Frank Olson

Frank Olson (July 17, 1910 – November 28, 1953) was a U.S. Army biological warfare specialist employed at Fort Detrick in Maryland, who was at first said to have taken his own life due to depression. In the 1970s it was revealed that he had been unwittingly given LSD at a joint meeting between CIA spies and US Army bio-warfare experts, who cooperated on biological weapons toxins and drugs under the umbrella of MKNAOMI and MKULTRA. This was said to have driven him to leap out of a hotel window ten days later. Further evidence pointed to the CIA having assassinated Frank Olson over fears that he would reveal the entire U.S. biological warfare program, as well as the chemical interrogation program, to the press.

Biographical

Frank Olson was a senior U.S. microbiologist at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. He was recruited from the University of Wisconsin, where his departmental advisor was Ira Baldwin, the civilian scientist who, along with industrial partners like George C. Merck and the U.S. military, established the U.S. bioweapons program in 1943, a time when interest in applying modern technology to warfare was at an all-time high.

His specific research work at Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division has never been revealed, but he was clearly involved in biological weapons research. He had been assigned as a contact with the CIA's Technical Services Staff, run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy Robert Lashbrook regarding experiments with bioweapons, toxins, and mind control drugs. This was the MKNAOMI - MKULTRA program, previously known as Project Artichoke and earlier, Project Bluebird, and justified by claimed Soviet efforts to create a "Manchurian Candidate." In 1953, as Deputy Acting Head of Special Operations for the CIA, Olson associated with Dr. William Sargant, investigating the use of psychoactive drugs at Britain's Biological Warfare Centre at Porton Down. He was clearly privy to the innermost secrets of the CIA interrogation and biowarfare programs.

Covert LSD administration and death

Ed Regis reports that the meeting at which Olson was dosed with LSD took place at Deep Creek Lake:

"Deep Creek Lake was three hours by car from Camp Detrick. On Wednesday morning, November 18, 1953, about a week before Thanksgiving, a group from the SO Division, including Vincent Ruwet, chief of the division, John Schwab, Frank Olson, Ben Wilson, Gerald Yonetz, and John Malinowski, drove out to the retreat."

"On Wednesday morning, November 18, 1953, about a week before Thanksgiving, a group from the SO Division, including Vincent Ruwet, chief of the division, John Schwab, Frank Olson, Ben Wilson, Gerald Yonetz, and John Malinowski, drove out to the retreat...The Detrick group was met at the lodge by Sid Gottlieb, his deputy Robert Lashbrook, and a couple of others from the CIA....On the second day of the retreat, after dinner, Gottlieb spiked a bottle of Cointreau with a small quantity of a substance that he and his TSS colleagues privately referred to as "serunin" but which was in fact lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD."

According to the government's version of events, Olson subsequently suffered severe paranoia and a nervous breakdown. The CIA sent him to New York to see one of their psychiatrists, who recommended that Olson be placed into a mental institution for recovery. This all took place after Olson asked to quit the biowarfare program the week after the retreat:

"Ruwet was surprised to see Olson at 7:30 in the morning, but asked him in. Olson told Ruwet that he was dissatisfied with his own performance at the retreat, that he was experiencing considerable self-doubts, and that in fact he had decided he would like to be out of the germ warfare business. He wanted to leave Camp Detrick and devote his life to something else."

The LSD experience may have led Olson to this conclusion, but it was one he had been thinking of for some time. The CIA asked him to go to New York to meet with their private psychiatrist, Harold Abramson, who was centrally involved in the "research".

The CIA claimed that on his last night in Manhattan, Olson purposely threw himself out of his tenth-floor hotel room window at the Hotel Pennsylvania, dying on impact. However, when Olson's body was exhumed by a skeptical family, there was evidence that a blow to the head preceded Olson's exit over the balcony window.

The biological warfare programs and the chemical interrogation programs remained almost completely hidden from the public, until Nixon's closure of the biowarfare program in 1969 and the Church Committee hearings of 1975.

Legacy

His family had no knowledge of the details of the accident until the Rockefeller Commission started uncovering some of the CIA's MKULTRA activities. In 1975, the government admitted that Olson had been dosed with LSD without his knowledge. The government offered his family an out of court settlement of $750,000, which they accepted.

In 1994, Eric Olson had his father's body exhumed. The forensic scientist in charge of the examination, George Washington University Professor James E. Starrs, determined that Olson had suffered some form of blunt force trauma to the temple/forehead prior to falling out of the broken window, but contrarily had no visible laceration indicating that he fell through a broken window. The evidence was called "rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide." Based on his findings, in 1996 the Manhattan District Attorney opened a homicide investigation into Olson's death, but was unable to find enough evidence to bring charges.

Further reading

• ISBN 0-8129-0773-6 The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control - John D. Marks 1979
• ISBN 0-9616475-8-2 MKULTRA: The CIA's Top Secret Program in Human Experimentation and Behavior Modification - George Andrews 2001
• ISBN 0-7432-7060-6 The Men Who Stare At Goats - Jon Ronson 2005
• ISBN 0-9777953-7-3 A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments - H.P. Albarelli Jr. 2010

External links

• "Son probes strange death of WMD worker" - Scott Shane writing for The Baltimore Sun (September 12, 2004)
• The Frank Olson Murder
• German documentary (includes a confession by an insider)
• LSD A Go Go Short documentary about the Frank Olson case
• audio interview with Olson's sons, Part 1
• audio interview with Olson's sons, Part 2
• Code Name ARTICHOKE, Hugh Turley, Hyattsville Life and Times, April 2008.