Maybe the CIA Could Learn Something From Faulkner
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner wrote in 1951, two years after winning the Nobel Prize for literature. It’s one of his best-known lines. sk
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If you have not heard of Chile’s secret torture camp ColoniaDignidad, don’t worry. Most North Americans haven’t either, along with the rest of the world.
Today there remain government documents held by all three countries involved that could tell us what happened at Dignidad, years later officially renamed Villa Baviera by the Chilean government. Most critical are classified internal reports that still haven’t seen the light of day.
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British actress Emma Watson stars in Colonia |
But today, she and others still demand complete information about her brother, while governments tightly keep their classified papers to themselves.
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Boris Weisfeiler |
In my own research while writing books in the series Civil Rights Mystery Sleuth, it angered me to learn CIA and other U.S. intelligence personnel participated at the Chilean site, invited by Chile’s ruthless dictator Augusto Pinochet, who the United States helped put into power by aiding the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.
U.S. agents were at Dignidad early-on to conduct biological weapons and related research. The renamed colony wasn’t shut down until 2005. How long were we there? What were we doing?
We’ll never get answers to such questions until all classified documents are released about this colony once opened by a Nazi supporter, who eighteen years after WWII escaped Germany on official charges of malicious child abuse.
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Augusto Pinochet |
The 1953 “murder” of Frank Olson becomes more interesting to me when you consider this strange event in the context of Dignidad. Olson was an early figurehead in the development of biological weapons; how he died was reportedly covered up for years by the CIA and military intelligence.
But much of Olson’s research had to do with early projects involving mind altering drugs, torture and use of uninformed and illegally detained subjects, all of which went on at Dignidad and countless other Chilean torture camps (and in other countries, as well), one author states.
Only recently did partial information come out via declassified documents, as told in the book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, written by H.P. Albarelli, Jr., a graduate of Antioch Law School who writes and produces documentaries on this and related topics.
The Olson family started asking questions about Frank Olson’s death (reported officially as a suicide), and so did their lawyers, government commissions and even some CIA agents, according to Albarelli who paints a grim picture about what Olson knew, and why he was killed.
While Olson died before the camp was opened, he still knew and helped develop the drugs and testing procedures used in the controversial Projects Artichoke and MKULTRA, later undoubtedly used on tortured anti-government, Jews and others detained at the colony
Drugs that were already being unethically and illegally tested in the United States and other parts of the world before Dignidad opened its gates. The Chilean camp would become just another venue for these terrifying, repulsive acts.
It has been written that nuclear weapons “of mass destruction” were being developed by German scientists at Dignidad, a rumor substantiated by academic historian Peter Levenda, author of Ratline: Soviet Spies Nazi Priests, and The Hitler Legacy.
But then perhaps this former Soviet Jew and Russian Refusenik, who’d left his country to work in the United States, was trying to find and help other Jewish captives escape?
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With all of this reshuffling of responsibilities, will the CIA’s irresponsible culture change? Will these questions ever be answered?
Likely it will be years, if ever, before citizens of he United States, Chile and Germany learn what really happened at this remote colony. At least a movie starring Emma Watson is set for opening this fall, and it looks like this story could shed some light.
Susan Klopfer, author of The Plan