CONT'D" IT DIDN'T START WITH ABU GHRAIB

CONT'D: IT DIDN'T START WITH ABU GHRAIB
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/3244cheney_olson_case.html

Dick Cheney continued to be a central player in the White House efforts to bury the Frank Olson story. On Aug. 4, 1975, Roderick Hills wrote another memo to Cheney, warning, "The attorneys for the Olson family are pushing very hard for information and are claiming a lack of cooperation with the CIA and DOD. I cannot be certain, of course, but it appears to me that they have been increasingly belligerent.... Accordingly, I believe that sometime in the next week or two we should attempt to contact the attorneys with the help of the Attorney General or perhaps through an intermediary (Mitch Rogovin, Special Counsel to the CIA has a partner at Arnold and Porter who is quite close to the Olson children) to see if a settlement might not be arranged."

Three days later, on Aug. 7, 1975, Mitchell Rogovin, Special Counsel to the Director of the CIA, wrote to Director Colby, reporting on his attempts to negotiate a settlement with Olson family attorney David Kairys. "David Kairys, the attorney for the Olson family, called this afternoon somewhat distressed," Rogovin wrote. "The family has reviewed the materials we had made available and appears to believe that Frank Olson was killed by the CIA. Their theory is bottomed on the assumption that Frank Olson was a security risk. Kairys says that the file seems to be more concerned about security than how Olson actually died." The memo itemized all of the questions raised by the family, after reviewing the CIA documents, and noted, ominously: "Kairys insists that the family wants to know what happened to Frank Olson. To facilitate this lack of information from the files, Kairys wants to take sworn depositions of CIA people as well as Lashbrook, Abramson, and Gottlieb."

"Abramson" referred to Dr. Harold Abramson, an allergist, who was secretly employed by the CIA in its experiments on LSD and other mind-altering drugs. Following Frank Olson's drugging on LSD at Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland on Nov. 19, 1953, he was brought by CIA official Lashbrook to New York, for "psychiatric" treatment by Dr. Abramson—who had no psychiatric training or degree.

"Gottlieb" referred to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the chief chemist of the CIA's Technical Services Staff, and the head of Project MKULTRA, one of the CIA's psychological warfare research and development projects, to develop "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything." Dr. Gottlieb was the person who covertly administered the LSD to Olson at Deep Creek Lake.

On Oct. 29, 1975, CIA Director William E. Colby wrote to President Ford, complaining that the Justice Department was balking at a private settlement with the Olson family, on the grounds that attorneys there believed the Government would win a law suit. "Under the circumstances," Colby wrote, "this would not appear to be in the best interests of the nation or the Olson family. I believe in good conscience that the circumstances of this case require an equitable response from the government." Colby recommended that the family be paid $1,250,000 through a private bill in the Congress.

Two days after writing the letter to President Ford, Bill Colby was fired as CIA Director in what came to be known as the "Halloween Massacre." Colby was replaced by George H.W. Bush as CIA Director. As for Dick Cheney, when his mentor and boss, Don Rumsfeld was named as Secretary of Defense, he was promoted to White House Chief of Staff, where he would continue to preside over the coverup of the death of Frank Olson.

It would take two more years for the Government to reach a settlement with the Olson family. When a private bill was finally introduced into the Congress, Rep. John T. Rousselot (R-Calif.) objected, and insisted that the deal be renegotiated. One year later, in Autumn 1977, the Olson family agreed to accept half the amount—$750,000—to close this sad and frustrating chapter in their lives.

Apart from his role in cutting back the Olson family's compensation payment, Rousselot earned another footnote in the Olson saga. In a contentious meeting with members of the Olson family, the Congressman blurted out that the family should not expect any special payments from the goverment, because "when someone works for the CIA, they know they are taking risks." Up until that point, no government official had bothered to tell the Olsons that Frank Olson had, indeed, been a CIA agent.
Eric Olson's Quest for the Truth

In a Nov. 2, 2005 interview with this author, Eric Olson recalled that he was so frustrated by the events of 1975-77, that he spent the better part of the next 14 years living in Sweden. However, the distance from his home town of Frederick, Md., also enabled him to put the pieces in place, and chart out a course of action that would lead him closer and closer to the truth about his father's life and death. In 1984, he returned briefly to Washington and convinced his mother and brother (his sister had died in a tragic plane crash, along with her husband and child, in 1978) to launch their own investigation into what had really happened to Frank Olson. Eric and his mother contacted Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, now retired from the CIA, and living in Culpeper, Va., and Col. Vincent Ruwet, Frank Olson's immediate boss at the U.S. Army's Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick. They demanded to meet in person with the two men, and with others who had knowledge of the death of Frank Olson.

Gottlieb agreed to meet with the Olsons. Eric recalls that as he and his mother, Alice, arrived at the front porch of Dr. Gottlieb's home, the ex-CIA scientist greeted them: "I am so relieved you didn't have a gun and shoot me on the porch." It was an unnerving start to a frustrating discussion.

The conversation with Colonel Ruwet was even more frustrating, because the retired Army chemist had been one of Frank Olson's closest and most trusted friends. Ruwet refused to give the family any information, even though the CIA documents provided to the family back in 1975 had clearly identified Col. Ruwet as being on the scene for all but the final 72 hours of Frank Olson's life.

In a visit a few weeks later to California, to meet with the man who had supposedly been asleep in the same room when Frank Olson took his plunge from the 13th floor of the Statler Hotel, a critical piece of information slipped out. Dr. Robert Lashbrook nervously admitted that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKULTRA, had been in New York during the entire time that Lashbrook and Olson were there, presumably getting psychiatric help from the allergist and CIA LSD experimenter, Dr. Abramson.

Before returning to Europe, Eric Olson made one final trip with his mother and brother. They went to Delaware to interview the night manager of the Statler Hotel who had been the first person on the scene to try to save Frank Olson after his plunge from room 1018A. Armand Pastore confirmed what Olson already suspected: The account provided by Dr. Lashbrook was "impossible."

Pastore told Olson that his father had still been alive when he rushed out to the front of the Statler Hotel after hearing a crash on the sidewalk. He also told Olson something that deepened Eric Olson's suspicion that his father had been murdered. Within moments of Frank Olson's plunge out the window, Dr. Lashbrook had placed a phone call to a number on Long Island. It was the home of Dr. Abramson. A switchboard operator at the Statler listened in on the brief conversation. Lashbrook said, "He's gone." Abramson replied, "That's too bad."

Pastore added that when he ushered police up to room 1018A, they found Lashbrook seated on the toilet. He had made no effort to call the police, and had not even rushed down to the sidewalk to see if Olson was dead or alive.
The New Autopsy

In 1993, Alice Olson died. Eric Olson returned to America, at this point resolved that he would devote almost every waking moment to getting to the bottom of his father's death. One of the first things Eric did, with the support of his younger brother, Nils, was to contact Dr. James Starrs, a noted forensic pathologist at the George Washington University Medical Center. The Olson brothers asked Dr. Starrs, who was a friend of the family, to assemble a team to conduct an exhumation and new, thorough autopsy on Frank Olson—nearly 41 years after his burial. The Olsons hoped that new breakthroughs in forensic pathology might shed light on the circumstances surrounding their father's death. They proved to be right.

Dr. Starrs agreed to assemble a team of experts, to carry out the exhumation and autopsy. On June 2, 1994, the body of Frank Olson was exhumed and brought to a nearby university laboratory. Dr. Starr's 15-person team spent months, conducting laboratory tests and field investigations. They sent out investigators to interview Dr. Gottlieb, Dr. Lashbrook, Colonel Ruwet, Armand Pastore, and others with information relevant to the reopened forensic probe. In 2005, Dr. Starrs wrote a book, A Voice for the Dead, recounting the Olson investigation and a number of other dramatic cases in which he participated.

From the very outset, it was clear to Dr. Starrs' team that there had been a coverup of the circumstances surrounding Frank Olson's death. First, back in 1953, the family had been urged by Olson's colleagues to bury him in a sealed coffin, because the body was "too gruesome" to look at, because of injuries from the ten-story fall. That was a flat-out lie. Second, it turned out that the New York City Coroner had been, in his own words, "taken in" by Dr. Lashbrook, and had not performed a serious autopsy at the time, assuming that there was no dispute about what had happened. It was, according to Lashbrook, an open and shut case of suicide. Dr. Olson had jumped through the closed 13th-floor hotel window. Dr. Dominic DiMaio, who later became the Chief Coroner of Manhattan, told Dr. Starrs's team that he had considered reopening the Olson case himself after the Rockefeller Commission report. But he never followed through.

Through computer simulations and other new techniques, Dr. Starrs's team recreated the fall, and concluded that Dr. Lashbrook's claim that Olson had plunged through the closed window could not have been true. Most important, Dr. Starrs found a severe hematoma above Frank Olson's left eye, which most likely came from a blow from a blunt instrument. It was certainly not the result of the fall.

On Nov. 28, 1994, 41 years to the day after Frank Olson's death, Dr. Starrs and his team held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to release their findings. Speaking for the majority of his team members and for himself, Dr. Starrs described the death of Frank Olson as "homicide deft, deliberate, and diabolical."
The Mysterious Death of William Colby

On the strength of the new forensic evidence, the Olson brothers hired attorney Harry Huge to take the Frank Olson case to the Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau. Huge's 15-page memo, dated May 12, 1995, summarized the Starrs findings, and itemized a string of anomalies in the case, which could only be solved through a criminal probe, which would allow for witnesses and documents to be subpoenaed. Finally, on April 19, 1996, the District Attorney informed Huge that a grand jury would be empaneled to probe Frank Olson's death. Two Assistant District Attorneys from the Manhattan DA's "cold case" squad, Steve Saracco and Daniel Bibb, were assigned to reopen the case as a potential homicide.

Several days into the reopened investigation, Saracco and Bibb sent a letter to the Central Intelligence Agency, requesting all CIA documents pertaining to the Olson death, and indicating that they wished to arrange to interview a number of former Agency officials about the death of Frank Olson. Among the ex-CIA people listed in the request were: Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Dr. Robert Lashbrook, and former Director William Colby. The investigators also sought to interview Col. Vincent Ruwet.

The meeting with Colby never took place. Within a matter of days, William Colby was dead, the victim of a bizarre canoeing "accident" that has left many people, Colby's wife Sally Shelton Colby included, perplexed.

According to news accounts, on the evening of April 27, 1996, William Colby was alone at his home in Rockpoint, Md. He left the home, supposedly to take an evening canoeing trip on the nearby Wiconico River. Uncharacteristically, he left a partially eaten dinner and a glass of wine on the table, and left his computer running. When his body was found a week later on May 6, he was not wearing a life vest. Friends and neighbors later told authorities that Colby was a meticulous boater, who never took out his canoe without his life vest on. The vest was subsequently found 20 yards away from where the canoe was discovered.

Medical examiners concluded, without a scintilla of proof, that Colby had suffered a heart attack or a stroke, while canoeing, and had drowned. An intial Associated Press story had claimed that Colby had called his wife, who was travelling in Texas, and told her that he was not feeling well, "but that he was going canoeing anyway." An angry Sally Shelton Colby refuted the story in every detail. She had spoken to her husband shortly before he left the house, but he had said nothing about any nocturnal canoeing and had not said he was feeling ill.

The actual circumstances surrounding the death of William Colby may never be clarified. But there is no question that his untimely death came shortly after the letter arrived, asking for an interview on his recollections of the Frank Olson case. A close friend and former Vietnam-era aide to Colby, John DeCamp, confirmed to this author that Colby had spoken to him, on numerous occasions about the mind control experiments of the U.S. Government, and had encouraged him to pursue his own investigations, first as a Nebraska State Senator, and later as a private attorney.

Ironically, in 1993, through a mutual friend, Eric Olson had received a cryptic message from Bill Colby. Colby said simply that if Eric had any questions about the circumstances surrounding the death of his father, he should give him a call. Cynical that anyone from the CIA would ever tell him the truth, Eric Olson had passed up the opportunity, and Colby took what he knew about the Olson case to his untimely grave.
1997

Two further dramatic breaks in the Olson saga came in 1997. Eric Olson found out that an Irish author, Gordon Thomas, had written a book in 1989 that contained some startling new information about the Cold Creek Lake meeting where Dr. Gottlieb had spiked his father's glass of Cointreau with LSD. According to Thomas's Journey Into Madness—The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse, the third CIA official in attendance, along with Doctors Gottlieb and Lashbrook, was Richard Helms. At the time, Helms was chief of operations for the CIA's Directorate of Plans, the covert action section. He would later be named CIA Director, and, in that capacity, he would order the shredding of the entire CIA file on the mind control experiments.

As Thomas reported on page 160, "The first three days of the [Cold Creek Lake] seminar passed uneventfully, with Dr. Olson explaining and demonstrating, and Richard Helms, Dr. Gottlieb and his assistant, Dr. Richard Lashbrook, listening...."

If, as the CIA claimed, the Cold Creek Lake session was a routine annual review session between CIA officials and their counterparts at the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army Chemical Corp at Fort Detrick, what was Helms, the boss of CIA covert operations, doing there?

On Nov. 30, 1998, after a year of correspondence, author Gordon Thomas sent a memorandum to Eric Olson, explaining how he came to learn this previously undisclosed, critical detail about the Cold Creek Lake gathering. He identified two men, whom he had come to know very well, as his confidential sources on Helms's presence at Cold Creek Lake: Dr. William Sargant, a