp (only in Japanese).
Funding: This work was supported in part by a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (No. 24220501) to HY. No additional external funding was received for this study. Shionogi Pharmaceutical Company provided support in the form of salaries for author MF but did not have any additional role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: Masakazu Fujiwara is employed by Shionogi Pharmaceutical Company. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.
In the United States and Japan, the decision to approve a drug for clinical use is based on its having a satisfactory balance of benefits and risks within the conditions specified in the package insert. Information regarding the benefits and risks of a drug is derived from clinical trials that have been conducted prior to approval. However, information relating to a drug’s safety profile can change over time as its use is expanded in terms of patient characteristics and the number of patients exposed. In particular, during the early post-marketing period, the product might be used in settings different from clinical trials and in much larger populations—increasing the potential number of patients exposed within a relatively short timeframe. As such, new information will be continually generated once a drug is marketed, which can have an impact on its benefits and risk profiles. Therefore, a detailed evaluation of the information generated through pharmacovigilance activities is important for all products to ensure their safe use. Pharmacovigilance practices can improve information feedback to medical care providers and their patients in a timely manner, thereby reducing the overall risk to patients. With these ideas at the forefront, the International Conference on Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) created the E2E guidelines for pharmacovigilance planning [1].
The ICH E2E guidelines include information about how to summarize the important risks identified for a drug, important potential risks, and important missing information, which may include potentially at-risk populations and situations where the drug is likely to be used that have not been studied before approval. Within the ICH E2E guidelines, the U.S. food and drug administration (FDA) issued guides for premarketing risk assessment, good pharmacovigilance practices, and pharmacoepidemiologic assessments [2–3].
In Japan, the “Risk Management Plan Guidance” [4], issued in 2012, describes the basic ideas needed to develop a drug risk management plan, including safety considerations, a drug safety monitoring plan, and a risk minimization plan based on the ICH E2E guidelines. Safety considerations listed in the Japanese “Risk Management Plan Guidance” include important identified risks, important potential risks, and important missing information. Important potential risks include important adverse events that have been associated with a drug, but that have not been confirmed from clinical trials. Specifically, these may include adverse drug reactions that have been observed in drugs with the same indications, but not observed in a specific drug. Evaluation of information about adverse drug reactions observed for drugs with the same indications is possible through the drug package inserts.
In addition to package inserts, information about adverse drug reactions observed in drugs with the same indications can be acquired through the Japanese Adverse Drug Event Report (JADER) database. Here, adverse drug reactions are reported and managed by the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA) during the post-marketing phase. Studies investigating possible associations between a drug and adverse drug reactions have been proposed in viewpoint of signal detections using JADER [5–7]. In Japan, the Japan Pharmaceutical Information Center (JAPIC), which provides information on adverse drug reactions during the post-marketing phase, has been utilized in studies investigating drug-drug interactions and drug-target interactions [8–10]. The FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) has features similar to those of JADER and has also been used for studies assessing associations between drugs and adverse drug reactions, drug-drug interactions, and drug-target interactions [11–13]. However, for adverse drug reactions occurring in drugs with the same indications, the data assessing the associated adverse drug reactions and the influence of demographics are insufficient.
In this paper, we consider the situation in which a new drug has been approved and has been in preparation for marketing. Under such circumstances, we propose using JADER as an evaluation tool for determining the association among adverse drug reactions that occur in drugs with the same indications along with the association between background information and adverse drug reactions. In order to evaluate potential associations, we used a data mining method applied to the JADER database. This approach could be an efficient evaluation method for identifying important potential risks as outlined in the Japanese “Risk Management Plan Guidance” and is expected to lead to higher quality security information monitoring.
For this study, we focused on antidepressant drugs. Various cohort studies have been performed during the post-marketing phase of antidepressant drugs in order to evaluate safety. For example, Jick et al. (2004) investigated the relationship between antidepressant use and suicide [14]. Weeke et al. (2012) investigated the association between antidepressant use and out-of-hospital cardiopulmonary arrest [15]. Because the safety profiles for antidepressants have been extensively evaluated after being commercially available, there is a great deal of additional safety information about new antidepressant drugs before arriving on the market. Here, we examine related adverse events and the influence of demographics within the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI), Serotonin and Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (SNRI), and Noradrenergic and Specific Serotonergic Antidepressant (NaSSA) antidepressant drug categories. We targeted seven drugs: fluvoxamine, paroxetine, sertraline, escitalopram, milnacipran, duloxetine, and mirtazapine.
The JADER dataset was downloaded from PMDA’s homepage (http://www.pmda.go.jp/) and included four tables as follows: 1) DEMO table (gender, age, weight, etc.), 2) drug table (drug name, causality of drug (suspected drug or concomitant drug), etc.), 3) REAC table (adverse drug reaction name, outcomes, etc.), and 4) MH table (medical history names, etc.). We used the REAC and DEMO table data taken from the JADER database updated in May 2015 for patients taking SSRI, SNRI and NaSSA antidepressants.
We evaluated the associations between adverse drug reactions and demographics using an apriori algorithm [16–18]. Support, confidence, lift, and conviction were used as indicators to assess the association of X and Y (X and Y being adverse drug reactions or demographic information) [19]. An apriori algorithm is a data mining method for extracting frequent combinations from a large database that can efficiently find sets of adverse drug reactions that occur more frequently than the minimum support threshold (defined as 0.001 in this study). After that, it generates sets of adverse drug reactions with the minimum confidence threshold (defined as 0.8 in this study).
Patients who experienced adverse drug reactions (more than one adverse drug reactions) were denoted by "Yes," whereas patients who did not experience adverse drug reactions (more than one adverse drug reactions) were denoted as "No"; in this way, we developed a contingency table for adverse drug reactions, X and Y, as shown in Fig 1.
Fig 1. Assessment of associations based on the presence or absence of adverse drug reactions and/or demographics.
(i.e., a = number of patients who reported the adverse drug reactions X and Y; b = number of patients who reported X, but not Y; c = number of patients who did not report X, but reported Y; and d = number of patients who did not report X or Y).
When considering the association among adverse drug reactions, patients were stratified according to whether or not they experienced specific adverse drug reactions, i.e. "a" in Fig 1 reflects the number of patients who have reported the adverse drug reaction X and the adverse drug reaction Y. In addition, the total number of reported patients is expressed as “t.” The equations for determining associations between X and Y are defined as follows:
Two association analyses were performed. First, we evaluated the associations between adverse drug reactions using the REAC table reported for the SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA, assigning adverse drug reactions to the X and Y variables. Second, we evaluated the associations between gender and adverse drug reactions by using the REAC table and the DEMO table. Specifically, we assessed the association between gender and adverse drug reactions by assigning gender to the Y variable and adverse drug reactions to the X variable as reported for the SSRI, SNRI, NaSSA, and demographic information (age category). We performed these analyses using the apriori function of arules library in the arules package of R version 3.1.2 software [20].
Associations between adverse drug reactions from SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA antidepressants
In the JADER database, which was updated in May 2015, there were 345,715 cases reported for adverse drug reactions, and within these cases the total number of adverse drug reactions was 549,508. In addition, there were 4377, 935, and 686 cases of reported adverse drug reactions for SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA, respectively. Within the reported cases, there were a total of 8462, 1417, and 1084 adverse drug reactions for SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA, respectively.
The association analyses were applied to the adverse drug reactions data for SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA, respectively. Support, confidence, lift, and conviction for each association rule are shown in Table 1; the association rules up to fifth in the descending order of the support are shown.
Table 1. Association Rules for the Adverse Drug Reactions Reported for SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA.
The association rules for SSRI with the highest score for support were X = aspartate aminotransferase increased and Y = alanine aminotransferase increased. The values for support, confidence, lift, and conviction were 0.0059, 0.93, 135.5, and 13.9, respectively. The association rules for SNRI with the highest score for support were X = international normalized ratio increased and Y = drug interaction. The values for support, confidence, lift, and conviction were 0.0064, 1.00, 71.9, and NA, respectively; values denotes as NA had a zero denominator in the formula for the conviction and therefore could not be calculated. The association rules for NaSSA with the highest score for support were X = anxiety and Y = irritability. The values for support, confidence, lift, and conviction were 0.0058, 0.80, 49.9, and 4.9, respectively.
Associations between adverse drug reactions and demographics
In JADER, the reported number of adverse drug reaction cases for women was 2562, 509, and 392 for SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA antidepressants, respectively. Within these reported cases, the total number of adverse drug reactions was 4946, 765, and 618 for SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA, respectively. For men, the reported number of adverse drug reaction cases was 1678, 418, and 286 for SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA, respectively. Within these reported cases, the total number of adverse drug reactions was 3206, 642, and 452 for SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA, respectively. Association analyses were also performed using background information (categorized as age), where the adverse drug reactions for SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA were set as X, and sex (male or female) was set as Y. Support, confidence, lift and conviction for each association rule are shown in Table 2. The association rules up to third in the descending order of support by gender are shown. The association between SSRI and female (Y) with the highest score for support was X = twenties and suicide attempt. In contrast, the association between SSRI and male (Y) with the highest score for support was X = thirties and neuroleptic malignant syndrome.
The association between SNRI and female (Y) with the highest score for support was X = eighties and inappropriate antidiuretic hormone secretion; for male patients, the highest score for support was X = interstitial lung disease. Finally, the association between NaSSA and female (Y) with the highest score for support was X = suicidal ideation; for male patients, the highest score for support was X = rhabdomyolysis. For all drugs examined (SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA), support for female patients had higher values compared to male patients.
In this study, we propose a new approach for improving safety monitoring of drugs that have been recently approved and are moving toward marketing that evaluates the associations between adverse drug reactions reported for drugs with the same indications, as well as the associations between demographics and adverse drug reactions by utilizing the JADER database. When new antidepressants are developed and approved by regulatory agencies, the approach described should be conducted, after which the results obtained using the approach should be shared with medical representatives so that doctors can be alerted to take precautions against combinations of adverse drug reactions. Our new method should improve drug safety monitoring, because current safety monitoring approaches focus only on individual adverse drug reactions.
Support values from two analyses of antidepressants (SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA) were small; therefore, the rate of each association rule was considered to be small. However, confidence values, which are taken from zero to one with a higher value denoting a stronger association between X and Y, were close to one. In addition, lift and conviction values were greater than one in nearly all instances—suggesting a strong association. These data suggest that each association considered was strong, although the expression rates were low. Furthermore, most of the adverse drug reactions considered in this study had previously been documented as known risks for antidepressant drugs [21, 22].
Although the specific adverse drug reaction combinations listed in Tables 1 and 2 differ for SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA, we considered them to be specific adverse drug reaction combinations for SSRI, SNRI, and NaSSA. Understanding the associations among adverse drug reactions that may occur for antidepressants or other drugs with similar indications will enable us to do high-quality safety monitoring.
Gender considerations are important, as the association values for women were generally higher compared with the values for men. It is known that the number of women patients with depression is higher than for men [23]; this was confirmed from these results.
From Table 2, the associated adverse drug reactions and age information differed by gender, suggesting that safety information monitoring by gender should be performed. This approach, using association analyses from data within the JADER database is beneficial and considers not only the frequency of adverse drug reactions, but also combinations among adverse drug reactions. One limitation of this study is the spontaneous nature of the adverse event reporting within the JADER database; adverse drug reactions may be reported more frequently and may include reporting bias. Therefore, the results of the association analyses should be interpreted in consideration of clinical perspectives.
This approach, using association analyses, can also be used in the development stage of new drugs. Specifically, by sharing analysis results with clinical research associates, it is possible to conduct clinical trials in consideration of safety of patients by further understanding the associations among adverse drug reactions of drugs with the same indications. Finally, this approach can also be applied to the FAERS. For drugs that will be marketed globally, evaluation of adverse drug reactions using FAERS and association analyses, including additional information (region, etc.) could lead to global monitoring based on safety information.
We are grateful to the anonymous referees for their constructive reviews.
Conceived and designed the experiments: MF YK HY. Performed the experiments: MF. Analyzed the data: MF. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MF. Wrote the paper: MF.
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メイン Finding wisdom in East Asian classics
Finding wisdom in East Asian classics
William Theodore de Bary
The perfect companion to courses in Asian civilization and culture, Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics provides nonspecialists with essential background on frequently assigned texts. With essays addressing foundational materials in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese traditions, including Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and early modern fictional classics up to the seventeenth century, this guide works in any classroom and with readers at all levels. It demonstrates the particular link between each text and its tradition and proves the global relevance of Asian classics to the humanities at large.
Wm. Theodore de Bary combines reprinted and original essays on texts that have survived for centuries, if not millennia, through avid questioning and contestation. Recognized as perennial reflections on life and society, these works represent diverse historical periods and cultures and include the Laozi, the Xunxi, the Lotus Sutra, Tang poetry,...
出版社: Columbia University Press
ISBN 13: 978-0-231-15397-3
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Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town
Bloomsbury UK
Protecting the gift : keeping children & teenagers safe (& parents sane)
Dell Pub
de Becker, Gavin
[image: image]
C. T. Hsia
AS A WORK of comic fantasy, Journey to the West (Xi yu ji) is readily accessible to the Western imagination, as witness the popularity of Arthur Waley’s abridged version, Monkey, with the general public and especially with the college audience. But Waley has chosen to present only a few of the forty-odd adventures in the latter half of the book; translated in their entirety, many of the episodes may seem tiresome to the Western reader as repetitious in character. Even so, he will find it a civilized and humane book and one, moreover, that meets his expectation of what a novel of comic adventure should be. Though, like Three Kingdoms (San guo) and Water Margin (Shui hu), the Journey is crowded with characters and episodes, its design of a journey makes it inevitable that the pilgrims are the objects of continual attention while the assorted gods, monsters, and human characters they meet on the road claim only secondary interest. And its author, Wu Chengen, though he also builds upon an earlier, simpler version of the story, proves his originality precisely in his subordination of story as such to the larger considerations of theme and character and in his firm comic portrayal of the main pilgrims—Tripitaka, Monkey, and Pigsy. The last two, especially, are fully as memorable as another pair of complementary characters famed in world literature: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. As a satiric fantasy grounded in realistic observation and philosophical wisdom, the Journey does suggest Don Quixote-— two works of comparable importance in the respective developments of Chinese and European fiction.
Ever since Hu Shi published his pioneer study of the novel in 1923, the authorship of the hundred-chapter Journey has by general scholarly agreement been assigned to Wu Cheng-en (c. 1506–1582), a native of Shan-yang xian, Huai-an fu (in present-day northern Jiangsu), who enjoyed a reputation among his friends for wit and literary talent. None of the premodern editions of Journey, however, bear his name as author or compiler, and Glen Dudbridge has recently questioned the slim documentary basis for this attribution. It is highly unlikely, however, that anyone will come up with a stronger candidate, and all circumstantial evidence seems to indicate that Wu Cheng-en possessed the necessary leisure, incentive, and talent for the composition of this novel. If we agree with the general opinion that the Journey is the work of an individual author who adapted his sources in the Shakespearean fashion of exuberant invention, then the hundred-chapter novel as we now have it poses few perplexing problems as to its text and derivation.
The novel has its historical basis in the epic pilgrimage of Xuanzang to India. Also known by his honorific title Tripitaka or Tang San-zang, this saintly monk of great intellectual ability is a major figure in Chinese Buddhism. He traveled abroad for seventeen years (629–645) and brought back from India 657 Buddhist texts. Upon his return, he devoted the remainder of his life to translating these scriptures and establishing the abstruse Mere Ideation school of Chinese Buddhism. His school was never that popular, but even during his lifetime his travels became a matter of public interest.
As his legend grew with his fame, Xuanzang became, like the Liangshan heroes, a popular subject for storytellers. There is extant a brief promptbook of seventeen chapters (the first chapter is missing) dating from the Southern Song period entitled Da-Tang San-zang qü-jing shi-hua (“The tale, interspersed with verses, of the quest of scriptures by Tripitaka of the great Tang dynasty”). In it we can already see that Monkey has emerged as Xuanzang’s chief guardian on the road and that the adventures they encounter are fantastic in character, involving gods, demons, and bizarre kingdoms.
The evolution of the Tripitaka legend properly culminates in Wu Chengen’s massive creation. What must be apparent to every reader of the Journey is that the Tripitaka of the novel, who often appears as a deliberate caricature of a saintly monk, could not have borne any resemblance to his historical counterpart. Though Xuanzang’s initial difficulties in the desert had provided clues for the storytellers, few details of his subsequent journey could have interested them. Soon after crossing the desert, the historical Xuanzang meets with the king of Turfan, who sends him off with a splendid retinue, letters of recommendation to rulers of other countries, and an abundant supply of gold, silver, and silk. It is true that the handsomely equipped traveler once meets with robbers and is on another occasion about to be sacrificed by pirates when a miraculous storm saves him, but during the years spent at the various courts in India in the company of kings, holy men, and leading scholars, Xuanzang appears primarily as a man of piety, courage, and tact, and one, moreover, endowed with great intellectual curiosity and deeply versed in scholastic Indian logic. We find no trace of this revered foreign intellectual in the popular literary representations of Tripitaka.
The Tripitaka of the novel is based on at least three different persons. First of all, he is the saintly monk of popular legend, a mythical hero suggestive of Moses and Oedipus. Son of a zhuang-yuan (one who has earned the highest honors at the palace examination) and a prime minister’s daughter, soon after his birth he is abandoned by his mother out of fear that someone is going to kill him. He drifts on a river until he is picked up by a Buddhist abbot, who rears him. At eighteen, he is ordained as a priest and goes in search of his lost parents. After he has found them both, his filial piety and evident holiness attract so much attention at court that he is soon entrusted by Emperor Taizong with a mission to India to procure Mahāyāna Buddhist scriptures. Modeled upon many earlier legends of Buddhist saints, the youthful Tripitaka is strictly a product of the popular imagination.
This second aspect of Tripitaka as a potential Buddha is central to the plot of the novel. After all, the monsters and demons are not interested in a monk from China, however saintly he may be, but in a magic host whose flesh can confer upon them everlasting life. But insofar as Tripitaka is aware of himself as an object of supreme temptation, he becomes in the novel a person forever apprehensive of his danger. His initial image as a pious monk endowed with wisdom and determination notwithstanding, Wu Cheng-en therefore presents Tripitaka primarily in his third aspect, as an ordinary mortal undertaking a hazardous journey and easily upset by the smallest inconvenience. Peevish and humorless, he is a bad leader partial to the most indolent of his group and shows little true faith in his role as a strict Pharisee, ostentatiously attempting to keep to his vegetarian diet and avoid compromising female company. Certainly he suggests nothing of the courage of his historic namesake nor of the fortitude of Christian saints willing to undergo temptation in order to reach the higher stages of sanctification. He neither withstands nor yields to the cannibalistic and sexual assaults of the demons and monsters; he is merely helpless. Whereas in such Western allegories as Everyman and The Pilgrim’s Progress the hero goes through a carefully charted journey to enable him to accept death or enter heaven at the end, Tripitaka shows no sign of spiritual improvement during his adventures. If anything, he gets even more peevish and ill-tempered as his journey progresses. Even while he is being ferried to the Further Shore of Salvation to face Buddha himself and receive the scriptures, he is angry at Monkey, who has pushed him into the bottomless boat and gotten him soaked. “Sitting miserably here, he wrung out his clothes, shook out his shoes, and grumbled at Monkey for having got him into this scrape.”1
As a comic figure in his own right, Tripitaka is indeed Everyman, as critics have often remarked, but the religious implications of that designation can be understood only by reference to the kind of idealistic Buddhist philosophy that the novel exemplifies. If Tripitaka shows no spiritual progress on his journey, it is because in the light of that philosophy he is the embodiment of fearful self-consciousness forever enslaved by phenomena and therefore forever incapable of reaching that peace of mind which alone can rout the terror of the senses. Early on his journey, after he has taken Monkey and Pigsy as disciples but before his meeting with Sandy, he is instructed to seek out the Zen master Crow Nest (Wu-chao) and to receive from him the Heart Sūtra, which is duly recorded in the novel in the historical Xuanzang’s own standard translation. Tripitaka appears so transported by the truth of that sūtra that he immediately composes a poem to indicate his new state of spiritual illumination. What has so far escaped the notice of modern critics is that, like his monster-disciples, the sūtra is itself a spiritual companion appointed for Tripitaka’s protection on his perilous journey. And in the scheme of the Buddhist allegory, it is a far more important guide than any of his disciples, since a Tripitaka in true possession of its teaching would have no need for their service and would realize the illusory character of his calamities.
Because of its brevity, the Heart Sūtra is the central wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) text of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Historically, it was a text dear to Xuanzang, “for when he was crossing the desert in 629,” Waley informs us, “the recitation of it had routed the desert-goblins that attacked him far more effectively than appeals to the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara [Guan-yin].” In the primitive Song version of the story, accordingly, we find that the receiving of this sūtra constitutes the crowning success of Tripitaka’s quest. He has already been to the kingdom of Tian-zhu (the traditional Chinese name for India), where he received 5,048 scrolls of Buddhist scriptures; though none of these are identified by name, it is pointedly mentioned that the Heart Sūtra is still missing. Now on his return journey, he stops by the Fragrant Grove Market (or Fragrant Grove Temple) of the Pan-lu Kingdom, and a god informs him in a dream that he is going to receive the Heart Sūtra the next day. And, the next day, a Buddha who looks like a fifteen-year-old monk descends upon a cloud and hands him the sūtra, saying, “I transmit to you this Heart Sūtra. When you return to court, you must protect it and cherish it. Its power reaches to heaven and hell. It is compact with the mysterious forces of yin and yang, and therefore do not lightly transmit it to anybody. It will be extremely difficult for the less fortunate multitudes to receive it.”
By the time the storytellers’ version was recorded in the Yuan period, we may presume that, in view of its climactic importance in the primitive version, the episode of the transmission of the Heart Sūtra must have been transposed to a much earlier section of the narrative, so that the meaning of that sūtra could be further expounded by the pilgrims on their journey. And we may further maintain that, in adapting this source, Wu Cheng-en has done nothing less than make his whole novel a philosophical commentary on the sūtra. George Steiner has brilliantly observed that the major characters in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, when confronted with personal problems of crucial moral importance, often recite and discuss passages from the New Testament, which in turn keynote and illuminate the meaning of the novels in which these characters appear. In Journey, the Heart Sūtra is a subject of repeated discussion between Tripitaka and Monkey and serves the same novelistic function.
Though Tripitaka seems to have gained immediate illumination upon receiving the sūtra and recites it constantly afterward, its transcendent teaching that “form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form” is so beyond his mortal understanding that every calamity that befalls him demonstrates anew his actual incomprehension. During pauses between adventures, therefore, it is Monkey, with his far superior spiritual understanding, that repeatedly asks his master to heed the sūtra. Thus, in chapter 43, he makes another attempt:
Reverend master, you have forgotten the verse, “No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind.” Of all of us who have forsaken the world, our eyes should not see color, our ears should not hear sound, our nose should not smell, our tongue should not taste, our body should not feel cold and heat, and our mind should not harbor vain illusions: this is known as “routing the six thieves.” Now your mind is constantly occupied with the task of seeking the scriptures, you are afraid of the monsters and unwilling to give up your body, you beg for food and move your tongue, you are fond of sweet smells and titillate your nose, you listen to sounds and excite your ear, you see things around you and strain your pupils. Since you have welcomed these six thieves on your own invitation, how can you hope to see Buddha in the Western Paradise?”
Tripitaka is often aware of Monkey’s superior understanding. In chapter 93, when Pigsy and Sandy laugh at Monkey’s pretensions as a Zen master because he has again reminded their master to heed the Heart Sūtra, Tripitaka upbraids the two less discerning disciples, “Sandy and Pigsy, don’t talk so foolishly. What Monkey comprehends is the wordless language. This is true comprehension.” Measured against the standard of nonattachment upheld by Monkey, therefore, Tripitaka’s every manifestation of fear and credulity, of fanatical obsession with correct conduct and peevish concern over his creaturely comforts is as much part of a deliberate comedy as the obviously gross behavior of Pigsy.
But Tripitaka is not only enslaved by his senses. His humanitarian pity—the most endearing trait about him—is itself a form of enslavement. Upon joining Tripitaka, Monkey’s first act is to slay the six thieves—Eye, Ear, Nose, Tongue, Mind, Body—an allegorical event indicative of his superior detachment in comparison with the other pilgrims. But Tripitaka is horrified because, among his other frailties, he is still obsessed with love and compassion for phenomenal beings. This episode causes the first temporary rift between master and disciple, and Monkey is later twice punished with dismissal, following his seemingly merciless killing of first a demon in a pathetic human disguise and then a number of brigands. From the viewpoint of popular Buddhism, Tripitaka has on all occasions followed the command not to kill, but because the novel inculcates the kind of Buddhist wisdom that excludes even the finest human sentiments as a guide to salvation, he is seen as a victim of perpetual delusion and can never make the same kind of spiritual progress as the hero of a Christian allegory. The novel, however, ultimately demonstrates the paradoxical character of this wisdom in that its nominal hero is granted Buddhahood at the end precisely because he has done nothing to earn it. To consciously strive for Buddhahood would again have placed him under bondage.
Monkey (Sun Wu-kong, or Sun Aware of Vacuity), who repeatedly warns Tripitaka of his spiritual blindness, is, of course, the real hero of the book. He has already assumed the role of Tripitaka’s protector on the road in the Song shih-hua, and many of his deeds familiar to the reader of the hundredchapter novel must have appeared in the Yuan version, in however sketchy a fashion. But it is Wu Cheng-en who has enlarged upon these deeds and consistently defined his hero’s character in terms of his spiritual detachment, his prankish humor, his restless energy, and his passionate devotion to his master.
Especially during the Tang, merchants from Central Asia carried on an active trade in China, and they brought with them stories of their own regions, which stimulated the Chinese literati to compose tales of a romantic and supernatural cast known as quan-ji. The Rāmāyana may or may not have contributed to the character Sun Wu-kong, but there is no doubt that his many tricks and feats along with other supernatural motives in the novel are ultimately traceable to the influence of Indian as well as Persian and Arab literature. Monkey, for example, is an adept at magical transformations. In his celebrated battle with the celestial general Erh-lang Shen in chapter 6, the two combatants pursue each other through a series of disguises. I quote a small excerpt:
Monkey, trembling in every limb, hastily turned his cudgel into an embroidery needle, and hiding it about his person, changed himself into a fish, and slipped into the stream. Rushing down to the bank, Erh-lang could see nothing of him. “This simian,” he said, “has certainly changed himself into a fish and hidden under the water. I must change myself too if I am to catch him. So he changed himself into a cormorant and skimmed hither and thither over the stream. Monkey, looking up out of the water, suddenly saw a bird hovering above. It was like a blue kite, but its plumage was not blue. It was like a heron, but had no tuft on its head. It was like a crane, but its feet were not red. “I’ll be bound that’s Erh-lang looking for me …” He released a few bubbles and swam swiftly away. “That fish letting bubbles,” said Erh-lang to himself, “is like a carp, but its tail is not red; it is like a tench, but there are no patterns on its scales. It is like a black-fish, but there are no stars on its head; it is like a bream, but there are no bristles on its gills. Why did it make off like that when it saw me? I’ll be bound it’s Monkey, who has changed himself into a fish.” And swooping down, he opened his beak and snapped at him. Monkey whisked out of the water, and changed himself into a freckled bustard, standing all alone on the bank.2
Though we find even in pre-Tang literature legendary or fictitious characters who are able to transform themselves into bestial shapes, the possessors of such powers could not assume any shape at will and certainly could not put on a performance of magical virtuosity like that of Monkey and Erh-lang. Their resemblance in this respect to the combatants from The Arabian Nights does not mean that the makers of the Monkey legend were specifically indebted to that book, but it certainly indicates their general awareness of the popular literature of the Middle and Near East.
In chapter 1, as the leader of the monkeys on the Flower and Fruit Mountain, he enjoys an idyllic existence of pure bliss. Provided with an infinite supply of food and unmolested by hunters or predators, the monkey colony behind the Water Curtain Cave is far more carefree than the Peach Fountain colony celebrated by T’ao Ch’ien. Yet Monkey is not content:
“Your Majesty is very hard to please,” said the monkeys, laughing. “Every day we have happy meetings on fairy mountains, in blessed spots, in ancient caves, on holy islands. We are not subject to the Unicorn or Phoenix, nor to the restraints of any human king. Such freedom is an immeasurable blessing. What can it be that causes you this sad misgiving?” “It is true,” said the Monkey King, “that to-day I am not answerable to the law of any human king, nor need I fear the menace of any beast or bird. But the time will come when I shall grow old and weak. Yama, King of Death, is secretly waiting to destroy me. Is there no way by which, instead of being born again on earth, I might live forever among the people of the sky?”3
His ambition, then, is to seek immortality, to perpetuate his enjoyment of life beyond the control of Yama. He presently undertakes a long voyage across the oceans to seek a master able to teach him how to conquer death. Allegorically, it is a quest for spiritual understanding, but in the larger mythical framework of the novel it is also a quest for magical power. Even for the most exalted celestials, their badges of power are invariably instruments of life-sustaining and death-causing magic. Laozi (Tai-shang Lao-jün), the supreme deity in the Daoist pantheon, cherishes as his chief possession the Crucible of the Eight Trigrams, by means of which he manufactures longevity pills and melts down intransigent enemies. And Subodhi, the Zen patriarch whom Monkey has chosen to serve, also respects his desire to prolong life and learn magical arts. Monkey is eventually dismissed because he has become vain of his attainments before the other disciples, but the inherent desirability of these arts is not held in question.
Monkey was hatched from a stone egg, under the influence of the sun and moon. Like many other Chinese novels, Journey begins at the beginning, with the creation myth. In this regard, Monkey’s discontent with a pastoral mode of life and his ambition to seek power and knowledge can be seen as signs of a conscious striving upward—from inanimate stone to animal shape with human intelligence to the highest spiritual attainment possible. Until this striving is deflected into the Buddhist path of obedient service, following his humiliating defeat in the palm of Buddha, Monkey is but the smartest of all the monsters, who share with him this unquenchable desire for evolution.
Even in his rebellious phase, he differs from the other monsters and from Ravana and the Satan of Paradise Lost in his ability to view himself in a humorous light and remain detached from whatever business he is engaged in. He is never too solemn, even when fighting an entire battalion of heavenly troops. Without his sense of humor, Monkey would become a tragic hero or share the fate of the other monsters. With it, however, he can turn from rebel to Buddha’s obedient servant without forfeiting our sympathy. This sense of humor, however coarsely and at times cruelly expressed at the expense of his companions and enemies, implies his ultimate transcendence of all human desires, to which Pigsy remains prey and from which Tripitaka barely detaches himself through his vigilant self-control. But to the end he retains the comic image of a mischievous monkey whose very zeal and mockery become an expression of gay detachment.
If Monkey is always the spirit of mischief when he is in command of a situation, there are occasions, nevertheless, when he impresses us with his passionate sorrow and anger. If humanitarian pity remains an endearing trait of Tripitaka, then, with all his superior understanding and mocking detachment, Monkey is also the antithesis of Buddhist emptiness in his passionate attachment to the cause of the journey and to his master.
Moreover, Tripitaka is so selfish that once, after Monkey has dispatched two brigands, Tripitaka prays for their peace and explicitly dissociates himself from the supposed crime:
He is Sun,
And I am Chen–
Our surnames differ.
To redress your wrong,
Seek your murderer–
Pray do not incriminate me,
A monk on his way to get the scriptures.4
In chapter 27, after Monkey has finally killed a demon who has thrice assumed human shape to deceive the pilgrims, the enraged Tripitaka gives him a note of dismissal, saying, “Monkey-head, take this as proof that I no longer want you as my disciple. If I ever see you again, may I be instantly condemned to the Avici Hell!” Monkey, who has killed the demon to protect his master, takes this extremely hard.
It is this passionate devotion to his home, to Tripitaka and his cause, that sets Monkey apart from the rest of the pilgrims. Above and beyond his mythic and comic roles, he shows himself as an endearing person subject to misunderstanding and jealousy and given to frequent outbursts of genuine emotion. He, too, belies his superior attainment in Buddhist wisdom with his incorrigible humanity.
In the preceding section, I have sketched Tripitaka and Monkey against their historical-literary backgrounds and, in doing so, have indicated the intricate connections between the diverse modes of myth, allegory, and comedy to be observed in the novel. In view of this complexity of structure, it is understandable that critics have tended to emphasize one mode at the expense of the others. Traditional commentators, more attuned to the mystical teaching of the book, have one and all stressed its allegory. Starting with Hu Shi, modern critics have repudiated the allegorical interpretation and stressed its wealth of comedy and satire. “Freed from all kinds of allegorical interpretations by Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucianist commentators,” declares Hu Shi in his foreword to Waley’s translation, “Monkey is simply a book of good humor, profound nonsense, good-natured satire and delightful entertainment.” (The phrase “profound nonsense,” however, concedes the necessity for philosophical or allegorical interpretation.) Communist critics have further elaborated on the political aspects of the comedy, paying special attention to the revolutionary implications of its satire on traditional bureaucracy. They have cited instances in Ming history of gross official injustice and of the pampered arrogance of Daoist priests at court, a class repeatedly ridiculed in the novel, as sources of Wu Cheng-en’s satiric inspiration.
The Communist approach, however, presupposes a political novelist deliberately scoring the evils of his time. But, under the autocratic rule of the Ming, it is very unlikely that Wu would have dared to make political remarks or concoct political fables in the Swiftian manner even if he had felt the urge to do so. A repeated failure at the examinations (he finally earned a senior licentiateship in 1544 and many years later served briefly in a minor official capacity), he could have become an embittered satirist of political intent, but, judging by his novel as well as his poetry and prose, he was rather a man of genial humor and not at all obsessed with his lack of worldly success or with the degeneracy of the Ming court at his time. He records in his novel, to be sure, many shrewd observations on Chinese bureaucracy, but they strike us as the quintessence of folk wisdom rather than as pointed satire of contemporary events. As a matter of fact, he regularly quotes proverbs for comic effect and makes fun of all traditional butts of satire. If Daoist priests are derided in some of the most hilarious episodes, Buddhists fared little better, since Tripitaka himself is seen as the constant source of ridicule. Yet in his didactic moments the novelist is not above adopting the traditional gesture of showing equal reverence for the three teachings: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism.
In extolling the novel as satire, however, modern critics have paid inadequate attention to its mythical strength. They have, of course, praised its author’s mythological imagination, but they see it at work mainly in his elaboration of the many fantastic episodes presumably already present in the Yuan version. Yet, as a critical concept in the study of literature, “myth” actually refers to the representation of any reality suggestive of the archetypal situations of primordial humanity. Ulysses is structured on myth though it deals with the Dublin of the early twentieth century. In like fashion, the mythical significance of Journey lies not so much in its use of Indic, Buddhist, and Daoist mythologies as in its rendition of archetypal characters and events. With Journey, even a reader of Waley’s abridgment will be struck by the resemblance of its major episodes to classic embodiments of mythical reality in Western and Indic literature. The story of the Crow-Cock Kingdom, for instance, has the makings of a Hamlet myth: a foully murdered king, a crafty confidant who usurps his throne and his conjugal bed, and an estranged prince enjoined with the task of revenge. In the story of the Cart-Slow Kingdom, the Buddhist inhabitants suffer the same fate as the Israelites in their Egyptian captivity, and Monkey and Pigsy vanquish the king’s three Daoist counselors in the same magical fashion as Moses and Aaron triumphed over Pharaoh’s priests. As for the monster that rules over the River That Leads to Heaven, his demand for an annual sacrifice of live children makes him kin to such familiar figures of Western and Chinese mythology as the Minotaur and Ho-po.
But in the last three episodes instanced and numerous other episodes of this type left out of Waley’s version, their possibly coincidental resemblance to earlier myths is a less impressive proof of their mythical status than their striking suggestion of the fertility cults of primitive man. Thus the monster at the River That Leads to Heaven has to be propitiated because failure to observe the annual sacrifice will bring agricultural ruin to the area under his control. Similarly, the three Daoists enjoy the complete trust of their king because, as rain makers of proved competence, they guarantee the fertility of his country. And, upon entering the Crow-Cock Kingdom, the future usurper breaks a long siege of drought and thereby earns the gratitude and love of the king. In this respect, the wizard is even more suggestive of Oedipus than of Claudius, in that his clearly manifested mana entitles him to the slaying of the powerless king and the possession of his wife. Yet, on the other hand, the story of the Crow-Cock Kingdom only goes through the motions of primitive ritual and tragic murder. Though the king is pushed into the well, he reposes down there quite unharmed and is eventually revived. The usurper is a castrated lion, so that, with all the lewdness implicit in his violation of the queen and the harem, the ladies actually complain of his neglect. And, quite unlike Hamlet, the prince is filial to his mother rather than obsessed with her supposed perfidy; with the aid of the pilgrims, he restores the old order without bloodshed. And after his spree on earth, the lion is reclaimed by his owner, the bodhisattva Manjusri. With this episode as with numerous other episodes, myth is ultimately placed in a larger comic framework: a primordial reality is represented so that its unreality may be the more effectively exposed.
With his sense of the ridiculous anchored in the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, therefore, the author mocks all the monsters just as he mocks all the pilgrims and celestials in the book. Not only is everything infinitely amusing to his observant eye, but in the ultimate religious sense everything that exists is but maya with which we are infatuated. Even Monkey, the most serious character and the one nearest to approaching an understanding of emptiness, is not spared this affectionate ridicule. To readers conditioned to accept the reality of literary fiction, this attempt at constant negation can be at times very unsettling. Writing from the Christian viewpoint, which accords reality to every soul be it suffering eternal damnation in hell or rejoicing in eternal bliss in paradise, Dante created a massive comedy of substantial reality designed to elicit our strongest emotional responses. Wu Cheng-en, on the other hand, provides in episode after comic episode the illusion of mythical reality, but he then inevitably exposes the falsehood of that reality in furtherance of his Buddhist comedy. Every time he kills off a fascinating monster or arbitrarily returns him to heaven, we are justified in feeling that he is mocking our emotional attachment to that monster. Like Tripitaka himself, we are too much creatures of the senses and of humanitarian sympathy to be able to adjust adequately to the Buddhist reality of emptiness.
Wu Cheng-en’s supreme comic creation is Pigsy, who symbolizes the gross sensual life in the absence of religious striving and mythical ambition. He is doubly comic, because as a reluctant pilgrim he has no calling whatever for the monastic life and because for all his monstrous size and strength he entertains no ambition beyond a huge meal and a good sleep with a woman in his arms. He is the average sensual man writ large. He deteriorates on the road, turning into an envious, mendacious, and cowardly glutton obsessed with the life of sensual ease, precisely because his journey lacks incentives for worldly success and domestic contentment. The son-in-law in the Kao family, he is a selfish and hard-working individualist, no different from any conscientious family man who works all day and comes home in the evening to attend to his family and beautify his home. Though lecherous, he is perfectly happy if he has the nightly consolation of sleeping with his wife. By ordinary standards, therefore, he is something of a model husband. His father-in-law may object to his hideous features, but he cannot complain that he does not work extremely hard on the farm. Even his huge appetite is a direct consequence of his hard labor.
In other scenes, the author brings out the sinister aspect of Pigsy’s selfishness and the unbelievable childishness of the easily despondent Tripitaka. Both are self-centered: Pigsy cares only for his own welfare, and Tripitaka thinks only of his personal danger. Both therefore are often seen in league against Monkey. If, with his superior understanding, Monkey exposes Tripitaka’s obsession with fear, with his zest for a life of disinterested action he puts to shame Pigsy’s sensuality, sloth, and envy. The allegorical meaning of these contrasts is quite obvious, but on a more literal level, in their frequent altercations these three are simply travelers on an arduous journey who sooner or later must get on each other’s nerves. In this realistic perspective, Tripitaka’s role is that of the unobservant, easily flattered father, while Monkey and Pigsy are rival brothers, in the fashion of Tom Jones and Blifil.
With all its wild conceits about food, Journey bears some important resemblance to Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais and Wu Cheng-en, moreover, were almost exact contemporaries, and both bequeathed to their respective national cultures two comic masterpieces unsurpassed for their sheer animal exuberance. In their grosser passages, both works can shock the more fastidious modern taste in their disregard of humanitarian feelings. Just as Gargantua, Pantagruel, and Friar John show the greatest contempt for their enemies and slaughter them for a joke, so does Monkey. And Pigsy, when he shakes off his usual indolence to share his fellow pilgrim’s prankish sense of humor, displays the liveliest spirit in teasing and punishing their defenseless enemies.
But, despite their comparable senses of humor, the two authors differ in their attitudes toward appetite. For all his comic exuberance, Wu Cheng-en is not a Renaissance humanist; in point of moral sensibility, he is far more Chaucerian than Rabelaisian, in that he finds man’s insatiable appetite ultimately laughable and as a negative confirmation of his absurdity. Pigsy, his major symbol of appetite, has no spiritual and intellectual pretensions whatever. In addition, the author can good-humoredly indulge his character’s appetite for food since, in Chinese eyes, gluttony calls for far less moral disapprobation than lechery and is typically a matter for comic attention.
In Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser, one of the few fruitful ventures into comparative studies of Chinese and Western literature and manners, H. C. Chang has admirably stated that whereas Western allegory as represented by The Faerie Queene personifies abstract mental and moral states, Chinese allegory, which is expressive of a more practical ethical impulse, primarily illustrates the fact of temptation. The temptation of Pigsy is therefore far more suggestive of a latter-day Western allegory like Tolstoy’s story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” in its impulse toward concrete fictional realization. Given the simpler conventions of Chinese storytelling, it is as gripping a study of lust as the latter is a study of greed. It is certainly far more psychologically subtle than anything in The Water Margin or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
The characterization of Pigsy in this self-contained allegory, one may further note, is of a piece with his characterization in the rest of the novel. The Pigsy that wants to marry and stay on the widow’s estate is the same person who reluctantly bids farewell to the Gao family. As always, he is an object of ridicule to the others, but he himself is serious throughout. He is very much on his best behavior in his negotiations with the widow, even though time and again his impatience betrays his desperation. He is apologetic about his appearance but brags about his usefulness on the farm. His sexual hunger is given astonishing reality when, faced with the daughters’ refusal, he begs the widow to marry him. But this sexual hunger is inseparable from his hunger for purposive activity. Like any other spiritually ungifted average sensual person, Pigsy sees challenge in the ownership and management of a large estate but no challenge at all in a wearisome pilgrimage. In The Faerie Queene, the voluptuous nymphs in the Bower of Bliss appear primarily in the aspect of naked sensuality, and the men who succumb to their lures immediately lose their self-respect and turn bestial in their obliviousness to all duties and responsibilities. With Pigsy, the sight of beautiful women in possession of a fabulous estate only fully arouses his domestic instinct. (In his subsequent temptation by the spider spirits, who are mere sirens without property, Pigsy behaves far more impudently, because he is not serious about them.) If he is starved of sex on his journey, he is at the same time stultified by his lack of opportunity to prove his usefulness as a householder. In Pigsy, with all his unflattering physical and moral features, Wu Cheng-en has drawn the portrait of every common man who finds fulfillment in his pursuit of respectable, mundane goals.
1. Wu Cheng-en, Monkey: Folk Novel of China, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Evergreen Books, 1994), 281–282. This passage occurs in chapter 98.
2. Cf. Chang T’ien-i, “Hsi-yu-chi cha-chi” (Notes on Hss-yu-chi), Hsi-yu-chi yen-chiu lun-wen chi. It originally appeared in Jen-min Wen-hsüeh (February 1954)
3. Wu Cheng-en, Monkey, 14 (Xi yu ji, chap. 1).
4. Xi yu ji, chap. 56, p. 649.
Franciscus Verellen
THE LAOZI IS a short collection of aphorisms that probably took shape in the fourth century B.C.E. The oldest extant version of the Laozi was discovered in 1993, inscribed on a bundle of bamboo slips, in a late fourth-century B.C.E. tomb in Guodian, Hubei. Two silk manuscripts discovered in 1973 in a tomb in Mawangdui near Changsha, Hunan, date from the beginning of the second century B.C.E. The oldest extant commentaries on the Laozi are found in the book of Hanfeizi (d. 233 B.C.E.). The commentary by Wang Bi (226–249 C.E.), some five centuries after the Hanfeizi, is the earliest to which both a date and an author may be confidently assigned. By the end of the Tang, in a preface dated 901 C.E., a scholiastic editor of the official commentary promulgated by Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–756) listed no fewer than sixty-one commentators preceding him. Today, the number of commentaries is said to exceed two hundred.
For all its brevity and mystery, the Laozi indeed constitutes one of the most challenging, intriguing, and influential sets of propositions put forward in the history of both Chinese philosophy and religion. Over the last century, several probing translations and many popular renditions have secured for it a permanent place in the literature of the West as well. One reason for this abiding interest and the perennial supply of reinterpretations is suggested in the Laozi itself: “My words are very easy to understand and very easy to practice. In the whole world nobody is able to understand them and nobody is able to practice them” (chap. 70).
Interpretations are indeed apt to differ between any two individuals, let alone readers widely separated by intellectual background and historical period. The quotations from the Laozi in this brief introduction reflect my own interpretations while also drawing on translations of the relevant passages by Wing-tsit Chan, J. J. L. Duyvendak, Max Kaltenmark, Bernhard Karlgren, D. C. Lau, and Arthur Waley.
The Laozi Legend in Antiquity
Despite the remarkable discovery of the ancient manuscripts at Guodian and Mawangdui, the history of Laozi teaching prior to the compilation of the work bearing his name remains difficult to ascertain. Already by former Han times (206 B.C.E.–8 C.E.), the most circumstantial biographical account of the sage consisted of a composite legend incorporating episodes from the lives of several distinct figures. These early traditions about Laozi’s career and reluctant bequest of his teaching to the world serve at any rate as indications of the views held by an early school of followers concerning their founder and the transmission of his teaching during the Warring States period (475–221 B.C.E.).
The main elements of the ancient legend are as follows: the real name of Laozi, to whom several early texts also refer as Lao Dan, was Li Er or Li Dan. He was a native of Huxian in the state of Chu, not far from modern Boxian (Anhui), and the site has been officially revered as Laozi’s birthplace since Han times. He is said to have served as curator of archives under the Eastern Zhou (770–256) in Luoyang.
An alleged visit by Confucius (551–479), and Laozi’s lofty rebuke of his interlocutor, afforded an opportunity for polemics between the rival schools. A later polemic, Laozi’s “conversion of the [Western] barbarians,” suggested that Buddhism was nothing but a return of Laozi’s teachings in India and aimed to challenge the independent status of Buddhism in China. Eventually, Laozi departed from the court of the declining Zhou to journey to Kunlun, the mythical sacred mountain of the Western regions. On the point of leaving the Middle Kingdoms, however, Laozi was detained by the guardian of the Hangu Pass, a hundred miles west of Luoyang. This discerning officer, named Yin Xi, persuaded the sage to impart his teaching, which he then committed to writing. The result, the Book of Five Thousand [Characters] (Wu-qien wen), as the Laozi also came to be known, was thus procured and transmitted by Yin Xi.
The Way and Virtue
The third traditional title for the work is Daodejing, or “Classic of Dao and De.” The two silk manuscripts from Mawangdui mentioned above confirm the division of the ancient text into two sections, though arranged in the reverse order—“De” followed by “Dao.” One of the two manuscripts actually features those terms as headings.
Bibliographic considerations aside, the concepts “Way” (dao) and “Virtue” (de), the latter in the sense of “inherent power” or “operative influence,” are indeed central to the philosophy of the Laozi. A direct relationship between the two is often implied by translating the pair as “the Way and its Virtue (or power).” The opening lines of the Laozi read: “The Way that can be defined is not the unchanging Way. The name that can be named is not the unchanging name. Nameless, [the Way] is at the origin of Heaven and Earth. Having a name, it is the mother of all things” (chap. 1).
The ineffable eternal Dao, which existed before the universe, also has a particular, manifest aspect that is inherent in all things constituting the phenomenal world. As such, it is endowed with qualities. Hence it is capable of being conceptualized, and it is subject to change: “There was something formless but complete which existed prior to Heaven and Earth. Soundless and indistinct, it stands alone, unchanging; it pervades all, unfailing. It can be regarded as the mother of all things. We do not know its name but style it ‘Dao.’ If I were compelled to name it, I would say ‘Da’ (the Great)” (chap. 25).
Because the eternal Dao is devoid of the qualities of phenomenal existence, termed yu (literally “to have”), the Laozi attributes to it the quality of nothingness, wu (literally “not to have”). Nothingness, in contrast to “nonbeing,” harbors the potential of every thing: “The Dao is empty, yet it can be used without ever being filled. How deep it is: the ancestor of all things!” (chap. 4).
The terms “valley,” “mother,” and “womb” stand in the Laozi for the receptivity and potential productivity of emptiness (xu), as do also various hollow implements: “The space between Heaven and Earth is like a bellows or a flute: though empty, it is inexhaustible. In operation, it produces ever more” (chap. 5). “Thirty spokes make a wheel, yet the use of the cart depends on that which does not contain anything [i.e., the hub]. We shape clay to make a vessel, yet the use of the vessel depends on that which does not contain anything” (chap. 11).
If, as we have said, the Dao in its aspect of nothingness harbors the potential of all things, then Virtue, De, is the aspect of Dao that lends specific potency to each particular thing or being. In man, De is, for example, the skill necessary to perform a specific task. “Skillful action leaves no trace, skillful speech is unblemished, a skilled reckoner uses no tallies, a well-closed [door] needs neither bolts nor bars yet cannot be opened, a well-tied knot needs neither rope nor twine yet cannot be loosened” (chap. 27).
It is also the moral influence that causes one to hold sway over fellow men. The true possessor of De is unaware of Virtue and never strives to use it to advantage: “Superior Virtue does not [pretend to] Virtue; thereby Virtue is possessed. Inferior Virtue does not disregard Virtue; thereby Virtue is not possessed. Superior Virtue does not act, but has no reason to act. Inferior Virtue acts, but has its [ulterior] reasons for acting” (chap. 38).
In the examples of De as skill quoted above from chapter 27, the practitioner refrains from imposing himself or any extraneous means on his work. In fact, his ability to recognize the operative principle inherent in a thing or situation allows him to utilize its natural, spontaneous (ziran) efficacy, unhampered by his interference. This is the mode of efficacious action of the Dao itself, which the Laozi literally calls “absence of [purposive] action” (wu-wei) and which might usefully be rendered as “nonintervention”: “The Dao never acts, yet nothing is left undone. If lords and princes adhered to this [principle], all things would evolve spontaneously” (chap. 37).
Before examining some topical aspects of Laozi’s application of wu-wei to political theory, we shall consider for a moment another approach to his philosophy of Dao, De, and wu-wei that suggests a rather different dimension to the work.
Laozi as Mystic
In the last phrase of the opening section of the Laozi, in its present arrangement, the chapter’s cryptic pronouncements concerning the eternal Dao and the different existential modes decidedly adopt the language of mystical contemplation: “Together, [wu and yu] are called mysterious (xuan), the mystery of mysteries, the gate to all wonders” (chap. 1).
The notion of the ineffable eternal Dao (“The Way that can be defined is not the unchanging Way,” etc.) itself evokes the familiar theme in mystical literature of the unchanging and undifferentiated first principle in which everything coexists simultaneously, as One: “I find only an undifferentiated Unity.… Indiscernible, it cannot be named” (chap. 14). From the One proceed all of creation, and the One proceeds from the Dao: “Dao produced the One. The One produced the two. Two produced the three. And three produced the ten thousand things” (chap. 42).
For many mystics, the postulate of unity, the idea that everything is ultimately one, has given rise to the expectation of gnosis, the possibility of an esoteric knowledge of spiritual mysteries, if not of union with the Absolute. The Laozi is a case in point:
Attain complete emptiness and hold fast to quiescence. All things arise together. I thereby witness their return. Creatures flourish profusely, but each returns to its root. To return to one’s root means quiescence, quiescence is the return to one’s destiny, the return to one’s destiny is called the Eternal. To know the Eternal is called illumination. Not to know the Eternal is to act in vain and invite misfortune. (chap. 16)
Laozi’s law of the return to the origin appears to be universal. There is no conclusive evidence that the work reflects the cult of immortality that was to flourish under the Han. It does, however, emphasize the ideal of longevity attainable through a regime of spiritual and physical discipline, in particular quiescence and yoga-like techniques of breath control (chap. 10).
Paradoxical discourse, a feature of prophetic and mystical writings in many traditions, is another way in which the Laozi draws the reader into a mystical mode of enquiry and apprehension: strong is weak and vice versa; female, soft, and passive prevail over male, hard, and active; water, the most pliant of elements, endures; single drops in time penetrate the hardest rock; the dark valley is where the waters gather; the low and submissive are exalted, the proud and exalted brought low; the infant and the “uncarved block” are symbols of the power to become; the obscure “spirit of the valley” is the mystical matrix of the creative and productive forces of the Dao.
In this context, wu-wei becomes mystical quiescence: not absolute stillness but nonresistance to the Way, as water runs its course, passively but inexorably, in compliance with the law of gravity and the lay of the land.
Classical Daoism
The term “Daoist” (daojia) originated as a category of ancient books in the imperial library of the Former Han dynasty. In the catalogue Qilüe (6 B.C.E), it designated the branch of philosophical learning that included the Laozi. Han sources also mention the doctrine of Huang-Lao (named after the mythical Yellow Emperor Huangdi and Laozi), which enjoyed considerable influence up to the reign of Emperor Wudi (140–87 B.C.E). The textual traditions associated with the terms daojia and Huang-Lao constitute the classical corpus of Taoist literature.
Though it is an open question to what extent Han bibliographical classifications reflected historical movements as well as sets of texts, it is useful to consider the teaching of the Laozi against the background of some of the rival schools of political philosophy that flourished during the Warring States period.
Philosophical debate in the mid-third century B.C.E. was characterized by intense competition for the implementation of theories of statecraft addressing such topics as military tactics, economic policy, and law and administration. In 221 B.C.E., both the practical and the theoretical aspects of this contention came to a head with the foundation of the Qin empire, the first to unite all of China under one rule.
The strategy of the successful state of Qin was based on policies proposed by the Legalists (fajia), a school that advocated the administration of a rigorous system of penal law to control every aspect of society and the state. While the nature and extent of the interaction between Daoist and Legalist thought remain to be fully explored, the major tenet of Legalism was plainly in conflict with the Laozi’s policy of government by nonintervention: “The more laws and ordinances are promulgated, the more thieves and robbers there will be” (chap. 57).
Half of the occurrences of the term wu-wei in the Laozi refer explicitly to laissez-faire governmental policies. Many additional passages convey the same advice. The famous line “governing a large kingdom is like cooking small fish” (that is, don’t overdo it) from chapter 60 was appropriately adduced by a recent U.S. president advocating “small government.”
In a passage that parallels the examples of skillful work cited above from chapter 27, the Lao Tzu requires a successful leader to refrain from coercion: “A skillful commander does not seem martial, a skillful warrior does not display anger, a skillful victor does not contend, a skillful user of men humbles himself. This is called the Virtue of not contending” (chap. 68).
The Laozi regretfully admits the necessity of certain military operations (chap. 69). Despite its visions of a utopian society living in peace, harmony, self-sufficiency, and simple contentment (chap. 47), its political attitudes are on the whole pragmatic, and its mystical insights, rather than denying worldly reality, claim a “truer” grasp of the sources and exercise of power.
Although Legalism briefly won the day in 221 B.C.E., the only ancient indigenous school of thought with which Daoism was to contend beyond the Han period was Confucianism. It would appear that the compilers of the Laozi were already taking issue with some of the positions of Confucianism, for example, in rejecting the importance that Confucians attached to humaneness (ren) and morality and to learning and education: “When the great Way fell into disuse, humaneness and sense of duty (i) arose. When intellect and cleverness appeared, great falsehood came into being. When the six relations of kinship were in disharmony, filial piety and parental love came into being. When the state fell into anarchy, loyal subjects came into being” chap. 18).
Consistent with the above and in striking contrast to Confucian thinking is the Laozi’s insistence on the indifference of both the cosmic powers and the sage (shengren) to human affairs: “Heaven and Earth are not humane. They treat the ten thousand creatures as [sacrificial] straw dogs. Sages are not humane. They treat the people as straw dogs” (chap. 5).
In a similar vein, the Laozi seemed to condemn the Confucian ideals of government through moral influence, by means of education (chap. 65), and through the performance of rites (chap. 38). Perhaps on a more fundamental level, however, the Laozi raised the question of the comparative values of the active and the contemplative roles of the sage (sheng) in human society, an issue eventually incorporated and reexamined over the centuries within the Confucian tradition itself.
Laozi in Medieval Thought and Religion
Favored by the Huang-Lao tradition and by association with messianic movements devoted to the fall of the Later Han dynasty (25–220 C.E.), the Laozi legend took a dramatic turn in the second century with the apotheosis of the founder as a cosmic deity titled Most High Lord Lao (Taishang laojun). By the end of the century, the Laozi had accordingly attained the status of a revealed scripture and was the object of fervent recitations by followers of Heavenly Master Daoism in western China.
The third century saw the celebrated syncretic revival of Daoist and Confucian philosophy under the Xuanxue school led by Wang Bi. The name of this movement, Study of Mysteries, was inspired by the passage in chapter 1 of the Laozi quoted above (“Together, [wu and yu] are called mysterious …”). Wang Bi’s principal contribution consisted in a refinement of Laozi’s theory of the existential modes wu and yu, coupled with the complementary concepts of “substantiality” (ti) and “functionality” (yong).
Following its encounter with Confucian thought in xuanxue, Daoist philosophy entered in the fourth century into an ongoing intellectual exchange with Mahāyāna Buddhism, on the subject of existential and ontological issues (on which Chinese Buddhists brought a rich Indian legacy to bear) and in the area of mystical gnosis and meditation techniques. The resulting interpenetration of Buddhist and Daoist ideas in the latter domain was to become instrumental to the development of Chan (Zen) Buddhism under the Tang (618–907).
The ruling Li clan of the Tang dynasty declared Laozi their ancestor. Emperor Xuanzong, promulgator of the official commentary mentioned above, canonized the Laozi as the most important scripture recognized by the state, to be revered throughout the empire. Under the Tang, the Laozi also became a civil-service examination text.
In medieval China, and to the present day, the Laozi continued to be regarded as the fundamental religious scripture of Daoism. The ancient category of daojia philosophers had since Han times assumed the new meaning of “Daoist clergy.” In the fifth century, the religious tradition based on the early Heavenly Master movement in Sichuan, and incorporating subsequent scriptural and liturgical developments, codified its teaching into a structured Daoist Canon with a division consecrated to the Laozi.
By Tang times, a uniform ordination system had evolved that linked the initiation into each grade of the hierarchy to the transmission of a set body of sacred texts, including the Daodejing. The transmission of the Laozi thus became institutionalized as part of an esoteric instruction passed on from Daoist master to disciple.
WAITING FOR THE DAWN
HUANG ZONGXI’S CRITIQUE OF THE CHINESE DYNASTIC SYSTEM
Wm. Theodore de Bary
HUANG ZONGXI (1610–1695) was the son of a high Ming official, affiliated with the reformist Donglin party, who died in prison at the hands of court eunuchs. At the age of eighteen, after the fall of Wei Zhongxian, the chief eunuch, Huang avenged his father’s death by bringing to justice or personally attacking those responsible for it. Thereafter he devoted himself to study, took part in a flurry of political agitation at Nanjing just before the fall of the Ming dynasty, and then engaged in prolonged but unsuccessful guerrilla resistance to the Manchus in southeastern China. There is evidence that he even took part in a mission to Japan, hoping to obtain aid. After finally giving up the struggle, Huang settled down to a career as an independent scholar and teacher, refusing all offers of employment from the Manchu regime.
Warfare being less total and intensive in those days, Huang was probably not forced to neglect his intellectual interests altogether during those unsettled years. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that his most productive years should have come so late in life. His first important work, Waiting for the Dawn (Mingyi daifang lu), was produced at the age of fifty-two. Thereafter, he worked on a massive anthology of Ming-dynasty prose and a broad survey of Ming thought, Mingru xuean, which is the first notable attempt in China at a systematic and critical intellectual history. At his death, he was compiling a similar survey for the Song and Yuan dynasties. Huang’s range of interests included mathematics, calendrical science, geography, and the critical study of the classics, as well as literature and philosophy. In most of these fields, however, his approach is that of a historian, and this underlying bent is reflected in the fact that his most outstanding disciples and followers in the Manchu period also distinguished themselves in historical studies. Huang was an independent and creative scholar who questioned whether individual self-cultivation (self-discipline) was a self-sufficient means of achieving good governance. His father had been a heroic example of Confucian personal character defeated by a system that gave power to less worthy men. Hence Huang balanced the predominant Neo-Confucian emphasis on individual virtue as the key to governance by stressing the need for constitutional law and systemic reform as well.
In his synthesis, Huang drew upon several major strains of Chinese thought that readers of Chinese classics will recognize. As a successor to the Donglin school of political, social, and moral reform, he combined the basic principles of the Neo-Confucian Four Books with the statecraft thinking of the Song period, which took into account the power factors that had been so prominent in early Legalist thinking and later in the so-called New Laws of Wang An-shi.
Zhu Xi’s key formula (in his preface to the Great Learning) had been “self-cultivation” (or self-discipline) for the governance of humankind,” and the essence of his sixteen-word formula for the mind-and-heart was the balancing of legitimate self-interest with the interests of others to achieve the common good. This was an imperative incumbent on all, both leaders and the led, which meant, among other things, that everyone had to be a leader of all in self-control.
This same principle is affirmed in Huang’s opening discussion of “The Prince” (Yuan jun), in which he recognizes the legitimacy of individual self-interest but also affirms that leadership in the ruler calls for him to subordinate his own self-interest to the interests of all. He is taking into account (but expresses in his own human terms) the classic argument over the goodness of human nature (Mencius) and human nature as evil (Xunzi). People do naturally act in their own interest, but there is nothing inherently bad or wrong in this as long as it is subordinated to the fulfillment of the shared or common good. Nor can the need for self-denying leadership be taken as a denial of the legitimacy of individual self-interest.
This balancing act had already been performed by the Neo-Confucians in their philosophy of human nature, primarily in regard to individual subjectivity versus objective needs in human society. Huang now extends this to the management of institutions as power systems. One can see this as responding to the objective economic circumstances in the Ming and early Qing: the continuing rise of the middle class and its profit-oriented mentality in the midst of many others’ impoverishment. However, there is little in Waiting for the Dawn that could be interpreted as a program that asserts middle-class interests as opposed to those of others. Virtually all of his programmatic recommendations are governed by the standards of universality, equality, and individual merit, not class interest. Here we have Legalist system building, but not in the interest of the state. Huang’s “Laws” or systems (fa), instead of aiming at enhancing state power at the expense of the people, are systems that control and direct state institutions to serve the people’s interest generally. This is neither Legalist state building nor one class dominating another but a Confucian communitarian ideal.
In effect, “waiting for the dawn” means “waiting for the prince” to come and listen to Huang’s plan for him. Here the primary function of the prince is service to the people; all exercise of his authority is to be in their interests. The same is true of Huang’s discussion of the duties and functions of government ministers; instead of treating them just as officials of state, that is, bureaucrats or servants of the ruler, he calls them “ministers,” in keeping with the moral responsibility invested in that term especially by Mencius. The Legalists had defined things functionally, but Huang, while taking the moral aspect as primary (rather than the practical or utilitarian), at the same time takes cognizance of the practical power factors at work by devoting a whole chapter to the need for maintaining the independence of the prime minister as a separate leadership function within the same ruling class. Both ruler and minister shared the same principled purpose, but along with functional differentiation within the system, a shaping and balancing of power was no less essential to the effective service of the common good.
Among traditional Chinese institutions, the one that comes closest to Huang’s conception of consensual rule is probably the community compact or community assembly (xiang yue) that Zhu Xi had sought to promote and that earlier Ming reformers had hoped to “revive.” But by Huang’s time, this institution had been taken over by the Ming founder for his own purposes and became largely co-opted by the bureaucracy. It is not surprising that Huang would not look to it as a source of political reform but would rather see the leviathan state as so dominating the political landscape that nothing short of its wholesale transformation would suffice for fundamental reform. As Huang saw it, this it necessitated a basic reconceiving of law—not as dynastic law based on the patriarchal enactments of the founding father of the dynasty1 but as something more like a state constitution with a separation of powers that would ensure and protect collegial rule.
In China, the dynastic state put a high value on scholarly expertise, and, paradoxically, the schools suffered for it. This is because the state’s interest in education was closely linked to its recruitment of men with talents useful in government: literary skills, a knowledge of historical precedents, and competence in the rituals so important to the legitimizing of government. While government schools were maintained in the capital and the principal seats of provincial administration, their main object was to prepare those who passed the district examinations for higher degrees leading to eventual employment in the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority of the people went uneducated. Except for the select number who gained admission to official schools and the Imperial College, instruction could be obtained only from private tutors or teachers in private academies, which few could afford. Thus the state’s interest in the recruiting of scholars did not have the effect of developing any general system of education. Even without such universal education or a public-school system, however, a degree of uniformity prevailed in education comparable to that achieved by modern states through centralized public-school systems. This was because virtually all instruction in China, whether public or private, was oriented toward the civil-service examinations. These were the gateway to advancement in government and, in Chinese society, official status was seen as the main road to success, influence, and often affluence. The government did not need to maintain an extensive school system with a curriculum and texts of its own choosing. Simply by prescribing what was to be called for in the examinations, it could determine what most aspiring students would find it in their interest to learn, whether in or out of state schools.
Against this background we can appreciate why Huang attaches such great importance to educational reform. He wishes to remedy the lack of general education and the prevalence of careerism in education by creating a universal public-school system with functions much broader than the mere training of officials. In classical times, he attempts to show, schools were centers of all-important community and state activities; they had a major role too, he claims, in debating public questions and advising the prince. Ideally, then, schools should serve the people in two ways: providing an education for all and acting as organs for the expression of public opinion. Likewise, the prince had two corresponding obligations: to maintain schools for the benefit of all and to give the people a voice in government through the schools. In ancient times, “the emperor did not dare to determine right and wrong himself, so he left to the schools the determination of right and wrong.” But since the rise of the Q’in, “right and wrong have been determined entirely by the court. If the emperor favored such and such, everyone hastened to think it right. If he frowned upon such and such, everyone condemned it as wrong.”
This argument is suggestive again of Confucian antipathy for Legalist doctrines that had been absorbed into the authoritarian dogma of subsequent dynasties. Han Feizi had said: “Whatever he [the ruler] considers good is to be regarded as good by the officials and people. Whatever he does not consider good is not to be regarded as good by the officials and the people.” The Legalist statesman, Li Si, who was chiefly responsible for suppressing free speech in independent schools, memorialized the throne as follows:
At present your Majesty possesses a unified empire and has laid down distinctions of right and wrong, consolidating for himself a single position of eminence. Yet there are those who … teach what is not according to the laws. When they hear orders promulgated, they criticize them in the light of their own teachings. … To cast disrepute on their ruler they regard as a thing worthy of fame; to hold different views they regard as high conduct. … If such conditions are not prohibited, the imperial power will decline.
(SCT, 1:209–210)
According to Huang, the prevalence of this view that the ruler determines what is right and wrong deprived the schools of one of their most important functions. They could no longer discuss public issues freely, and because the authority of the state was set against the autonomy of the academies, an unnatural separation arose between the two. Thereafter, the schools could not even fulfill the functions remaining to them of training scholars for office, because the true aims of education were lost sight of in the mad scramble for advancement and the desperate endeavor to conform. Thinking men, in their search for true education, turned more and more to the local, quasi-private academies that had become centers of Neo-Confucian thought in the Song and Ming dynasties. But the independence and heterodox views of these academies brought repeated attempts at suppression by the Ming state.
Thus the arbitrary separation of school and state ended in open conflict between them, which was detrimental to the true interests of both. Though Huang defends the local academies, which had been so much blamed for the political troubles of the late Ming, his real purpose is not to assert the claims of independent private schools. These are a recourse only in the absence of true public education, which, according to the Confucians, it is the duty of the ruler to provide. Instead, Huang advocates a system of universal public education maintained by the state but free of all centralized control. There are to be schools from the capital down through every city and town to even the smallest hamlets, but on each level supervision is to be independent of control from above. The principal units of administration, the prefectures and districts, would be presided over by superintendents of education chosen locally, not appointed by the court. These men need never have served as officials before or have qualified for the civil service. Not only should they have complete freedom in ordinary educational matters, including the right to override the provincial education intendants in the appointment of licentiates (those who have achieved the first degree in the prefectural examinations), but their pronouncements on any matter affecting the community should be listened to respectfully by the local magistrate. Similarly, at the capital the libationer (or chancellor) of the Imperial College should lead a discussion each month on important questions, with the emperor and his ministers attending in the role of students.
This arrangement, and the political function it serves, are of paramount importance to our understanding of Huang’s whole plan. His unhappiness over the “unnatural separation between school and state” and his belief that the semiprivate local academies are no substitute for an adequate system of universal education underlies much of what follows.
The rest of Waiting for the Dawn extends this same type of analysis to other aspects of organized society, recognizing that many of the essential functions involve a practicality that cannot be reduced simply to either moral principles or utilitarian expediency. Instead, morality needs to take into account different aspects of material reality, especially the condition of agriculture and the burdens put on it (as the prime economic base) by taxation, finances, and military conscription. The need for the decentralization and sharing of power is what leads Huang to an acceptance of “feudalism,” in the form of the enfeoffment of military commanders at the frontiers. In this respect, we see the persistence of the Mencian conception of the enfeoffment system as preferable to centralized control.
Here the limits of power and the need to adjust to local circumstances set a limit on the extension of an otherwise “universal” system. In this way Huang’s principles can be thought of as universally applicable but at the same time differentiated in their application to particular circumstances.
Huang wants both to regularize and diversify the examination system, but he does not propose to base his meritocracy on an electoral process. The important function of public discussion and participation is as we have seen located in largely autonomous schools, locally based. In other words, Huang does not conceive of public opinion (gong-lun) as something that would be better served through an electoral process, operating in the form of party politics rather than through institutions already grounded in established practice. Consultative and consensual processes can work as long as autonomy is respected and open discussion allowed. How this kind of suasive process can be established without power struggles is not a question directly addressed by Huang, but suffice to say that formal elections are not among the options (systems) that occur to him.
Nevertheless, although Huang has made a definite advance in articulating a constitutional order with checks and balances appropriate to a mature centralized bureaucratic system (such as neither Mencius nor Xunzi knew) and has defined a kind of public sphere or civil society that might mitigate the authoritarianism and offset the concentration of power in the late imperial system, we are still left uncertain as to whether the custodians of that public sphere, as a scholarly elite, might not still become isolated from the common people, serving more their own sectional or class interests than the general welfare.
A modern observer might be more mindful of how easily ruling elites can convince themselves that they know what the people want or need better than the people do themselves, as did later the Communist elites, who, often idealistically and quite conscientiously, lent their services to a “dictatorship of the people’s democracy” that made up its own mind about what was best for the people. From this heightened perspective, we can still appreciate Huang’s achievement in recognizing the need for a constitutional order and a public sphere as a check on the ruler, but we remain conscious of the ambiguity that attaches to the Confucian scholar-official’s ambivalent status between the ruler and the common people. With no middle class to support him, with little of a popular press, without a consensus-making infrastructure other than the schools and academies of the scholar-officials (shi), and without a defined electoral process for expressing the wishes of the common people, the public service of the scholar-official, even when conscientiously rendered as a Confucian Noble Man, leaves him in a precarious, dubious, and insecure position between the ruler and the common people (min). To what extent can the common people be considered an active constituency representing the general welfare or public interest?
To pose the question in these terms is not to suggest that a perfect solution to the problem has ever been at hand. Modern electoral processes in themselves, being subject to some pressures and manipulation, are not as such any guarantee of effective representative government, though in East Asia they have already proven superior to “people’s democracies” led by a one-party dictatorship and controlled by “democratic” centralism (which, in the words of one-time People’s Republic of China President Liu Shao-qi, could dispense with elections as “needless formalities”). Even in modern states, something like Huang’s parliament of scholars, if carried on in autonomous schools and conducted in the open manner he suggests, could serve to offset concentrations of power in entrenched authoritarian regimes, which though unlikely to accept multiparty politics might allow a measure of latitude to scholars and scientists upon whom they depend for technical expertise. In this latter case, however, the scholars and scientists would still, somehow, have to be, as Huang insists, persons of conscience, people liberally educated to meet their public responsibilities.
Whether or not I am right in thinking that Huang’s plan still has relevance to the persistent problems of contemporary China, recent scholarship in both China and Japan has confirmed his stature as a major figure in the overall development of Chinese political thought. Some writers emphasize Huang’s debt to his immediate scholarly forebears. I myself see in Huang’s plan the product of a significant long-term development of Neo-Confucian thought and scholarship, neither just a retread or recycling of Mencius, on the one hand, nor a work of genius sui generis on the other—a star that suddenly shot across the seventeenth-century firmament and disappeared into the night of Manchu rule. Huang and his work stand out as a singular synthesis of Confucian thought with the thinking that emerged from the Chinese experience under late imperial, Legalist-type, dynastic institutions. From the Neo-Confucian experience, Huang drew both on the intellectual breadth and encyclopedic scholarship of the Zhu Xi school and on the freshness and vitality of thought stimulated by Wang Yang-ming. Indeed, it is unlikely that he could have commanded such a range of institutional issues as he did in his Plan had it not been for the monumental histories and encyclopedic compilations of Neo-Confucians, of more than one school in the Song, Yuan, and Ming periods, from which he quotes so freely. Nor could he have been so incisive about key issues had he not learned much from the “utilitarian” thinkers of the Song (Li Gou, Ye Shi, and Chen Liang) as well as from the actual experience of the Dong-lin and Fu-she movements in the late Ming.
No one is more conscious than Huang of his indebtedness to earlier writers, some famous and others comparatively obscure, who had wrestled with the same problems. In certain cases, indeed, it is quite apparent that his solution for a given problem was anticipated by others. It is also true that other men of his own time shared Huang’s views. They were by no means generally accepted, yet, among men with an intellectual inheritance similar to his, the same Confucian ideals inspired similar sentiments in regard to critical questions of the day. Among them Gu Yan-wu is an outstanding example. He says, in his letter to Huang after reading Waiting for the Dawn, that his own views are in agreement with “six- or seven-tenths” of what is set forth therein. A reading of Ku’s essays on “Commanderies and Prefectures” (jun xian lun) and “Taxes in Money” (Qian-liang), as well as relevant passages in his great work Rizhi lu, confirms that his views were close to Huang’s on many major issues. Other contemporaries, such as Lii Liu-liang (1620–1683) and Tang Zhen (1620–1704), are likewise outstanding exponents of the people’s welfare against despotic rulers and oppressive institutions.
In this perspective, then, one can still say that Huang’s work is the most eloquent and comprehensive statement of its kind in Chinese political literature. It draws together the ideas that others, in the past or present, had expressed in scattered or unsystematic form, and, while his discussion of certain problems is sometimes less exhaustive than the treatment of them by others (here the comparison to Gu Yan-wu is particularly apt), the balance that Huang achieves between general principles and their historical application adds considerably to the force of his presentation. It is for this reason, perhaps more than any other, that Waiting for the Dawn has proved the most enduring and influential Confucian critique of Chinese despotism in the late imperial age as well as the most powerful affirmation of a liberal Confucian political vision in premodern times.
In my conclusion to the above essay, I have presumed to speak of Waiting for the Dawn as an “early modern classic.” Whether or in what sense it could be so classed many readers would have reason to doubt, especially here where it is placed in the impressive company of John Locke. It would be hard to overrate the importance of Locke as a major landmark in early modern thought and politics in the West and even, by extension, among the Western influences on Asia. Huang Zongxi’s importance in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China was significant among reformist and republican thinkers and to a limited degree among liberal elements in twentieth-century Japan, but it was short lived and soon became submerged in the flood of Western influences that overtook all of East Asian thought and politics in the twentieth century. From this standpoint, Hegel, Rousseau, Marx, and Weber are more likely to have been read by educated East Asians, most of whom would not even have heard of Huang. But no less would this be true of many influential Western writers about China in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Part of the problem is that today education in East Asia is dominated by the economic, scientific, and technological rush toward the global market, which leaves little room for reading classics of any kind. But at least lip service is paid to tradition as, in some way, defining national identity and also possibly as a resource in deciding what ends are to be served by these new modern means. As China sooner or later comes to reassess the meaning of what is called “Chinese” Socialism, I believe it will want to reexamine works such as Huang’s Mingyi daifanglu as major efforts to survey and reevaluate the Chinese tradition in broad, long-range terms, and I think that it will find therein much to think about. At the same time, however, other co-inhabitants of the same globe should be engaged with the Chinese in this process and should acquaint ourselves with this and other “modern classics” so as to be prepared for informed discourse with them.
A complete translation may be found in Wm. Theodore de Bary, Waiting for the Dawn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
1. See the Ming founders’ raw assertion of their own personal will as binding law. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 780–784. Hereafter abbreviated SCT in the text.
THE TALE OF GENJI AS A JAPANESE AND WORLD CLASSIC
Haruo Shirane
THE TALE OF Genji, or the Genji monogatari, was written in the early eleventh century by a woman named Murasaki Shikibu. We know very little about the author except that she was the daughter of a scholar-poet, that she came from the middle ranks of the aristocracy, and that she served, at some point, as a lady-in-waiting to the empress, for whom she probably wrote at least part of this lengthy narrative. The title The Tale of Genji comes from the surname of the hero, who is the son of the emperor regnant at the beginning of the narrative and whose life, marriage, and relationships with various women are described over the course of the first forty-one chapters. The remaining thirteen chapters are primarily concerned with the affairs of Kaoru, Genji’s putative son.
Murasaki Shikibu’s creation of highly individualized characters in a realistic social setting and her subtle presentation of inner thought and emotion have encouraged critics to call the Genji the world’s first psychological novel. The appearance of a lengthy masterpiece of vernacular fiction toward the beginning of a literary tradition is indeed highly unusual. The Chinese tradition, for example, begins with poetry, history, and philosophy, all of which become classic genres. Vernacular fiction, which has a problematic place in the tradition, does not emerge until much later, and the novelistic masterpiece of Chinese fiction—A Dream of Red Mansions (Honglou meng), or The Story of the Stone—does not appear until the late eighteenth century (1792), about the same time that the novel comes into its own in the Anglo-European tradition.
The Japanese, following the Chinese model, considered poetry, history, and philosophy to be the classic literary genres. But literary masterpieces failed to materialize, at least initially, from either history or philosophy, both of which had to be written in Chinese, the official language of religion and government. Of the three ideological centers—Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism—two (Buddhism and Confucianism) are borrowed from the continent, and the third, Shintoism, the indigenous religion, while containing a body of intriguing myths, did not develop a self-conscious textual tradition. There is, in short, no Old Testament, no Plato, no Confucius. The impact of Buddhism and Confucianism, whose texts were considered literary classics by the Japanese priesthood and intelligentsia, cannot be underestimated. But these centers of thought did not directly give birth to great literature, at least not in the beginning.
Nor do we find epics, drama, or tragedy, the literary genres associated with the wellsprings of the Western literary tradition. Instead, there is poetry and, in particular, waka, the thirty-one syllable lyric, which was composed and exchanged by all educated Japanese from the ancient period onward. Waka was overwhelmingly private in nature and had little concern for politics, philosophy, or the larger humanistic issues that we normally associate with the Great Ideas, but it functioned superbly as a vehicle of aesthetic consciousness and led to an outstanding tradition of fiction, drama, essays, epics, and literary diaries, all of which are highly lyrical and poetic and of which the Genji is perhaps the most outstanding example.
The Tale of Genji also emerged out of a tradition of folk narratives, which can be traced back to the early histories and which had developed by the tenth century into a tradition of vernacular tales and Buddhist anecdotes. Of the two native genres, folk narratives and Japanese poetry, the latter took absolute precedence. Japanese poetry in fact was the only native, vernacular genre to be considered serious literature in Murasaki Shikibu’s day. One consequence was that The Tale of Genji was not recognized as a classic in its own time.
Buddhism condoned storytelling for its use as parable, as a vehicle for transmitting higher truths, but it fundamentally distrusted prose fiction. Buddhist writers repeatedly condemned prose fiction for deceiving the reader, distorting facts, and encouraging immoral acts. Later medieval Buddhist anecdotes depict Murasaki Shikibu as suffering in hell for having written excessively of amorous affairs and of having “fabricated a tissue of lies.” The early Anglo-European novel, which initially came under similar attack, defended itself by pretending to be a form of history, a kind of biography, or, as in the case of Robinson Crusoe, an authentic document. Probably for similar reasons, to borrow the prestige and apparent authenticity of the histories, Murasaki Shikibu gave her narrative a strong historical cast, interweaving historical names, places, and events, to the extent that parts of The Tale of Genji, which was written in the early eleventh century, can be regarded as a historical novel set a hundred years earlier. The title itself evokes the past, for the practice of conferring the surname of Genji, or Minamoto, upon a prince and thereby making him a commoner—which the emperor does in the opening chapter to provide the hero with political protection and opportunity—had ceased by the early tenth century. In an age in which the Fujiwara clan monopolized all phases of the imperial government, it was inconceivable for a Genji to gain power, let alone control the throne, as the Shining Hero eventually does.
In a famous discussion of fiction in the middle chapters of The Tale of Genji, the hero attacks monogatari, or vernacular tales, for being deceptive and worthless, but in the end he is persuaded, as Murasaki Shikibu no doubt hoped her readers would be, that there was more truth to be found in this admittedly fictitious tale than in the highly esteemed histories. It was, however, The Tale of Genji’s poetic qualities that first earned it literary prominence.
When the Genji was finally recognized as a classic in the medieval period, from the early thirteenth century onward, it was recognized not as a work of prose fiction per se but as a sourcebook for poetry, a guide to the poetic diction, imagery, and sensibility required for composing poetry, which was de rigueur for all educated Japanese. Fujiwara no Shunzei, the leading poet of the late twelfth century, publicly remarked that “any poet who was not well versed in The Tale of Genji was to be deplored.” Indeed, without an intimate knowledge of the Genji, the subtle allusions upon which medieval poetry and linked verse, or renga, depended could not be comprehended. The Tale of Genji also lived in the popular imagination, in oral and written narratives, in Japanese drama, particularly the Nō plays of the late medieval period, and in the visual arts, where it graced everything from scroll painting to furniture engraving. But it was the medieval poet-scholars who were responsible for preserving, annotating, and explicating Murasaki Shikibu’s masterpiece for future readers. In the premodern period alone, there are over a thousand commentaries.
One of the obvious attractions that the Genji holds for modern readers, particularly for those concerned with today’s undergraduate curriculum, is the fact that it is a major classic by a woman. In Murasaki Shikibu’s day, as in previous centuries, men devoted themselves to writing prose in Chinese, the official language of religion and government. (The only prose writing that was taken seriously was historical and philosophical writing, all of which was done in Chinese and little of which is read today.) One consequence was that women, who were not obligated to write in a foreign language and who were in fact discouraged from doing so, were the first to create a substantial body of prose texts in the vernacular. If Virginia Woolf lamented the silence of Shakespeare’s sister, Japan’s Shakespeare was a woman with many literary sisters. In the tenth century, vernacular prose, particularly literary diaries, belonged to women to the extent that the leading male poet of the day, Ki no Tsurayuki, pretended to be a woman in order to write a literary diary in Japanese—a reversal of the George Eliot phenomenon.
Male scholars, however, were the first to write vernacular tales, or monogatari, though they did so anonymously, for such writing was considered a lowly activity directed only at women and children. These early vernacular tales, which begin with the Taketori monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, early tenth century), tend to be highly romantic, fantastical, and dominated by folkloric elements. Women, by contrast, wrote highly personal, confessional literature based on their private lives and centered on their own poetry. The author of the Kagerō nikki, the first major literary diary by a woman, wrote out of a profound dissatisfaction with contemporary monogatari, which, in her view, were “little more than gross fabrications.” Standing at the crossroads of literary history, Murasaki Shikibu was able to combine both traditions. The Tale of Genji carries on the monogatari tradition in its larger plot and its amorous hero. But in its style, details, psychological insight, and portrayal of the dilemmas faced by women in aristocratic society, The Tale of Genji remains firmly rooted in the women’s tradition.
It was a plot convention of the vernacular tale that the heroine, whose family has declined or disappeared, is discovered and loved by an illustrious noble. This association of love and inferior social status appears from the opening line of the Genji: “Which imperial reign was it? Of the many consorts who were in the service of the emperor, there was one who was not of particularly high status but who received the special favor of the Emperor” (translation mine).
In the opening chapter, the emperor regnant, like all Heian emperors, was expected to devote himself to his principal consort (the Kokiden lady), the lady of the highest rank, yet he dotes on a woman of considerably lower status, a social and political violation that eventually results in the woman’s death. Like his father, Genji pursues love where it is forbidden and most unlikely to be found or attained. In the fifth chapter, Genji discovers his future wife, the young Murasaki, who has lost her mother and is in danger of losing her only guardian when Genji takes her into his own home.
In Murasaki Shikibu’s day, it would have been unheard of for a man of Genji’s high rank to take a girl of Murasaki’s low position into his own residence and marry her. In Heian aristocratic society, the man usually lived in his wife’s residence, either in the house of her parents or in a dwelling nearby. As a rule, the wife did not leave her family after marriage. She received her husband at her own home, reared her children there, and continued to be supported by her family. Though political power lay in the hands of men, the succession to marital residences remained matrilineal. The prospective groom thus had high stakes in marriage, for the bride’s family provided not only a residence but other forms of support as well. When Genji takes a girl with absolutely no political backing or social support into his house and marries her, he openly flouts the conventions of marriage as they were known to Murasaki Shikibu’s audience. In the monogatari tradition, however, this action becomes a sign of excessive, romantic love.
A number of other sequences in the Genji—those of Yūgao, Suetsumuhana, Tamakazura, the Akashi lady, Oigimi (Agemaki), and Ukifune—start on a similar note. All of these women come from upper- or- middle-rank aristocratic families that have, for various reasons, fallen into social obscurity and must struggle to survive. The appearance of the highborn hero signifies, at least for those surrounding the woman, an opportunity for social redemption, an expectation that is usually fulfilled in the earlier monogatari. Murasaki Shikibu, however, focuses on the difficulties that the woman subsequently encounters either in dealing with the man or in making, or failing to make, the social transition between her own class and that of the highborn hero. The woman may, for example, be torn between pride and material need, or between emotional dependence on the man and a desire to be more independent, or she may feel abandoned and betrayed—all conflicts explored in Heian women’s literature. In classical poetry, which had a profound influence on the Genji, love has a similar fate: it is never about happiness or the blissful union of souls. Instead, it dwells on unfulfilled hopes, fear of abandonment, deep regrets, and lingering resentment. One of the most prominent poetic stances in the Kokinshū, the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry (early ninth century) is that of the lonely woman. As the medieval aesthetic term sabi (which comes from the word sabishii, or “lonely”) suggests, loneliness is not only a state of being; it is part of a larger aesthetic consciousness that finds melancholy beauty in loneliness.
As mentioned above, The Tale of Genji has often been called the world’s first psychological novel, a notion reinforced by Arthur Waley, who transformed The Tale of Genji both stylistically and socially into a Victorian novel. The label of novel is obviously meant to be a compliment, but it can be misleading. First of all, The Tale of Genji need not be read from front to back as a single monolithic work. The Tale of Genji was not conceived and written as a single product and then published and distributed to a mass audience as novels are today. Instead, the chapters were issued in limited installments to a small aristocratic audience, possibly to a single reader (the empress). Furthermore, the chapters probably did not appear in the order that we have them today. In all likelihood, the Genji began as a short story, and in response to reader demand, Murasaki Shikibu produced another story or sequel.
The Genji is probably best appreciated as Murasaki Shikibu’s oeuvre, or corpus: a closely interrelated series of texts that can be read either individually or as a whole and that is the product of an author whose attitudes, interests, and techniques evolved significantly with time and experience. For example, the reader of the Ukifune story (the last five chapters, devoted to Ukifune) can appreciate this sequence both independently and as an integral part of the previous narrative. It is thus possible for undergraduates to read only a part of The Tale of Genji and still appreciate many of its finer qualities. In fact, it is sometimes better to start with the later, more mature sequences and then, having acquired a taste for the narrative, go back to the earlier chapters.
Japanese poets were well aware that meaning is dependent on context and that the significance of a thirty-one-syllable waka could be profoundly altered by the prose context or by contiguous poems. An entire poetic genre—renga, or linked verse—eventually grew out of the pleasure derived from deliberately changing the meaning of a preexisting verse by adding another verse to it. In a similar fashion, Murasaki Shikibu altered the significance of her existing text, or body of texts, not by rewriting but by adding and interlacing new sequences. To take a larger example, love, glory, and miyabi (“courtliness”), the secular ideals assumed in the earlier volumes, are placed in relative and ironic perspective in the latter chapters by the emergence of their opposite: a deep-rooted desire to renounce the world and achieve detachment.
That The Tale of Genji is an evolving narrative, however, does not mean that Murasaki Shikibu ignores or forgets the earlier stages of the narrative. The author links many of the women by blood or physical appearance, in the form of surrogate figures. For example, in the opening chapter, after losing the Kiritsubo consort (Genji’s mother), the emperor finds consolation in Fujitsubo, a lady of similar countenance. Genji, longing for his deceased mother, is likewise drawn to his father’s new consort. Frustrated by Fujitsubo’s stiff resistance and the barriers that separate them, he eventually finds a substitute and a wife in the young Murasaki, who is Fujitsubo’s niece and almost identical in appearance. In each case, the loss of a woman leads the man to find a surrogate who is similar in appearance, or closely related, or both. The notion of the surrogate lover enabled Murasaki Shikibu not only to explore one of the great themes of the Genji—the pseudoincestuous nature of male/female relationships—but to move smoothly from one new sequence to the next.
An equally significant form of linkage exists between characters who are not associated by blood or appearance but who bear common social, spiritual, and emotional burdens. Perhaps the most revealing of these analogous relationships involves Asagao, Princess Ochiba, and Oigimi, three royal daughters who appear in three different parts of the Genji. Owing to an unfortunate turn in family circumstances, all three women have been placed in difficult positions. But despite the obvious rewards of marriage, each one rejects the advances and generous aid of a highborn, attractive noble: Genji, Yūgiri, and Kaoru, respectively. None of these women is directly related to the other. Nevertheless, each successive sequence explores, with increasing intensity, the problem of honor, pride, and shame in regard to the spiritual independence of a highborn but disadvantaged lady.
The Genji can also be thought of as a kind of bildungsroman, in which the author reveals the development of the protagonist’s spirit and character through time and experience. In the Genji this growth occurs not only in the life of a single hero or heroine but over different generations and sequences, with two or more successive characters. Genji, for example, gradually attains an awareness of death, mutability, and the illusory nature of the world through repeated suffering. By contrast, Kaoru, his putative son, begins his life, or rather his narrative, with a profound grasp and acceptance of these darker aspects of existence.
The same is true of the mature Murasaki, the heroine of the first half, and Oigimi (in Waley, Agemaki), the primary figure of the last part. By the beginning of the middle chapters, Murasaki has long assumed that she can monopolize Genji’s affections and act as his principal wife. Genji’s unexpected marriage to the high-ranking Third Princess (in Waley, Nyosan), however, crushes these assumptions, causing Murasaki to fall mortally ill. Though Oigimi never suffers the way Murasaki does, she quickly comes to a similar awareness of the inconstancy of men, love, and marriage, and she rejects Kaoru even though he appears to be the perfect companion. Building on the earlier chapters, Murasaki Shikibu makes a significant leap, moving from a narrative about the tribulations of love and marriage to one that explores a world without men.
The form of the Genji is closely bound to its aesthetics. Beauty in the West has often been associated with the eternal, the sublime, with the uplifting, and in form it has been often tied to unity and balance. In Heian literature, however, beauty is found in the fleeting, in the uncertain, in the fragmentary, and in the inherently sorrowful aspects of the world. The cherry blossoms—the quintessential image of Japanese aesthetics even today—were loved by Heian poets not only because the delicate, multi-petaled flowers reminded them of the glories of this world but because the same blossoms, in a matter of days, turned color, faded, and scatter
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Mass drowning of migrants in the Mediterranean
Described by the United Nations refugee agency as “the deadliest shipwreck in the Mediterranean so far this year”, up to 150 migrants and refugees are feared drowned attempting to make the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea into Europe after their boat capsized off Libya. The vessel, which was possibly three boats lashed together, is reported to have started to fill with water 90 minutes after setting out before the engine failed and the passengers began to drown. Libyan fishers in small boats took part in rescuing 134 survivors, who were returned to Libya by the coastguard.
With the withdrawal of coordinated search-and-rescue operations previously provided through the European Union, rescue operations in such incidents, including the recovery of bodies, now depend on the Libyan coastguard and local fishers and volunteers.
Although the number of people crossing the Mediterranean and arriving in Europe decreased by 17 percent in the first three months of 2019 compared with the same period of 2018, there are concerns that a greater proportion are drowning and being lost at sea as the people traffickers are cramming more people into unseaworthy boats to make the crossing in unsafe conditions.
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Refugees Still Reluctant to Return
More than a million displaced people still prefer life in Pakistan’s makeshift camps to the uncertain security situation back home,
By Abubaker Saddique
For 70-year-old Afghan refugee Ghulam Ghous, leaving his two-room mud house in a refugee camp south of Peshawar is still unthinkable.
“There is no security, there is no work and our house in Afghanistan lies in ruins,” he said, explaining why he is unwilling to return to his homeland after nearly15 years in neighbouring Pakistan.
Ghous left his village close to the Afghan capital of Kabul in the early Nineties, at the height of the Afghan civil war. Now, his six children weave carpets at the Khurrasan refugee camp and earn enough to feed their 15-member family.
They have access to potable water, electricity, a health clinic and, above all, a feeling of security. “If we go back to our village, we are bound to lose this,” Ghous told IWPR.
The mood in the 20-year-old Khurrasan camp, home to 9,000 people, is against returning to Afghanistan any time soon. “We will not leave Pakistan until we are forced out,” said Haji Ayub, a middle-aged Turkmen.
Although he has seen many relatives return to their village in the northern Afghan province of Jawzjan, he wants to stay for a few more years. “Over the past two years I made a few journeys to Jawzjan, but it will take a long time for things to normalise there,” he said.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, expects to assist some 400,000 refugees in Pakistan to return to Afghanistan by providing each with a travel grant, food and other items when they arrive in their homeland.
Overall, some three million Afghans have returned home from Pakistan, Iran, the Central Asian republics and other parts of the world. But of late, the number of those returning has slowed dramatically and a further 1.1 million have chosen to stay in 200 refugee camps across Pakistan.
“The decision to return remains completely with the refugees,” said Jack Redden, spokesman for UNHCR in Islamabad. “Rather than push factors from Pakistan, the pull factors of developments inside Afghanistan are likely to be the more important.”
Redden said that returning refugees must be satisfied with the state of security in their homeland - and for now this remains uneven at best. “Economic development - providing the jobs necessary to sustain returning refugees - is a main requirement for repatriation and reintegration of the Afghans now living outside the borders,” he added.
Over the past year, aid agencies have been the targets of sporadic attacks often blamed on Afghanistan’s former hard-line Islamist Taleban rulers. Last November, UNHCR suspended operations following the murder of staff member Bettina Goislard in the eastern Afghan city of Ghanzi.
“What [refugees] are doing is wait and see,” said Richard Ndaula, a repatriation officer with UNHCR in Peshawar. “Most of the people in these camps have spent well over two decades in Pakistan. Their families have grown up there and need more time to consider more issues before deciding anything.”
The Afghans living in the Pakistani urban centre, on the other hand, are more likely to move back as are generally educated, middle-class city dwellers who can more easily find jobs in their homeland. “We think that as the development and reconstruction of Afghanistan takes place you will see many refugees moving back,” Ndaula said.
Redden told IWPR that UNHCR plans to consolidate some of the "new" camps, established after the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001.
This process will begin with the closure of Shalman, a refugee village in the Khyber district along Pakistan's rugged, mountainous border with Afghanistan.
Despite a survey that showed that more than half of the 10,000 Afghans living there wanted to stay in Pakistan, they will now be relocated to Bajaur district, some 80 kilometres north of Peshawar.
For now, some of the refugees have decided to hedge their bets about returning. In the refugee camp of Khurrasan, Uzbek carpet weaver Haji Javed has decided to send half his family back to their village in Jawzjan before deciding whether the rest will also return.
“If things really improve in Afghanistan, we all will move there, otherwise I will be here to welcome my family back,” he said.
Abubaker Saddique is an independent journalist reporting on South Central Asia.
Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan
http://tinyurl.com/y3zuftc6
New Hope for Rural Health Care
Forced Marriage Leads to Tragedy
Friction Over Land Rights in South
Armed Group Turns to Politics
Tensions Mounting in Herat
Kenya: Challenging Corruption
Investigative journalism is being used as a robust tool for advocacy.
Nigeria: Working Together for Change
Rwanda: How Trade in Banned Alcohol Wrecks Lives
Ethnic Kazaks Flee Chinese Crackdown
More than 1,000 families returned to Kazakstan in the first six months of this year.
Could China Be Softening Stance on Kazak, Kyrgyz Minorities?
Tajikistan: Afghan Refugees Feel Secure - But Poor
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Sterling Professor of Political Science
Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Shapiro teaches in the Political Science Department and at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. He has written widely and influentially on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry. A native of South Africa, he received his J.D. from the Yale Law School and his Ph.D from the Yale Political Science Department where he has taught since 1984 and served as chair from 1999 to 2004. Shapiro is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a past fellow of the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cape Town, Keio University in Tokyo, Sciences Po in Paris, and Nuffield College, Oxford. His most recent books are The Real World of Democratic Theory (Princeton University Press, 2012) Politics Against Domination (Harvard University Press, 2016), and, with Frances Rosenbluth, Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself (Yale University Press, 2018). His current research concerns the relations between democracy and the distribution of income and wealth.
Professor Shapiro is the co-principal investigator of the Leitner Program on Effective Democratic Governance: https://jackson.yale.edu/leitner-program-on-effective-democratic-governance/
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An extensible protocol-processing code generator from definitions of application-layer protocols
Katsuyuki Abe, Hideya Iwasaki, Kenji Kono
Department of Information and Computer Science
Server/client programs for Internet services have to be updated every time application-layer protocols are revised, e.g., from HTTP/1.0 to HTTP/1.1, to cope with the extensions. This makes it difficult to properly maintain the server/client programs. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a system that automatically generates protocol processing codes for both server and client programs from the descriptions of the server/client's state transitions, which are caused by message exchanges between a server and a client. The proposed system introduces two mechanisms, namely inheritance and override of state transitions, that enable us to specify only the differences between the old and new versions of the protocols. Using this system, both server and client programs are expected to be easier to reuse and maintain.
Abe, K., Iwasaki, H., & Kono, K. (2007). An extensible protocol-processing code generator from definitions of application-layer protocols. Computer Software, 24(2), 150-163.
An extensible protocol-processing code generator from definitions of application-layer protocols. / Abe, Katsuyuki; Iwasaki, Hideya; Kono, Kenji.
In: Computer Software, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2007, p. 150-163.
Abe, K, Iwasaki, H & Kono, K 2007, 'An extensible protocol-processing code generator from definitions of application-layer protocols', Computer Software, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 150-163.
Abe K, Iwasaki H, Kono K. An extensible protocol-processing code generator from definitions of application-layer protocols. Computer Software. 2007;24(2):150-163.
Abe, Katsuyuki ; Iwasaki, Hideya ; Kono, Kenji. / An extensible protocol-processing code generator from definitions of application-layer protocols. In: Computer Software. 2007 ; Vol. 24, No. 2. pp. 150-163.
@article{63bc9c8d5dd940fd83795d96cea27831,
title = "An extensible protocol-processing code generator from definitions of application-layer protocols",
abstract = "Server/client programs for Internet services have to be updated every time application-layer protocols are revised, e.g., from HTTP/1.0 to HTTP/1.1, to cope with the extensions. This makes it difficult to properly maintain the server/client programs. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a system that automatically generates protocol processing codes for both server and client programs from the descriptions of the server/client's state transitions, which are caused by message exchanges between a server and a client. The proposed system introduces two mechanisms, namely inheritance and override of state transitions, that enable us to specify only the differences between the old and new versions of the protocols. Using this system, both server and client programs are expected to be easier to reuse and maintain.",
author = "Katsuyuki Abe and Hideya Iwasaki and Kenji Kono",
journal = "Computer Software",
publisher = "Japan Society for Software Science and Technology",
T1 - An extensible protocol-processing code generator from definitions of application-layer protocols
AU - Abe, Katsuyuki
AU - Iwasaki, Hideya
AU - Kono, Kenji
N2 - Server/client programs for Internet services have to be updated every time application-layer protocols are revised, e.g., from HTTP/1.0 to HTTP/1.1, to cope with the extensions. This makes it difficult to properly maintain the server/client programs. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a system that automatically generates protocol processing codes for both server and client programs from the descriptions of the server/client's state transitions, which are caused by message exchanges between a server and a client. The proposed system introduces two mechanisms, namely inheritance and override of state transitions, that enable us to specify only the differences between the old and new versions of the protocols. Using this system, both server and client programs are expected to be easier to reuse and maintain.
AB - Server/client programs for Internet services have to be updated every time application-layer protocols are revised, e.g., from HTTP/1.0 to HTTP/1.1, to cope with the extensions. This makes it difficult to properly maintain the server/client programs. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a system that automatically generates protocol processing codes for both server and client programs from the descriptions of the server/client's state transitions, which are caused by message exchanges between a server and a client. The proposed system introduces two mechanisms, namely inheritance and override of state transitions, that enable us to specify only the differences between the old and new versions of the protocols. Using this system, both server and client programs are expected to be easier to reuse and maintain.
JO - Computer Software
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He rebounded in the 60’s and 70’s, designing his own line and stunning Paris and the entire fashion world with his own brand of French elegance. However, the stress of his work led him to abuse booze and drugs; in time, the fragile designer’s health became precarious. By 1987, he was unable to fulfill his responsibilities, and allowed others to design his prêt-a-porter line.
Known for balancing modern designs with traditional elegance, Vera Wang is arguably the most prominent designer of bridal wear in America. Wang introduced her first bridal collection in 1990 after fifteen years editing at Vogue and a two designing for Ralph Lauren. After spending more than a decade dressing countless stars for weddings and red carpets in her ultra-elegant, custom-made gowns (even publishing a book in 2001, “Vera Wang on Weddings”), it was a natural progression for Wang to introduce ready-to-wear in 2004.
Purple isn't for everyone, but it certainly made a bold splash across the runways of A/W 19. Major names stood behind the regal hue, including Dries Van Noten and Comme des Garçons. Many of the purple-centric outfits you'll come across featuring a spectrum head from to toe, with different shades thrown in for good measure—but IRL, we predict this shade will become more of an accent to darker winter wardrobes, so feel free to translate this into your own closet alongside black, white, navy and brown.
One of the reputed & primitive style-diva and is the most esteemed Indian-designer. Her dressing line has a diversity from traditional to the western! For the first time in India, she introduced the culture of “boutique” under the name of “Ritu”, Ritu has developed a unique style of her own depicting the Indian-ancient-traditions! Her outfits are worn throughout the world.
Born in Rome in 1890 to an aristocratic mother and an intellectual father, Schiaparelli soon rebelled against the conventional life of the upper classes. Her desire for exploration and experimentation landed her in hot water as a teen, when she published a book of poems with decidedly sensual overtones. Her work deeply offended her parents, who punished her by placing her in a convent. Schiaparelli was so determined to escape from the nunnery that she initiated a hunger strike which resulted in her release. By her early twenties she had fled to London, where she could live under less scrutiny. Later, during a foray in New York, she joined with artist friends and they all made their way to Paris…
Ralph Lauren is known for his desire to control every facet of his company’s image: some of his ex-employees tell tales of a control freak with a quick temper and little patience for mistakes. In fact, the whole Lauren saga, with its many reversals of fortune and huge comebacks, was recorded with biting accuracy in the nasty, unauthorized tell-all book, Genuine Authentic.
A-line has been administering the design world for quite a while, and it is certainly on the ascent, particularly for the resort season. It looks best when brandished with a touch of the 70s for somewhat of a bend. A fun loving blend of manly coats with modernized flower prints or beautiful crisscrosses, trimmed cuts, and high-waisted flared fits or straight-leg pants worn with mentors, can leave no uncertainty. A-line jumpsuits, and dresses, or skirts with weaving, matched with shirts or sews, are ladylike, thus 2019!
In addition to bovver boots, a treasure trove of key pieces to plunder awaits you: Some you may own already (dig out that camel sweater), but a few entirely new-looking items will probably be worth the hype (that JW Anderson trench coat is going to sell out so fast). We chart those below, as well as all of the teeny-tiny details that make a difference, like a choker necklace—they're back—as well as the most of-the-moment colours, prints, fabrics, silhouettes, formulas and overarching themes that make up autumn/winter 2019's top trends. From dark floral dresses (Paco Rabanne wins) to the kind of tights every fashion girl will wear when the centigrade drops (with crystals on, please), here's what's what for autumn.
Tom Ford studied design at the before he worked for Perry Ellis andCathy Hardwick. Tom was hired in 1990 to oversee Gucci’s women’s wear collections, and had a breakthrough four years later when he was appointed creative director. The Gucci makeover masterminded by Ford was the biggest fashion success story of the late 90s. His sultry rock-star velvet hip-slung trousers, leather stilettos, and Halston-esque dresses were blockbusters. After Gucci’s buyout of Yves Saint Laurent in 1999, Ford also became creative director of YSL Rive Gauche. In 2005, Ford launched the Tom Ford brand.
In the 60’s, Valentino made a decision that would enhance his reputation; he sent Jacqueline Kennedy, the American First Lady and fashion icon, a series of his pieces to look over. She was enchanted with his designs, and even chose to wear one of his dresses when she married her second husband, Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis: her influence led to greater fame and fortune in North America.
In the City of Light, during the years from 1927 to 1940, Schiaparelli’s reputation for daring designs grew steadily. Soon, Parisians developed a passion for her unusual dresses, sweaters, and accessories. Her signature style always encompassed some whimsical elements, such as lobster motifs or skeleton ribs and bones (made with trapunto quilting); however, the construction of the garments themselves was often quite strict and tailored…this dichotomy made for original pieces that were often “knocked off” by other designers.
Valentino Garavani, better known as Valentino, was born in northern Italy in 1932. From childhood, he was interested in fashion, and he pursued apprenticeships and training from family and local designers. By his late teens, he was ready for Paris. His parents helped him to move there, and when he arrived, he began to study art and design in preparation for his chosen career.
Thomas Burberry was born in 1835 in Brockham Green, Surrey. Burberry opened his own small clothing outfitters in Basingstoke in 1857. At that time Basingstoke was a small country town. Nowadays, the Burberry Group is a leading global fashion brand which now sells womenswear, menswear, non-apparel and children’s wear. It is famous for its iconic trademarked check design and British heritage branding.
I love Valentino, Tom Ford, Mary Quant, Yohi Yamamato and Donna Karen. I pull from these guys a lot for my cosplay. No, that isn’t sacrilege. Cosplay cannot be ignored as far as a money making design market goes. Top designs have trickled into cosplay and cosplay has trickled into top designs. There is just no way around it. Nor should there be. 🙂
Vivienne Westwood, the godmother of punk, is considered one of the most unconventional and outspoken fashion designers in the world. Westwood’s fashions woke to fame in the late 1970s when her early designs helped shape the look of the punk rock movement. The highly influential shop changed its name and décor with every collection, and would later be credited for setting off both the punk trend and the new romantic wave. In 1981, Westwood launched her signature collection and has since continued to shock and amuse the fashion world with her hard-core Anglomania.
Donatella started to work for her brother Gianni in the late 1970s, serving as his muse and adviser. Then she became the designer for the company’s Versus line in the 1980s. After her brother was murdered, in 1997, she became creative director of the Versace Group. Donatella made sure that Versace shops would be on different fashion centers around the world, particularly Milan and New York. Top celebrities like Jennifer Lopez and Madonna have endorsed the company’s collection of clothes, accessories, fragrances and home furnishings.
A New-Delhi based stylist and was the first one to lead Jean-Louis Scherrer, a French-Fashion-Brand. Her collection is matchless! Her designs have drawn attention in Mumbai, Delhi, USA, London, Bangalore and Paris. It was 1987, that she did ‘er graduation from Delhi-University & then joined fashion-industry. In1990, Ritu started her distinguished career by launching her clothing-line named “Lavanya” that was a big hit! She signed up the National-Institute-Of-Fashion-Technology in 1988 that is linked to Fashion-Institue-Of-Technology in newyork.
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By Justice Bill Cunningham
I read in one of the local papers that a teacher has been suspended for throwing a book at a student.
I had a seventh grade English teacher who threw books at her students.
Her name was Miss Mary Henson. I use her real name here for two reasons. First, she was an old maid with no family that I know of and has been dead for many years now. And secondly, everyone, including her students, loved and respected Miss Mary. Even if she did throw books at us.
Miss Mary was very old. I mean really, really old. And she looked the part. We were convinced that she had been on a first name basis with the Old Testament prophets. She had a shock of frizzy gray hair and wore granny glasses and old- fashioned dresses. At the end of the day, with her frazzled hair standing straight up and shoulders sagging, she looked like a used bar of soap.
Miss Mary drove a black Model A car to school and always parked it in the same exact spot every day. She only drove the car to school and back from her little white house up on the hill next to the prison. There was a story, apocryphal of course, that one day she decided to drive the ancient auto to Princeton and it turned in at the school automatically.
Miss Mary was not a very good teacher. And she had very little control of her classroom. The fact that we liked her and respected her age kept us from taking over the room, tying her to the chair, and changing all our grades in her grade book. She would sit next to her desk in an old wooden chair and read parts of stories from Washington Irving and Rudyard Kipling. She would recite poetry from Keats, Tennyson and Coleridge. It was the first time I ever heard the word “Longfellow.” With a name like that, I thought he must have played basketball. I was also blown away to learn that a great writer actually had the good fortune of being named “Wordsworth.”
Her daily monologue of dusty old authors and ancient writings bored us. So, we would begin to whisper among ourselves. Then we would begin to talk to each other, giggle, and even laugh. Finally, the din in the room would rise to the same level of Miss Mary’s talking. Then she would lose it. She would stand up, scream at us, and then hurl the giant old literature book towards the back of the room. It would go sailing over my head, pages flapping in the wind like some exotic bird trying to take flight. It would finally smack into the back wall and, like a dead pigeon that had flown into a plate glass window, crumple lifeless to the floor.
The room would immediately go deathly silent. Miss Mary would stand there with her eyes a glaze with anger, her hands on her hips surveying the room, just daring anyone to say or do anything. It looked like she was searching for someone to pull out of his or her chair and choke to death. No one wanted to be that person. We lay low and still in those tense moments. Then, like a teapot on the burner of a stove which had been turned off, she would begin to cool. At last she would sheepishly go to the back of the room, pick up the book, and return to her chair. After a couple of minutes of composing herself and finding her place in the book, she would continue to feed the sleeping gas into the room.
We would be quiet for a week or so. And then the decibel level in the room would begin to rise until Miss Mary’s stress needle would once again edge over into the red.
In her defense, I never remember the book hitting anyone. It’s hard to know how it missed. Maybe she was aiming just above our heads. A warning shot. Also to her credit, she fought her own battles. Miss Mary never passed the buck by sending students with notes to the office for the principal to do her dirty work. She stood her ground.
No one ever complained about Miss Mary throwing books. The reason was simple. If we complained to our parents about her throwing a book at us, the conversation would naturally lead to the question, “Why was she throwing a book at you?” We would not want to go there. Another reason no doubt why we didn’t report it is that many parents would just laugh. They had books thrown at them too by Miss Mary.
I guess, because of her age, Miss Mary was taken out of the classroom the next year and moved upstairs to become the librarian. Now she had many, many books to throw. Funny. I never remember her throwing a single book when she was the librarian. All that ammunition and not a volley fired.
Finally, I think it was my 9th grade year, she announced her retirement. One spring afternoon they had a big retirement ceremony for her out in the old gym. It was packed with school kids, teachers, and all the muckadee mucks from the county school system. There were speeches about Miss Mary and the program took on a theme of “This is Your Life”– a popular TV program at the time. They brought back some old friends and even former students. In fact, some of her former students looked almost as old as she did. When it was over, the little wooden cracker box of a gym came apart at the seams. We kids yelled, screamed, stomped our feet, whistled, and cheered. We liked old Miss Mary. Even if she did throw books at us.
At the close of the ceremony, they presented a portrait of Miss Mary to be hung in the school. I remember that it was really a good likeness and very well done. It hung in the library of the school. I wonder if it survived the demolition and relocation of the school. I wonder if it still hangs somewhere in the various rooms and hallways of the Lyon County school system.
Many years later, when I got out of the Army and came back home, I was amazed to learn that Miss Mary was still living. Incredibly, she was still living alone in the little white house next to the prison where she had lived all her life. I went to see her and found that she didn’t look any older than she had in her book throwing days. I guess you get to a certain age and, like a rock, you just stay that way till the end of time. Her mind was alert. There is a time in most of our lives when we go back to visit old former teachers as equals. It is a pleasant time of catching up and swapping stories. At that meeting, with the brooding prison walls looming just outside her door, she told me two interesting stories.
The prison was built when she was just a little girl. She remembered the large sign hung over the entrance when it first opened for inmates — “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.”
It was the second story she told me that was the most intriguing. For the first time I got an intimate peep into the old lady’s past. She said she had dated the French engineer who had come to help install the electric chair in 1911. Miss Mary dating? Miss Mary with a boyfriend? Miss Mary involved in a romantic relationship? It was unthinkable.
I remember wondering as I drove home that day how the romantic engagement with the French beau had ended. I wondered, with sadness, if maybe her heart had been irreparably splintered by his return to his home far away across the waters just before the bloody World War began. It saddened me to think that she was left there alone in the dirty river town, destined to take care of aging parents till she too was aging. Assigned to teaching piano lessons at night. Abandoned to carry out a long lifetime of driving the old Model A to school and back every day. And throwing books at yard apes like me.
Miss Mary’s health finally gave way and she went into a rest home. She suffered from dementia. One moment she was in the real world; the next she was in a world of her own.
I went down to see her at the rest home one last time. She was lying in bed, flat on her back, with the sheet pulled up around her neck and staring at the ceiling. I gingerly approached the head of the bed. “Hello Miss Mary. How are you doing?”
There was a sudden glint of recognition and brightness in her eyes as she glanced toward me. “Well, hello Billy Boy!” she exclaimed in a strong and kind voice. “How are you doing? Don’t you think this is the best school year we’ve ever had?” I leaned closer to speak directly into her ear. “Yes ma’am. How are they treating you here? How is the food?” I inquired. She answered immediately. “Just great, Billy Boy. And I think this is the best school year we’ve ever had. Don’t you think it’s the best school year we’ve ever had?” I had dealt with these people before. I knew how to handle it. So, I responded. “I sure do Miss Mary. What are you teaching this year?” With that question, her eyes widened and flashed with an excitement as if I had just set her bed on fire and was standing there holding a can of gasoline. “Teaching?” she bellowed incredulously. “I’m in the rest home!”
There are times when no matter how much your mind is racing for something to say, the conversation just kind of dries up.
So, many years later, I’m sitting in my easy chair in the late night quietness of my home. I’m reading the news report of the teacher suspended for throwing a book at a student.
The newspaper slips into my lap and I stare into space. I can see it as clear as if it happened yesterday. I see the big literature book–Keats, Tennyson, and Chaucer all in flight together–sailing past my head, the leaves flapping in the wind. I can even feel the breeze.
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Natrona County High School Students Protest For Safety
Hunter Bullard, in the gray coat, speaks to more than 100 Natrona County High School students at a protest on Wednesday. Tom Morton, Townsquare Media
For 1,606 seconds -- about 27 minutes -- more than 100 students left their classes at 10 a.m. Wednesday to gather at the Natrona County High School football stadium for a combined protest, memorial service, call to action, and some inspiration.
"Ladies and gentlemen, for those who say democracy has died, that's simply not true," NCHS senior Kevin Milburn told the crowd sitting on the turf during the school administration-approved walkout.
Speeches don't mean anything unless people act on what they believe, Milburn said.
"This is not a debate over who's a Republican or who's a Democrat or supports guns or who doesn't support guns, he said. "This is a representation of democracy and how we can voice our opinions, and we don't need any political leader or any special organization to voice how we feel about our lives and our rights."
The organizers of the protest call themselves Casper Youth for Change, and they started to plan the protest three weeks after 17 people were gunned down at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14.
The 1,606 seconds mark the 1,606 mass shootings involving four people at the same place and time since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012, organizer Hunter Bullard said.
At one point, she asked the students to take a moment of silence for the victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The event was about school safety, and not about the gun control debate, Bullard added.
She also noted the event was to be peaceful and had the support of the school administration and Casper Police Department.
Bullard suggested students consider five "calls to action" to enhance safety:
Aid those who are being bullied, and to prevent bullying if possible.
Aid those who may be struggling with a mental health issue.
Urge the school administration and school security to act on the first two recommendations.
Make safety the utmost priority for the school, including locking all doors to entryways except those that go to offices, from 8:20 a.m. to 3:24 p.m.
"That all those here today make a solemn vow to themselves to uphold these calls to action."
Bullard also urged the students to not ignore warning signs of potential trouble. Students at Parkland High School tried to warn the school's administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but those concerns were swept under the rug.
As the students dispersed to return to their classes, Milburn said democracy still thrives in America. Even though he's active in the local Republican Party, the protest was not partisan.
"This is not a liberal movement or a conservative movement, it's an American movement, how American citizens as young as us still educate ourselves about social issues domestically and foreignly," Milburn said. "We're just trying to prove to all those in our community that we, too, have voices in this issue, not just leaders in certain organizations, but we, the students who are affected by this, whatever decision they make, we're more affected than them."
Filed Under: Casper Youth for Change, florida, high school, Hunter Bullard, Kevin Milburn, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Natrona County, protest, shooting
Categories: Casper News, Education, K2 Morning Show, Politics
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Home / S.O. "All Day" (Feat. Json & Mission)
S.O. "All Day" (Feat. Json & Mission)
Default Title - $1.99 USD Regular price
After an unorthodox 2017 featuring a series of single releases, S.O. is back with another single called “All Day” featuring Mission, Lamp Mode’s Json, and produced by Sebastian V.
“All Day is a song that is about living for the Lord 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It’s an anthem designed to amp people up to go into the world and live out what they believe,” said S.O.
Known for his ability to change gears sonically and his trademark delivery, S.O. is excited about how this single will impact people for the Kingdom.
“Often times we try to compartmentalise what we believe. Christianity becomes something we do on Sundays. God's vision for us is totally opposite of that though -- He wants it all”
When asked about 2017, S.O. was quite clear about his approach.
“Who wouldn't love new releases from their favourite artist on a regular basis? For artists, who wouldn’t like the flexibility of being able to drop different sounding singles every month? One month, I can drop an afrobeat song like “What’s Your Name?” Another month I can drop a boom bap song like “No Recess.” The feedback I’ve gotten from fan base has been incredible.”
“All Day” is available everywhere music is sold or streamed.
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Music, People Video
by Lowlife Magazine October 11, 20167:56 pm
Jeff Buckley’s Final Recorded Performance Of “Hallelujah” (Live In Chicago 1995)
The following video, which was recorded in May 1995 at Chicago’s Metro venue, is Jeff Buckley’s last-known recorded performance of his version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, a song that was made much more famous by Buckley on his 1994 album Grace, his only complete studio album. Jeff Buckley would later die in May 1997 of an accidental drowning, having gone swimming in Wolf River Harbor, a channel of the Mississippi River.
Despite releasing only one studio album in his time, he is considered by many artists and publications, not least Rolling Stone (who, in 2004, ranked Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” number 259 in “The 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time”), to be one of the greatest singers of all time. Notably, David Bowie thought that Grace was the best album ever made, and Buckley’s version of Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has since been inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry.
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Tagged with: chicago 1995 chicago metro cinema film Films grace hallelujah jeff buckley last goodbye leonard cohen live in chicago movie movies Music
Jeff Buckley’s Final Recorded Performance Of “Hallelujah” (Live In Chicago 1995) — LOWLIFE MAGAZINE – jeangenieweb on October 12, 2016 at 11:41 am
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3D Street Artists Whose Work Is Sure To Amaze (Or Induce Acrophobia)
Who Remembers Nineties Film “Shazaam” Starring Comedian Sinbad As A Genie? Guess What. You Have Imagined It, As Have Many Others.
Rashad Alakbarov: Painting With Light And Shadows
Sandy Hook Promise’s “Evan”: A Gun Violence Prevention Advert Like No Other
Photo Manipulation Done Right: Touching Upon The Work Of 4 Artists
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Fandoms in Swarovski
Pokemon Go Teams
Classic LCJ
Shows & Stores
Now offering free shipping on all orders totaling over $35 to US destinations!
Asparagus Necklace in Silver
Pattern 18 in (45.7 cm) 14 in (35.5 cm) 16 in (40.6 cm) 20 in (50.8 cm) 22 in (55.9 cm) 24 in (60.9 cm) 26 in (66.0 cm) 28 in (71.1 cm) 30 in (76.2 cm) 32 in (81.3 cm) 34 in (86.4 cm) 36 in (91.4 cm)
18 in (45.7 cm) 14 in (35.5 cm) 16 in (40.6 cm) 20 in (50.8 cm) 22 in (55.9 cm) 24 in (60.9 cm) 26 in (66.0 cm) 28 in (71.1 cm) 30 in (76.2 cm) 32 in (81.3 cm) 34 in (86.4 cm) 36 in (91.4 cm)
Enjoy your favorite vegetable year-round with this silver-plated asparagus charm necklace! Asparagus is your thing. You eagerly await Spring because Spring means asparagus season. You can't get enough of it, and you're sad when the season's over. Although you can't eat it, you can wear your #1 veggie in necklace form every month of the year. It will never spoil and it will always be your friend, but only if you adopt it as your own.
Silver-plated asparagus charm
Handmade silver-plated necklace with lobster clasp
Silver-plated brass/copper components
Charm - 0.75 inches long x 0.25 inches wide (2.2 cm long x 0.7 cm wide)
Back to Classic LCJ
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7868 Mace Windu's Jedi Starfighter
7868 Mace Windu's Jedi Starfighter is a Star Wars: The Clone Wars set released in January 2011 (in some parts of the world the release was not till June). The set includes Mace Windu
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/7868_Mace_Windu's_Jedi_Starfighter
Star Wars is a current licensed theme introduced in 1999. The theme is based on material from the Star Wars franchise of films, cartoon series, comic books, video games, and other media. The theme covers
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars
List of LEGO Star Wars Vehicles
This page has a list of Star Wars vehicles. The ARC-170 Starfighter is a starfighter utilized by the Grand Army of the Galactic Republic, usually by it's Clone Pilots.
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_LEGO_Star_Wars_Vehicles
LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars is a Star Wars video game developed by Traveller's Tales and published by LucasArts. It was released on March 22, 2011, over a year after its announcement
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/LEGO_Star_Wars_III:_The_Clone_Wars
Star Wars: The Clone Wars is one of the main subthemes of the major Star Wars theme. This sub-theme was released as part of the Star Wars theme in 2008 to coincide with the
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Clone_Wars
10221 Super Star Destroyer
10221 UCS Super Star Destroyer is a classic Star Wars Ultimate Collector's Series set released on September 1, 2011. It contains 3,152 pieces. The set also includes a mini-scale Imperial Star Destroyer
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/10221_Super_Star_Destroyer
Mace Windu is a minifigure based on a character from the Star Wars movies of the same name. Mace Windu has appeared in four variations throughout sets in LEGO Star Wars, and a fifth variant
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/Mace_Windu
The Battle Droid is a Star Wars minifigure first released in 1999. Battle droids were used by the Trade Federation and later the Confederacy of Independent Systems in the Clone Wars. They form the majority
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_Droid
7958 Star Wars Advent Calendar
7958 Star Wars Advent Calendar is Star Wars Seasonal set released in August 2011. Each part of the set is sealed inside a separate box, to be opened one-by-one on the days leading
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/7958_Star_Wars_Advent_Calendar
7965 Millennium Falcon is a classic Star Wars set released July of 2011. It was the third normal-scale Millennium Falcon set released (the others being 7190 Millennium Falcon in 2000 and 4504 Millennium Falcon
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/7965_Millennium_Falcon
7964 Republic Frigate
7964 Republic Frigate is a Star Wars The Clone Wars set that was released in the second wave of 2011, in June. The set has 1015 pieces. The cockpit on the front of the ship
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/7964_Republic_Frigate
7914 Mandalorian Battle Pack
7914 Mandalorian Battle Pack is a Star Wars: The Clone Wars set released in January 2011. The set consists of 68 pieces and four minifigures, all Mandalorians. The set is composed of two main models
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/7914_Mandalorian_Battle_Pack
7913 Clone Trooper Battle Pack
7913 Clone Trooper Battle Pack is a Star Wars: The Clone Wars set released in January of 2011, but appeared on the LEGO online store and has been sold in Toy "R" Us stores and
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/7913_Clone_Trooper_Battle_Pack
7961 Darth Maul's Sith Infiltrator
7961 Darth Maul's Sith Infiltrator is a Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace set released in June 2011. This is the third version of the Sith Infiltrator, behind the 1999 set and the
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/7961_Darth_Maul's_Sith_Infiltrator
Jedi Starfighter (Disambiguation)
Many sets with a Jedi starfighter have been released under the LEGO Star Wars theme. A Jedi starfighter has been released with every new LEGO Star Wars subtheme since Star Wars: Episode II. The Delta
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/Jedi_Starfighter_(Disambiguation)
Events LEGO's license with Lucasfilm for Star Wars is renewed., A LEGO factory is opened in Monterrey, Mexico, LEGOLAND Florida opened on October 15, becoming the second LEGOLAND park to open in North America
List of Ninjago cards
This is a list of the cards in the Ninjago trading card game, Spinjitzu. Notes Samukai does not have a character card or spinner., Jay DX also does not have a character card, his spinner
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Ninjago_cards
TX-20
TX-20 is a Minifigure based upon the Tactical Droid of the same name in the Star Wars Universe. The Tactical Droid has dark blue arms and legs, and parts of his head-body (one
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/TX-20
5000214 LEGO Star Wars Character Encyclopedia
The 5000214 LEGO Star Wars Character Encyclopedia is a book released in 2011. The book showcases every minifigure ever released in the Star Wars theme, and includes an exclusive Han Solo Episode 4 Celebration minifigure
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/5000214_LEGO_Star_Wars_Character_Encyclopedia
R8-B7
R8-B7 is a Star Wars: The Clone Wars minifigure. He is an Astromech Droid, and appears in the set 7868 Mace Windu's Jedi Starfighter. R8-B7 is similar in appearance to any other
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/R8-B7
8093 Plo Koon's Jedi Starfighter
The set 8093 Plo Koon's Jedi Starfighter is a Star Wars: The Clone Wars set released in July and August of 2010; also, the set appeared in toy stores in the Netherlands around late
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/8093_Plo_Koon's_Jedi_Starfighter
7879 Hoth Echo Base
7879 Hoth Echo Base is a set released in 2011 of the Classic Star Wars line. It contains a number of similar things that were used in the 7749 Echo Base set such as the
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/7879_Hoth_Echo_Base
7956 Ewok Attack
7956 Ewok Attack is a Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi set released in 2011. The set resembles a part of the Battle of Endor. The small set includes three minifigures, a speeder
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/7956_Ewok_Attack
7957 Sith Nightspeeder
7957 Sith Nightspeeder, released outside North America as 7957 Dathomir Speeder, is a Star Wars: The Clone Wars set released in June of 2011. Sith Nightspeeder:
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/7957_Sith_Nightspeeder
7962 Anakin's and Sebulba's Podracers
7962 Anakin's and Sebulba's Podracers is a Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace set released in June 2011. The set includes 808 pieces to construct another version of the podrace scene, the
https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/7962_Anakin's_and_Sebulba's_Podracers
Why Cherry Blossoms Are So Significant in Anime
5 Eerie Anime About Urban Legends You Need to Watch
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Mark & Mary Devlin
Scotland, Japan & America
The Mishima Incident
Sunday Times Mishima Feature
Terrie Lloyd
Hello and welcome to our site. This is the place where we keep links to current work and old articles and assorted items about us. If you’re an old friend who’d like to keep in touch please look us up on Facebook.
We grew up in Scotland and met on the first day of studying Manufacturing Engineering at Strathclyde University.
In 1989 Mark moved to Japan and Mary followed a year later. Mary worked for UBS and Mark worked for Jardine Fleming Securities.
With a friend, we started Tokyo Classified in February 1994 by handing out the four-page classified ads sheet on Tokyo street corners. 14 years later, those four pages had become an 80 page full-color city and entertainment guide, with a distribution of 30,000 ABC certified copies. Renamed and expanded to Metropolis in 2003 it was, by far, Japan’s No 1 English magazine and one of the most visible successful foreign-owned businesses in that country.
In 2000 we started japantoday.com, which became the No 1 site about Japan in English in the world. Japan Today was the first news site in the world to have reader comments directly under the news stories. We also started Crisscross, an innovative social search network as well as a creative agency called Crisscross Creative.
When we sold the business to Terrie Lloyd in 2007 Metropolis had 35 staff, just under $4 million in annual revenues and 20% profit.
We moved to Sarasota, Florida, and set up Kroaky’s Karaoke, a private room karaoke business. Unfortunately we were the victim of a fraud when Terrie Lloyd did not paid in full for the magazine and cheated us out of our collateral, which meant we did not have the funds to evolve the business and it closed in 2014.
In 2016 we returned to Scotland, where are currently working on Newslines, a website that allows people to collaborate on news-based timelines about any topic. For more information about us check out our newsline.
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of the West
Home › Maps › Ski maps › Ski resorts of the West
All ski resorts of the western USA and the Canadian west on a large map. Ski resorts of the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, the Coast Mountains and more.
Paper Foamcore Aluminium composite Acrylic glass
New release: 10-15-2017
Size: 36 x 48 in (914 x 1219 mm)
Print: Offset 250g matt
Basic structure of our map
The map shows the North American West and all downhill ski resorts in Alaska, Alberta, Arizona, British Columbia, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming and the Yukon. We make use of the Lambert azimuthal equal-area map projection. The backbone of the map consists of contour lines for every 1,000 feet (ca. 300 meters) of height, which vividly illustrates the topography of each mountain range. Then we added roads and waters, cities and mountains, as well as regional and country borders.
246 ski resorts
With the data provided by skiresort.info, we checked and marked all 246 ski resorts on the map.
We distinguish between small ski resorts with a total combined slope length of less than 5 miles, medium resorts with a combined slope length of 5 to 50 miles, and large resorts with more than 50 miles of slope.
For each ski area, we list the state, province, or territory, minimum and maximum height, as well as green, blue, and black slope miles.
The highest mountains of each of the twelve US states, the two Canadian provinces, and the Yukon are illustrated on the map.
These 15 mountains (and more) are also available as illustrated prints.
Borah Peak (Idaho), Boundary Peak (Nevada), Denali (Alaska), Gannett Peak (Wyoming), Granite Peak (Montana), Humphreys Peak (Arizona), Kings Peak (Utah), Mount Columbia (Alberta), Mount Elbert (Colorado), Mount Fairweather (British Columbia), Mount Hood (Oregon), Mount Logan (Yukon), Mount Rainier (Washington), Mount Whitney (California), Wheeler Peak (New Mexico)
Infographics for both the Canadian and the American part, and for each of the 15 states, provinces, or territories complete our map.
Marmota Stickers for our ski map
Our matching Marmota stickers let you mark your very own experiences in the North American West.
add for € 4.00
Tips for hanging up the map
How do I get the map onto my wall?
Maps and prints
on other materials
Our products behind acrylic glass, on aluminium composite, foamcore, and more.
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Pop & Hiss
The L.A. Times music blog
« Previous Post | Pop & Hiss Home | Next Post »
Dr. Dre returns with 'Kush,' first single from long-awaited 'Detox'
It took more than a decade, but the seemingly impossible has happened: A new Dr. Dre single has officially arrived.
Not that Pop & Hiss doesn't trust Dre, but learning that the legendary producer was finally releasing a track from his oft-delayed album, “Detox,” was met with a little skepticism. After all, we've heard some of "Detox" before, and it was selling soda-pop.
But what do you know, the notoriously perfectionist producer actually came out of hibernation, albeit forced.
After “Kush,” the Snoop Dogg- and Akon-assisted track hit the Net early Tuesday in an unmastered, prefinished form, Dre unleashed a more definitive edition. The cut was sent to radio and is now available for purchase on iTunes. Listeners can also stream it on his website.
The single is sure to be a breath of fresh air to Dre fans -- unless they are busy partaking in the song’s theme. Dre followers have waited more than 10 years for the album, reportedly his final. "Detox" has become rap’s own version of Guns 'N Roses’ “Chinese Democracy,” an album that feels more myth than reality, although the G'NR effort did eventually make it to retail.
In a radio interview with host Big Boy on Power 106 (105.9), he mentioned he didn’t intend for "Kush" to come out, at least not yet, and hopes it doesn't give listeners the impression that “Detox” is all about blunt smoking, as classic of a Dre and Snoop theme as it is.
“It’s about weed smoking, and I don’t want people to think that’s what my album’s about,” he said. “This is actually the only song with that type of content in it. But it seems that everybody likes it. So we’re going to go ahead and push with it.”
"Detox" has gone through an exhaustive list of reported release dates for at least the last six years, and earlier this year an unmixed version of the originally planned first single "Under Pressure," featuring Jay-Z, leaked online. He vented his frustrations in a cover story with Vibe Magazine, and has reportedly pulled the track -- and the other demo cuts that have hit the Net -- from the album.
Dre has also said that he is crafting an instrumental album of the solar system, which he wants to title “The Planets.” The album, which he says will be his interpretations of how each planet sounds, will be surround-sound ready, if it happens.
Dre, of course, hasn’t exactly been dormant. The artist has been busy producing for the likes of Eminem and 50 Cent, among others. He also co-founded the successful high-performance headphone line, Beats by Dr. Dre.
-- Gerrick D. Kennedy
twitter.com/GerrickKennedy
Photo: Dr Dre at his Sherman Oaks studio. Credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times
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English Language & Culture
English Language & Culture French Language & Culture Other Languages Chinese Language & Culture Polish Language & Culture Spanish Language & Culture Vietnamese Language & Culture Arabic Language & Culture Japanese Language & Culture Korean Language & Culture Sign Language & Braille Italian Language & Culture Russian Language & Culture German Language & Culture Tagalog Language & Culture Greek Language & Culture Portuguese Language & Culture Hebrew Language & Culture Dutch Language & Culture Language WonderHowTo
How To: Understand old school hip hop slang
Today's word is "hierarchy". This is a noun which means a system of people, organizations, or things that have ranks.
This video tutorial is in the Language category which will show you how to describe problems in English. When describing problems in English, many people use the word trouble. When you frame a question, you can frame it in the present or the present continuous tense. For example; what do you have trouble with or what are you having trouble with? Similarly, when you answer the question you can use the present or the present continuous tense. Examples of this are; I have trouble with my car or ...
By rhei222
In this episode, Jennifer goes over the use of the word "seem" in the English language. This is great for all levels of students learning English as a second language (ESL).
How To: Pronounce the English word "queue"
Today's word is "queue". This is both a verb and a noun. As a noun, it means a line of people waiting their turn.
In English, "supposed to" expresses obligation. Someone expects you to do something. It's an unusual form of the passive voice, but it's very important to learn. This ESL tutorial teaches you how to use "supposed to" in English. Watch this grammar how to video and you will be speaking English in no time.
This ESL lesson talks about friends and friendship. Friendship is very important to being a happy and fulfilled person. This language tutorial teaches you how to describe your friends in English. Learn American and British words and phrases to describe your best companions with this how to video.
By Howcast
How To: Pronounce the word "rendezvous" in English
By Reform Ed
How To: Make the AH sound in American English
By RachelsEnglish
How To: Pronounce the English word "aesthetic"
How To: Practice saying the "t" sound in the middle of words
How To: Replace possessive nouns and adjectives with pronoun
How To: Pronounce the phrase "status quo"
How To: Pronounce the word "weary"
How To: Differenciate between this, that, these & those
How To: Speak English better by always speaking slower
How To: Parse a sentence in English
How To: Use double comparatives in the English language
How To: Say the days of the week in English
How To: Pronounce the English word "alumni"
How To: Describe a famous person in English
How To: Use "It's + adjective + infinitive" in English
How To: Pronounce the word "panacea"
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Evolutionary Psychological Science
September 2018 , Volume 4, Issue 3, pp 272–284 | Cite as
What Caused over a Century of Decline in General Intelligence? Testing Predictions from the Genetic Selection and Neurotoxin Hypotheses
Michael A. Woodley of Menie
Matthew A. Sarraf
Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre
Heitor B. F. Fernandes
First Online: 16 January 2018
Several converging lines of evidence indicate that general intelligence (g) has declined in Western populations. The causes of these declines are debated. Here, two hypotheses are tested: (1) selection acting against genetic variants that promote g causes the decline and (2) the presence of neurotoxic pollution in the environment causes the decline. A linear mixed model was devised to test (1) and (2), in which the secular decline in a “heritable g” (g.h) chronometric factor (comprised of convergent indicators of simple reaction time, working memory, utilization frequencies of high difficulty and also social-intelligence-indicating vocabulary items and per capita macro-innovation rates) was predicted using a neurotoxin chronometric factor (comprised of convergent secular trends among measures of lead, mercury and dioxin + furan pollution, in addition to alcohol consumption) and a polygenic score chronometric factor (comprised of polygenic score means for genetic variants predictive of g, sourced from US and Icelandic age-stratified cohorts). Bivariate correlations revealed that (other than time) only the polygenic score factor was significantly associated with declining g.h (r = .393, p < .05 vs. .033, ns for the neurotoxin factor). Using a hierarchical linear mixed model approach incorporating 25 year lags between the predictors and g.h, time period, operationalized categorically as fifths of a century, accounted for the majority of the variance in the decline in g.h (partial η2 = .584, p < .05). Net of time period and neurotoxins, changing levels of polygenic scores also significantly predicted variance in the decline in g.h (partial η2 = .253, p < .05); however, changing levels of neurotoxins did not significantly predict variance in g.h net of time (partial η2 = .027 ns). Within-period analysis indicates that the independent significant positive effect of the polygenic score factor on g.h was restricted to the third fifth of a century period (β = .202, p < .05).
Directional selection Dysgenics General intelligence Neurotoxins Polygenic scores
Matthew A. Sarraf and Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre: Joint second authors
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© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
1.Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary StudiesVrije Universiteit BrusselBrusselsBelgium
2.Unz FoundationPalo AltoUSA
3.University of RochesterRochesterUSA
4.Department of PsychologyUniversity of ArizonaTucsonUSA
5.Department of PsychologyTechnische Universität ChemnitzChemnitzGermany
Woodley of Menie, M.A., Sarraf, M.A., Peñaherrera-Aguirre, M. et al. Evolutionary Psychological Science (2018) 4: 272. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-017-0131-7
First Online 16 January 2018
Publisher Name Springer International Publishing
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EU privacy watchdogs have questions about Yahoo's secret email scanning
Caspar, one of the more outspoken of Germany's regional data protection commissioners, pointed out that, thanks to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's revelations, we've known for some time that big U.S. internet companies were obliged to give their user data to the country's security services. "The suspicion that Yahoo has actively assisted to scan mails of their users as a henchman of the NSA is not really surprising regarding the information of the PRISM program. On the other hand it goes far beyond what is acceptable," Caspar said. He wants to know what really happened at Yahoo, too. "There has to be a clear and fast examination of these allegations by the competent data protection authority," he said.
Secure Docker on Linux or Windows platforms
Linux alone cannot secure Docker. On the contrary, when administrators allow a subset of end users access to the Docker daemon, they are implicitly granted root access. Therefore, use great caution when granting access. Within the context of Docker, when an end user accesses the daemon, the user could alter the host machine's file system, even without intending to do so. When the developers, IT team or business leaders decide to utilize Docker containers, systems administrators should take comfort in the fact that some of their usual burden is eased by Docker's cross-platform portability. However, admins cannot ignore that the cross-platform nature of Docker containers also gives rise to various other issues, not the least of which is security.
The Big Data Challenge: Getting from Data to Decisions in the Era of IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) already has enabled connectivity in billions of devices – from thermostats to cars to wearables. But there is a new stumbling block on the horizon. Sensors are now spreading across almost every industry, triggering a massive onslaught of new data that will clearly lead us into the next era of the information age. This reality presents both an opportunity and a challenge. On the upside, many believe that big data will unleash new opportunities for businesses, support decision-making, and lead to the development of new products and services. The question is how to get from data to decisions on a massive scale. After all, the value in big data lies in our ability to analyze and make sense of the information, and as the IoT expands many fear big data will simply become too big, too fast, or too hard for existing tools to process, analyze, and convert into insights.
The need for updated technology
Data play a large role in successful revenue management today. The airline industry has moved to a retailing mindset, and to properly attract and retain today's customers and competitive nuances, airlines need data in the form of proactive, actionable information. Traditional revenue-management systems have relied on a batch-based, processing methodology and predefined data-processing intervals. However, airlines need to be aware of market and competitive changes as they occur. Markets evolve dynamically, not at preset intervals. One of the greatest influences on the success of an airline's business and competitive standing in the market is the ability to understand who is traveling across its network and how much each passenger spends across all revenue streams.
Research Reveals Why Hacked Patient Records Are So Valuable
Typically after a health record hack, the data will "go dark" for some time before resurfacing in different variations, he says. "So, it will look like basic short-form ID theft material, but eventually the electronic health record will surface as a 'fullz' - the slang term on the deep web [for] a complete long-form document [containing] of all the intricacies of a person's health history, preferred pharmacy, literally everything," he says. "What happens is the people who purchase those [fullz] then go to another vendor on the deep web for what's called 'dox,' the slang term for documentation, where they then proceed to have passports, drivers' licenses, Social Security cards - all these things that will help the counterfeit imitation of the victim. ..., and once it's an identity kit, you can sell it for $1,500 to $2,000."
Samarth Shekhar of FinTech Forum: „Banks can’t generate innovations on their own“
We have been fortunate to be the first-movers in the FinTech space in Continental Europe, giving us the chance to build relationships with founders early, as well as giving us visibility on the global stage. Our eleven events since 2013 have brought together nearly 200 startups with over 450 investors and corporations. Over one-third of the FinTech funding rounds in 2015 involved alumni of FinTech Forum. This was also the first year when German FinTech funding overtook the UK. To give you a comparison: As of 2013, Germany’s share of FinTech investments was less than $60 million, versus UK’s $3.2 billion! We have been invited to present the German FinTech scene at leading global events like Innotribe/SIBOS (Boston, 2014),
8 challenges that keep financial services CTOs and CIOs up at night
“Security is the thing that keeps me up at night,” says Michael Thorne, CTO at Bristlecone Holdings. “Nothing else compares. It is never done. The minute you think you're secure, you're at risk again. Being on top of it is nearly impossible. To gain some traction though, I make sure I'm following what's happening with data security and understand the flaws exposed, I stay up to date on developing tech, and, most importantly, I share information among my peers in groups that promote shared insights to enhance security across the board.” ... The challenge for financial services CIOs and CTOs is to “figure out how to update and proactively maintain infrastructures in order to mitigate security risks and keep adversaries at bay during a time when boards of directors are asking IT to further cut budgets to help meet ROE targets”
Are you encouraging your employees to take security risks?
In the information security world, the not so carefully guarded little secret is that conforming to security rules reduces productivity. I might claim that everyone could follow safe security practices and continue to be as productive as they would without following them, but this would be dishonest In fact, following the rules will definitely impact productivity to a varying degree. As an example, we tell our employees to be cautious about clicking on links in email, but then we press them to finish work that relies on links sent via email. We may also require them to research topics, while blocking a large number of websites for security reasons.
Proper Usage of Metrics with Flow Debt as an Example
Flow debt is incurred when Lead Time defined as (Completed Date – Started Date) is artificially reduced for some work items in progress by “borrowing” Lead Time from other work items in progress. The term was coined by Daniel Vacanti in his excellent book Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability: An Introduction. Here is a flow debt example. Let’s say we have only one work item in progress. If we start another work item before finishing the first one, then we will have two in progress. If we finish the second work item before the first one, then we have incurred flow debt. ... One way to calculate Flow Debt for a given reporting interval is:Flow Debt = The Approximate Average Lead Time (as predicted by the CFD) minus the exact average Lead Time for the items that finished.
Chief risk officers ‘must change course’ to avert another economic crash
Ever more complex financial products, growing technical automation and a narrow focus on regulatory box-ticking could be the perfect storm for banks to lose control of their decision-making processes and potentially wreak havoc on the financial system, warns Dr. Colin Lawrence, partner and managing director of financial services at Parker Fitzgerald. A thirty-year veteran of the financial risk management arena, Lawrence believes CROs need to move far beyond conducting measurement, and start driving strategic change. “Risk officers often don’t have the full picture and don’t know the core risks,” he told delegates at Bloomberg’s recent Risk Day 2016 in London.
"Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope." -- Helen Keller,
Labels: banking, big data, containers, CxO, cyber security, financial services, fintech, hacking, health care, innovation, IoT, metrics, privacy, risk management
Daily Tech Digest - October 31. 2016
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Index Islamicus 1906+
Indexes literature in European languages on Islam, the Middle East and Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, plus Muslim minorities elsewhere. Includes over 2,000 journals, conference proceedings, monographs, multi-authored works and book reviews.
Encyclopedia of Islam
Comprehensive information on the world of Islam in disciplines ranging from religion and history to politics and culture with a geographic and chronological scope encompassing the early Arab-Islamic Empire, Iran, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia, the Ottoman Empire and all modern Islamic states.
Middle East and Africa: A Reference Corporation World Area Studies Database
Provides area coverage (especially for political development, social development, foreign policy, economic development, investment, oil and petrochemicals, trade and technological industries) for the Middle East, North Africa, the Sahel & the Horn of Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Arabs, Iranians, Turks and Africans worldwide. Provides access to journals, newspapers, conference proceedings, press releases, books, manuals, magazines, and ephemera.
EURA: A Reference Corporation World Area Studies Database (Eurasia Atlantic Database)
Provides intensive area coverage (especially for economic development, investment, trade and technological industries) for Eastern Europe & the Former Soviet Union, and lesser coverage to Western Europe.
OACIS (Online Access to Consolidated Information on Serials)
Freely accessible, continuously updated listing of Middle East journals and serials, including those available in print, microform, and online.
Dayan Center Bibliographical Database
Index to articles, pamphlets and occasional publications on the Middle East published in English, French, and Arabic, based on the holdings of the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv.
U.S. Intelligence on the Middle East, 1945-2009
Contains full-text documents from U.S. intelligence agencies covering the Middle East and North Africa from the end of WWII to 2009. Includes CIA reports and briefings.Note: Select ‘this collection only’ to limit search to this resource.
Early Arabic Printed Books From the British Library Science & History 1475-1900
Digital library of early printed books in Arabic script. Covering religious literature, law, science, mathematics, astrology, alchemy, medicine, geography, travel, history, chronicles, and literature, and including European translations of Arabic works and Arabic translations of European books, it exemplifies the long exchange of ideas and learning between Europe and the Arabic-speaking world.
International Security & Counter Terrorism Reference Center
Offers comprehensive coverage of security & counter-terrorism issues. Content includes full text articles, news feeds, reports, summaries, books, FAQs, and background information summaries that pertain to terrorism and security.
Subscribe to updates for Core Resources for Near Eastern Studies
Access to the full text of over 140 African newspapers and magazines, including articles in French. Covers the entire African continent.
Border and Migration Studies Online
Primary sources, maps, videos, and multimedia providing historical background on more than thirty key worldwide border areas, including: U.S. and Mexico; the European Union; Afghanistan; Israel; Turkey; The Congo; Argentina; China; and Thailand.
Mamluk Bibliography Online
Comprehensive bibliography of all primary sources relating to the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria and all research and discussion germane to this subject. An on-going project of the Middle East Documentation Center (MEDOC) at the University of Chicago.
MENALIB (The Middle East Virtual Library)
Information portal for Middle East and Islamic Studies which provides access to online information and to digital records of printed and other offline media. Created by the State- and University Library of Saxony-Anhalt in Halle, Germany and integrates the efforts of many institutions and individuals.
Middle Eastern Manuscripts Online 1: Pioneer Orientalists
Manuscript Collections of Scaliger, Raphelengius and Golius from Leiden University Libraries.
Middle Eastern Manuscripts Online 2: The Ottoman Legacy of Levinus Warner
Consists of 140 volumes from the Warner Collection, totaling 45,809 pages of Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian texts.
Middle Eastern Manuscripts Online 3: Arabic Manuscripts from the Hungarian Academy
Mideastwire
Daily email newsletter of concise, translated briefs covering some of the key political, cultural, economic and opinion pieces appearing in the media of the 22 Arab countries, Iran and the Arab Diaspora.
Multi Data Online Data Bank
Provides articles from important studies, opinions, and analyses published in Arab newspapers and magazines.
Collection of English-language reference resources on the Islamic world, including the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, The Oxford History of Islam, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, and two translations of the Qur'an. Also includes a timeline of Islamic events and a date converter for the Christian and Islamic calendars.
Twentieth Century Religious Thought Library
Online collection of important works in twentieth-century Christian, Islamic, and Judaic thought.
USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive
More than 53,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. The interviews have been conducted in 63 countries and 40 languages. Each collection adds context for the others, providing multiple pathways to learn from the eyewitnesses of history across time, locations, cultures and sociopolitical circumstances.
Subscribe to updates for Supplemental Resources for Near Eastern Studies
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