{{short description|American bacteriologist (1910-1953)}} {{distinguish|Frank Olsen|Frank Olsson}} {{about|the bacteriologist and biological warfare scientist|the business executive|Frank Olson (business executive)}} {{Use American English|date=May 2026}} {{use mdy dates |date=December 2022}} {{Infobox military person | name = Frank Rudolph Olson | image = Frank Olsen (1910-1953).jpg | alt = | caption = | birth_date = {{Birth date|1910|7|17}} | birth_place = Hurley, Wisconsin, U.S. | death_date = {{Death date and age|1953|11|28|1910|7|17}} | death_place = New York City, New York, U.S. | other_names = | battles = World War II<br/>Korean War * Project Artichoke * Operation Big Switch | alma_mater = University of Wisconsin | spouse = Alice Smith "Wicks" Olson | children = 3 | allegiance = {{flag|United States|1912}} | branch = 25px United States Army * 25px Army Medical Corps | service_years = 1941–1953 | rank = 25px Captain }}
'''Frank Rudolph Emmanuel Olson''' (July 17, 1910 – November 28, 1953) was an American bacteriologist, biological warfare scientist, and an employee of the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories (USBWL) who worked at Camp Detrick (now Fort Detrick) in Maryland. At a meeting in rural Maryland, he was covertly dosed with LSD by his colleague Sidney Gottlieb (head of the CIA's MKUltra program) and, nine days later, plunged to his death from the window of the Hotel Statler in New York. The U.S. government first described his death as a suicide, and then as misadventure, while others allege murder.<ref name=Ignatieff-2001>{{cite news |title=What did the C.I.A. do to Eric Olson's father? |date=April 1, 2001 |first=Michael |last=Ignatieff |author-link=Michael Ignatieff |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/magazine/01OLSON.html |work=The New York Times Magazine |access-date=January 17, 2013}}</ref> The Rockefeller Commission report on the CIA in 1975 acknowledged their having conducted covert drug studies on fellow agents. Olson's death is one of the most mysterious outcomes of the CIA mind control project MKUltra.
==Biography== ===Youth and education=== Olson was born to Swedish immigrant parents in Hurley, Iron County, Wisconsin.<ref name="Obit">{{cite news |title=Dr. Frank R. Olson Dies in New York City |url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/22421355/frank_olson_19101953/ |newspaper=Iron County Miner |date=December 4, 1953 |page=1 |via=Newspapers.com |access-date=August 2, 2018}} {{Open access}}</ref> Olson graduated from Hurley High School in 1927.<ref>{{Cite news|date=December 4, 1953|title=Dr. Frank R. Olson Dies In New York City|work=Montreal River Miner}}</ref> Olson enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, earning both a B.S. and, in 1938, a Ph.D. in bacteriology. He married his classmate, Alice, and would go on to have three children.<ref>{{cite web|title=Family Statement on the Murder of Frank Olson|url=http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Statements/FamilyStatement2002.html|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030211052410/http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Statements/FamilyStatement2002.html|archive-date=February 11, 2003|access-date=January 2, 2018|website=Frank Olson Project|df=mdy-all}}</ref> Olson enrolled in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps to help pay off his college costs, and was called to active duty at Fort Hood in Texas as the United States entered World War II. Olson worked for a short time at Purdue University's Agricultural Experimentation Station before being called to active duty.
===Work with the Army & CIA=== Olson served as a captain in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. In December 1942, he got a call from Ira Baldwin, his thesis adviser at UW and the future mentor of Sidney Gottlieb, who would go on to be the CIA's leading chemist and director of MK-ULTRA. Ira had been called to leave his University post to direct a secret program regarding the development of biological weapons, and wanted Olson to join him as one of the first scientists at what would become Fort Detrick. The army transferred him to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. A few months later, the Chemical Corps took over Detrick and established its secret Biologicals Warfare Laboratories.
At Camp Detrick, Baldwin worked with industrial partners such as George W. Merck and the U.S. military to establish the top secret U.S. bioweapons program beginning in 1943, during World War II, a time when interest in applying modern technology to warfare was high. Olson also worked with ex-Nazis who had been brought into the country through Operation Paperclip on the utilization of aerosolized anthrax.<ref name="Ignatieff-2001" />
Olson was discharged from the Army in 1944 and remained at Detrick on a civilian contract, continuing his research into aerobiology. In 1949, he joined many other Detrick scientists in Antigua for Operation Harness, which tested the vulnerability of different animals to toxic clouds. In 1950, he was a part of Operation Sea-Spray, where the bacterium ''Serratia marcescens'' was released into the coastal mists of San Francisco through a minesweeper, reaching all of San Francisco's 800,000 residents, as well as people living in eight surrounding cities. Olson traveled often to Fort Terry, a secret army base off Long Island, where toxins too deadly to be brought onto the U.S. mainland were tested.
This was the period where senior military officials and CIA officers were becoming deeply troubled at Soviet progress, and feared they were heading towards mastery of microbe warfare. Their alarm led to the forming of the Special Operations Division at Detrick in spring of 1949, with the purpose of conducting research on ''covert'' ways to utilize chemical weapons. SOD was known as a "Detrick within a Detrick" due to its level of secrecy. Olson became acting chief of SOD within a year of its creation, originally invited to join by colleague and SOD's first chief, John Schwab.
At some point while assigned as a civilian U.S. Army contractor, Olson began working as a CIA employee.<ref name="Ignatieff-2001" /> In May 1952, Frank Olson was appointed to the committee for Project Artichoke, an experimental CIA interrogation program.<ref name="terrible">A Terrible Mistake</ref>
===Disaffection=== {{see also|Allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War|Operation Big Switch}} By the time Olson stepped down as chief of SOD in early 1953, citing "pressures of the job" that aggravated his ulcers, he had officially joined the CIA after working closely with them for years. He did stay with SOD, which functioned as a CIA research station hidden within a military base. Olson did a lot of work at Detrick that his children said had a lasting effect on his psyche. Olson witnessed and assisted in the poisoning, gassing, and torture of laboratory animals at Detrick, which his son Eric recalled having a deep effect on Olson: "He'd come to work in the morning and see piles of dead monkeys. That messes with you. He wasn't the right guy for that." Olson also witnessed multiple torture sessions in international CIA safe-houses, where people were "literally interrogated to death in experimental methods combining drugs, hypnosis, and torture to attempt to master brainwashing techniques and memory erasing."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Kinzer|first=Stephen|title=Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control|publisher=Henry Holt|year=2019|location=New York|pages=112–113}}</ref>
On February 23, 1953, the Chinese broadcast charges that two captured American pilots had claimed the U.S. was conducting germ warfare against North Korea.<ref>{{cite news|title=Red Germ Charges Cite 2 U.S. Marines |url=https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1953/02/23/83712037.pdf |access-date=January 19, 2013|newspaper=New York Times|date=February 23, 1954}}</ref> Other captured Americans such as Colonel Walker "Bud" Mahurin made similar statements.<ref name="Factories">Harris, Sheldon H.; ''Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-up''; Taylor & Francis; 2002 {{ISBN|978-0-203-43536-6}} {{page needed|date=March 2020}}</ref><ref name="NYT 1954">{{cite news|title=Marine Ex-P.O.W. Backs Schwable |url= https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1954/03/03/83321859.pdf |access-date=13 March 2020 |work=The New York Times |date=3 March 1954}}</ref> The United States government threatened to charge some POWs with treason for cooperating with their captors.<ref>{{cite web |url= https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/03/201031761541794128.html |title=Dirty little secrets |date=4 April 2010 |access-date=21 May 2019 |work=Al Jazeera |publisher=Government of Qatar}}</ref> After their release, the prisoners of war would publicly repudiate their confessions as having been extracted by torture.<ref>{{citation |last=Lech |first=Raymond B. |date=2000 |title=Broken Soldiers |publisher=University of Illinois |location=Chicago |isbn=0-252-02541-5 |pages=162–163}}</ref> On 27 July 1953, the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, launching Operation Big Switch, the repatriation of Korean War POWs. Twenty-one American POWs refused repatriation and defected, and the returning POWs were viewed as potential security risks. As a result, debriefings became "hostile investigations in search of possible disloyalty".<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2003/04/15/tending-to-the-psychic-wounds-of-pows/2b63a859-7abf-4d6f-9715-639b9c2853f9/|title=Tending to the Psychic Wounds of POWs|first=Don|last=Oldenburg|date=April 15, 2003|via=www.washingtonpost.com}}</ref> The day the armistice was signed, Olson, a bacteriologist, arrived in Northolt, UK. Olson's home movies from the trip indicate he traveled to London, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin.<ref name="koch">27 July departure per [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rba9OfTY8o Codename Artichoke, The CIA's Secret Experiments on Humans]</ref> Upon his return, Olson's mood was noticeably changed, according to his family.<ref name="nyt94">{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/magazine/cia-what-did-the-cia-do-to-his-father.html|title=C.I.A.; What Did the C.I.A. Do to His Father? (Published 2001)|first=Michael|last=Ignatieff|newspaper=The New York Times|date=April 1, 2001}}</ref><ref name="auto2">{{Cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/06/from-mind-control-to-murder-how-a-deadly-fall-revealed-the-cias-darkest-secrets|title=From mind control to murder? How a deadly fall revealed the CIA's darkest secrets|first=Stephen|last=Kinzer|newspaper=The Guardian |date=September 6, 2019|via=www.theguardian.com}}</ref><ref>Dead Silence, p. 95</ref> According to coworker Norman Cournoyer, Olson had witnessed interrogations in Europe and become convinced that the United States had used biological weapons during the Korean War.<ref name="koch" /><ref>Wormwood episode 2{{time needed|date=October 2022}}</ref> Journalist Gordon Thomas claims that Olson subsequently visited William Sargant, a British psychiatrist with high level security clearances. According to Thomas, Sargant reported that Olson had become a security threat and his access to military facilities should be limited.<ref name="nyt94" />
Olson had spent a decade at Detrick and knew all the secrets of the Special Operations Division. He frequently traveled to Germany to witness interrogation sessions in multiple secret prisons (evidence places Olson in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Heidelberg), where the victims would occasionally die from trauma of the tactics used. Olson was one of the several SOD scientists who traveled to, or through, France in the summer of '51 when the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit was poisoned by naturally occurring ergot, the fungus from which LSD was derived.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Kinzer|first=Stephen|title=Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control|publisher=Henry Holt|year=2019|location=New York|pages=116–117}}</ref>
===Drugging of Olson=== A semi-monthly retreat of the men closest to MK-ULTRA was scheduled at a cabin at Deep Creek Lake for Wednesday, November 18, to Friday, November 20, 1953. A tentative participants list included twelve names:<ref>{{cite web|url=http://frankolsonproject.org/staging01/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/deep-creek-memo-2.jpg|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200621203056/https://frankolsonproject.org/staging01/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/deep-creek-memo-2.jpg|url-status=dead|archive-date=June 21, 2020|title=Deep Creek Lake Memorandum|publisher=Frank Olson Project}}</ref><ref name="auto1">{{Cite web|url=https://www.druglibrary.net/schaffer/lsd/marks5.htm|title=The Search for the Manchurian Candidate - Chapter 5|website=www.druglibrary.net}}</ref>
; Fort Detrick participants * Olson, a scientist with the Special Operations Division of the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick, who was suspected of being a security risk. * Lt. Col. Vincent Ruwet, Olson's supervisor, the head of the Special Operations Division. * John L. Schwab, who had founded the division and in 1953 served as its lab chief<ref name="nytlist"/> * John Stubbs, one of the Fort Detrick personnel<ref name="nytlist">{{Cite web|url=http://archive.org/details/nsia-OlsonFrank|title=Olson Frank|publisher=The Weisberg Archive, Beneficial-Hodson Library, Hood College|via=Internet Archive}}</ref> * Benjamin Wilson, a member of the Special Operations Division. * Herbert "Bert" Tanner, one of the Fort Detrick personnel<ref name="nytlist"/> * John C. Malinowski, a Detrick staffer who didn't drink alcohol and thus was not dosed.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ItK7DwAAQBAJ|isbn = 9780735215771|title = Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act|date = July 21, 2020|publisher = Penguin}}</ref> * Gerald Yonetz, a Special Operations Division scientist
; CIA participants * Sidney Gottlieb, a CIA chemist responsible for Project MKUltra.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Weinberger |first1=Sharon |title=When the C.I.A. Was Into Mind Control |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/books/review/poisoner-in-chief-stephen-kinzer.html |access-date=15 December 2019 |work=New York Times |date=10 September 2019}}</ref> * Robert Lashbrook, Gottlieb's deputy, who dosed the liquor everyone was drinking along with Gottlieb. * A. Hughes, suspected to be CIA<ref name="nytlist"/> * Henry Bortner, of the CIA<ref name="nytlist"/><ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/18/archives/destruction-of-lsd-data-laid-to-cia-aide-in-73-destruction-of-lsd.html|title=Destruction of LSD Data Laid to C.I.A. Aide in '73 (Published 1975)|first=Nicholas M. Horrock Special to The New York|last=Times|newspaper=The New York Times|date=July 18, 1975}}</ref>
=== Aftermath of drugging === On Thursday evening, November 19, around 7:30, Olson and some of the other participants were drugged with a "potential truth serum", decades later discovered to be LSD.<ref>A Terrible Mistake, timeline</ref><ref name="Regis">{{cite book |first=Ed |last=Regis |author-link=Ed Regis (author) |date=1999 |title=The Biology of Doom: America's Secret Germ Warfare Project |location=New York |publisher=Henry Holt & Company |isbn=978-0-80505-764-5 |url=https://archive.org/details/biologyofdoomhis00regi }}</ref> The next morning, Olson headed back to Maryland a changed man. Having dinner with his family, Olson refused to eat, and seemed distant from his family, not speaking about his trip or attending to his children. He blurted out to his wife, "I've made a terrible mistake." MK-ULTRA had been underway for seven months at this time, and barely two dozen men knew the true nature and intentions of the project.
On November 23, Olson and his boss, Lt. Col. Vincent Ruwet, arrived to work at Detrick, both still in bad shape from the retreat. Ruwet later recalled that Olson appeared to be agitated, and asked if Ruwet should fire him or if he should quit. While Ruwet was able to calm him down for the day, Olson only worsened by the next day. Ruwet later testified Olson was "disoriented," felt "all mixed up" about the work he had been doing, and felt "incompetent" in his field.
===Attempted resignation=== On Tuesday, November 24, Olson went to work as usual, but unexpectedly returned home before noon, accompanied by a coworker, John Stubbs. Olson explained Stubbs's presence to his wife by saying "They're afraid I might hurt you." Olson informed his wife that he had agreed to undergo psychiatric treatment.<ref name="terrible"/>
That same day, Olson, Ruwet, and CIA chemist Robert Lashbrook flew to New York City. In New York, Olson and Lashbrook met with Harold Abramson, a CIA-linked medical doctor, who had worked with Olson years earlier on studies of aerosolization.<ref name="Regis"/>{{rp|158}}<ref>Wormwood ep 2{{time needed|date=October 2022}}</ref>
===Death=== [[File:Hotel Pennsylvania, NY (external view, ca 1919).jpg|thumb|120px|right|The Hotel Pennsylvania, NYC (called the Hotel Statler in 1953).]] Around 2 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, November 28, 1953, Olson plummeted onto the sidewalk in front of the Statler Hilton Hotel (formerly the Hotel Pennsylvania). The night manager rushed to Olson, who was still alive and who "tried to mumble something". Olson died before medical help arrived.<ref name="nyt94"/> Years later, the night manager recalled "In all my years in the hotel business, I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn."<ref name="auto2"/>
When police entered the hotel room, they found Robert Lashbrook sitting on the toilet in the room he shared with Olson.<ref name='nyt94'/>
The hotel’s switchboard operator reported having connected a call from room 1018A to a number listed as belonging to Dr. Harold Abramson. According to the operator, who overheard the entirety of the brief call, the occupant in 1018A reported "Well, he's gone." to which the call's recipient had replied "Well, that’s too bad."<ref name='nyt94'/>
Lashbrook's wallet contained the initials, address, and phone number of magician-turned-CIA asset John Mullholland. Lashbrook claimed he and Olson had visited Mulholland, although this is disputed by author H.P. Albarelli.<ref name="auto1"/><ref>Terrible Mistake</ref><ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/03/archives/cia-hired-magician-in-behavior-project-paid-him-to-write-a-manual-a.html|title=C.I.A HIRED MAGICIAN IN BEHAVIOR PROJECT (Published 1977)|first=Joseph B. |last=Treaster |newspaper=The New York Times|date=August 3, 1977}}</ref>
At the scene, and in their written report, the two police officers discussed similarities to the 1948 Laurence Duggan case, in which a high-level government official suspected of espionage died after plummeting from his New York office.<ref name="auto">Wormwood, ep 1{{time needed|date=October 2022}}</ref><ref name="mistake">A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson</ref> The ensuing police report said that on his last night in Manhattan, Olson purposely threw himself out of the window of his tenth-floor hotel room at the Hotel Statler, which he had been sharing with Lashbrook, and died shortly after impact.<ref name=unwitting>{{cite news |first=Seymour |last=Hersh |author-link=Seymour Hersh |title=Family Plans to Sue C.I.A. Over Suicide in Drug Test |date=July 10, 1975 |quote=The widow and children of a researcher who committed suicide in 1953 after his participant in a Central intelligence Agency drug experiment said today that they planned to sue the agency over what they claimed was his "wrongful death." |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/10/archives/new-jersey-pages-family-plans-to-sue-cia-over-suicide-in-drug-test.html |newspaper=The New York Times |access-date=March 16, 2008}}</ref>
==Murder and wrongful death allegations==
===1975=== Although Olson's family told friends that he "fell or jumped" and had suffered "a fatal nervous breakdown" which resulted in the fall,<ref name=Ignatieff-2001/> the family had no real knowledge of the specific details surrounding the tragedy, until the Rockefeller Commission uncovered some of the CIA's MKULTRA activities in 1975. That year, the government admitted that Olson had been dosed with LSD, without his knowledge, nine days before his death. After the family announced they planned to sue the Agency over Olson's "wrongful death," the government offered them an out-of-court settlement of $1,250,000, later reduced to $750,000 (about $3.8 million in 2021 value <ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/|title=Inflation Calculator | Find US Dollar's Value from 1913-2022|website=www.usinflationcalculator.com}}</ref>), which they accepted.<ref>{{Cite book |first1=Bob |last1=Coen |first2=Eric |last2=Nadler |title=Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail |location=Berkeley |publisher=Counterpoint Press |date=2009 |page=[https://archive.org/details/deadsilencefeart0000coen/page/97 97] |isbn=978-1-58243-509-1 |url=https://archive.org/details/deadsilencefeart0000coen/page/97 }}</ref> The family received apologies from President Gerald Ford and CIA director William Colby.<ref name="Brown">{{Cite news |url=http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-frank-olson-lawsuit-20121208-story.html |title=Six decades later, sons seek answers on death of Detrick scientist |last=Brown |first=Matthew Hay |date=December 8, 2012 |newspaper=The Baltimore Sun |access-date=September 24, 2016}}</ref>
=== 1977 === The death of Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) Supervisory Agent at Large George Hunter White led his wife to donate all of his written materials to Foothill College. (They are now located in the Stanford University Libraries).<ref>{{Cite book |last=White |first=George H. |url=https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/4336457 |title=George H. White papers}}</ref> Subsequently, the CIA redacted many of the documents, but also obtained many of them for use in the CIA's Victims Task Force, designed to reach settlements with the victims of MKUltra.<ref name=":152">{{Cite book |last=Albarelli |first=H. P. |url=https://archive.org/details/terriblemistake00hpal |title=A terrible mistake : the murder of Frank Olson, and the CIA's secret cold war experiments |date=2009 |publisher=Walterville, OR : Trine Day ; Chicago, Ill. : Distribution to the trade byIndependent Publishers Group |others=Internet Archive |isbn=978-0-9777953-7-6 |page=692 |chapter=Chapter Three: Who Was George Hunter White?}}</ref> His diaries and later interviews by the author H.P. Abereilli show that White had been given responsibility for watching over Olson at the Statler Hotel, but had to leave the city to take care of his mother.<ref name=":153">{{Cite book |last=Albarelli |first=H. P. |url=https://archive.org/details/terriblemistake00hpal |title=A terrible mistake : the murder of Frank Olson, and the CIA's secret cold war experiments |date=2009 |publisher=Walterville, OR : Trine Day ; Chicago, Ill. : Distribution to the trade byIndependent Publishers Group |others=Internet Archive |isbn=978-0-9777953-7-6 |chapter=Chapter Three: Who Was George Hunter White?}}</ref> As a result, he left stewardship of the room to Jacques Voignier, also known to the CIA as "Jean Pierre Lafitte," (and dozens of other names) a high-ranking member of Union Corse who had been brought into the FBN. Voignier had already been working at the hotel, employed under his alias Pierre Lafitte. At some point, Voignier's childhood friend, François Spirito, the leader of the French Connection and Union Corse at the time, came to the Statler Hotel.<ref name=":152" />
===1994–1996=== In 1994, Eric Olson had his father's body exhumed to be buried with his mother. The family decided to have a second autopsy performed. The 1953 medical report completed immediately after Dr. Olson's death indicated that there were cuts and abrasions on the body.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://frankolsonproject.org/staging01/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/William_Colby-1975-documents.pdf |title=CIA Documents Concerning The Death of Dr. Frank Olson |date=January 11, 1975 |website=Frank Olson Project |access-date=January 6, 2019 |archive-date=May 10, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180510071003/http://frankolsonproject.org/staging01/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/William_Colby-1975-documents.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref> Theories that sparked about Olson having been assassinated by the CIA led to the second autopsy, which was performed by James Starrs, Professor of Law and Forensic Science at the George Washington University National Law Center. His team searched the body for any cuts and abrasions and found none, though did find a large hematoma on the left side of Olson's head and a large injury on his chest. Most of the team concluded that the blunt-force trauma to the head and the injury to the chest had not occurred during the fall, but most likely before the fall (one team member dissented).<ref name=Ignatieff-2001/> Starrs called the evidence "rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide."<ref name="Brown"/>
Also in 1994, Eric Olson testified before the U.S. House of Representatives' "Legislation and National Security Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations" hearings on the US Government's "Cold War Era Human Subject Experiments". He spoke about how the sudden and mysterious death of his father deeply affected his family and appealed to the Congress to help with their ongoing battle to get the CIA to release more details of his father's final days.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://fowlchicago.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/usa-cold-war-era-human-subject-experiments_prepared-testimony-of-dr.-eric-olson.pdf |title=USA Cold War Era Human Subject Experiments - Prepared Testimony of Dr. Eric Olson |date=28 September 1975 |website=Friends of WikiLeaks Chicago |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210311170743/https://fowlchicago.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/usa-cold-war-era-human-subject-experiments_prepared-testimony-of-dr.-eric-olson.pdf |access-date=11 March 2021|archive-date=2021-03-11 }}</ref>
In 1996, Eric Olson approached the U.S. District Attorney in Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, to see if his office would open a new investigation. Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb of the office's "cold case" unit collected preliminary information, including a deposition of Lashbrook, but concluded that there was no compelling case to send to a grand jury.<ref name=Ignatieff-2001 /> In 2001, Canadian historian Michael Ignatieff wrote for ''The New York Times Magazine'' an account of Eric's decades-long campaign to clear his father's name.<ref name=Ignatieff-2001/><ref>{{cite magazine |url=http://frankolsonproject.org/Articles/GQ.html |title=The Man Who Knew Too Much |first=Mary A. |last=Fischer |date=January 2000 |magazine=GQ |via=Frank Olson Project |access-date=May 10, 2018 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20020205013544/http://frankolsonproject.org/Articles/GQ.html |archive-date=February 5, 2002}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine |url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/22/who-killed-frank-olson/ |title=Who Killed Frank Olson? |last=Ignatieff |first=Michael |date=February 22, 2018 |magazine=The New York Review of Books |access-date=January 6, 2019}}</ref> Eric Olson asserts that the forensic evidence of death is suggestive of a method used by the CIA found in the first manual of assassination that says "The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface."<ref name="villagevoice.com">{{Cite news |url=https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/12/12/errol-morriss-wormwood-descends-into-time-killing-conspiracy-fanfic/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171212190012/https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/12/12/errol-morriss-wormwood-descends-into-time-killing-conspiracy-fanfic/ |url-status=dead |archive-date=December 12, 2017 |title=Errol Morris's "Wormwood" Descends Into Time-Killing Conspiracy Fanfic |first=Alan |last=Scherstuhl |date=December 12, 2017 |newspaper=The Village Voice |access-date=December 17, 2017}}</ref>
===2012–2013=== On November 28, 2012, sons Eric and Nils Olson filed suit in the US District Court in Washington, D.C.,<ref>The case was ''Olson v. U.S.'', 12-cv-01924, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).</ref> seeking unspecified compensatory damages as well as access to documents related to their father's death and other matters that they claimed the CIA had withheld from them.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://bigstory.ap.org/article/family-sues-cia-over-scientists-mysterious-death |title=Family Sues US Over Scientist's Mysterious Death |first=Frederic J. |last=Frommer |date=November 28, 2012 |website=Associated Press |access-date=November 29, 2012 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121202034641/http://bigstory.ap.org/article/family-sues-cia-over-scientists-mysterious-death |archive-date=December 2, 2012}}</ref><ref name=Guardian1>{{cite news |title=CIA sued over 1950s 'murder' of government scientist plied with LSD |url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/29/cia-lawsuit-scientist-1950s-death |newspaper=The Guardian |access-date=January 12, 2013 |location=London, UK |first=Karen |last=McVeigh |date=November 29, 2012}}</ref> The case was dismissed in July 2013, due in part to the 1976 settlement between the family and government.<ref>{{cite news |last=Gaines |first=Danielle |title=Lawsuit by family of drugged Detrick employee dismissed |url=http://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/crime_and_justice/article_8705f623-edfd-59b0-9e04-548b15a2c423.html?TNNoMobile |access-date=October 20, 2013 |newspaper=Frederick News-Post |date=July 18, 2013}}</ref> In the decision dismissing the suit, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote, "While the court must limit its analysis to the four corners of the complaint, the skeptical reader may wish to know that the public record supports many of the allegations [in the family's suit], farfetched as they may sound."<ref>{{cite web |last=Schoenberg |first=Tom |title=CIA Cover-Up Suit Over Scientist's Fatal Fall Dismissed |url=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-17/cia-cover-up-suit-over-scientist-s-fatal-fall-dismissed.html |access-date=February 22, 2014 |website=Bloomberg News |date=July 17, 2013}}</ref>
=== 2017–2018 === Netflix released a documentary miniseries, entitled ''Wormwood'' (2017), based on the mystery of Olson's death; it was directed by Errol Morris.<ref>{{Cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/movies/wormwood-review-errol-morris-peter-sarsgaard.html |title=Review: 'Wormwood' Confirms That Errol Morris Is Our Great Cinematic Sleuth |last=Scott |first=A. O. |author-link=A. O. Scott |date=December 14, 2017 |newspaper=The New York Times |access-date=December 15, 2017}}</ref> In the miniseries, journalist Seymour Hersh says the government had a security process to identify and execute domestic dissidents (perceived to pose a risk). He said that Frank Olson was a victim of this and an ongoing cover-up after his death. However, Hersh explained that he cannot elaborate or publish on the facts because it would compromise his source.<ref name="villagevoice.com"/>
Writing for ''The New York Review of Books'', scholar Michael Ignatieff concludes "Though I still resist the facts, the facts, as [Eric] Olson’s research has established, are that Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and other unnamed persons at the highest levels of the American government ordered the death of Eric’s father [Frank Olson] because they feared he knew too much about US biological warfare during the Korean War and about the torture and execution of Soviet agents and ex-Nazi "expendables" in black sites in Europe during the early 1950s. Having killed him, the CIA confected the story that Olson's death was a suicide brought on by stress, and later attributed his jump from the window to the effects of a cocktail laced with LSD. It now appears that the LSD was administered, at a CIA retreat in Maryland, to discover exactly what Olson knew. When this experiment revealed that he was indeed "unreliable," he was taken to New York and disposed of."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/22/who-killed-frank-olson/ |title=Who Killed Frank Olson? | by Michael Ignatieff | the New York Review of Books |website=www.nybooks.com |access-date=17 January 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180422045029/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/22/who-killed-frank-olson/ |archive-date=22 April 2018 |url-status=dead}}</ref> Academic Milton Leitenberg strongly disputed Ignatieff's conclusions, arguing that "there was no biological warfare carried out by any agency of the US government during the Korean War, or for that matter by anyone else."<ref>{{Cite magazine|url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/03/22/biological-warfare-korean-war/|title = No, They Didn't|last1 = Ignatieff|first1 = Michael}}</ref>
== See also == * Harold Blauer * James Forrestal * Laurence Duggan
==References== {{Reflist}}
==Further reading== * {{cite book |title=MKULTRA : The CIA's Top Secret Program in Human Experimentation and Behavior Modification |first=George |last=Andrews |year=2001 |publisher=Healthnet Press |isbn=0-9616475-8-2}} * {{cite book |title=The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control |first=John D. |last=Marks |year=1979 |publisher=Times Books |isbn=0-8129-0773-6 |url=https://archive.org/details/searchformanchur00john }} * {{cite book |title=The Men Who Stare At Goats |first=Jon |last=Ronson |author-link=Jon Ronson |year=2005 |publisher=Simon & Schuster |isbn=0-7432-7060-6|title-link=The Men Who Stare At Goats }}
==External links== * {{cite web |url=https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Son-probes-strange-death-of-WMD-worker-He-2694834.php |first=Scott |last=Shane |title=Son probes strange death of WMD worker |newspaper=The Baltimore Sun |via=sfgate.com |date=September 12, 2004 |access-date=May 10, 2021 }} * [http://www.frankolsonproject.org/ The Frank Olson Project] - explores the circumstances of Olson's death and the political and ethical issues embedded in them * {{YouTube|iPNklPGF-wk|LSD A Go Go}}, Short documentary about the Frank Olson case * [https://web.archive.org/web/20071116230200/http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03%2F04%2F07%2F044254&mode=thread&tid=5 "Did the CIA Drug Paul Robeson? – a Look at the Secret Program Mk Ultra" Part 1]. 23:16 minutes. Amy Goodman interviews Paul Robeson, Jr., Dr. Eric Olson, Martin Lee. Democracy Now!. Thursday, July 1, 1999. Retrieved August 22, 2010.
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Olson, Frank}} Category:1910 births Category:1953 deaths Category:20th-century American chemists Category:American microbiologists Category:American people of Swedish descent Category:Death conspiracy theories Category:Deaths by defenestration Category:Human subject research in the United States Category:Military personnel from Wisconsin Category:Mind control Category:People from Hurley, Wisconsin Category:People of the Central Intelligence Agency Category:MKUltra Category:Purdue University faculty Category:United States Army officers Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni