Frank Olson

Did You Know?

• Olson was covertly dosed with LSD by Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA's MKUltra program, at a meeting in rural Maryland on November 19, 1953.
• Olson participated in Operation Sea-Spray in 1950, which released the bacterium Serratia marcescens over San Francisco, reaching all 800,000 residents.

Biography

Olson was born to Swedish immigrant parents in Hurley, Iron County, Wisconsin, and graduated from Hurley High School in 1927. He earned a B.S. and, in 1938, a Ph.D. in bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin, where he married his classmate Alice; the couple had three children. To help pay college costs, Olson enrolled in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and was called to active duty at Fort Hood in Texas when the United States entered World War II. He briefly worked at Purdue University's Agricultural Experimentation Station before active duty. Olson served as a captain in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. In December 1942, his thesis adviser Ira Baldwin—who would later mentor Sidney Gottlieb—recruited Olson to join a secret biological weapons program at what became Fort Detrick. The army transferred him to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, and months later the Chemical Corps established the secret Biological Warfare Laboratories at Detrick. At Camp Detrick, Olson worked with industrial partners and ex-Nazis brought in through Operation Paperclip on aerosolized anthrax. Discharged from the Army in 1944, he remained at Detrick as a civilian, continuing aerobiology research. In 1949 he participated in Operation Harness in Antigua, and in 1950 in Operation Sea-Spray, which released Serratia marcescens over San Francisco. He frequently traveled to Fort Terry, a secret base off Long Island, for testing of toxins too dangerous for the mainland. Olson became acting chief of the Special Operations Division (SOD) within a year of its creation in spring 1949. In May 1952, he was appointed to the committee for Project Artichoke, an experimental CIA interrogation program. By early 1953, Olson stepped down as chief of SOD, citing 'pressures of the job' that aggravated his ulcers, but stayed with SOD as a CIA employee. He witnessed and assisted in the poisoning, gassing, and torture of laboratory animals at Detrick; his son Eric recalled, '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.' On July 27, 1953, the day the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, Olson arrived in Northolt, UK, and traveled to London, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin. Upon his return, his mood was noticeably changed. 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.

Murder and wrongful death allegations

For years, Frank Olson’s family told people he had either fallen or jumped during a fatal nervous breakdown, but they had no real details. That changed in 1975, when the Rockefeller Commission revealed CIA mind-control experiments called MKUltra. The government then admitted that Olson had been secretly given LSD nine days before he died. Later, after narcotics agent George Hunter White died, his widow donated his papers to a college. Those records showed White had been assigned to watch Olson at the Statler Hotel but had to leave town to care for his mother. He handed that duty to Jacques Voignier, a Union Corse member working at the hotel under a fake name. At some point, Voignier’s childhood friend François Spirito, then head of the French Connection and Union Corse, also showed up at the Statler.