Posted on 08/19/2002 6:25:03 AM PDT by robowombat
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel August 18, 2002 Pg. 5
Despite Son's Pleas, Scientist's Death Remains A Cold War Mystery
Given LSD, he died in a fall from hotel room; government later promised to tell all, but didn't
By Frederic N. Tulsky, Knight Ridder News Service
San Jose, Calif. -- The death in 1953 of a government scientist, Frank Olson, in a fall from a New York hotel window is one of the most notorious cases in CIA history.
Only in 1975 did Olson's family learn that the CIA had slipped LSD into his drink, days before his death. President Ford apologized for an experiment gone awry, and promised that the government would reveal everything about the case.
But newly obtained documents show that the Ford administration continued to conceal information about Olson -- particularly, his role in some of the CIA's most controversial research of the Cold War, on anthrax and other biological weapons.
The documents show that two of the key officials involved in the decision to withhold that information were White House aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, today the nation's vice president and secretary of defense.
"These documents show the lengths to which the government was trying to cover up the truth," said the scientist's son, Eric Olson, who gave them to the San Jose Mercury News. "For 22 years there was a coverup. And then, under the guise of revealing everything, there was a new coverup."
Rumsfeld's office referred questions about the withholding of information to the CIA, where a media officer, Paul Nowack, said that CIA activities related to Frank Olson's death were investigated by the Rockefeller Commission as well as subsequent congressional committees.
"The CIA fully cooperated" in those investigations, he said, and "tens of thousands of documents were released." If anyone has new information, he said, "they should contact appropriate authorities."
Eric Olson has contended for years that his father was murdered to cover up his research for the CIA. The new documents do not prove those allegations. But they do show that the White House officials were concerned about any public revelation of Frank Olson's work.
Contrary to the official explanation that Frank Olson was an Army scientist, Olson worked for the CIA, at the special operations division at Fort Detrick, the Maryland laboratory where biological weapons were tested.
Contact from colleague
Eric Olson says that a former colleague and friend of his father's contacted him last year and described some of the closely guarded work his father conducted.
He said the colleague told him his father was among scientists studying the use of LSD and other drugs to enhance interrogations, as Cold War tensions ran high and Americans feared that captured soldiers had been brainwashed in Korea.
In the months before his death, the colleague said, Frank Olson had gone to Europe, where he observed the interrogation of former Nazis and Soviet citizens at a secret U.S. base. And, the colleague said, Frank Olson had knowledge of the U.S. biological weapons program.
Eric Olson contends that in the final days of his life, his father became morally distraught over his work and decided to quit. Personnel records show that agency officials were concerned that he was a security risk. Eric Olson believes the thought of Frank Olson quitting was a motive for the government to want him dead.
In 1993, Eric Olson arranged for his father's body to be unearthed and examined by a forensic scientist, James Starrs. Starrs concluded that Frank Olson had probably been struck on the head and then thrown out of the hotel window.
Starrs' conclusion is one of the tantalizing pieces that Eric Olson has gathered to support his belief that his father was murdered.
Visits to a doctor
In November 1953, Frank Olson, then 43, joined a group of government officials at a conference at Deep Creek Lodge in western Maryland. For days afterward, Olson was withdrawn. His son, Eric, says his father told his wife that he intended to quit his job.
But Frank Olson did not quit. And on Nov. 23 he went to New York with another government official, where he twice visited Harold A. Abramson, a doctor who was one of the first researchers to study the effects of LSD.
Olson returned to Washington, then went back to New York on Nov. 28 and checked into the Statler Hotel. He was scheduled to enter a sanitarium the next day.
But early in the morning of Nov. 29, Frank Olson went through the window of the hotel room he was sharing with a colleague, Robert Lashbrook. Lashbrook told police that he was awakened by the sound of breaking glass.
The Olson family knew little else. But in 1975, a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller issued a report on CIA abuses, and an account in The Washington Post included a mention of an Army scientist who jumped from a New York hotel room days after being slipped LSD in 1953.
"We realized they were talking about my father," Eric Olson recalled. Family members talked to reporters about their outrage and said they would sue the government. Days later, the family was invited to the White House to meet President Gerald Ford. He assured them that they would be given all information about what happened to Frank Olson.
Lunch with CIA chief
Soon after, the family was invited to lunch with CIA Director William Colby, who gave them a file of documents that amounted to the CIA investigation into Olson's death. But the documents left many questions unanswered about both his work and the circumstances of his death.
The family was told that a lawsuit was unlikely to succeed. Instead, the administration promised to support a private bill in Congress, through which the family received $750,000 to resolve their claims.
"The express understanding was that the government had promised to give us all information, which clearly meant information about his work relationship with the CIA," said the Olsons' attorney, David Rudovsky of Philadelphia. "It now appears that was not the case."
Over the years Eric Olson turned up many clues, real or coincidental. There was, for example, the assassination manual that the CIA declassified in connection with its Guatemala activities. The manual, created in the early 1950s, identified "the contrived accident" as "the most effective technique" of secret assassination.
"The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface," the manual stated.
Only recently Eric Olson obtained files from a University of California-Davis history professor that showed White House officials had intentionally withheld details of Frank Olson's death from the family.
Memo from Cheney
The professor, Kathryn Olmsted, came across the records at the Gerald Ford Library at the University of Michigan. They included a memo from Dick Cheney, a White House assistant at the time, to Donald Rumsfeld, the chief of staff, on July 11, 1975, one day after the Olsons first held a news conference.
The memo warned that a lawsuit could involve "the possibility that it might be necessary to disclose highly classified national-security information in connection with any court suit or legislative hearings on a private bill."
The documents also include memos written by White House counsel Roderick Hills to the president that were routed through Cheney and other officials. "Dr. Olson's job is so sensitive that it is highly unlikely that we would submit relevant evidence" to a court, Hills wrote, regarding a potential suit by the Olson family.
"If there is a trial, it is apparent that the Olsons' lawyer will seek to explore all of the circumstances of Dr. Olson's employment as well as those concerning his death. Thus, in the trial it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national-security reasons and any settlement or judgment reached thereafter could be perceived as money paid to cover up the activities of the CIA."
As a result, Hills urged settling the case out of court.
So the claim is that Cheney and Rumsfeld were involved in a cover-up two decades ago that took place under a Republican president (ok, ok . . . I know Ford wasn't really a Republican, he just played one at the polls). Why does the son wait until another Republican president is in place to raise this issue?
Why didn't he get this done during the Clinton administration? The dems would have been more than happy to open any file that would discredit a Republican, and the son could have had access to whatever he wanted.
Eric Olson has contended for years that his father was murdered to cover up his research for the CIA.
So why is this making news at this late date?
Eric Olson says that a former colleague and friend of his father's contacted him last year and described some of the closely guarded work his father conducted.
So the "friend and colleague" was unaware of Eric's contention until last year?
Must be a slow news year in Milwaukee.
The article does not say exactly when the new documents were obtained (found). It's likely that a story of this nature only has legs now, when the media has opportunity to criticize public figures. This was also printed (online) in the Mercury News on the 8th.
The son has been saying for years that his father was murdered. According to this, from the article, the only thing the new documents show is that the WH was concerned about Public Relations. The WH is always concerned about Public Relations.
But newly obtained documents show that the Ford administration continued to conceal information about Olson -- particularly, his role in some of the CIA's most controversial research of the Cold War, on anthrax and other biological weapons.
Revealing to the public, in 1977 or '78, that the CIA was experimenting with LSD in the 1950s would have caused a panic. The NYT, Wa Post, and Dan Rather were so hot to overthrow the government they would have claimed the experiments were still going on. Watergate had recently ended, and much to the dissatisfaction of the press, Nixon had not been publicly hanged and Republicans had not been rounded up and exterminated. The revelation of CIA drug experiments twenty years prior would have started yet another round of witch hunts.
After Ford, we got Carter, and a whole new set of problems. With double digit inflation, gas shortages, and 18% mortgage rates, people in the US weren't interested in what happened in the fifties, they wanted to go back to the fifties.
...[snip]Senator INOUYE. Thank you very much.
Admiral Turner, MKULTRA subproject 3 was a project involving the surreptitious administration of LSD on unwitting persons, was it not?
Admiral TURNER. Yes, sir.
Senator INOUYE. In February 1954, and this was in the very early stages of MKULTRA, the Director of Central Intelligence wrote to the technical services staff officials criticizing their judgment because they had participated in an experiment involving the administration of LSD on an unwitting basis to Dr. Frank Olson, who later committed suicide. Now, the individuals criticized were the same individuals who were responsible for subproject 3, involving exactly the same practices. Even though these individuals were clearly aware of the dangers of surreptitious administration and had been criticized by the Director of Central Intelligence, subproject 3 was not terminated immediately after Dr. Olson's death. In fact, according to documents, it continued for a number of years. Can you provide this committee with any explanation of how such testing could have continued under these circumstances?
Admiral TURNER. No, sir, I really can't....[snip]
It's odd that the media didn't jump all over this, unless Watergate had them fully occupied. I suppose if you're going to hold hearings about something as controversial as drug testing on uninformed subjects, you're better off doing it while there's a really good scandal going on.
But if this testimony was part of the Senate Record, it should have been publicly available, no? Has the Congressional Record always been open to the public? I can't recall.
If this testimony was publicly available back in 1977, the media are probably banging their collective heads against the wall. This would have been a killer story back then. Now the best they can hope for is that they might be able to stretch a v-e-e-e-e-r-y thin line from the supposed cover-up to the present Bush administration.
I feel sorry for the son, who believes his father was murdered. But I doubt he'll get much farther now than he has over the past several years. If the media can't tie it to the Bush administration, they'll soon lose interest, and that will be the end of the story.
I'm not sure which hearing this was, though I know at least some of the Church Committee hearings were televised and some CIA abuses came to light during them as well.
DECEMBER 22, 1974 : (WILLIAM COLBY & THE GUTTING OF US COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CAPABILITY -- See SEYMOUR HERSH [See NIGERFLAP]) Exhibit D: Undermining American Counterintelligence Capability
In the wake of Watergate, the [NY] Times and liberal elements in the CIA capitalized on the scandal by using it as a pretext to push for a reorganization of the intelligence community along liberal lines. This push was triggered by a leak from CIA Director William Colby to Seymour Hersh, which resulted in a December 22, 1974 New York Times article titled “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces”. Although there was a real story of actual abuses to be told here, Hersh’s article and follow-up allegations later proved exaggerated.
But Hersh’s article served Colby’s purpose. Colby used the leak to force the resignation of counterintelligence veteran James Angleton, the bastion of hard-line anti-Communism in the CIA. Meanwhile Congressional contacts of the antiwar movement called for investigations into Hersh’s allegations. These investigations culminated in the recommendation of sweeping reforms of the intelligence community.
The implementation of these “reforms” over 1976 and 1977 took the form of a systematic stripping of US counterintelligence capability. This included abolishing Congressional and Department of Justice bodies assigned to monitor subversive activity, eliminating the internal security branch of the FBI's intelligence division, and dismissing several hundred of the CIA’s experts on Communism. Antiwar leaders such as Ramsey Clark tried to push this even further by promoting legislation which would have virtually eliminated the FBI, but this effort failed.
---------- "Traitors of Record: The Record of the New York Times," By FR's Fedora, Original FReeper Research, 12/19/2005
1974 : (CIA DIRECTOR WILLIAM COLBY PARTICIPATES IN THE FOUNDING CONFERENCE OF THE CNSS[See CNSS HEAD MORTON HALPERIN {See IPS}]) Also in 1974, while still director of the CIA, Colby participated in the founding conference of the CNSS-alongside various Communists and assorted radicals.13 [13 see Martin, D.C., Wilderness of Mirrors, Harper & Row, New York, 1980, pp. 183-184, 217; Epstein, E.J., Deception, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1989, p. 100; Story, C., Soviet Analyst 22 (9-10), June 1994, p. 4; Broken Seals, Op cit., p. 17. ]
**********
1974 : (FUND FOR PEACE ESTABLISHES THE CNSS -- See MORTON HALPERIN, ANTI-INTELLIGENCE LOBBY ) In 1974, the Fund for Peace established the Center for National Security Studies (CNSS), which has worked closely with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in pursuing political and legal challenges against US intelligence. Staff and leadership for the CNSS have been drawn almost entirely from the IPS and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG); the NLG is the American branch of the Soviet-controlled International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), operates as a front of the Communist Party, USA, and publicly supports dozens of terrorist groups ranging from the PLO to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). IPS member Morton Halperin became head of the CNSS.7 [7 Broken Seals, Op cit., passim; 'Outlaws of Amerika,' report of the Western Goals Foundation, Alexandria, VA, 1982, pp. 51-60, passim. ]
Morton Halperin today is Senior Vice President of the left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP) and Director of the Open Society Policy Center established by eccentric billionaire international financier George Soros. ----------From FrontPageMag.com:
1977 : (THE CARTER ADMIN, STANSFIELD TURNER & THE "HALLOWEEN MASSACRE" / GUTTING OF THE CIA -- see CHURCH COMMISSION, AFGHANISTAN )
* Stansfield Turner :
The decimation of human intelligence really began under Jimmy Carter and his CIA Director Stansfield Turner. Turner really believed in satelites and gadgetry and thought that agents in the field only caused trouble. He reduced by more than half the operations element and human intelligence suffered greatly. (E.g., there was no agent on the ground in Afghanistan when Russia invaded in December 1979.) First under Reagan and then under Bush the CIA began the slow process of rebuilding its operations. Then Clinton arrived and the rest is history. With any luck Bush II will have rebuilt operations by 2009. 18 posted on 12/20/2003 6:36:15 AM PST by gaspar
Thanks for remembering this updating it Piasa.
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