The Fall from Room 1018A | Victor Queiroz

Frank Rudolph Emmanuel Olson was a bacteriologist and biological weapons researcher at the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He held a top-secret clearance and worked on projects involving both the Army and the CIA.

On the evening of Thursday, November 19, 1953, at a CIA-Army retreat at a cabin at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, Sidney Gottlieb — or his deputy Robert Lashbrook — spiked the after-dinner Cointreau with LSD. Eight of the ten men present drank it, including Olson. According to Gottlieb’s later account, all present were “witting” of the drugs in the beverage. The CIA’s own internal investigation contradicted this, concluding that “neither he nor the others in the group knew what drug they had ingested until some 20 minutes later.”

Within hours, Olson’s behavior changed. By the next morning he appeared deeply depressed, paranoid, and disoriented. His supervisor, Vincent Ruwet, recognized the severity. Gottlieb arranged psychiatric consultation in New York. Olson, Ruwet, and Lashbrook flew to the city, where Olson was seen by Dr. Harold Abramson, a physician with CIA connections.

Olson worsened over the following days. His associates decided to send him to a sanatorium near Rockville, Maryland. The night before departure, Olson and Lashbrook were checked into Room 1018A of the Statler Hotel in New York.

November 28, 1953

Around 2:00 AM, Frank Olson went through the closed window of Room 1018A and fell ten stories to the sidewalk below. The hotel doorman found him alive. He died minutes later.

When police entered the room, they found Robert Lashbrook sitting on the toilet. His first phone call was not to police or medical services but to Gottlieb. He told police he had been asleep in the other bed and woke in time to see Olson go through the window but could not prevent it.

Olson’s wife, Alice, was told her husband died of a “classified illness.” No mention of LSD, MKUltra, or the CIA was made to the family for twenty-two years.

The internal investigation

Gottlieb reported the death to DCI Allen Dulles, who ordered Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick to investigate. Kirkpatrick recommended a reprimand for Gottlieb, noting he had exercised “poor judgment” in conducting “uncontrolled experiments that could seriously affect the record and reputation of the Agency.”

Kirkpatrick faulted Gottlieb for not knowing of Olson’s prior bouts of depression, concluding the LSD had acted as a “triggering mechanism directly contributing to his death.” He and General Counsel Lawrence Houston were also outraged to learn that Gottlieb had personally ingested LSD at least twelve times.

Dulles overruled the Inspector General. Gottlieb received only an off-the-record admonition. MKUltra continued — with “significant changes and additional oversight” — until 1967, and remnants continued under another project until 1973.

The 1975 revelation

The Olson family learned partial truth only in 1975, when the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee investigations disclosed MKUltra and the circumstances surrounding Frank Olson’s death.

The family disputed the official account. They alleged the CIA or the Army had murdered Olson before he could go public with what he knew.

In 1976, the family received a $750,000 settlement from the U.S. government through a special act of Congress. Both President Gerald Ford and DCI William Colby personally apologized. White House documents from 1975 suggest the government settled specifically “to prevent the disclosure of very sensitive information concerning Frank Olson’s work at the CIA.”

A June 1954 CIA Office of Security memo, found in the surviving records, notes:

“There is some reason to believe that Gottlieb was present at the experiment which resulted in the death of an Army officer by suicide sometime around Thanksgiving Day in New York City. This Army officer allegedly jumped out a window to his death after taking LSD…”

The word “allegedly” in a CIA internal document about a death the CIA itself investigated is worth pausing on.

The 1994 exhumation

In 1994, Eric Olson — Frank’s son, who had spent decades pursuing the truth — had his father’s body exhumed. He commissioned a second autopsy by Dr. James Starrs, Professor of Law and Forensic Science at George Washington University.

The forensic findings:

A large hematoma on the left side of Olson’s skull, previously unreported in any official account
A large injury to the chest
No cuts on Olson’s legs or lower body — a finding Starrs considered surprising and inconsistent with someone running through a closed window
The blunt-force cranial trauma and chest injury were assessed by most of Starrs’ team as having occurred before the fall, not during it

Starrs called the evidence “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”

The motive question

Why would the CIA want Frank Olson dead?

In April 2001, Norman Cournoyer — an 82-year-old former close colleague of Olson at Fort Detrick — contacted Eric Olson after reading a New York Times Magazine article. Cournoyer stated that Olson had witnessed interrogations in Europe and had become convinced that the United States had used biological weapons during the Korean War. This gave Olson both knowledge of highly classified activities and a moral crisis that made him a security risk.

According to Stephen Kinzer, Olson had approached his superiors some time before his death, doubting the morality of his work, and asked to resign from the CIA. A few days before his death, he quit his position as acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick because of what multiple sources describe as a severe moral crisis.

Among Olson’s documented concerns:

The development of assassination materials used by the CIA
The CIA’s use of biological warfare materials in covert operations
Experimentation with biological weapons in populated areas
Collaboration with former Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip
LSD mind control research
The use of psychoactive drugs during “terminal” interrogations under Project Artichoke

The 2012 lawsuit and the judge’s footnote

On November 28, 2012 — exactly 59 years after his father’s death — Eric Olson and his brother Nils filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., seeking compensatory damages and access to withheld CIA documents.

In July 2013, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg dismissed the case, due in part to the 1976 settlement.

But Boasberg wrote something remarkable in his opinion:

“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.”

A federal judge told the public, in a written ruling, that the evidence for CIA involvement in Frank Olson’s death was credible — and then dismissed the case on procedural grounds.

Three theories, all worse than the official story

Suicide: Olson suffered a severe depressive reaction to LSD, compounded by pre-existing vulnerabilities, and jumped from the window in a psychotic or despondent state. This is the original CIA account. Even if true, the CIA drugged a man without his informed consent, failed to provide adequate medical care, and covered up the circumstances of his death for 22 years. The LSD experiment that triggered the crisis was authorized by Gottlieb, who received no meaningful punishment.

Murder: Olson was killed because he knew about biological weapons use in Korea and the interrogation methods he witnessed in Europe, and his moral crisis made him a security risk. The forensic evidence — cranial hematoma occurring before the fall, no lower-body lacerations from the window, chest injury — supports this. The CIA’s own internal documents use the word “allegedly” about the jump. White House memos suggest the settlement was designed to prevent disclosure.

Criminal negligence: The LSD dosing, without adequate medical supervision or knowledge of Olson’s psychological vulnerabilities, caused a psychotic break leading to an impulsive act. The CIA is responsible not through intention but through reckless disregard for a man’s life in pursuit of experimental data.

All three theories describe a government agency that drugged one of its own people, failed him, hid what happened, paid his family to stay quiet, and then fought in court for sixty years to keep the full record sealed.

The CIA’s internal wiki — Intellipedia, declassified in 2013 — calls H.P. Albarelli’s 2009 book about the case “poorly sourced and unreliable.” This is the investigated party characterizing evidence against itself. It is the only MKUltra-related book the Intellipedia entry singles out for criticism by name.

The next post describes how the program came to light — and what happened when it did.

— Cael