I have not in the past ever reviewed a book for Daily Kos, but this book is a factual account of a Cold War chapter that has been very closed to the American public. There has been tons of disinformation, outright lies, and a wall of silence since WW2 and the creation of the OSS and it's subsequent organization called the Central Intelligence Agency.
Many of the people who worked for the OSS went on to work in the newly created CIA. Names that are known today that are on the fringes of the known facts and the disinformation spread during the past 6 decades. It ties together the stories of the OSS working with the organized crime families of Lucky Luciano, Joe Traficante, Jack Ruby, Clay Shaw, Robert Mahue, Howard Hughes, William "Wild Bill" Donovan, Allen Dulles, Sidney Gottlieb, Richard Helms, E. Howard Hunt, Meyer Lansky, Timothy Leary, G. Gordon Liddy, George Merck, Frank Olson killed Nov 28, 1953, Lee Harvey Oswald, Edgewood Arsenal, Camp Detrick/Fort Detrick Maryland.
The story was basically written to cut thru the fiction created by the intelligence agencies since that fateful night in the Statler Hotel in New York City and how this nation lied to the Olson family about the death of Frank Olson and to the extent the government of this nation helped to cover up the reason behind his death and to protect the real secret it was protecting.
Hank Albarelli Jr. spent ten years of his life investigating the death, it took him down the rabbit holes of the seediest side of American life, the lies he was told like many others that get to close to the intelligence agencies and their secrets. Except he found inroads to the mental health institutions where the agencies hid the people they considred security risks, the CIA had moved beyond Saint Elizabeths which the OSS used extensively during WW2 to lock up security risks that could not be court martialed or tried without revealing national security aspects, so President Roosevelt had found by locking people up for mental health reasons did not violate their rights to due process, they had doctors commit them as mental patients for the duration of the war.
By the 50's that would not work at Saint Elizabeths any longer but many of the doctors had spread around the nation that depended on the CIA for research contracts and worked with exclusive facilities for the insane, a perfect cover for placing security risks and then using them for electric shock therapy, LSD experiments and other substances they wanted to use. One man died in these experiments shortly before he was to be discharged from one of these facilities, Harold Blauer overdosed and died within days of being released. This book explains the details and how it happened and the drugs used.
The book debunks the lies told by the players in the federal government, from the original lies told in Nov 1953 to the Olson Family all the way thru the lies told to the New York detectives told in the late 90s that were assigned the cold case of Frank Olson's murder.
The book names the persons who committed the murder and how it was done and why it was done. It also explains how Frabk Olson got himself into this position, he talked about an experiments with LSD-25 that he had found a way to make into an aerosol spray, which was then used on a small French village Pont St-Esprit in this article it is blamed on the bread the book describes the army plane that sprayed the town the day of the incident and deals with the Sandoz researchers in the town before and after the incident.
I had a lot of my own personal questions answered about Edgewood Arsenal which I have many. I am one of the Army soldiers who volunteered as a "med vol" which from 1955 thru 1975 participated in the Cold War experiments that ran from MKLULTRA, MkNAOMI, OFTEN, Artichoke, Blueberry, etc the code names ran into the hundreds, each project was named, the experiments at safe houses, Army bases, insane asylums, both in the US and Canada, open air tests in San Francisco, Hawaii, Florida, New York, the Pentagon, Panama, Alaska, Fort McClellan, Fort Bragg, and many other places, some with simulants, some of which still turned out to be dangerous.
This book should be adopted by every high school in the nation to that our students are made aware of what is being done in the name of "national security" and with their tax dollars, and if they are approached about working for a classified government program, they might really want to think long and hard before getting involved. The majority of these men were doing what they were told was for the "greater good of the nation" where have we heard that before? The Germans who were doing the Reichs bidding? The Chinese doing Mao's bidding, the Japanese doing the Emporers bidding, regardless of who ordered it, bottom line it was wrong.
Our own chapter into the dark side lasted from Roosevelt thru Ford, it affected Republicans and Democrats, men whom I thought of as hero's JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Ike, even the Presidents I didn't really like Johnson, Nixon and Ford, we have seen where men like President Bush, VP Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld took us as a nation preemptive war based on lies, renditions, secret prisons, torture, Gitmo, wire tapping the entire nation, phone and internet. The Patriot Act which is still in effect. There are no secrets any more, if you are afraid to speak your ideas do not discuss them on a phone or in an e mail or post them on the internet.
The Tea Partiers are a joke, they are worried about President Obama creating "big brother" it was done long before he was elected, your cell phones and cars now have chips that can be used to locate you, your bank debit cards, credit cards, these were things set in motion decades ago, data banks that know which soft drinks you buy, what deodorant, fast foods, doctors, movies etc, the days of freedom from 1776 are dead and over, and the "tea party" needs to wake up.
But Hank Albarelli's book opens the doors to six decades of lies, omissions and disinformation that every American needs to read, Frank Olson was just the first known death in the Cold War experiments, the med vols have a death and disability rate of 74.43% as of FY 2000 when the last data was gathered. 3098 men dead and 2200 disabled, men aged 45-65 at the time of the health study, numbers that far surpass average healthy American males of the same age groups. The Army claims Edgewood was safe, they lied about what happened in France for 60 years, how long will they lie about what they did to American soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal, Fort Detrick, Dugway Proving Grounds, Project SHAD/112, Fort Greeley? Will we ever know the truth?
Thanks to Hank Albarelli Jrs new book: A Terrible Mistake we know the truth about this ugly episode and the death of one man, the very beginning of decades of lies just starting. With hundreds of deceased military test subjects to follow, a few in the immediacy of the tests and most over the slow falling apart of their bodies.
Who killed Frank Olson and why? Why did the U.S. government actively work for over 50 years to conceal and cover up the facts surrounding Olson’s death? What were the bizarre connections between Olson’s death and Lee Harvey Oswald, foreign drug traffickers, and deadly government-sponsored assassins and undercover agents? What was the horrible experiment conducted by the U.S. government that cost Olson his life? What was Frank Olson’s self-admitted "terrible mistake"?
Today, following over ten years of investigation, the shocking truth about Olson’s work and murder is revealed by H.P. Albarelli Jr. in his remarkable and stunning book, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments (October 2009, TrineDay Publishers, ISBN-10: 0977795373, Hardcover, 864 pages.).