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Defenestration Row: Convenient
Suicides and State Power
Chris Floyd
Lew Rockwell.com
Thursday, March 8, 2007
This week
saw the mysterious death of yet
another journalist in Moscow. This time it was Kommersant
columnist Ivan Safronov, a former colonel who wrote about Russia's
ever-murky military affairs, as the Moscow Times reports.
Safronov, who occasionally ran afoul of the "security organs"
when digging up dirt on Russia's military-industrial complex (much
akin to its American counterpart centered in the north Virginia
badlands formerly known as Hell's Bottom but now called the Pentagon),
apparently committed suicide by jumping out of a fifth-floor window,
head first, with his hat and coat on. And if you believe that
"official" explanation, we have some beachfront property
in Nizhny Novgorod we'd like to sell you.
The Western
media is emphasizing the fact that Safronov joins a list of some
dozen other Russian journalists who have died under mysterious
circumstances during the presidency of Vladimir Putin (including
real journalists like
Anna Politkovskaya and shadowland
operatives like Alexander Litvinenko). Although this number
is but a fraction of the
death toll of journalists in George W. Bush's satrapy of Iraq,
it is of course a disturbing figure.
But let's
not pretend that this kind of thing began under Putin's reign,
with its Bush-like concern for stifling dissent and concentrating
power in the name of national security. Scribal life was also
cheap during the merry misrule of that
unquenchable favorite of Western governments, Boris Yeltsin.
(In fact, everyone's life was pretty cheap in those glorious,
gangterish days of yore. And as for anti-democratic draconia,
Putin has yet to do anything remotely as radically authoritarian
as shelling the democratically elected Duma with tanks and muscling
through a dubious (and probably bogus) referendum granting himself
and future presidents the wide-ranging powers that Putin now employs
with considerably greater skill than his drunken mentor.)
During my
first stint at the Moscow Times in 1994, another reporter
who made a specialty of investigating the rampant corruption in
Yeltsin's armed forces was blown up in his office at Moskovsky
Komsomolets, just across the street from our building. Dmitry
Kholodov was killed when he opened a package that an informant
had told him contained evidence of military malfeasance. There
followed a great outpouring of crocodile tears from Yeltsin and
the top military brass implicated in many of Kholodov's stories.
His killing was officially upgraded from ordinary murder to a
case of "terrorism," to be given the highest attention
by every investigative tool at the state's command. Years later,
in 2004, six
army officers were finally tried for the murder – and
acquitted. Kholodov's killing remains officially unsolved. But
at least they didn't say he blew himself up on purpose.
Kholodov
was just one of the several journalists who met their final deadline
with Uncle Borya in the Kremlin. This is a particular hazard of
those who delve into military matters, like Safronov. The Russian
military, like its American counterpart, is a vast, amorphous,
many-headed hydra, with numerous secret units, criminal enterprises
and rogue operators, all of them well-armed and many of them trained
in the blackest covert arts. One needn't automatically assume
that presidential orders (or knowledge) are required to instigate
the murder of a reporter disturbing some well-feathered military
nest somewhere.
On the other
hand, the window -drop "suicide" does have a well-established
official pedigree – and not just in Russia. When I first
read of Safronov's death, I immediately thought of a similar case
involving the death of an American scientist who had uncovered
Nazi-style medical experiments on prisoners and tests of LSD and
other mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting targets. He too "committed
suicide" by somehow hurtling himself through a glass window
from a hotel room, while in the company of a CIA handler. The
government cover-up of his death continued for decades, and was
assisted, years after the death, by the knowing deception of two
top presidential aides: Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.
I wrote about
the case of Frank Olson for CounterPunch in 2002. The story
traces "the thin red cord that weaves in and out of the shifting
facades of reason and respectability that mask the brutal machinery
of power. At certain rare moments the thread flashes into sight,
emerging from the chaotic jumble of unbearable truth and life-giving
illusion that makes up human reality." One emergence was
the Frank Olson case, which had been kept alive by his son, Eric
[shown in a childhood photo with Frank below], who for half a
century tried to find out what happened to his father on that
fatal night in 1953. As I wrote then:
Frank's
son, Eric, believes he knows the answer now: his father was murdered
to keep the thread from sight, to "protect" the American
people from the knowledge that their own government had taken up
and extended Nazi experiments on mind control, psychological torture
and chemical warfare – and that it was conducting these experiments
as the Nazis did, on unwilling subjects, on captives and "expendables,"
even to the point of "termination."
Frank
Olson was a CIA scientist at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the Army's
biological weapons research center. Ostensibly he was a civilian
employee of the Army; his family didn't know his true employer.
Olson worked on methods of spreading anthrax and other toxins; some
of his colleagues were involved in mind control drugs and torture
techniques. But his life within the charmed circle of the American
intelligence elite would unravel with dizzying speed in just a few
months in 1953.
It
began in the summer of that year, when Olson made several trips
to Europe, to investigate secret American-British research centers
in Germany. There he found the CIA was testing "truth serums"
and other torture drugs on "expendables," including captured
Russian agents. He told a British colleague that he had witnessed
"horrors" there – horrors which called into starkest
question his own work on biochemical weapons. He came home a changed
man, troubled, morose. He told his wife he wanted to leave government
service.
But
it was too late: the brutal machinery was already grinding. His
British colleague told his own superiors about Olson's concerns;
they in turn informed the CIA that Olson was now a "security
risk." Not long after his return, Olson given LSD by one of
his colleagues – slipped into his drink as part of a covert
"field experiment." A few days later, he was flown to
New York, ostensibly for psychiatric treatment at the hands of a
CIA doctor – who prescribed whiskey and pills. Then he was
taken to a CIA magician – yes, a magician – who apparently
tried to hypnotize him for interrogation.
Finally
he checked into a cheap hotel – with a CIA handler, Robert
Lashbrook, in tow. Olson called his wife, told her he was feeling
better and would be home the next day. But that night, he was found
dead on the street, 10 floors below. The handler said that Olson
had apparently thrown himself through the closed window in a suicidal
fit. The government told the family it was simply a tragic suicide.
They didn't mention the LSD – or the fact that Olson worked
for the CIA.
It
would take Eric Olson 49 years to piece together as much of the
truth as we are ever likely to know about what happened that night.
But first would come a false dawn, a cruel trick played on the family
by cynical operators in Ford Administration, who used a screen of
half-truth and deliberate falsehood to divert the Olsons –
and the nation – from the darkest tangles of the thread. Two
of those operators would work the thread – play upon it, thrive
on it, hold hard to its damp crimson stain – to rise from the
obscurity of White House functionaries to positions of colossal,
world-shaking power:
Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld.
(The complete
story, with annotations, can be found here: The
Secret Sharers: The CIA, the Bush Gang, and the Killing of Frank
Olson.)
So let us
lay not that flattering unction to our souls, that such mysterious
deaths and defenestrations occur only in the mephitic air of Putin's
Moscow. Inconvenient people – especially those persistent
enough to be a bother but not powerful or connected enough to
protect themselves from reprisal – are removed from the scene,
one way or another, all the time. Gangsters do it; terrorists
do it; and so do agents of the state, "rogue" or otherwise.
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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