The CIA: Haspel, Olson, and JFK, by Andrew Joppa

 

 

Before I plunge into the body of this essay that will deal with the CIA, its murder of Frank Olson, and their potential involvement in the JFK assassination, I need your help. I simply ask, “Where in the world is Gina Haspel, former director of the CIA?” In December of 2020 she became the subject of what was called a death “hoax”. According to social media claims, Haspel was either killed, injured, or arrested in a CIA raid on a server farm in Frankfurt Germany. It was suggested that this “farm” was involved with the 2020 elections.

 

Following that supposed “hoax,” The CIA announced her retirement after 36 years of service, via her tweet, on January 19, 2021, one day prior to the presidential transition from Trump to Joe Biden. After retiring from the CIA, Haspel apparently began advising the law firm King and Spaulding.

 

Since that point, with controversies swirling around the CIA, Haspel has not made an appearance before congress or anywhere. She was deeply involved with the Black Ops Sites, enhanced interrogation methods and, as previously noted, the elections of 2020.

 

Yet, with all the controversies surrounding her, you would think that there would have been a need to show her face in public…or anywhere. I cannot find any documentation since early 2021 that Haspel is alive and even that date is dubious. So…if you know something I don’t, other than someone mentioning a tweet, or someone suggesting she’s working somewhere…if there’s something conclusive…something definitive…let me know.

 

If her being alive cannot be confirmed, it suggests a conspiracy of the largest magnitude. If, in fact, she was killed, wounded, or arrested in Frankfurt it would provide enormous credibility to the claims that were being made about Frankfurt following the 2020 election debacle. I am not making any claims about this situation other than I can’t confirm she’s alive in an environment that should have been going out of its way to do just that.

 

Now…the CIA itself.

I recently watched a Netflix series titled Wormwood. It resurrected my awareness, from many years ago, of MKULTRA and the death of one its agents Frank Olson. This project was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the CIA and was intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken people and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. It began in 1953 and was halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects’ mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals without the subjects’ consent, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.

 

MKUltra was preceded by Project ARTICHOKE. It was organized through the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence and coordinated with the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories. The program engaged in illegal activities, including the use of U.S. and Canadian citizens as unwitting test subjects. MKUltra’s scope was broad, with activities conducted under the guise of research at more than eighty institutions aside from the military, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operated using front organizations, although some top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA’s involvement.

 

MKUltra was revealed to the public in 1975 by the Church Committee of the United States Congress and Gerald Ford’s United States President’s Commission on CIA activities within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission). Investigative efforts were hampered by CIA Director Richard Helms’s order that all MKUltra files be destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the small number of documents that survived Helms’s order.

 

The project was headed by Sidney Gottlieb but began on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953. Its aim was to develop mind-controlling drugs for use against the Soviet bloc in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean War. The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives and was interested in manipulating foreign leaders with such techniques, devising several schemes to drug Fidel Castro.

 

As I previously noted…most MKUltra records were destroyed in 1973 by order of CIA director Richard Helms, so it has been difficult for investigators to gain a complete understanding of the more than 150 funded research subprojects sponsored by MKUltra and related CIA programs. Once Project MKUltra got underway in April 1953, experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and prostitutes – “people who could not fight back,” as one agency officer put it. The aim was to find drugs that would bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject’s mind clean and program them as “a robot agent.” Military personnel who received the mind-altering drugs were also threatened with court-martials if they told anyone about the experiments. LSD and other drugs were often administered without the subject’s knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code the U.S. had agreed to follow after World War II.

 

The experiments continued even after Frank Olson, an army chemist, who had never taken LSD, was covertly dosed by his CIA supervisor and nine days later plunged to his death from the window of a 13th-story New York City hotel room, supposedly as a result of deep depression induced by the drug. According to Stephen Kinzer, Olson had approached his superiors some time earlier, doubting the morality of the project, and asked to resign from the CIA. The CIA itself subsequently acknowledged that these tests had little scientific rationale. The officers conducting the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.

 

Olson, a United States Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in November 1953, as part of a CIA experiment. A CIA doctor assigned to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep in another bed in a New York City hotel room when Olson fell to his death. In 1953, Olson’s death was described as a suicide that had occurred during a severe psychotic episode. The CIA’s own internal investigation concluded that the head of MKUltra, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, had conducted the LSD experiment with Olson’s prior knowledge, although neither Olson nor the other men taking part in the experiment were informed as to the exact nature of the drug until some 20 minutes after its ingestion.

 

The Olson family disputed the official version of events. It is this that forms the basis of the Netflix series. They maintained that Olson was murdered because, especially in the aftermath of his LSD experience, he had become a security risk who might divulge state secrets associated with highly classified CIA programs, about many of which he had direct personal knowledge. This included the illegal use of Bioweapons against North Korea.

 

Later forensic evidence conflicted with the official version of events; when Olson’s body was exhumed in 1994, cranial injuries indicated that Olson had been knocked unconscious before he exited the window. The medical examiner termed Olson’s death a “homicide”. In 1975, Olson’s family received a $750,000 settlement from the U.S. government and formal apologies from President Gerald Ford and CIA Director William Colby, though their apologies were limited to informed consent issues concerning Olson’s ingestion of LSD. On 28 November 2012, the Olson family filed suit against the U.S. That Olson was murdered was later confirmed by investigative reporter, Sy Hersh of the NYTs.

 

It should be noted that Olson was murdered in the exact method as prescribed by the CIA Handbook. In other words, they anticipated the need to murder. The presumption of the CIAs “right” to murder in the interest of national security has been a thin disguise over their need to cover up their illegal activities. I would suggest that the history of the CIA, since the murder of Olson, is replete with other situations where murder could be suspected, including, but certainly not limited to, the death of JFK. I don’t know if the CIA authored that assassination. I do know they would have and could have, if they felt it necessary by their predetermined standards of when they have the obligation to kill…” for us.” I believe they still function within the same mindset.

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