Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (3 page)

Also note that forensic science isn’t as simple as it sounds, or as we’re too often led to believe on popular television shows. Cliff Spiegelman, distinguished professor of statistics and toxicology at Texas A&M University, is the author of many articles for peer-reviewed science journals, and is considered an expert in the field of forensic technology. Prof. Spiegelman observes:

“The application of forensic sciences is often lacking application of the scientific method. This is true in high-profile cases as well. Examples of misused forensic techniques include compositional bullet lead analysis (no longer used by the FBI Crime Lab) and firearm toolmarks (striations on bullets).”
⁴

Spiegelman and his colleagues have called for re-opening the investigation into the JFK assassination due to “fundamentally flawed” evidence procedures.

“The painful truth is that nearly all forensic procedures have been developed without much involvement from the statistical community or enough involvement from the independent, university-based scientific community or federal research labs. . . . As a result, forensic results are typically stated with uncertainty statements that cannot be supported. For example, it is typical in firearm toolmark identifications to state that, to a practical certainty, the defendant’s gun fired the bullets found in a decedent. Two recent National Research Council (NRC) reports (
Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward
and
Ballistic Imaging
) conclude there is no statistical foundation for such an absolute statement. Also, some federal and state jurisdictions recently ruled that firearm toolmark examiners may only testify that it is more likely than not that the defendant’s gun fired the bullets found in a decedent. (See
State of Ohio v. Anderson
(pdf) and
U.S. v. GLYNN
.) That is, the courts require only a better than 50-50 chance of a match.

The broader scientific community has noted the blatant failures of forensic science, but the justice system has not paid careful enough attention.”
⁵

These observations are important; Spiegelman organized a “bulletproof” panel of scientific and forensic experts that included former FBI scientist William Tobin, an expert in evidentiary techniques as well as ballistic forensics. The blue-ribbon panel utilized the latest compositional analysis techniques that were not available in the 1960s. Conclusion? In the evidence techniques employed by the government after the JFK assassination:

“ ... evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed.”
⁶

⁴
Clifford Spiegelman, email to author, 31 May 2010.

⁵
Clifford Spiegelman, “Weak Forensic Science Has High Cost,”
AMSTAT News
, Magazine of the American Statistical Association, 1 Mar. 2010.

⁶
Clifford Spiegelman, William A. Tobin, William D. James, Simon J. Sheather, Stuart Wexler, and D. Max Roundhill, “Chemical and forensic analysis of JFK assassination bullet lots: Is a second shooter possible?,”
The Annals of Applied Statistics
, Volume 1, Number 2 (2007), 285-634.

Frank Olson— November 28, 1953 Head of Special Operations Division (Top-Secret Research), CIA

Photo courtesy of
Frank Olson Legacy Project,
FrankOlsonProject.org

VICTIM:

FRANK OLSON

Cause of Death:

Fell from the thirteenth-story window of his hotel in New York City.

Official Verdict:

“SUICIDE”: Coroner cited autopsy findings indicating that the victim jumped from his window. In 1975, the CIA admitted doping Olson with LSD that led to his suicide (what is known in intelligence parlance as a “limited hangout”) and settled out of court with the Olson family for $750,000 precluding further investigation. Olson’s family had the body exhumed and re-autopsied in the 1990s and forensic experts concluded that Olson was murdered; the New York District Attorney’s office conducted a murder investigation but never filed criminal charges.

Actual Circumstances:

Olson’s death was a clear-cut case of “National Security homicide.” As head of CIA bio-weapons research, he had extensive access to “state secrets.” One of those secrets was that bombs with the anthrax virus had apparently been dropped on North Korea. He’d become increasingly outraged and vocal by what he saw as an immoral use of his research. He told colleagues he was disturbed about evidence of CIA torture-to-death interrogations in Germany and bacteriological warfare on North Korea. He was deemed a security risk and was interviewed by Military Intelligence. He was drugged with LSD without his knowledge (or permission) and further interrogated about his plans. On the Monday immediately preceding his death, he informed his boss that he was quitting his job (he died the following Saturday). That weekend, he was booked into the Hotel Statler in New York City accompanied by a CIA agent who was constantly guarding him. He was then visited by a military doctor, and once again drugged, and apparently clubbed and pushed out the window of the hotel (the window was closed at the time) and found dying on the sidewalk. A phone call was placed by the CIA agent immediately afterwards (and overheard by a hotel operator) in which the agent stated only: “Well, he’s gone.” Exhumation and autopsy revealed that he had suffered a severe hematoma to the skull (blow to the head) prior to the fall. It was a textbook murder taken directly from the CIA Assassination Manual.

Inconsistencies:

1. A second autopsy demanded by relatives confirmed ’blunt force trauma’ and that the victim was rendered unconscious
prior
to his fall. Forensic findings were also that there were no indications that the trauma could have come from the window and that the forensic evidence was “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”

2. The U.S. government conceded in an out-of-court settlement that LSD was administered to Olson without his knowledge or permission.

3. Forensic experts conducting a second autopsy concluded that the first autopsy report intentionally misrepresented the true facts in order to make it appear a suicide.

4. Contrary to the first autopsy report, no lacerations were found upon the victim, even though he had supposedly crashed through and out of a plate glass window at high speed, plus a canvas shade and cloth curtain covering the shade. Even if the window shade had protected his body from cuts on the way through the window, the forensic literature reveals that individuals receive the most lacerations as parts of their body withdraw from the glass, not as they crash through it (i.e., on the way
out
of the window, not on the way through it), specifically causing multiple lacerations, especially upon the legs of the victim. Olson had none.
⁷

5. The hotel room was so small that it would have been impossible for the victim to build up sufficient running speed, then catapult over the twin beds that intersected the room and crash through a plate glass window upon impact, especially one that was not very high.

6. Forensic examination determined that the body of the victim was medically consistent with the body having been dumped out the window in a semi-conscious state, rather than having intentionally crashed through it.

7. The CIA agent, Robert Lashbrook, who was “shadowing” the victim, kept changing his story about how the victim went out the window. The night manager at the hotel immediately realized that something was clearly amiss:

         “And here is Lashbrook sitting on a john in his skivvies and the police thought to question him and I heard him say, ‘Well all I heard was a crash. ’I walked around the room to look around. Nobody ever jumps through a window. They open the window and they go out, not dash through a shade and a sheer drape. You know, there’s no sense to that.”         

8. Instead of calling the police or the hotel desk after “the accident” as might be expected, the CIA agent called his superior, CIA scientist Dr. Harold Abramson (who had sedated Olson earlier) and, in a conversation enabled and overheard by the hotel operator, stated only:

“Well, he’s gone.”

9. Olson had been interviewed by Military Intelligence and deemed a security risk.

10. Nine days before his death, Olson was drugged (without his knowledge or permission) with LSD and a drug known to make a person more open and talkative and then, in a drugged state, was interrogated utilizing secret interrogation techniques garnered from
Artichoke,
the mind-control operation that Olson had been part of.

11. Shortly before Olson’s death, the CIA distributed its Assassination Manual to agents (it was declassified in 1997) which details the precise method of Olson’s death as
the
most preferable method of assassination.

12. In training for the assassinations unit of the Israeli Mossad (Institute for Intelligence & Special Operations), the Olson murder has been used as an example of a perfect assassination.

“Frank Olson’s murder is like a nuclear bomb in an 18th century naval battle. It stands out because of its context … In the absence of oversight or accountability, sadism and stupidity compete for domination.”
⁸

Would it surprise you to learn that the CIA drugged an entire French village with LSD? Or that it “tested” LSD on unknowing U.S. citizens right in the middle of Manhattan; and on our own soldiers, prisoners, and mental patients locked-up in hospitals?
⁹
How about that the U.S. tested anthrax on American factory workers and used BW (Bacteriological Warfare) on civilians in North Korea? Or that the CIA secret prisons now known as black sites for “extraordinary rendition” (translation: kidnap-torture) bear their roots in the research of the 1950s? You won’t be seeing those facts in high school history books any time soon, but they
did
happen; and Frank Olson was the man who attempted to intervene on behalf of humanity—an act that cost him his life.

Frank Olson, a gifted chemist, was a CIA officer and Acting Chief of Special Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency at the top-secret Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick in Detrick, Maryland. Biological warfare, LSD as a mind-control technique, terminal interrogations, and assassination techniques were the realm of the Special Operations Division. Olson was an expert in the use of psychoactive drugs and biological warfare, including anthrax and other viral agents, and he had top security clearance.

A special CIA operation code-named Artichoke “involved the development of special, extreme methods of interrogation.”

Robert Lashbrook was the identity of the CIA agent shadowing Olson, day and night.

Historical Perspective of Operation Artichoke