Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (5 page)

“Well, he’s gone.”

The other party then stated:

“Well, that’s too bad.”

Both parties then hung up.

▸ Saturday, November 28, 1953, 2:40-3:00 AM

Hotel manager Armand Pastore notified police and also determined that the victim must have fallen from Room 1018a on the thirteenth floor and that there was another occupant of that room. Pastore led police to 1018a and opened the door for them. The police entered, guns drawn, and encountered the room’s other occupant, Robert Lashbrook, seated on the toilet. The police said, “What happened?” and Lashbrook responded: “I don’t know, I just heard a crash of glass and then I see that Frank Olson is out of the window and he is down on the street.”

▸ Sunday, November 29, 1953

The case was classified as a suicide and immediately closed.

▸ Post-Mortem—Summer, 1975

The report of The Rockefeller Commission was released in which it was made public that the CIA had drugged U.S. citizens with LSD without their permission. The Olson family investigated the information contained in the report and confirmed that one of the subjects referred to was indeed Frank Olson. They held a press conference and demanded that the case of their father’s death be investigated.

▸ Post-Mortem—Summer, 1975

Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, aides to President Ford, confidentially recommended to the President that he contain the “Olson matter” by setting out of court to preclude “the possibility that it might be necessary to disclose highly classified national security information,” because it had become known that the CIA did indeed drug Frank Olson with LSD just prior to his death. Therefore, in what is known in Intelligence parlance as a “limited hangout,” the CIA settled out of court with the Olson family for $750,000 retribution for past wrongdoing. Ten days after the memo from Rumsfeld and Cheney recommending retribution and an apology, President Ford hosted the Olson family at the White House for photos and handshakes with the family after the President apologized on behalf of the U.S. Government.

▸ Post-Mortem

Former longtime CIA agent lke Feldman investigated the circumstances of Olson’s death:

“The source that I have was the New York City Police Department, the Bureau of Narcotics Agents, and the CIA agents themselves. They all say the same thing: that he was pushed out of the window and that he did not jump.

People who wanted him out of the way said he talked too much and he was telling people about the things he had done, which is American secret. If you work on a top government secret, a city secret, a state secret, and it spills out to people who should not know, there is only one way to do it: kill him.”

▸ Post-Mortem — June 2, 1994

Olson’s body was exhumed and autopsied at the insistence of relatives suspicious of foul play. Eminent forensic scientist James Starrs, Professor of Law and Forensic Science at the National Law Center at George Washington University, led the autopsy team, also selecting a diverse team of scientific experts in the appropriate fields. The team determined that the original medical report in 1953 was “manipulated” and “totally inaccurate in some very important respects.” Forensic finding is that the victim suffered a severe hematoma, i.e., a blunt force trauma to the head, prior to his fall through the window:

“That is only reasonably explainable as having occurred by reason of his being shall we say silenced, being rendered unable to defend himself, so that he could be tossed out of the window.”

Official finding of Professor James Starrs, George Washington University:

“HOMICIDE”

Regarding the assassination method detailed in the CIA Assassination Manual, Professor Starrs further states:

“What was spelled out in that ‘Assassination Manual’ was almost letter for letter what happened to Doctor Olson and it was a protocol, as we call it, for an assassination, which fit like the fingers in a glove.”

Source material for the above chart was derived primarily from the following:

“The Frank Olson Legacy Project,”
http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Contents.html
.
Code Name: Artichoke; The CIA’s Secret Experiments on Humans,
film by Egmont R. Koch & Michael Wech, 2002,
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/code-name-artichoke/
.
A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments;
H. P. Albarelli Jr.; 2009, TrineDay.

“The Case of Frank Olson,” Oliver Boothby, February 11, 1996:
http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Student%20papers/Oliver.html
.

“Scientist was ‘Killed to Stop Him Revealing Death Secrets’; So Did Cheney and Rumsfeld Cover Up a CIA Assassination?,” Gordon Thomas,
London Sunday Express
, August 25, 2002.
“Frank Olson: Did a government scientist jump to his death from a New York hotel? Or was he pushed?,”
http://www.unsolved.com/ajax-files/une_frank_olson.htm
.

“LSD, Murder and the CIA: Frank Olson, Enemy Combatant,” David Swanson,
Counterpunch,
March 26-28, 2010.

The Biology of Doom: The History of America’s Secret Germ Warfare Project,
Ed Regis
,
2000.

"Rumsfeld & Cheney’s Dirty Little Spy Secret," Fintan Dunne, Editor,
GuluFuture.com,
March 6, 2006:
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/03-06-06/discussion.cgi.31.html
.

The Men Who Stare at Goats,
Jon Ronson, 2005.

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

Armond Pastore, who was the night manager at the hotel, had seen more than his share of accidents, and immediately took the police up to room 1018A so the police could investigate. They found the CIA agent sitting in the bathroom. Pastore recalled very clearly:

“And here is Lashbook 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.”
¹⁴

“The first call that Lashbrook made was not to the hotel management or the police, but to his superior, Dr. Sid Gottlieb, at his home in Virginia, to tell him what had happened. Then he reported to the hotel desk clerk and telephoned Dr. Abramson.”
¹⁵

“In those days all of the calls were manual. You call the operator and you tell her what number you want and she would dial it for you. And then she listened to see that you got connected. When the man in the room called this number he said, ‘Well, he’s gone.’ And the man on the other end said, ‘Well, that’s too bad.’ And they both hung up. I mean, what’s more suspicious than that? You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that there’s something amiss. Or, Hamlet said, ‘There’s something rotten in Denmark.’ I mean, I knew there was something rotten at the hotel that night.”
¹⁶

Kathryn Olmsted, Professor of History at the University of California, discovered documents indicating a White House-level cover-up of the Frank Olson case, related of the secret use of anthrax weapons. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were directly involved in concealing information about Olson’s death. Dr. Olmsted also said that part of Olson’s work was the making of anthrax and other biological weapons.

Rumsfeld, at that time, was White House Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford and Dick Cheney was a White House assistant.

One of the documents that Professor Olmsted obtained states:

“Dr. Olson’s job was so sensitive that it is highly unlikely that we would submit relevant evidence.”
¹⁷

In another memo, Cheney acknowledges the following:

“The Olson lawyers will seek to explore all the circumstances of Dr. Olson’s employment, as well as those concerning his death. In any 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.”
¹⁸

Many observers, therefore, have “connected the dots” and concluded that Cheney and Rumsfeld were given the task in the 1970s of covering up the details of Olson’s death.

“The fact that Frank Olson had died shortly after being given LSD in a CIA experiment came out in 1975 as a consequence of President Ford’s Rockefeller Commission investigation into the CIA’s domestic activities. Further investigation was called for, but in a White House memo advisers to President Ford stated that this would risk revealing state secrets (probably meaning, in part, the use by the U.S. of germ warfare in Korea); further investigation was suppressed and the whole matter covered up. The names of those White House advisers were Dick Cheney, current U.S. Vice-President, and Donald Rumsfeld, current Secretary of Defense. They have never been questioned as to what they knew about Olson’s death.”
¹⁹

Cheney-Rumsfeld: The “formative” years:
Both handled the “limited hangout” under President Ford in 1975, settling with the Olson family for $750,000, a private audience and apology from President Ford, and an apparent end to the uncomfortable issues surrounding Frank Olson’s knowledge of bacteriological warfare by the U.S. in North Korea and the “enhanced” interrogation techniques of
Project Artichoke.
The Olson family later learned that a “renewed coverup of the truth concerning this story was being carried out at the highest levels of government, including the White House.”

The following is a verbatim excerpt from the CIA Assassination Manual which was declassified in 1997; this document was written and put out to “agents in the field” only a short time prior to Olson’s death:
²⁰

Professor Starrs, who led the autopsy team which concluded that the death was actually murder, concluded that the:

2. Accidents

For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.

The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows, and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly-cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [next word excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness,” no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.