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Sidney Gottlieb's Secret: The CIA Program That Dosed Its Own
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In 1953, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb launched MK-Ultra — a covert mind control program that dosed unwitting Americans with LSD, ran wired brothels, and funded brutal psychiatric experiments. This is the documentary series that follows every thread, from Frank Olson's fatal fall to the files Gottlieb destroyed before Congress could ask a single question.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On the twenty-eighth of November, nineteen fifty-three, a man fell from the thirteenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City. He was a government scientist.
To understand what happened to Frank Olson, you need to understand what he was part of. In April of nineteen fifty-three, CIA Director Allen Dulles authorized a secret program called MK-Ultra.
The man at the center of it was Sidney Gottlieb. He was a chemist from New York.
Frank Olson was a biological weapons researcher at Fort Detrick in Maryland. He worked in a division that had deep ties to the MK-Ultra program.
Lashbrook told investigators he was asleep when it happened. He heard a crash.
Frank Olson's family spent decades being told nothing. His wife, Alice, was informed her husband had jumped from a window in a state of depression.
Frank Olson's case is one thread in a much larger picture. Across the life of MK-Ultra, the CIA ran operations of a scale that's hard to absorb.
The program's exposure came in stages. In nineteen seventy-three, with congressional pressure building over a range of CIA abuses, departing Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all MK-Ultra files.
Decades later, the questions haven't gone away. In twenty twenty-six, Representative Anna Paulina Luna led a House Oversight Committee investigation into MK-Ultra.
The honest position on Frank Olson is this. The evidence doesn't allow a definitive verdict.
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