Reply #36: The Secret Sharers: The CIA, the Bush Gang and the Killing of Frank Olson

[Octafish]

If I didn't like what he's writing, I'd say young Floyd uses too many darn adjectives.

Oh yeah. It's another missing jewel the Bush Crime Family seems to have missed in the accounting.

The Secret Sharers
The CIA, the Bush Gang and
the Killing of Frank Olson

by Chris Floyd
August 28, 2002

EXCERPT...

Keeping the Faith

Washington, 1975. It was a long hot summer of discontent in the White House. The unelected president, Gerald Ford--who'd taken office after the resignation of Richard Nixon--was raging. Every day seemed to bring fresh horrors from the Congressional committees investigating America's intelligence agencies. Assassination plots, terrorist acts, coups, secret armies, subversion of allied governments, Mafia connections, torture, press manipulation, domestic surveillance--the revelations were endless, a bottomless pit of corruption and criminality being dredged up by the House and Senate panels.

Where was their sense of duty, the code of omerta that had for so long protected those who toil in the shadows, who do the dirty work to keep America fat and safe and happy? What right did these mere senators and representatives have to tell the people--the big dumb dazed mobocracy out there--the truth about what their leaders were doing in their name? They were like children, they could never understand the higher wisdom that guided the elites. Oh, it was a far cry from the old days, back on the Warren Commission, when a good soldier like Jerry Ford knew just what to do: you accepted whatever the agencies told you, and you steered investigations away from anything that might break the code and pierce the shadows.

So Ford seethed. What the hell is wrong over there at the CIA, he complained to his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld. Why couldn't Bill Colby, the director, keep a lid on things? Colby had even come clean about Operation Phoenix, for Christ's sake. More than 20,000 Vietnamese murdered in the CIA-run program--did Joe Lunchbucket really need to know about that?

What next? Are they going to find about Reinhard Gehlen, too: the Nazi spy who joined the CIA and recruited thousands of Hitler's best and brightest--including Klaus Barbie and a cadre of SS veterans--to work for the Agency? Sure, it would look bad, but come on: Gehlen was championed by Allen Dulles himself--the founding father of the CIA, the hotshot lawyer who kept Prescott Bush's name out of the papers when Pres was caught trading with the Nazis in 1942. Dulles and those Yale boys knew what was best--but try explaining that to some poor schmuck whose father got killed at Normandy or Auschwitz or some other godforsaken hole, eh?

As it happened, the "Gehlen Organization" stayed secret for another 26 years. But in July 1975, Ford had still more worries. A top White House aide, Dick Cheney, sent a memo to Rumsfeld, warning him about an upcoming lawsuit. The family of Frank Olson had found out--through the Congressional investigations--that he had been secretly drugged by the CIA not long before he took that fall from the hotel window. Now they were suing the government for damages.

The lawsuit could be bad business, Cheney told Rumsfeld. "It might be necessary to disclose highly classified national security information" during the trial. That would include the truth about Olson: the CIA connection, biochemical weapons, the mind-control and torture experiments based on Nazi death-camp "research," and the Agency fingerprints all over Olson's last days in New York City. The case might even reveal the existence of special "CIA Assassination Manuals," like the one issued in the year of Olson's death, 1953, stating: "The most efficient accident, in simple assassinations, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. , it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him."

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd0828.html

Thank you for the kind words, sfexpat2000. Your friendship means the world to me.