by David Wayne
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.
Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. It will be more reliable if the assassin can arrange to attempt rescue, as he can thus be sure of the subject’s death and at the same time establish a workable alibi.
If the subject’s personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used [2 words excised] to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.
Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.
“ … evidence from 1953 demonstrates a concerted pattern of concealment and deception on the part of those persons and agencies most closely associated with—and most likely to be accountable for—a homicide most foul in the death of Dr. Olson … The confluence of scientific fact and investigative fact points unerringly to the death of Frank Olson as being a homicide, deft, deliberate, and diabolical.”21
Olson’s son, Eric Olson, who is Director of The Frank Olson Legacy Project and has literally spent decades researching the circumstances of his father’s death, deserves the last word here and, frankly, no one could put it more eloquently:
“What this means for me is that a national security homicide is not only a possibility, but really it is a necessity, when you have a certain number of ingredients together. If you are doing top secret work that is immoral, arguably immoral, especially in the post-Nuremberg period, and arguably illegal, and at odds with the kind of high moral position you are trying to maintain in the world, then you have to have a mechanism of security which is going to include murder.”22
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments; H. P. Albaselli Js.; 2009, TrineDay.
The Biology of Doom: The History of America’s Secret Germ Warfare Project, Ed Regis, 2000.
The Men Who Stare at Goats, Jon Ronson, 2005.
Code Name: Artichoke; The CIA’s Secret Experiments on Humans, film by Egmont R. Koch & Michael Wech, 2002, http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/code-name-/chdr-name-artichoke/.
“The Frank Olson Legacy Project,” http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Contents.html.
“LSD, Murder and the CIA: Frank Olson, Enemy Combatant,” David Swanson, Counterpunch, March 26-28, 2010.
“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.
“The Case of Frank Olson,” Olives Boothby, February 11, 1996: http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Student%20papers/Oliver.html.
“Frank Olson: Did a government scientist jump to his death from a New York hotel? Or was he pushed?,” Unsolved.com http://www.uncolved.com/ajaxfiles/une_frank_ olson.htm.
“Rumsfeld & Cheney’s Dirty Little Spy Secret,” Fintan Dunne, Editor, GuluFuture.com, March 6, 2006, http://www.apfn.nrt/messageboard/03-06-06/discussion.cgi.31.html.
* * *
7 James E. Starrs with Katherine Ramsland, A Voice for the Dead: A Forensic Investigator’s Pursuit of the Truth in the Grave (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005).
8 David Swanson, “LSD, Murder and the CIA: Frank Olson, Enemy Combatant,” Counterpunch, 26-28 Mar. 2010.
9 H. P. Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments (TrineDay, 2011).
10 Joint Chiefs of Staff 1837/26, “Biological Warfare: Memorandum by the Joint Advanced Study Committee for the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” 21 September 1951, Combined Chiefs of Staff 385.2, sec. 13, RG 330, NARA: JCS 1837/26, “Statements of Policy and Directives on Biological Warfare,” 3 July 1952, Combined Chiefs of Staff 385.2, sec. 15, RG 273.
11 Stephen Endicott & Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea, Indiana University Press, 1998.
12 Walker M. Mahurin, Honest John: The Autobiography of Walker M. Mahurin, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962).
13 Amy Goodman, “An Inside Look at How U.S. Interrogators Destroyed the Mind of Jose Padilla,” August 16, 2007, DemocracyNow.org, http://www.democracynow.org/2007/8/16/exclusive_an_inside_look_at_how (accessed 14 May 2011).
14 Unsolved.com, “Frank Olson: Did a government scientist jump to his death from a New York Hotel? Or was he pushed?,”
http://www.unsolved.com/ajaxfiles/une_frank_olson.htm (accessed 2 Feb. 2011).
15 Stephen Endicott, “Memo from Stephen Endicott, Professor of History, York University, analyzing the documents obtained by the Olson family from CIA Director William Colby in June 1975,” FrankOlsonProject.org, February 4, 1999, http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Sources/Notes%20on%20items%20&%20events/Endicott-Analysis.html (accessed 16 Feb. 2011).
16 Unsolved.com, “Frank Olson: Did a government scientist jump to his death from a New York Hotel? Or was he pushed?,”
http://www.unsolved.com/ajaxfiles/une_frank_olson.htm (accessed 2 Feb. 2011).
17 Gordon Thomas, “Scientist was ‘killed to stop him revealing death secrets’; So did Cheney and Rumsfeld cover up a CIA assassination?” London Sunday Express, August 25, 2002, http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/LondonExpress.html (accessed 14 Jan. 2011).
18 Gordon Thomas, “Scientist was ‘killed to stop him revealing death secrets’; So did Cheney and Rumsfeld cover up a CIA assassination?” London Sunday Express, August 25, 2002, http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/LondonExpress.html (accessed 14 Jan. 2011).
19 Serendipity, “The Frank Olson Murder,” http://www.serendipity.li/cia/olson2.htm (accessed 14 May 2011).
20 Central Intelligence Agency, A Study of Assassination, 1954 (National Security Archive Center, Washington University), Released via Freedom of Information Act, May 23, 1997.
21 Starrs with Ramsland, A Voice for the Dead.
22 Code Name: Artichoke; The CIA’s Secret Experiments on Humans, film by Egmont R. Koch & Michael Wech, 2002, http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/code-name-artichoke/.
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 i
ndicating 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.
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.”
Inconsistencies 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.
Henry Marshall —
June 3, 1961
Inspector, U.S. Department of
Agriculture
Spartacus Educational, www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmarshallH.htm
* * *
VICTIM:
HENRY MARSHALL
* * *
Cause of Death:
Five gunshots from a bolt action rifle.
* * *
Official Verdict:
“SUICIDE” (ruling by County Sheriff Howard Stegall and Justice of the Peace Lee Farmer, who ordered the body to be buried without an autopsy)
Actual Circumstances:
Investigator for U.S. Department of Agriculture, who uncovered vast financial scam being run by Billie Sol Estes and linked to Lyndon Johnson in Texas. Estes later testified that Johnson had ordered Marshall killed, using hit man Mac Wallace.
* * *
Inconsistencies:
1. Initial death ruling never even addressed the impossibility of a person shooting himself five separate times with a bolt-action rifle.
2. The rifle was never checked for fingerprints; nor was Marshall’s pickup truck, which his corpse was found laying beside.
3. No samples were taken of the blood stains on the truck and it was washed and waxed the following day.
4. No photographs were taken of the crime scene.
5. A Grand Jury later ruled that Marshall’s body be exhumed and an autopsy revealed that he had suffered a severe blow to the head prior to his death and that his body contained a carbon monoxide concentration of fifteen percent. The doctor performing the autopsy estimated that the carbon monoxide concentration at the time of death was as high as thirty percent.
* * *
It may shock some to learn that Lyndon B. Johnson, the thirty-sixth President of the United States, was also apparently a mass murderer … but he was. Henry Marshall was one of several victims whom Johnson reportedly ordered his henchman, Mac Wallace, to murder.
Incredibly, the fact that Henry Marshall was shot five times with a bolt-action rifle did not preclude an official death verdict of “suicide.” Think about that one for awhile. ...
President Lyndon B. Johnson was, by many accounts, one of our most ruthless politicians, and his path to the presidency was littered with dead bodies and highly questionable circumstances. None was more obvious than Agricultural Inspector Henry Marshall, who had uncovered a huge financial scandal leading directly to LBJ’s doorstep.
Marshall, in his capacity as a U.S. Department of Agriculture Investigator, saw through a false paper trail and uncovered the fact that Billie Sol Estes was receiving millions of dollars in federal agricultural subsidies for crops of cotton that were non-existent. The profits raked in from the scheme represented a major source of Lyndon Johnson’s political funding.
One thing tha
t can, however, be said of Lyndon Johnson, is that he attempted simpler solutions prior to employing the use of murder. When Marshall got too close to the big financial scam that Johnson’s associate Billie Sol Estes was running, Johnson apparently arranged for a fat promotion for Marshall to the Washington, D.C. office of the Department of Agriculture. Perceiving it as a bribe, Marshall refused the promotion and continued his efforts to prosecute the corruption he had discovered. That refusal was apparently tantamount to signing his death warrant.
Billie Sol Estes has testified that he had a meeting with Lyndon Johnson and his closest associates, Cliff Carter and Ed Clark, on January 17, 1961, and the purpose was to discuss what to do about Marshall, since he refused the promotion to Washington. Lyndon Johnson reportedly made the decision: “It looks like we’ll just have to get rid of him.”23 It was also decided at that meeting that the assignment was to be given to Mac Wallace, who was a hit man used by Johnson.
On June 3, 1961, Marshall was found dead next to his pickup truck on a remote portion of his farm.
Early in 1962, several months after Henry Marshall’s death, Billie Sol Estes was arrested by the FBI and officially charged with fraud and conspiracy. That arrest inspired the Robertson County Grand Jury to order that the body of Marshall be exhumed and autopsied. The autopsy revealed that Marshall had suffered a severe blow to the head prior to his death and had an extremely high level of carbon monoxide in his body prior to the gunshots. The suicide ruling was overturned.
