NOTE: I will be speaking today and tomorrow at the Ron Paul Institute’s annual conference on America’s warfare state, which this year is being held at the The Westin Washington Dulles Airport. The theme of the conference is “Anatomy of a Police State.” For details, see this blog post. If you can make it, I am sure you’ll be happy you did. If you do attend, please come up and say hello. Register here. — Jacob
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The title of an article in Newsweek yesterday makes an interesting point: “Russians Keep Mysteriously Falling from Windows to Their Deaths.” Newsweek wonders why that is happening so often in Russia.
Well, maybe it’s because Russian national-security state officials have studied “A Study in Assassination,” which was a top-secret, early version of a CIA assassination manual written in 1953 and disclosed to the public in the 1990s.
The CIA’s manual details various methods of assassination, among which is throwing a person out of a high-story building and making it look like a suicide or an accident. The manual states in part:
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.
Was the CIA’s manual simply an academic exercise? Actually not. This form of assassination was actually carried out by the CIA against a man named Frank Olson. He was a CIA employee who participated in the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA program, which involved CIA drug experiments on unsuspecting Americans. Unfortunately, the CIA destroyed virtually all of its MKULTRA records when Congress got wind of the program, and so we will never know the full extent of what these people did to countless innocent people.
Olson had a crisis of conscience, which is a dangerous thing for a CIA operative to have. He was deemed a threat to national security because of the good possibility that he would disclose dark-side secrets of the national-security establishment. These secrets involved not only MKULTRA but also that the Pentagon had illegally waged germ warfare against North Korea during the Korean War.
So, they put their assassination manual to practical use. First they invited Olson to a CIA party where they drugged him with LSD without his knowledge or consent. When Olson began having psychological problems associated with the drugging, they took him to see a CIA psychiatrist in New York City. They put Olson into an upper-story hotel room to stay overnight. They then threw him out the window. The death was declared a suicide. The CIA’s dark-side secrets were now safe.
The CIA later admitted to drugging Olson and paid off the family in settlement of a lawsuit. Many years later, the Olson family, which by this time was somewhat suspicious, exhumed the body and had an autopsy conducted. The autopsy determined that Olson had a blunt force wound on his head that could not have been caused by the fall. It could only have been caused by someone hitting him in the head, thereby making it easier to throw him out the window. The courts refused to permit the Olsons to re-litigate the matter because of their previous settlement of the case.
This is what the national-security state does to people who reveal or threaten to reveal their dark-side secrets. Notwithstanding the horrific treatment that U.S. officials have meted out to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden for revealing some of the national-security establishment’s dark-side secrets, both men should be counting their lucky stars. Unlike Olson, both of them are still alive.
To learn more about what these people did to Frank Olson and his family, read my article “Watch Wormwood,” which is about a fantastic documentary about the case, which I highly recommend watching. Also, read the book: A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War by H.P. Albarelli. Read this Wikipedia entry on Olson. Finally, read this fantastic book by Stephen Kinzer: Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.
Russian national-security state officials are not dumb. They learn only from the best.