Wormwood (2017) s01e06 Episode Script

1 Moon-faced, starry-eyed Peaches and cream With nuts on the side I never knew There was anyone living like you Thank you.
Moon-faced, starry-eyed I'm gonna bust my vest with pride I never lived, baby Not at all till I met you At six o'clock, I expect your call At seven o'clock, I am in the hall Sorry.
- Thanks a lot.
- If you don't come by At nine o'clock, baby, I die Moon-faced, starry-eyed Cookin' with gas When I'm by your side I swear my heart's nowhere Without you I told Vin not to worry, but he insists on meeting us at the airport.
I'd like another drink.
Where did that waitress go? There's one account, when his death was some kind of accident.
1953 was some kind of accident.
Hard to understand, incoherent.
Nevertheless, some kind of accident.
Then there's 1975, when it's some kind of drug-suicide.
We did an experiment, it went badly, God knows we tried to take care of him, as best we could, but things go wrong, stuff happens, and he died.
Incoherent, hard to understand, but suicide.
The whole thing really starts to shift towards something else in '94, when we exhumed the body.
It starts to seem like, yes, this is a homicide.
And then over the past year, this moves from homicide to execution undertaken with all the full legitimacy of the organization.
Including Richard Helms, and ultimately Allen Dulles, in which they got approval for not a murder, not an assassination, but an execution.
We've got to talk about what the problem with the CIA is, and always has been, at least in the years I've been looking into it as a journalist.
It's a basic question of integrity, of honesty.
I frankly think there's a double standard at work here when Mr.
Colby asks us to be responsible, the press.
It seems to me there's a terrific function and need for the CIA to behave more responsibly responsibly itself.
If you step back, which is difficult, because there's the emotional thing, but if you step back, it's just remarkable that this could even occur.
That such a baloney story could fly at all.
And that the likes of Seymour Hersh and all these other journalists could buy it.
I think that's Hersh's problem now.
His first book, back in the '60s, was on biological and chemical warfare.
And then he does this other work on the CIA and all this stuff which leads to these committee hearings, and everything else.
The whole arc of his career from the beginning till now is part of this story.
And his whole kind of identity is wrapped up with being this guy who doesn't buy the bullshit.
But in this case, he bought the farm completely, and until last year, when I told him this is a myth, and he didn't like hearing it, and I don't think he liked hearing it from his source, his very much trusted source, that, "Eric is right, and you're wrong.
" He also calls it the million-to-one bank shot.
He's the only guy who would have had the sources and the judgment to ask the right question to the right guy, and he nails it.
When I give him the right question, he poses that question to the source, source tells him.
48 hours later, he's got it.
But now we're a year later, and he hasn't published a story.
Well, he wants further confirmation.
My attitude is, "Look, you only get one million-to-one bank shot.
I'm stunned that you got this one.
" And he says, "Some people won't believe this.
" And I'm saying, "I don't care if you have another source.
They're not gonna believe it then, either.
" Are we running? All right, let's go.
What do you wanna talk about? Your first meeting with the Olson family.
Well, you know the story they tell.
This is how naive I was then.
I'd been a reporter for 15 years.
I'd won all sorts of prizes.
Done M Lai, did stuff on the CIA and Chile and Watergate.
And I still didn't know how it plays.
I accepted the story that he was given LSD, because I was only 15 years into the business.
The CIA was using LSD on people.
That would be bad.
But I think the real bad was something worse.
That they killed him.
But I don't know that in a way I can publish it.
So, what does it mean? We're talking about journalism 101 here.
If I publish what I knew, I make somebody into a Snowden.
That's one thing.
And secondly, even if I published what I knew I'd have to have somebody else saying something.
But do I believe something heinous happened to Olson? Yes.
Do I believe that he was seen as somebody who was a malcontent? Yes.
Do I believe in that year, in '53, do I know there was incredible fear and paranoia about the Russians? And using drugs to create a monster who will kill without thinking, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera? The objective of communism at the outset was to establish itself as the only form of society on Earth.
Mrs.
Ethel Rosenberg, who, with her husband, was convicted of transmitting secrets to Russia through Soviet diplomatic channels.
Even if there were only one communist in the State Department Even if there were only one communist in the State Department, that would still be one communist too many.
From coast to coast, hardcore Reds continue to use every available technique to capture the minds and control the behavior of loyal Americans.
What do you do with somebody who's inside and knows a lot? Why wouldn't you do something heinous? But I can't say what I know without putting somebody in jeopardy, so I can't do it.
This whole series of trades and agreements, you depend on a source to give you information, but you can't compromise that source by giving too much information.
It's not about information.
It's about what one had to do to find the Olson story from the inside.
You know, suppose I ask somebody, "What do you know about Olson?" Somebody will maybe know something, or somebody will say, "I'll take a look.
" But then, what he learns and how he learned it is what I can't talk about.
People sign in for things.
With the deepest, darkest, most sequestered vault in all of Washington.
A vault inside of a vault inside of a vault.
That's my kind of metaphor for the thing.
It's a place that nobody would have thought to go, and very few would have had access to.
Is it in a box? I don't know.
I don't know.
Is it in a file just on a bookshelf? I don't know.
Is it in a file drawer? I don't know.
I'm just amazed that it's anywhere.
And I'm amazed that this guy would then tell Hersh about it.
He had gone to a place and I don't know where, but somewhere in the deepest of the deep vaults, and had found a document, which described exactly what had happened in this incident.
In detail.
And this source had then taken notes on this document, and had recited those notes to Sy Hersh.
I believe he was killed.
I have reason to believe he was, but I can't prove it.
There's a crucial fact that would make the case, but it would also finger people.
So I can't do it.
And I tried very hard to get further information, and I probably will eventually.
I found out other incidents of suspicious deaths.
The mechanism of this process.
If I'm right, that he was done in, there was a mechanism.
It wasn't ad hoc.
What do you mean by "mechanism"? See, I knew you'd ask that question.
What do you mean by "what do you mean"? A mechanism.
There was a procedure.
A procedure to eliminate undesirable Mm-hmm.
Why not? If you have a dissident in a system, maybe you have a procedure for dealing with it.
And maybe some of the people who wrote the reports were involved in the procedure.
Maybe it was all one big, frantic cover-up.
Those documents provided a narrative.
Choppy, elliptical, not to mention false.
Over the years, I've given less and less attention to what happened during those ten days, because we don't know.
Nobody that I know or trust was there.
Whatever we think we know, we know because of these documents.
The documents are patched together and incoherent.
We don't actually know.
So what is this about? For me, that was always the question.
What is this about? Not only was my father murdered, but what what's it about? What is this story about? Well, it's about the position that the United States found itself in, in the post-war period, for which it wasn't prepared, and it began to do things, which put its own democratic institutions in great jeopardy.
How could you have a democracy if your institutions are doing things that the public can't know about? Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
The very day after we were in the White House, the very next day, there was a committee hearing.
Chaired by Bella Abzug.
Set up to investigate one specific thing: an agreement that had been made between the CIA and the Justice Department in the early days of 1954, basically a month after my father had died.
At a House hearing today, Lawrence Houston, General Counsel for the CIA for more than a quarter of a century, from its founding until 1973, testified about how the CIA protected its agents who might have operated beyond the law.
The CIA and the Justice Department entered into an agreement of understanding, which said that the CIA would not be prosecuted for serious crimes if the claim of national security could be invoked.
The witness she's interrogating, or questioning about this is Lawrence Houston, the General Counsel for the CIA at the time when my father died.
To this day, I think it would surprise people that there was such a memo of understanding, that it existed, and that she was concerned that this thing was unconstitutional and illegal.
If there were even allegations of murder, if it meant revealing sources and methods, you did not believe they had to be referred to the Attorney General.
And I ask you, by what authority? There was a balancing of interest between the statutory responsibility of the director and the statutory requirement for the Department of Justice.
What does this mean? How does this fit into our concepts of equal justice? I daresay the Central Intelligence Agency has done as much or more to protect the freedoms and rights you're talking about as any agency in over the course of the last, uh, 27 years.
What do you imagine Frank Olson did that would make them wanna kill him? Guess what? I probably know, but I can't tell you.
Is that what you wanted, in an interview, somebody like that saying to you, "I'm being coy like that"? Frank was viewed as a dissident.
You understand that in 1953 if you thought somebody was detrimental to the war against the Russians, you have no problem dealing with them.
It wouldn't be just a question of saying, "You have to leave the Agency.
" Tell me about that.
Think about that.
Somebody who has secrets? I mean, are you kidding me? Frank was was out there.
He was letting them know that he was marching to a different drummer, and you couldn't do it back then.
He's a man that was profoundly, profoundly distressed about what he was learning.
And he was dangerous.
That I can tell you.
I can't tell you more.
What I thought was gonna happen was Hersh was gonna publish this.
Not a perfect resolution, but it's some kind of resolution.
And then it's yanked away.
He's not gonna do it.
He's not gonna do anything.
He's got a lot of reasons why.
But now, you're in a worse position than you ever were, because you know what happened, but no one else does.
And his distancing from the whole thing became greater and greater all the time.
He doesn't believe what he heard? No, I don't think that even is in the realm of possibility.
He knows that what he heard is true.
He completely trusts the source from which he got it.
I asked Sy at one point, "Why do you think your source told you this?" He said, "Well, he told me because I asked him.
We're good friends.
I asked him a question, he had the answer, he told me.
" That's it.
What makes you so sure that the source is telling Sy the truth? Nobody had a motive to make up a story this horrendous.
Why would you do that? Why? This was a a devastating thing to hear.
My father was executed by the CIA.
This was a fully authorized institutional decision.
The only way this becomes bearable at all is if it's known.
Because the story for the last 40 years has been a public story.
If the story is now totally different than what the public has heard, it's very important that this story be told correctly.
So if this doesn't drive a person crazy, you must be immune.
- You were crazy already.
- Well, whatever.
But this didn't help matters.
For me, part of the story is the fact that you can't tell the story.
That's not a new phenomenon.
That's a very serious issue.
I do operate at different levels than other people, because I can get information.
People trust me.
They trust my judgment.
I'm I'm old.
I told you, I'm 79.
I've been doing this goddamn thing, well, for 350 years, something like that.
I can't blow it.
Don't make this a big deal about journalism, and about an amazing, sensitive, incredible thing.
And duh the source is more important than the story.
Always.
Always.
I don't have it in the way that can protect somebody.
And he can't understand that.
Because he'd say, "I've been tortured about this for 40-some-odd years.
Doesn't that mean anything to you? It ruined my life.
" Do you feel that you could ever let this go? I feel like I have already let it go, but it hasn't let me go.
All the things that I now know, I needed to know when I was 30, let's say.
20, let's say.
Maybe 40, let's say.
Maybe 50.
Not now.
I needed truth a long time ago.
A long time ago.
Anything else you wanna ask? Why do you think Eric hasn't been able to go on with his life? I can't answer that, but it's a great loss, because he's very bright, and he had something to contribute.
Even though he's mad as hell at me and all that, he's not been illogical about me.
He's right about me.
I'm holding back something from him for a reason he doesn't think is worthy.
He knew it didn't happen the way they said it happened.
He knew that right away.
They did the best they could to muffle it.
But they're very good at that.
They invented a story.
The fact that you can't get closure in this thing will be of great satisfaction to the CIA.
The old-timers, they'll love it.
They'll love it.
The tradecraft won.
"We got away with one.
" Even though a few people may know what happened, so what? Nobody else does.
It's a victory for them.
You know, mark up one, one for them, zero for us on this one.
But don't you know how wonderful it is to not have an ending? I think you're really wrong to want this pretty little thing bowed up and tied.
It's wonderful not to have an ending.
It is.
It says a lot about the world of intelligence.
There sometimes isn't an ending.
You can't wrap it up with a bow.
Eric knows the ending.
He knows the ending.
I think he's right.
I can't help him.
He's totally convinced he knows the ending.
Am I right? Is he ambivalent in any way? No.
It's a terrible story.
First, it wasn't Lashbrook who did the wet work.
He was a very slight, thin guy, not anybody who could be throwing people out of windows nor was that remotely related to his job.
He was a chemist.
You had specialists for that kind of thing.
Absolutely you have specialists.
And those people are in many cases, thugs.
You had stuff that the best and the brightest from Yale or wherever wouldn't be doing.
They might be ordering it, but they wouldn't be doing it themselves.
The Office of Security, that's what they did.
If any kind of problem showed up in the CIA office, you wouldn't handle it yourself.
First of all, because you weren't equipped to do that.
Second of all, because you don't wanna be the one who knows exactly what happened.
"You don't need to know what solution we figured out to this.
You tell us a problem, we're gonna solve it, you don't know what happened.
And we who carry this out, we don't even know why you thought there was a problem.
Whatever was going on with person X, which leads you to come to the conclusion that something has to be done, that's your business.
We don't need to know that, and you don't need to know how we solved it.
" They regarded my father as a problem.
That became crystallized at Deep Creek Lake.
The purpose of the whole meeting was to find out whether Frank Olson was a problem.
He made some statements that were highly critical of what his group was doing.
They then gave him a chance to "recant.
" "I didn't say that.
I don't mean that.
" "Recant" is a funny word.
And apparently, he said, "No! This is where I stand.
I can do no other.
" He refused to take back the stand he had made.
And later realizes there may be incredible cost to this.
He felt, "Hmm, I may have gone too far here.
Maybe there's gonna be cost to this that I don't wanna pay.
" He started to realize that his life was at stake here.
He goes to work, and says, "I wanna quit the job.
" They take him to Abramson, the doctor in New York.
He probably said, "There's no way we can guarantee what he's gonna do.
" Lashbrook called the Office of Security, "We're really up against it here.
" That's kind of the end of their responsibility.
Probably they wouldn't even know exactly how it's gonna be handled.
They wouldn't know.
The Office of Security arranges some guys to do whatever guys do.
Hey, Bob? Bob, are you in there? Bob? Hey, Bob? Bob? Bob? Okay.
Oh, my God.
Okay.
Stop for a second.
Let's sit down.
"Remember me.
" It's easy to emphasize the word "remember.
" But the other part is the "me.
" One can make a terrible mistake if you remember the other, but you forget yourself.
I remembered my father, but I forgot who I was.
- You lost yourself in this? - Absolutely.
Totally.
You become lost in a sea of questions, all of which pertain to the other, none of which pertain to yourself.
What cost are you willing to pay? You're willing to cut off your left hand? How about up to your elbow? How about your whole shoulder? How about your right hand? How about your right arm? How about your foot? How do you make any kind of reasonable decisions? Based upon what? Because the value of the lost one is infinite the sacrifice becomes infinite.
You've now decided you're gonna pursue the thing that is infinitely valuable with a total commitment.
You're gone.
You think that finding the answer to this is gonna restore the path of your own life.
But how can it possibly do that if you've lost yourself along the way? You think you're gonna get a judicial decision? You think somebody's eventually gonna pay the bills for all this? You think you're gonna find peace of mind? What's that gonna consist of? You're gonna find out that your father was murdered by the CIA.
Feel better now? Do you feel better now? Is that better than not knowing? Is it? Wormwood.
It's all bitter.
No No other love have I Only my love for you Only the dreams we knew No other love Watching the night go by Wishing that you could be Watching the night with me Into the night I cry Hurry home Come home to me Set me free Free No other love No other love Have I Into your arms I'll fly Locked in your arms I'll stay Waiting to hear you say No other love have I No other love Have I No other, no other love Have I No other, no other love