by David Wayne
In conclusion, I would have the distinguished prosecutor ponder two quotes:
“Let General de Pellieux allow me respectfully to point out that a piece of evidence, whatever it may be, cannot have any value and cannot constitute scientific proof before it has been subjected to cross-examination...”
—Fernand Labori, defense attorney at the trial of Emile Zola. Paris, February 17, 1898
And finally: “There is a certain nobility about facing up to the truth... ”
—Oxford scholar Richard Dawkins
P.S. I highly recommend Josiah Thompson’s masterpiece Six Seconds In Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination, published by Bernard Geis Associates, distributed by Random House, 1967; The Oswald Affair - An Examination of the Contradictions and Omissions of The Warren Report, by Leo Sauvage, published by The World Publishing Company, 1966; and the most compelling, incredibly revelatory book ever written about the murder and all its labyrinthine logistics and mysteries, Ultimate Sacrifice, by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, published by Carrol & Graf, 1966.
Conspiratorially Yours,
RICHARD BELZER
INTRODUCTION BY DAVID WAYNE
Governments tell lies, and most of us are learning to look at that as a reality. Forensic evidence stands in stark contrast, exhibiting the signposts of truth in a mute testimony that is almost timeless.
Those who commit crimes—be they governments, mobsters, or maniacs—inevitably make mistakes. And it’s the evidence—in its silent but relentless integrity—which proves that which actually took place.
Even at its ugliest, evidence is somehow comforting, even beautiful: purplish bruises (known technically as lividity marks) telling us that a body was moved post-mortem; dried vomit that ran up a cheek, informing us that the victim wasn’t standing or sitting at the time of death and that any drugs involved were not fully ingested.
Evidentiary findings serve as a fixed beacon from which to navigate the shifting sands of time. They are of such significance that even what is missing helps us to solve the puzzle: An absence of sufficient blood determines what could not have happened at a crime scene; a stomach without refractive crystals screams to us that the victim could not have swallowed the drugs.
So, if you still believe that Marilyn Monroe overdosed on pills, or that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered JFK, or that Sirhan Bishara Sirhan killed Senator Robert Kennedy, then you better keep reading. In fact, you owe it to yourself as a witness to history. All the aforementioned allegations are quite literally impossible. If at first glance that seems arrogant, then just read those three chapters—it won’t seem so after you have; for it is not a matter of opinions—those are the conclusions that the evidence necessitates. Examine the facts fairly and you will reach the same conclusions. Former FBI Special Agent Zack Shelton, whose excellent investigative summary, The Shelton Report, appears exclusively in our JFK chapter, summed up our work ethic best:
“I don’t have any theories. All I have are the facts.”
We include two types of entries: deaths that were alleged to be suicides or were originally ruled suicides, but have so many suspicious circumstances that they appear to have been murders; and deaths that were known to be murders but have so many irreconcilable issues that something is clearly amiss. In some cases, they were obvious: shooting oneself in the head five times with a bolt-action rifle is a bit of a stretch to term a suicide—even in Texas. In others, the flawed official reasoning was more subtle but, upon examination, every bit as clear.
In some chapters, we provide a brief summary of the major thinking that has developed regarding a specific death or assassination. Therefore, please note in sections following the subtitle “possible scenarios” that we at times may be leaving the field of facts and entering the arena of speculation—two very different places—and that we do not necessarily subscribe to a particular viewpoint.
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
▸ World War Two
The “sweeping up” by the Allies following the fall of Nazi Germany includes Operation Dustbin, Operation Trashcan, and Operation Paperclip. The Allies perceived that both Russia and China were already enemies. Some generals recommended continuing on from Berlin to Moscow in order to keep Eastern Europe from going Communist, while other generals counseled that land wars in Asia were unwinnable (wisdom that the U.S. later ignored in its wars against Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia, Iraq & Afghanistan).
Therefore, a contest ensued to capture the best of Nazi technology for use in the coming Cold War.
▸ Operation Paperclip
Operation Paperclip “saved” Nazi scientists. It was a mission to determine those scientists of value to the West in the Cold War. We interviewed Nazi scientists, including those who had conducted experimentation on human subjects in concentration camps such as Dachau, to determine what research was of value and potential use. One of these men was the infamous Kurt Blome. They were shielded from conviction at the Nuremberg war trials (although the evidence against them was substantial and they were clearly Nazi war criminals) and they were quite literally “rescued” from the gallows in exchange for their help with U.S. research programs.
▸ Operation Artichoke
Artichoke continued where the research had left off in Nazi Germany, and Kurt Blome worked with the scientists on the program. Frank Olson, as Acting Director of CIA Special Operations Division, oversaw the work of this program. Artichoke largely dealt with mind-control techniques and brutal interrogation methods often ending in the death of what the CIA termed “expendables” (prisoners, suspected double agents, etc.). Olson witnessed these interrogations and apparently considered them immoral and very disturbin
g. “Tests” under Artichoke included combinations of hypnosis, torture, LSD and other hallucinogens, and “mind-opening” and “tongue-loosening” agents. These tests were in the direction of mind-control, maneuvering subjects into controllable states to manufacture “Manchurian candidates” (programmed killers) or, in the case of interrogations, will-less subjects who became totally compliant. Tests sometimes left victims in vegetative states and were other times fatal.
▸ Use of BW (Bacteriological Warfare) against North Korea
Top secret order JCS 1837/26 dated September 21, 1951, from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Command clearly authorized the “field testing” of anthrax weapons and there is evidence that testing was conducted on the civilian population of North Korea.10 Eyewitnesses to the testing verify the reports.11
