Class, Race and Corporate Power Class, Race and Corporate Power

Abstract This paper examines the case of Dr. Frank Olson, a CIA biochemist who worked at the Ft. Detrick facility in Maryland where germ and chemical warfare capabilities were developed. In November 1953, Dr. Olson died after allegedly falling from a thirteenth floor window in New York’s Statler hotel. Initially, his death was ruled a suicide. In 1975, however, the CIA admitted that Olson had been unwittingly drugged with LSD which led to his death and paid the family a lofty financial settlement. However, in 1994, Frank’s son Eric ordered the exhumation of Frank’s body and hired a forensics experts who found that the cause of Frank’s death was a blow to the head. The New York District attorney subsequently changed the classification of his death from suicide to unknown. This paper examines the circumstances surrounding Olson’s killing, his son’s quest to undercover the truth, and speculates about the programs that Olson may have threatened to expose, which led to his death. The paper further addresses the social and political significance of the Olson case to modern American history and seeks to analyze why it remains resonant to Americans over sixty five years after Frank’s death.

In June 1975, the Rockefeller commission, which was created to investigate CIA misdeeds, advanced the theory that Olson's death resulted from an adverse reaction to LSD.The Olson family met with CIA director William Colby and President Gerald Ford who released some pertinent documents, issued a formal apology and awarded the family a $750,000 settlement.However, after the death of Frank's widow, Alice, son Eric had Frank's body exhumed by pathologist Dr. James E. Starrs from Georgetown University, who found a hole in Frank's head that came from the butt of a gun and not a fall from a thirteenth-floor window.The autopsy also revealed a lack of cuts or lacerations, which meant he had to have gone out of an open window as glass from the window would have cut his skin.The New York District Attorney subsequently changed the designation of Frank's death from "suicide" to "unknown." 3ccording to two confidential CIA sources interviewed by investigator Hal P. Albarelli Jr., when a late-night attempt was made to remove a subdued Olson from his room in the Statler to transport him by automobile to Maryland, "things went drastically wrong.The short and entire explanation is that [Olson] resisted and in the ensuing struggle he was pitched through the closed window."These same sources note that Lashbrook apparently was awake the whole time, though out of the way.They said that Olson wasn't "cut out for the type of work he was doing.He was in way over his head, and he knew it at last." 4 Errol Morris' 2017 film, Wormwood, chronicles the Shakespearian tragedy in which Frank's son Eric gives up a promising career as a psychiatrist to pursue the truth about his father's death.At the end, he comes close to uncovering the identity of the killers, though maverick reporter Seymour Hersh will not reveal his "deep throat" source who told him that Frank had been murdered.The Olson case remains significant today because it exemplifies the harsh treatment towards whistle-blowers whose threat stems not only from the information that they may leak or threaten to leak, but also from the fact that they challenge the legitimacy and authority of the state far more gravely than any political radical or criminal. 5That the American public has remained fascinated with the Olson case over sixty five years later reflects a deepseated mistrust in government institutions.American national identity has long been predicated, and the pursuit of overseas empire legitimated, on the belief that the American democratic system is morally virtuous compared to illiberal rivals like China and Russia and that agents of the government would never kill their own citizens like in those nations. 6President Donald J. Trump punctured this myth, however, when in response to a question by Fox News about killings by Russian President Vladimir Putin, he responded: "There are a lot of killers.We've got a lot of killers.What, you think our country's so innocent?" 7The Olson case affirms Trump's assessment and suggests that we are not who we say we are, and have no legitimacy in colonizing the globe with military bases.This is why the case is so explosive and why, beyond the protection of individual reputations, there remains so much secrecy and resistance to a full accounting of the facts.Fareed Zakaria expressed characteristic fear about the opening of a "power vacuum" that would be "filled by illiberal powers like China, Russia, and Turkey."Quoted in Alfred W. McCoy, "The World According to Trump: Or How to Build and Lose an Empire," January 16, 2018, tomdispatch.com

Who Was Frank Olson and What Kind of Work Did he Do?
Frank Olson did not fit the pattern of a man at the center of a malevolent government plot lifted straight out of an X-Files episode.He was a straight-laced company man with strong anticommunist views. 8 Located on the site of an obscure National Guard camp and "cow pasture" airfield, the Ft.Detrick facility was established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after he had read intelligence reports noting that Germany and Japan were stockpiling poison gas and that Russia, Britain and Canada were ahead of America in biological weapons research.The town of Frederick, Maryland was considered a perfect spot for the secret facility because the residents minded their own business and did not gossip too much.Newspaper editor A.T. Bush reported they were making "colored smoke for airplanes" at Ft. Detrick.In reality, they were developing exotic poisons, guns firing darts that could penetrate clothing and skin unnoticed and then dissolve, and weed killers designed to wipe out the enemy's food supply, which the chief of the army chemical warfare services believed would "hasten the end of war." 9 Nicknamed "Fort Doom," Ft.Detrick embodied the wedding of scientific talent to the dictates of the Cold War National Security State.Look Magazine reported in November 1950 that the Truman administration had "summoned scientists…as never before" from their peacetime work-benches to the task of bettering the tools of war.In the Pentagon and in hundreds of labs and proving grounds from White Sands, New Mexico to Aberdeen, Maryland, these scientists are engaged in a vast program opening up awesome vistas of mass destruction and death." 10 Judged by his superiors to be an "outstanding professional man," Olson's work at Ft. Detrick focused on assessing and improving protective masks and clothing under conditions of biological warfare.One of his mentors was Theodor Rosebury who headed airborne infection projects.Rosebury was investigated by the FBI for exposing secret experiments and published a book, Peace or Pestilence, which concluded that the logic for biological warfare was '"less compelling" in the Cold War than World War II and that the "smell of evil" had now come to "hang over it [BW]." 11Rosebury terminated his association with Ft.Detrick when he recognized that there was no way to stop the dissemination of such a weapon, and began urging the conversion of the facility into an "international center for microbiological research." 12 1947, Olson and Rosebury produced a technical monograph after constructing a special chamber for the study of "airborne clouds of highly infective agents" that recommended the use of airplanes as the "best delivery systems for biological agents." 13In May of the previous year, members of Congress hoping to secure support for a $4.6 million naval appropriations bill, leaked to the Associated Press news about a "new germ spray capable of wiping out large cities and entire crops at a single blow, a secret weapon" deliverable from high-flying planes, "far more deadly than the atomic bomb." 14The excited language exemplifies a cultural infatuation with super-weapons that reached its apex in the post-World War II "victory culture." 15onsidered by critics to be "madmen in the laboratories," Ft.Detrick scientists conceived of themselves as a "community of saints dedicated to using the most fearful and secret science to defend the republic." 16They were among those sent to France, Germany and Japan to assess and begin expropriating Axis biological warfare capabilities.Some of the toxic agents under development were lethal while others merely incapacitating.The military valued the latter for potentially tying up medical personnel and hospital facilities and impeding movement of forces. 17son was given the field notes of Lt. Col Arvo Thompson who had carried out daily interrogation sessions with Lt. General Shiro Ishii, head of Japan's infamous Unit 731, which had carried out ghastly experiments in China during World War II.Ishii was allegedly brought to Ft. Detrick to give a series of lectures sometime after 1947.His experiments in the war included live vivisection of human beings, spraying people with anthrax and plague infected fleas, and tying them to trees and then exploding germ bombs overhead while soldiers wearing protective gear of particular interest to Olson timed their deaths. 18 1950, Olson became chief of the plans and operations branch of the CIA's Special Operations Division (SOD) which connected him with Lashbrook, and the TSS Chemical Division's liaison to SOD.In that capacity, he served as a deputy to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who headed MK-ULTRA (CIA drug testing program). 19Working out of laboratories patrolled by armed guards with orders to shoot any intruders, the SOD grew lethal cells and cultured deadly viruses along with "techniques for the offensive use of biological weapons," according to court documents, and "covert dissemination of biological warfare agents."Some of the projects requested by the CIA under the code name MKNAOMI (named after Dr. Harold Abramson's assistant, Naomi Busner) included the development of toxic sprays and poisons, testing various pharmaceutical products, and even exploring the "ability to induce cancer through covert means." 20orge W. Merck, a pharmaceutical executive influential in establishing Ft.Detrick, wanted to shut down the SOD, considering it "un-American." 21Possessing the top military security Q-clearance, Olson became part of a team that covertly tested how a weaponized biological agent might disperse if used against Americans. 22According to The Washington Post, the U.S. army conducted 239 secret open-air germ warfare tests from 1949-1969, which were carried-out with "appalling deception." 23They involved dangerous pathogens such as Serratia marcescens, a bacteria similar to anthrax, which was sprayed off the coast of San Francisco, exposing over 800,000 people including an Irish man who died.In Alaska, Olson's team sprayed bacteria out of airplanes to see how the pathogens would disburse in an environment similar to a harsh Russian winter."We used a spore," colleague Norman Cournoyer said, "which is very similar to anthrax so to that extent we did something that was not kosher.Because we picked it up all over the United States months after we did the tests." 24 the years leading up to his death, Olson reportedly visited France, Germany, England and Norway, where an anonymous Ft.Detrick employee said his work "may have been connected to the testing of psychoactive drugs."25This is a field that Olson is known to have experimented in while working with Dr. Harold Abramson in the office of Strategic Service (OSS) during World War II.Olson was issued a diplomatic passport, which allowed him to carry items in a diplomatic pouch that would not be subject to searches by Customs.In Germany, he met with legendary CIA official William King Harvey where plans for the CIA's Operation Artichoke involving illegal drug testing were discussed.Olson's scientific knowledge of how to administer drugs and chemicals made him particularly useful to Artichoke, the precursor to the Operation MK-ULTRA.He may have partaken in or witnessed "terminal experiments" being conducted by the CIA on former Nazi SS officers and captured Russian double agents or the slipping of drugs to unwitting guinea pigs in cafés and bars. 26 June 12, 1953, declassified documents show that Olson arrived at Frankfurt from the Hendon military airport in England and made the short drive West into Oberursel.There, Artichoke experiments were taking place at a SAFEHOUSE called Haus Waldorf."Between 4 June 1953 and 18 June 1953, an IS&O [CIA Inspection and Security Office] team…applied Artichoke techniques to operational cases in a safe house," explains an Artichoke memorandum, written for CIA Director Allen Dulles, and one of the few action memos on record not destroyed by Richard Helms when he was CIA director.
The two individuals being interrogated at the Camp King safe house "could be classed as experienced, professional type agents and suspected of working for Soviet Intelligence.""In the first case, light dosages of drugs coupled with hypnosis were used to induce a complete hypnotic trance," the memo reveals."This trance was held for approximately one hour and forty minutes of interrogation with a subsequent total amnesia produced."27Through his work with SOD, Olson knew about the recruitment of Nazi scientists under the Operation Paperclip.Olson was allegedly among a secret group of Ft.Detrick scientists who traveled to Germany to interview Dr. Walter Schreiber, the Nazi's anthrax expert who tested psycho-chemical drugs on concentration camp inmates, and he may have witnessed Dr. Kurt Blome, the Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich, conduct interrogation experiments at Camp King. 28cording to his Detrick colleague Norman Cornoyer, Olson had a "tough time after Germany….[d]rugs,torture, brainwashing," Cournoyer explained decades later for a documentary for German television made in 2001.Cournoyer said Olson felt ashamed about what he had witnessed, and that the experiments at Camp King reminded him of what had been done to people in concentration camps.Back in the CIAs office at Detrick Building Number 439, Olson contemplated leaving his job, telling his wife, Alice, that he had "made a terrible mistake."Although we don't know exactly what he meant, Dr. Olson appears to have recognized he had placed himself in danger by admitting under interrogation that he had breached security protocols.CIA consultant Stanley Lovell referred to Olson as "having no inhibitions.Baring of inner man," meaning he had wrongly spoken out. 29William Sargant, a psychiatrist who advised British intelligence reported that Olson was a security risk after he had expressed misgivings about his work with Artichoke to him.The CIA subsequently placed a memo in his file claiming he may have violated security restrictions, which his sons believe led to his murder. 30"Key to Your Father's Death:" Korea and Germ Warfare Alice Olson told her kids before her death in 1994 that "Korea really bothered your father." 31She was likely referring to his role in germ warfare experiments, which were part of an attempt to create a contamination belt designed to stop the movement of soldiers and supplies across the 38 th parallel dividing North and South.Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIAs "doctor death" whom Olson worked directly under, believed that pest-laden bombs would "have a greater effect on the outcome of the war than all the men being called up." 32 When the Korean War broke out, the Truman administration increased the biological warfare budget from $5.3 million in 1950 to $345 million for the years 1951-1953.A top-secret order dated September 21, 1951 from the Joint Chiefs of Staff Command authorized the fieldtesting of anthrax weapons in Korea.Another report recommended that the U.S. "be prepared to employ BW whenever it is militarily advantageous." 33Survivor and eye-witness testimonials and journalistic accounts confirm the presence of flies not native to the region and that North Koreans died from disease outbreaks, including of the bubonic plague. 34Cylinders found to have released flies bore remarkable resemblance to those used in field tests within the United States.Dr.Joseph Needham, an expert on Oriental Medicine from Oxford University, headed an investigation, which concluded the U.S. carried out experiments in a type of bacteriological warfare Japan had specialized in which spread "vector insects like yellow-fever carrying mosquito capable of transmitting disease from one body to another."This charge was confirmed by a team of international jurists who found flies infected with cholera. 35ring the war, captive American pilots testified that they dropped pest-laden bombs, though their confessions were retracted after their release under the threat of court martial and possibly their subjection to Artichoke interrogation techniques involving psychological torture.POW Kenneth Enoch told Al Jazeera in 2010 that his confession was not coerced but real. 36nother POW who issued a confession, Walker Mahurin, had curiously visited Ft.Detrick while serving as assistant executive to the Secretary of the Air Force. 37Dave Chaddock's This Must be the Place: How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied it Ever Since, points to the authenticity of the pilot confessions by virtue of the precision of the detail and fact 32  that some of the pilots genuinely felt bad about what they had done, particularly since they had been well-treated in captivity. 38Military records show that the U.S. Air Force's 3 rd Bomb Wing dropped leaflet bombs after raids by 36 F-84 bombers followed by four B-26s, which carried leaflet cannisters.The 3 rd Bomb Wing's Commander, Colonel Moore explained that the purpose of the leaflet warnings was to assist civilians before a bombing raid to escape injury and fatalities, which makes no sense coming at the end of an attack.Dropping bombs containing bacteriological agents is more likely in order to prolong the damage by contaminating the bombed area, as the Chinese had alleged. 39son and his colleagues at Ft. Detrick had developed their capacity for producing and delivering bacteriological weapons through expertise acquired secretly from Japanese scientists such as Gen. Ishii who according to Reuters, visited South Korea during the Korean War. 40embers of his Unit 731, according to a 2001 Japanese language book, worked for a chemical section of a clandestine unit hidden in Yokosuke naval base during the Korean War. 41According to Professor Masataka Mori who has studied Unit 731, there are striking similarities between the diseases and weapons used by the Japanese military in China and those said to have been deployed by the United States against targets in northern Korea."The bombs found on the Korean Peninsula were made of metal, while those used in China were ceramic," Mori stated, "but the symptoms reported in North Korea are very similar to those witnessed in China." 42itish author Gordon Thomas reported that Sidney Gottlieb instructed CIA agent Hans Tofte to obtain a selection of Korea's insect life and small field animals like jungle rats and voles.These were brought back to Ft. Detrick where Olson and the other "madmen in the laboratories" tested them on guinea pigs, rabbit, rhesus, monkeys and pigs in order to establish their suitability to form the basis for biological weapons. 43Olson is alleged to have subsequently traveled with Dr. Gottlieb to Tokyo to visit the Far East Command's Unit 406 Medical Laboratory in the Mitsubishi Higashi building where researchers assisted by Japanese scientists were working with plague, anthrax, undulant fever and cholera to discover their potential for being used as weapons.Olson according to Thomas helped set up an ultra-high security unit known as 8003 that was active in the development of airborne pathogens. 44Norman Cournoyer Griffith Edwards noted: "The official explanation [of the outbreak] was of flour having been contaminated by an organic mercury fungicide but much of the evidence points to a variety of ergot poisoning.The similarity of the symptoms to those of LSD effects is startling."Fuller had rendered the same conclusion quoting a physician-expert who said "there is one and only one cause of the tragedy.Some form of ergot, and that form has logically got to be akin to LSD." 49 Fuller's book noted the presence of Sandoz Company researcher Dr. Albert Hoffmann in Pont Saint D'ésprit during the summer of 1951 (Sandoz supplied LSD to the U.S. army and CIA).Hoffman mentions the outbreak in his own book, LSD: My Problem Child in 1979, but leaves out that he was in town in the days immediately after.Evidence from Frank Olson's passport and those of his SOD colleagues' shows that they happened to be in France at that time as well.George H. White referred to the "secret" of Pont Saint D'ésprit in an agency memo; other declassified documents show that Sandoz and CIA officials engaged in discreet, ongoing discussions about Pont St.D'ésprit which was referred to as "an experiment" and not an accident.According to Albarelli Jr., the village was chosen because it was on the outs with the French government of Charles de Gaulle and had a number of communists living there. 50e U.S. army at the time considered LSD a potential secret weapon that when added to the drinking water could make an army of soldiers disoriented and psychotic, hence incapable of fighting.Major General William M. Creasy, former chief of the army chemical corps, wrote in Readers Digest in September 1959, that psycho-chemical agents were preferable to conventional bombing to recapture [enemy-held] positions and could deliver a town unharmed "once the population has recovered from a brief period of lunacy."The army, Creasy said, had the capacity to deliver psycho-chemicals through aerosol bombs [Olson's specialty] or in liquid and powder form by "sabotage methods" such as contamination of water and food supplies, which could have been tested at Pont Saint D'ésprit. 51A doctors such as Henry K. Beecher who reported to the TSS Branch and Dr. Gottlieb are known to have proposed contaminating a battleship with LSD and putting LSD in the water supply as a way to test its effects.Albarelli Jr. suspects that this occurred at Pont Saint D'ésprit under an Operation Spann. 52He found a secret FBI document that pointed to an experiment involving chemical agents that was planned for the New York subway system, and was told by a former Fort Detrick biochemist that the New York City experiments "were delayed until after the experiment was conducted in France."The results of the latter, he said, were "good" but yielded "an adverse effect or what would now be called a 'black swan' reaction.That several people died was unexpected, completely unexpected.It wasn't supposed to turn out that way." 53 The same source told Albarelli Jr. that Olson was drugged at a company retreat in Deep Creek Lodge in Maryland several days before his death because he was thought to be "talking to the wrong people" about Pont Saint-D'ésprit including a neighbor he car-pooled with, and the CIA wanted to know the extent of his indiscretions.This, according to Albarelli Jr., explains cryptic references in CIA documents to possible security violations, and remarks by CIA operative Stanley Lovell about Frank having "no inhibitions."Olson feared for his safety on the eve of his death, telling his wife someone was trying to poison him.Before being checked into the Statler hotel, he was taken to his old boss, Dr. Harold Abramson because the two men knew each other well and it was thought Olson would be forthcoming about the reasons for his security breaches, but to no avail.54

An Act of State: Piecing Together the Facts and Meaning of Olson's Murder
After Frank Olson's death, his wife Alice had been visited by Frank's superior, Lt. Col. Vincent Ruwet who said that there had been "some sort of accident" and that Frank had "either fallen or jumped out of a window," two very different things. 55The police investigation ended abruptly, and no autopsy was ever ordered.The priest called to administer Frank's rites was also quietly moved aside.The family was told that Frank's body was too badly disfigured for viewing -a falsehood that prevented the family from noticing a hematoma on his temple, a wound consistent with a blow to the head omitted from the 1953 medical examiner's report.Five CIA "investigators" carried out their own inquiry into what agency documents labelled a "suicide," paying substantial sums to Dr. Harold Abramson and another unidentified colleague who knew the truth. 56bert Lashbrook and Sidney Gottlieb came over to the Olson home after the funeral and Vincent Ruwet made regular visits to "encourage [Alice] to think things that were not true about Frank's death," as he put it. 57Edward Kennedy (D-MA) chaired a 1977 Congressional probe in which Sidney Gottlieb testified that there was only a causal connection between the LSD and Olson's suicide because it had been taken a week before.Gottlieb otherwise was evasive at the hearing.Senator Kennedy, "the liberal lion" nevertheless concluded that the hearings "closed the book on this sorry chapter [the Olson affair]," which was framed as a "tragic accident."Four years earlier, "the liberal lion" refused to subpoena another member of the executive branch, William Sullivan, after his committee had determined that Sullivan committed perjury when he stated that U.S. air strikes in Laos did not target civilians.Kennedy's exoneration of Gottlieb and Lashbrook -who both committed perjury at the hearing -was an example of Congress failing to hold Executive Branch representatives accountable for their abuses of power, commensurate with the breakdown of democracy in the United States. 58llowing the excavation of rank's body in 1996, tests for LSD in Frank's system proved inconclusive, affirming Gottlieb's statement.No evidence furthermore ever emerged to confirm that Frank had become psychotic in the days leading to his death, only that he had begged his CIA captors to let him go so he could flee some-place. 59The LSD story appears to have been concocted in an attempt to not only cover up the real circumstances behind Olson's death but also discredit the 1960s counter-culture which promoted LSD as a consciousness raising drug. 60 1959 internal Army study had found that there was not one single case of residual ill-effect recorded in the years of LSD tests on thousands of soldiers, and a follow-up study authored by Jerome Jaffe, the drug-czar under Richard Nixon, found that "in man, deaths attributable to direct effects of LSD are unknown."61 Eric Olson had never believed the CIA's official story because the documents he was given by the agency were "so riddled with contradictions, omissions and outright lies" it was difficult to have any confidence in them; an assessment shared by the New York Times.Dr. Gottlieb previously shredded key documents and had said he was not in New York the week of Olson's death, though Lashbrook later said that he was.Colby had continued to hide the fact that Frank worked for the CIA.Dick Cheney, then Deputy Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford wrote a memo to Donald Rumsfeld, Ford's chief of staff, noting that the administration had not fully investigated Olson's death and saying he was concerned that a lawsuit could result in the disclosure of classified information.
Eric noted that "in the wake of the Nuremburg trials in the late 1940s, the United States could not afford to be exposed as a sponsor of the sort of research it had prosecuted the Nazis for undertaking."After interviewing some of his father's colleagues, Eric came to the realization that the slipping of LSD into his father's Cointreau at the Deep Creek Lodge was not an experiment that went wrong but was designed to get him to talk while hallucinating; an effort at enhanced interrogation.Mixed with the LSD was Meretran, a drug designed to make people talk more freely.Eric in turn believes that Frank revealed his whistle-blowing intentions to Gottlieb and other MK-ULTRA men present; the "terrible mistake" he had made.Eric stated that "for all his loyalty to his country and his readiness to perform his duty as an apostle of the biology of doom, [Frank] finally allowed his strong sense of morality to get the better of him.As a result, he had become another 'expendable' in the sinister world that Dr. Gottlieb had created." 62ter reopening investigation into the case in 1996, New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau was astounded to discover several odd deaths that befell people linked in some way with the Olson case.They included David Bellin, the Executive Director of the Rockefeller Commission who may have been part of the cover-up, and Rudolph Halley, a close friend of CIA agent George White who knew about White's work in drugging prostitutes with MK-ULTRA and possibly Olson's death.(Halley was only 43 and said to have died from pneumonia but he was in excellent health).CIA Director William Colby also died in a suspicious "boating accident" off Chesapeake Bay Island days before he was scheduled to be interviewed by New York's cold case unit. 63shbrook's behavior had been particularly suspicious in that he was found sitting on the toilet having never left the room and told police that he discovered Olson was gone when he saw he was not in his bed.However, Olson's bed-sheet and clothes had been pulled back in a manner consistent with someone ripping him out of bed forcibly, and the crash from the window would have required a running start (more than was possible in the small room) and made a noise. 64oorman Armand Pastore told an interviewer: "[Lashbrook] told the police he didn't see any reason to go down.No reason, I mean what kind of animal reacts like that?" 65 In 2000, Hank Albarelli Jr. interviewed Pastore who recalled a mysterious Frenchman named Jean Martin who worked at the Statler the night of Olson's death.Albarelli Jr. determined that Martin was actually a CIA agent named Pierre Lafitte, who had ties to organized crime and did dirty work for the agency.He and Francois Spirito, a heroin trafficker and ex-Nazi collaborator who had just been released from an Atlanta penitentiary snuck in and out of the 62 Thomas, Secrets & Lies, 51; Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats, 235; Albarelli Jr.A Terrible Mistake; Starrs, A Voice for the Dead, 148, 149; Tom Schoenberg, "CIA Accused of Cover-up in Military Scientist's 1953 Fatal Fall," Bloomberg News, November 29, 2012, https://eassurvey.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/cia-accused-of-coverup-inmilitary-scientists-1953-fatal-fall-bipartisan-legislation-to-help-train-child-protection-professionals-to-detect-andprevent-child-abuse/;Stephanie Desmon, "In Reburial, Olson's hope to lay saga of father to rest," Baltimore Sun, August 9, 2002, http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/BaltSun.html.Gottlieb testified before Congress about the use of Meretran. 63Albarelli Jr.A Terrible Mistake, 637, 654.Bellin died after a freak fall in the shower of a hotel room in Rochester, Minnesota where he had gone for his annual physical at the Mayo clinic.For more on Colby's suspicious death, see Zalin Grant, "Who Murdered the CIA Chief?William Colby A Suspicious Death," http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/colby.htm; Randall B. Woods, Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA (New York: Basic Books, 2013). 64Starrs, A Voice for the Dead, 130. See also Kinzer, Poisoner In-Chief, 124. 65Pastore stated that the window shade had been fully intact, which contradicted Lashbrook's original statement that he was awakened by a flapping window shade after Olson went out the window.Later, Lashbrook changed his story and told a psychiatrist Dr. Robert Gibson that "he awoke in the middle of the night and saw Olson standing in the middle of the room and crash through the window."The latter is impossible because it would have required a running start and the size of the hotel room was too small.Fischer, "The Man Who Knew Too Much;" Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake, 492.hotel room through a side door.They then struck Frank in the back of the head with a baseball bat or some other object, smashed the window and threw Frank out the window to make his death look like a suicide.A cryptic unsigned letter sent to Assistant New York District Attorney Steve Sarraco on April 17, 2000 from a former CIA employee who "had the luck of the draw to deal directly with Olson's demise" said that "Mr.Olson's fateful flight was ventured on wings bestowed by enfants terrible, LaFitte and Le Grande Lydio [Spirito]." 66 2013, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg dismissed a lawsuit by the Olson family on technical grounds (notably that the family had already been awarded compensation by the CIA) though stated that the "public record supports many of [the family's] allegations, far-fetched as they may sound." 67The CIA appeared to be following the modus operandi of its assassination manual published the year of Olson's death.It recommended drugging somebody, hitting them in the head with a blunt object and then throwing them from a high place while making it look like a suicide as an ideal way of disguising murder.The manual also emphasized the method of the "contrived accident" which when successfully executed, "causes little excitement and is only casually investigated." 68ciologist David Simon notes in Elite Deviance that corruption and criminality are embedded in a competitive capitalistic society such as the U.S. in which people are socialized to accept a "win at all costs mentality" from the time they are young. 69CIA operatives considering themselves as "game players" trying to outmaneuver their rival (the Russians and Chinese) were socialized into a world where deviant behavior extending to the realm of murder was considered necessary to gain advantage. 70The national security bureaucracy at the same time prized secrecy and loyalty to one another above all else. 71son's killing coincided with some other suspicious deaths resulting from "falls."Laurence Duggan for example, chief of the Latin American Division at the State Department and a diplomatic adviser to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, died after purportedly jumping from a sixteenth-floor window in the midtown Manhattan building that housed the Institute of International Education, which he headed in December 1948.Only a few days before his fall, Duggan had been vigorously questioned by the FBI about secret contacts he maintained with Soviet intelligence agents while he worked for the State Department.The FBI also wanted to know about his relationship with another departmental employee, accused spy Alger Hiss who was about to go on trial.Armand Pastore noted: "They ruled Duggan's death a suicide too, even though he had an overcoat and one galosh on when he fell.I mean, who takes off a galosh and then decides to jump out the window?" 72James Forrestal, the former Defense Secretary plunged to his death with a cord tied around his neck after being hospitalized for mental exhaustion at the Bethesda Naval hospital.Forrestal's brother, Henry, believes his brother was murdered, as there were numerous inconsistencies in the official story and James was looking forward to release from the hospital the next day and to organizing his diaries and writing a new book, which might have exposed state secrets.Like with Olson, the case was hushed up and no thorough investigation was undertaken. 73instream historians and political scientists are reluctant to consider the possibility that the CIA or elements working within the U.S. government would engage in violent intimidation or murder to silence whistle-blowers and prevent political change.Those analysts who delve into this realm of "deep politics," like those who address the CIAs complicity in the global narcotics trade, may be labelled as conspiracy theorists and deprived choice academic appointments or tenure.However, as Peter Dale Scott points out, this ostracism stems from an engrained ideology of American exceptionalism that attributes acts of political assassination to lone gunmen and refuses to acknowledge a dark and violent underbelly of American political culture comparable to authoritarian states.Scott notes that the Kennedy assassinations, combined with the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. and other liberal heroes in the 1960s, resulted in a major conservative and geographical realignment in U.S. politics and enabled the passage of laws restricting civil liberties.This is unlikely to have been coincidental, especially in considering the contradictions in the official narrative in each case. 7472 Albarelli Jr.A Terrible Mistake, 23; "Mid Century Deaths all Linked to CIA? New Evidence in Olson Case Suggests Similarities with Other Incidents," World Net Daily, September 4, 2001, https://www.wnd.com/2001/09/10682/.Undersecretary of State Sumner Wells asked police for a complete investigation because he did not believe that it was possible Duggan had committed suicide.That he had only one galosh on suggests the other fell off in a struggle. 73See Cornell Simpson, The Death of James Forrestal (Boston: Western Islands, 1966); David Martin, The Assassination of James Forrestal (McCabe Publishing, 2017).James Forrestal's spiritual adviser, Monsignor Maurice Sheehy, told reporters that an unidentified Navy warrant officer at the hospital told him that Forrestal "didn't kill himself."Martin's account raises doubt about reports that Forrestal had gone insane beforehand.He bases his analysis on the findings of a secret Navy inquiry which previous historians ignored.Most suspiciously, Forrestal's room was tampered with after his death.It was alleged that he had transcribed a poem before his death but the poem was not in his own handwriting and the Guard on duty reported that when he looked in his room before his death he was sleeping.In December 1963, Edward Grant Stockdale, Kennedy's ambassador to Ireland who was said to have known a lot about Lyndon Baines Johnson's crony Bobby Baker's shady buildings and LBJ's possible connection to the JFK assassination, was another one to "fall" from the window of his office on the thirteenth floor of the Alfred I. Dupont building in Miami. 74Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).A newly released memo by J. Edgar Hoover gives strong evidence of a cover-up, as he wrote that: "The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so that we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin."Scott Shane, "J.F.K. Files Released, Highlighting Hoover, L.B.J.Among Others," The New York Times, October 26, 2017.The existing evidence shows that Frank Olson's killingthe possibility of a suicide was ruled out by the New York District Attorney -was also covered up and had major political significance.It helped keep secret the fact that the United States government engaged in biological warfare, unethical drug testing, chemical weapon and LSD spraying and medical experimentation, and recruited Nazi scientists.Olson's killing also prevented a potential challenge to cultural assumptions surrounding scientific wonder weapons and the use of science for nefarious purposes in the Cold War, and kept powerful people out of jail.Furthermore, it blocked potential opposition to U.S. foreign policy, which was engaging in the very evil associated with the communists.
Recent studies have pointed out that American public opinion was not uniformly supportive of huge military budgets in the early Cold War, despite large-scale efforts to condition them. 75After giving a speech in Madison Square Garden calling for worldwide prohibitions on the manufacture of atom bombs, guided missiles and military aircraft and cutting military spending to under 15 percent of the budget, then-Commerce Secretary and later presidential candidate Henry Wallace received over 10,000 letters, 81 percent of which were approving. 76Had more people known about unethical government programs like those which Olson participated in, the rhetoric of the Cold War would have been rendered hollow, and dissent could have blossomed a generation before Vietnam and Watergate.
In a press conference on August 2002, Eric Olson told the media that his father's coffin had "turned out to be a pandora's box.It's no surprise that the CIA's unethical human experiments would turn out to be linked to assassination.Once the value of human life has been cheapened, then murder lurks just around the corner.The surprising thing is that it has taken so long to make the connection.Even to historians, these two domains appeared to be discreet areas of endeavor.Now that has all changed." 77After years after searching for the truth about his father, Eric had come to recognize something important: namely that the violence of the American Century had come home, as Malcom X. once predicted ("chickens come home to roost'), and that empire was incompatible with democracy.His father was the one to pay the ultimate price. 75Robert Schaffer, "The Christian Century: Protestants Protesting Harry Truman's Cold War," Peace & Change, 42, 1, January 2017, 93-127. 76Dickson Hartwell, "The Abundant Mr. Wallace," Colliers Magazine, September 20, 1947, 113. 77Albarelli Jr.A Terrible Mistake, 699.
On the Robert Kennedy assassination, see Philip H. Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 1968-1991 (New York: S.P.I Books, 1994); and on the King case, see William Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King Jr. (London: Verso, 2003).
. Many of the allegations against Russian President Vladimir Putin fueling a New Cold War are actually unsubstantiated.Amy Knight in her book Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) cannot confirm that Putin actually killed anyone and can only speculate.
7Abby Phillips, "O'Reilly told Trump that Putin is a killer.Trump's reply: 'You think our country is so innocent?'"The Washington Post, February 4, 2017.
Olson was born in July 1910 in small town Wisconsin and studied chemistry at the University of Wisconsin where he enrolled in the University's Reserve Officer Training Program.Olson pursued his Ph.D. under the direction of Dr. Ira L. Baldwin, an agricultural bacteriologist appointed Ft.Detrick's first scientific director in 1942.He recruited Olson to work first at the Edgewood Chemical Warfare Arsenal and then at Ft. Detrick, one of the biggest biological laboratories ever built named in honor of Captain Frederick L. Detrick, flight surgeon of the 104st Aero squadron and faculty member at John Hopkins medical school.
Thomas, Secrets and Lies, 47, 51. 33e, Korea, 174, 175.The latter memo was removed from the National Archives Record Group 218 with 1431 declassified documents in 2006 as part of what The Washington Post called a "secret government program to disappear historical documents from public view." 34n Butler, The Red Dean of Canterbury: The Public and Private Faces of Hewlett Johnson (London: Scale Arts Publishing, 2011), 196-202; See Stephen L. Endicott, James G. Endicott: Rebel Out of China (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett, ed.George Burchett and Nick Shimmin (Australia: University of New South Wales Press, 2005), 403, 406; Burchett,This Monstrous War, 237-245.In July 1952, Dr. Hewlett Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury in England, reported that he had seen evidence of germ warfare in China, though was dismissed as an "aged cockatoo of communism" and "wicked and irresponsible old man."Histestimonydovetailed,however, with observations by Canadian Reverend James G. Endicott and Australian journalist Wilfred G. Burchett, who interviewed peasants in Chukdong on the Chinese border who discovered clumps of flies and mosquitoes unnatural to the area and found mosquitoes when the area was under heavy snow.35StephenEndicottandEdwardHagerman,The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (Indiana University Press, 1989), 194; Commission of International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea, March 31, 1952, Pyongyang, Korea, www.wwpep.org/index/Resources_files/crime.pdf;TomBuchanen,"TheCourage of Galileo: Joseph Needham and the Germ Warfare Allegations in the Korean War," The Historical Association, 2011, http://www.csupomona.edu/~zywang/needham.pdf.British soldiers witnessed a team of men in gas masks placing feathers around a small village which may have been laced with anthrax.36DiarmuidJeffreys,"DirtyLittle Secrets: Al Jazeera Investigates the Claim that the U.S. Used Germ Warfare During the Korean War," Al Jazeera, April 4, 2010; Thomas, Secrets & Lies; Thomas Powell, "Biological Warfare in the Korean War: Allegations and Cover-Up," Socialism and Democracy, 31, 1 (2017), 23-42.37StephenL. Endicott, "Germ Warfare and 'Plausible Denial:' The Korean War, 1952-1953," Modern China, 5, 1 (January 1979), 93.