CIA Hushes Up Anthrax Scandal

August 13, 2002
Billy Cox

With the FBI on the trail of missing, weapons-grade anthrax and former government bio-lab scientist Steven Hatfill claiming to be the victim of an Orwellian setup, there's only one thing anybody can be sure of: The genie left the bottle a long time ago. And it's insane to think anyone -- least of all Uncle Sam -- is going to accept any accountability for this stinking mess.

Last Thursday, in a remarkable press conference not nearly as extensively covered as Hatfill's brief media debut, the son of the man who once ran the special-operations division for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute in Fort Detrick, Md., revived a Cold War scandal that could've been soundtracked by The Who's sardonic "Won't Get Fooled Again." Among the documents touted by 57-year-old Eric Olson as additional proof of the long-standing cover-up was a letter from Dick Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld -- from 1975.

"The disinformation campaign was brilliant," Olson said several days later by phone from Maryland. "Everyone was focused on my father's death as a mind-control story, which it never was. This was about biological warfare. My father's specialty was the aerosol delivery of anthrax."

Much has been written and broadcast about the controversial last days of a troubled Frank Olson. When he crashed to his death from the 10th floor of a New York City hotel in 1953, police immediately logged it as a suicide. But one of the first skeptics was Armond Pastore, now 82 years old and living in Suntree. Pastore, the erstwhile night manager of the Pennsylvania Hotel, was the first to approach Olson's broken body. He'd seen jumpers before, but this one was completely different. "Suicides," he reasoned, "don't jump through glass." Pastore concluded the fix was in when no one bothered to interview him about what he saw that night.

The Olson family nursed its doubts in silence until the 1975 Rockefeller committee hearings into CIA abuses. To their surprise, they learned, among other things, that an unnamed scientist had leaped from a New York hotel room in '53 after being given LSD without his knowledge. The Olsons connected the dots and held a press conference threatening legal action against the CIA. They were promptly summoned to the White House by President Ford, issued a public apology for a misfired mind-control experiment, and awarded a $750,000 settlement to relinquish all claims against the government.

Still, the family never fully bought the story that Frank Olson died from a surreptitious LSD trip. In 1994, his body was exhumed and a forensics expert determined Olson couldn't have burst through the window by himself. By 1995, the Manhattan district attorney was investigating for homicide. And later, compelling memos began surfacing, including a correspondence from then-White House assistant Dick Cheney to Chief of Staff Rumsfeld, dated July 11, 1975 (one day after the Olsons held their press conference): A lawsuit could ignite "the possibility that it might be necessary to disclose highly classified national-security information in connection with any court suit or legislative hearings on a private bill."

Eric Olson says his family accepted a payoff without knowing the big picture, which he says emerged only recently through snippets of documentation and a retired agency veteran. At a time when the United States was publicly disavowing the use of biological weapons, the CIA was employing them in Europe and Korea, most notably during "terminal interrogations," Eric Olson contends.

"The cover-up was about the close compatibility between biological weapons -- which are cheap, portable and deniable -- and covert operations. My father was very patriotic, he was very religious," he insists. "I doubt he was going to be a whistleblower in a conventional sense -- what, talk about biological weapons during the Korean War? But he was facing a real moral crisis. He told them he was going to quit on Monday, and by Friday, he was dead."

Ultimately, Eric Olson says he was naive to think the district attorney, who has since dropped the case, would press a full-fledged murder prosecution. "No DA in the country, in New York or anywhere else, is going to indict an intelligence agency for murder," he says. "It just isn't going to happen."

Thus, last week, after proving to his satisfaction his father was whacked by his own people, Eric Olson reburied his dad's remains. "There's nothing more I can do. I've got to get on with my life."

In response, a CIA spokesman told a West Coast newspaper the agency "fully cooperated" with Rockefeller during the Frank Olson inquiry. He suggested any new evidence be forwarded to "appropriate authorities."

http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/columnstoryA26753A.htm