MKUltra: Nine Days - The Death of Frank Olson Frank Olson Pt. 1
On the night of November 28th, 1953, a man named Frank Olson went out a tenth-floor window at the Statler Hotel in New York City. He was 43. He was a biological warfare scientist for the United States Army. He had a wife and three kids in Maryland.
The official story, for the next 22 years, was suicide.
The actual story is that nine days earlier, the CIA had spiked his drink with LSD without telling him. And when his behavior became inconvenient, they put him in a hotel room with a chemist, and at 2:30 in the morning he was on the sidewalk.
Kathryn and Gabriel open a three-part series on MKUltra. Part 1 traces the program from Cold War panic through Operation Paperclip to the signing of MKUltra on April 13th, 1953. They profile Sidney Gottlieb — chemist, folk dancer, goat farmer, assassination program director — and John Mulholland, the magician the CIA hired to teach agents how to drug people without being seen. Then they follow Frank Olson: the Fort Detrick biological warfare scientist who saw things he wasn't supposed to see, got dosed at a cabin in western Maryland, and nine days later was dead on a New York sidewalk.
In 1994, forensic examiner James Starrs exhumed Frank's body. He found a hematoma above the left eye inconsistent with a fall. His official conclusion: the evidence was, in his words, rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide. The Manhattan DA opened a homicide investigation in 1996. It is technically still open. The cause of death was changed from suicide to unknown. No arrest has ever been made.
Frank's son Eric has been pulling the thread for fifty years.
SOURCES: Church Committee Final Report, 1976. Rockefeller Commission Report, 1975. CIA MKULTRA Collection, declassified 1977. U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Health, Hearing on Human Drug Testing by the CIA, 1977. Starrs, J.E. forensic examination report, Frank Olson exhumation, 1994. Albarelli, H.P. A Terrible Mistake, 2009. Kinzer, S. Poisoner in Chief, 2019. Marks, J. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 1979. Operation Sea-Spray, U.S. Army declassified documents. Mulholland, J. "Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception," declassified 2007, reprinted in The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception. U.S. Army, Special Operations Division, Fort Detrick records. Manhattan District Attorney homicide investigation, People v. Olson, 1996.
DISCLAIMER: This episode discusses covert government experimentation on non-consenting subjects, LSD administration, biological weapons development, covert testing on civilian populations, suspected homicide, and Cold War-era institutional cover-up. The Frank Olson death timeline is reconstructed from declassified CIA documents, congressional testimony, and the 1994 forensic examination. Robert Lashbrook's account is drawn from his own statements to investigators. The forensic conclusion of possible homicide reflects James Starrs's published findings and does not constitute a legal determination. The Manhattan DA investigation remains open and no charges have been filed. Operation Sea-Spray and the death of Edward Nevin are documented in declassified Army records and subsequent federal litigation. No living individual is accused of criminal conduct. This epi
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