Frank Olson

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.

Olson graduated from Hurley High School in 1927.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In May 1952, Frank Olson was appointed to the committee for Project Artichoke, an experimental CIA interrogation program.

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."

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.

Other captured Americans such as Colonel Walker "Bud" Mahurin made similar statements.

The United States government threatened to charge some POWs with treason for cooperating with their captors.

After their release, the prisoners of war would publicly repudiate their confessions as having been extracted by torture.

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.

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.

Olson was born to Swedish immigrant parents in Hurley, Iron County, Wisconsin.