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
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd0828.html
|