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CounterPunch
August
28, 2002
The Secret Sharers
The CIA,
the Bush Gang and
the Killing of Frank Olson
by Chris Floyd
There is a thread running through modern American
history, a thin red cord that weaves in and out of the shifting
facades of reason and respectability that mask the brutal machinery
of power. At certain rare moments the thread flashes into sight,
emerging from the chaotic jumble of unbearable truth and life-giving
illusion that makes up human reality. It appears, bears witness,
then vanishes again, forgotten behind the next facade.
It's a thread that runs from horrified
young intelligence operatives stumbling into the death camps
of Nazi Germany to hardened agents running assassination programs
in the jungles of Vietnam to august men of state building a shadow
government with secret decrees authorizing tyranny, murder, torture
and deceit. It's a thread of moral corruption, corruption by
an idea, a temptation, a perversion of reason, the whisper of
evil that says: "The end justifies the means."
That thread fetched up briefly again
earlier this month, then was buried, literally, in a Maryland
grave. The family of Frank Olson laid his exhumed remains to
rest, closing the book on their half-century of struggle to find
out why he died so violently in the hands of the government he
had served--and whose deepest secrets he had guarded.
Frank's son, Eric, believes he knows
the answer now: his father was murdered to keep the thread from
sight, to "protect" the American people from the knowledge
that their own government had taken up and extended Nazi experiments
on mind control, psychological torture and chemical warfare--and
that it was conducting these experiments as the Nazis did, on
unwilling subjects, on captives and "expendables,"
even to the point of "termination."
Frank Olson was a CIA scientist at Fort
Detrick, Maryland, the Army's biological weapons research center.
Ostensibly he was a civilian employee of the Army; his family
didn't know his true employer. Olson worked on methods of spreading
anthrax and other toxins; some of his colleagues were involved
in mind control drugs and torture techniques. But his life within
the charmed circle of the American intelligence elite would unravel
with dizzying speed in just a few months in 1953.
It began in the summer of that year,
when Olson--increasingly troubled by his own and his colleague's
work--made several trips to Europe, to investigate secret American-British
research centers in Germany. There he found the CIA was testing
"truth serums" and other torture drugs on "expendables,"
including captured Russian agents. He told a British colleague
that he had witnessed "horrors" there. And it called
into starkest question his own work on biochemical weapons. He
came home a changed man, troubled, morose. He told his wife he
wanted to leave government service.
But it was too late: the brutal machinery
was already grinding. His British colleague told his own superiors
about Olson's concerns; they in turn informed the CIA that Olson
was now a "security risk." Not long after his return,
Olson was given the LSD. Then he was flown to New York, ostensibly
for psychiatric treatment, at the hands of a CIA doctor--who
prescribed whiskey and pills. Then he was taken to a CIA magician--yes,
a magician--who apparently tried to hypnotize him for
interrogation.
Finally he checked into a cheap hotel--with
a CIA handler, Robert Lashbrook, in tow. Olson called his wife,
told her he was feeling better and would be home the next day.
But that night, he was found dead on the street, 10 floors below.
The handler said that Olson had apparently thrown himself through
the closed window in a suicidal fit. The government told the
family it was simply a tragic suicide. They didn't mention the
LSD--or the fact that Olson worked for the CIA.
It would take Eric Olson 49 years to
piece together as much of the truth as we are ever likely to
know about what happened that night. But first would come a false
dawn, a cruel trick played on the family by cynical operators
in Ford Administration, who used a screen of half-truth and deliberate
falsehood to divert the Olsons--and the nation--from the darkest
tangles of the thread. Two of those operators would would work
the thread--play upon it, thrive on it, hold hard to its damp
crimson stain--to rise from the obscurity of White House functionaries
to positions of colossal, world-shaking power:
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Keeping the
Faith
Washington, 1975. It was a long hot summer
of discontent in the White House. The unelected president, Gerald
Ford--who'd taken office after the resignation of Richard Nixon--was
raging. Every day seemed to bring fresh horrors from the Congressional
committees investigating America's intelligence agencies. Assassination
plots, terrorist acts, coups, secret armies, subversion of allied
governments, Mafia connections, torture, press manipulation,
domestic surveillance--the revelations were endless, a bottomless
pit of corruption and criminality being dredged up by the House
and Senate panels.
Where was their sense of duty, the code
of omerta that had for so long protected those who toil
in the shadows, who do the dirty work to keep America fat and
safe and happy? What right did these mere senators and representatives
have to tell the people--the big dumb dazed mobocracy out there--the
truth about what their leaders were doing in their name? They
were like children, they could never understand the higher wisdom
that guided the elites. Oh, it was a far cry from the old days,
back on the Warren Commission, when a good soldier like Jerry
Ford knew just what to do: you accepted whatever the agencies
told you, and you steered investigations away from anything that
might break the code and pierce the shadows.
So Ford seethed. What the hell is wrong
over there at the CIA, he complained to his chief of staff, Donald
Rumsfeld. Why couldn't Bill Colby, the director, keep a lid on
things? Colby had even come clean about Operation Phoenix, for
Christ's sake. More than 20,000 Vietnamese murdered in the CIA-run
program--did Joe Lunchbucket really need to know about that?
What next? Are they going to find about
Reinhard Gehlen, too: the Nazi spy who joined the CIA and recruited
thousands of Hitler's best and brightest--including Klaus Barbie
and a cadre of SS veterans--to work for the Agency? Sure, it
would look bad, but come on: Gehlen was championed by
Allen Dulles himself--the founding father of the CIA, the hotshot
lawyer who kept Prescott Bush's name out of the papers when Pres
was caught trading with the Nazis in 1942. Dulles and those Yale
boys knew what was best--but try explaining that to some poor
schmuck whose father got killed at Normandy or Auschwitz or some
other godforsaken hole, eh?
As it happened, the "Gehlen Organization"
stayed secret for another 26 years. But in July 1975, Ford had
still more worries. A top White House aide, Dick Cheney, sent
a memo to Rumsfeld, warning him about an upcoming lawsuit. The
family of Frank Olson had found out--through the Congressional
investigations--that he had been secretly drugged by the CIA
not long before he took that fall from the hotel window. Now
they were suing the government for damages.
The lawsuit could be bad business, Cheney
told Rumsfeld. "It might be necessary to disclose highly
classified national security information" during the trial.
That would include the truth about Olson: the CIA connection,
biochemical weapons, the mind-control and torture experiments
based on Nazi death-camp "research," and the Agency
fingerprints all over Olson's last days in New York City. The
case might even reveal the existence of special "CIA Assassination
Manuals," like the one issued in the year of Olson's death,
1953, stating: "The most efficient accident, in simple assassinations,
is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts,
stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. [In some
cases], it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject
before dropping him."
Such revelations had to be avoided at
all costs. Rumsfeld and Cheney urged Ford to make a settlement
before the trial started. To avoid the courts entirely, they
would arrange a private bill in Congress to give the family some
cash. The deal would be sweetened by private audiences with both
Ford and Colby, apologizing for the CIA's past "mistakes,"
and promising "full disclosure" of all the facts, so
the family could at last find peace.
And so it was done. And it was all a
lie--beyond the bare fact, already unearthed by Congress, that
Olson had been drugged by the CIA. The family got 17 minutes
in the Oval Office with Ford--who apologized for the government's
indirect involvement in Olson's death--that LSD test gone awry.
Rogue elements, you know; unauthorized activity. Shouldn't have
happened; never happen again. This was followed by a meeting
with Colby, who handed over a thick file: the CIA's "complete"
investigation of the Olson affair--so complete that it forgot
to mention that Olson was a CIA official. Or that his colleagues
considered him a "security risk." Little things like
that.
Thus began the second cover-up. It took
Eric Olson another 27 years to piece together the story, from
obscure archives, through lucky accidents, and strained meetings
with old CIA hands, who let fall dribs and drabs of the truth.
He was even forced to exhume his father's body: a gruesome process
that revealed the original 1953 post-mortem had also been a lie.
That examination had simply confirmed
the cover story: poor sap had flung himself through the glass
and splattered on the sidewalk below. No autopsy needed. Close
the coffin--the body is too busted-up for the family to see--and
close the case. But the second examination, decades later, carried
out by forensic experts, revealed the truth. There were no marks
on the well-preserved cadaver consistent with a self-propelled
flight through the window: no cuts on the face or arms. There
was, however, a cranial injury entirely consistent with a blow
to the head--delivered before the fall.
Earlier this year, the Cheney-Rumsfeld
memos came to light, confirming that the Olsons had been deliberately
lied to in 1975. It helped fill in some of the remaining pieces
of the scattered jigsaw puzzle that was his father's death--and
had become Eric's life. And although the centerpiece of the puzzle--the
fateful moments in that hotel room, before Frank Olson went through
the glass--remains forever absent, the picture was as complete
as it would ever be, Eric decided. And so he buried his father,
again, in the dark Maryland earth.
But Ford, Rumsfeld and Cheney had kept
the faith back in those dangerous days of 1975. They had honored
omerta. Colby was not so lucky. For his sins--his "weakness"
in allowing a few spears of sunlight into the shadows--he was
summarily dismissed a few months later. He was replaced by a
man who also lived by the code, who would keep the precious Agency--and
all its Gehlens, its torturers, its dopers, its shooters--safe
from the mobocracy, the ignorant rabble with their pathetic fairy-tale
notions about democracy, justice, law and honor. He would guard
the shadow world so well that one day the headquarters of the
CIA would proudly bear his name:
George Herbert Walker Bush.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
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August 28,
2002
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