Frank Olson: nine days between a drink and a fall

Frank Olson was a bacteriologist at the US Army Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He worked on aerosol delivery and had a security clearance that gave him knowledge of programmes very few people knew existed.

On 19 November 1953, at a retreat at Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland, he and several colleagues drank Cointreau that had been dosed with LSD. They were told about twenty minutes afterwards. The dosing was arranged by Sidney Gottlieb’s deputy Robert Lashbrook, as part of the CIA’s programme.

Nine days later Olson was dead.

What is documented

Olson became agitated and distressed in the days after the retreat. He told colleagues he wanted to leave his job. He was taken to New York, not to a hospital or a psychiatrist, but to Harold Abramson — an allergist and asthma specialist with a research relationship to the CIA programme.

On the night of 27 to 28 November he was sharing a room at the Statler Hotel with Lashbrook. In the early hours he went through the window of room 1018A and fell to the street. He was found alive and died shortly afterwards.

The death was recorded as a fall. His family were told he had jumped, and were not told about the LSD.

What was reopened

In 1994 the family had Olson’s body exhumed. A forensic examination was led by James Starrs of George Washington University.

Starrs reported a haematoma on the left side of the head that he did not consider consistent with the fall or with injuries sustained on the pavement. He described the findings as suggestive of homicide, and the team’s conclusion was that the death was not a straightforward suicide.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office opened an investigation in 1996. It did not result in charges, and the case was left open rather than resolved.

What a court said

In 2012 Olson’s sons sued the federal government, alleging the death was a killing and that the 1975 account had been a cover story.

The case was dismissed in 2013, on the ground that the 1976 settlement barred further claims. That is a procedural ruling and not a finding on the facts — and in dismissing it the court noted that the family’s allegations were supported by substantial circumstantial evidence.

Why Abramson matters

The decision to take Olson to Harold Abramson is the most examinable oddity in the case, and it is worth understanding who he was.

Abramson was a New York physician specialising in allergy and asthma. He was not a psychiatrist. He was, however, a researcher with a working relationship to the CIA's LSD programme, and had himself conducted studies with the drug.

So a man in acute distress after being covertly dosed was taken not to a hospital, and not to a psychiatrist, but to a doctor whose relevant qualification was involvement in the programme that had dosed him.

Why this case matters to the wider programme

Because it is the one point where MKULTRA has a name, a date, a body and an admission.

Almost everything else in the programme is known through paperwork about proposals and payments. Olson is the case where the practice met a person, and it is the reason the whole subject reached the public at all — the 1975 disclosure of his dosing is what made the programme a scandal rather than a footnote.