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.
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