It was a dinner party like no other, a gathering that has gone down in CIA history because of the tragic consequences for one particular guest.
And it continues to cast a long shadow for the family of Dr Frank Olson, an eminent biological warfare scientist.
They believe a post-prandial glass of liqueur covertly spiked with the mind-altering drug LSD led to his murder by the agency.
Recently unsealed documents detailing Olson’s last days have brought the scientist’s death back into the spotlight decades after he fell from the 13th floor of a New York City hotel.
His family are intent on winning him justice.
Olson, who worked on the CIA’s top-secret mind-control program, MKUltra, died nine days after the dinner party. His death at age 43 was at first attributed to an accident by the U.S. Army, and then subsequently amended to suicide.
His son Eric Olson, now 81, believes it was neither.
‘Frank’s death was a CIA authorized non-judicial execution. He was thrown out the f****** window,’ he tells the Daily Mail.
Dr Frank Olson, a biological warfare scientist, was covertly dosed with LSD at a meeting and died nine days later after falling out of his hotel room in New York City
Pictured is Dr Frank Olson with his wife Alice and their children (L-R) Eric, Lisa and Nils
The Daily Mail has contacted the CIA for comment.
‘To summarize my view, he was murdered,’ Paul Vidich, Olson’s nephew, agrees.
‘There is no smoking gun. What you have is a lot of information that points to murder, and none of it points away.’
Olson was one of at least eight men given LSD that night of November 19, 1953 as part of an experiment in the CIA’s MKUltra program, according to Vidich.
He also claims that a 1994 autopsy found evidence of a hematoma – localized bleeding above Olson’s left eye – which showed that he had been dealt a blow.
‘[The forensic pathologist] concluded that he had been hit in the head [before he went out the window]… He basically suffered a wound that was not from the fall.’
Vidich, 74, said his uncle had ‘moral qualms about the nature of the work he was doing’ and was eventually seen as a security risk.
‘Getting thrown out the window was a very convenient way of disposing of a national security risk,’ he adds.
The CIA poured millions of dollars into the MKUltra program in the 1950s and ’60s, to investigate brainwashing by administering experimental drugs, such as LSD, to unsuspecting individuals.
The program had 17 goals, including creating substances ‘which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public’.
Olson’s nephew, Paul Vidich, believes his uncle was murdered by the CIA because he had ‘moral qualms about the nature of the work he was doing’ and was eventually seen as a security risk because’
Olson’s body was found in the street after falling from the 13th floor of The Statler Hotel
It also aimed to develop substances that would ‘produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts’.
The program sought to find methods that would also ‘promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects’.
According to CIA documents released in 2018: ‘Historians have asserted that creating a true “Manchurian Candidate” subject through ‘”mind control” techniques was a goal of MK-ULTRA and related CIA projects’.
(In the 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate, a US soldier is captured during the Korean War and brainwashed by communists to become an assassin in a Chinese/Soviet plot to overthrow the American government.)
Notable test subjects included Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, and notorious convicted crime boss James ‘Whitey’ Bulger. But Dr Olson is the only person known to have died during the program.
His story begins on November 19, 1953, at Deep Creek Lake in Maryland, which was the site of a cabin the CIA used as a hideaway and where it is believed it conducted mind-controlling experiments.
A memorandum dated December 2, 1953 provided details about Olson’s death and included illegible Xeroxed copy of the death certificate
A group of 10 scientists from the Agency and Fort Detrick, then the center of the U.S. Biological Weapons Program, attended a conference there hosted by MKUltra’s director Dr Sidney Gottlieb at the cabin.
According to one CIA official, members of the Special Operations Division of the US Army’s Chemical Corps ‘agreed that an experiment involving some of the participants would be desirable’.
In statements made during a 1977 hearing about the activities of the CIA according to Gottlieb, a ‘very small dose’ of LSD was added to the bottle of Cointreau which was served after dinner.
The drug was placed in liqueur by Robert Lashbrook, deputy director of MKUltra, and about 20 minutes later ‘Gottlieb informed the other participants that they had received LSD’.
Gottlieb later stated that the ‘drug had a definite effect on the group to the point that they were boisterous and laughing and they could not continue the meeting or engage in sensible conversation’.
Over the next week and a half, Dr Olson spent time with his boss, Vincent Ruwet, who wrote a statement about the events following the scientist’s death.
He detailed how Olson appeared agitated compared to his usual ‘life of the party’ demeanor.
In the days that followed, according to Ruwet’s report, Olson became paranoid, barely ate and one evening disappeared into the night to toss away his wallet, identification badge and money because he believed Ruwet told him to (he had not).
Within days he would be in New York seeking psychiatric help accompanied by Lashbrook.
Ruwet’s statements were released in December 2024, detailing his experience with Olson from November 19 to November 28, 1953.
Other documents showed that materials about Olson’s death were too sensitive to release and would affect national security if they were
Eric Olson was just nine years’ old when two men knocked at the front door of the family home in Frederick, Maryland to inform his mother Alice that her husband had died.
She was told he had fallen or jumped out of the window in his room at the Statler Hotel in New York on November 28.
‘It is so horrible, even now,’ says Eric who still lives in Maryland. ‘But imagine how it was for a nine-year-old boy who is awakened before dawn to be told his father went to New York for some kind of treatment and fell out the window and died. The world stops.’
Dr Olson was in New York to see a psychiatrist after feeling ‘all mixed up’, according to Ruwet’s statement.
The family were oblivious to what had taken place at the dinner party.
Until 1975, when a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller released a report on CIA abuses that included a reference to an Army scientist who had jumped from a New York hotel days after being slipped LSD in 1953.
Olson’s family was not allowed to see his body, instead being told he had suffered significant facial injuries in the fall and that he had killed himself by jumping. However, it was confirmed that he did have LSD in his system at the time of death
The Olson family threatened to sue the government, but President Gerald Ford invited them to the White house to assure them they would receive all information about Olson’s death.
However, Eric said that the CIA never gave him and his family a true picture of what happened to his father.
In 1994, Eric had his father’s body exhumed for a second autopsy conducted by James Starrs, a leading forensic scientist and friend of the family who specializes in exhuming bodies to solve old cases.
Starrs was a forensics scientist at George Washington University during his 44-year career before passing away in 2021.
He concluded that Olson never went through glass and there was an impact on the skull above his eyes which could only have come from a blow delivered in the hotel room and not by the fall.
Eric Olson and nephew Paul Vidich point to other key questions and discrepancies in the story that they want answers to.
A detective who attended the scene on the night of Olson’s death wrote in his report that Olson’s widow, Alice, was told by MKUltra deputy Robert Lashbrook who was also at the Statler Hotel, that he ‘was awakened about 1.30am to see Olson going at a full run toward the window’.
‘He said he saw Olson go through both the ‘closed window and drawn curtains” the detective wrote.
Stephen Saracoo, former District Attorney for New York assigned to the Olson case, said in a 2000 statement: ‘Frank Olson would have had to be a Superman or a professional athlete to dive through that window.’
Olson spent time with his boss Vincent Ruwet who also wrote a statement about the events following the scientist’s death. Ruwet was also at the cabine with Olson
‘There wasn’t enough run space. It was heavy glass, there was a radiator in the front of it, a closed curtain and a drawn blind. It just wasn’t possible.’
The scientist was found on the pavement with just his undershirt and shorts on.
A memorandum from the CIA dated December 2 1953, provided details about his death and included an illegible Xeroxed copy of the death certificate.
‘With reference to cause of death, it states death caused by multiple fractures, shock and hemorrhage; jumped or fell from the 10th-floor hotel,’ it reads.
However, it known that Dr Olson fell from the 13th floor of the hotel.
‘[My uncle’s room was 1018 or something like that. The difference might be that there were three floors before the floors of the rooms started, they being the lobby floor, a ballroom floor and another,’ said Vidich.
Another memo dated December 17 1953, was written by C R Kiddleton, the CIA’s medical deputy director, and stated he and Dr Franklin Halpin, the director, reviewed the classified records on the events leading up to Olson’s death.
‘Such material is highly sensitive and is of a nature which if we divulge might seriously affect this national security,’ it reads.
‘On February 23, 1954. three months after Olson’s death, the CIA and the Department of Justice issued a Memorandum of Understanding that allowed the CIA to withhold information relating to criminal activity if disclosure of compromised intelligence sources and methods,’ Vidich to the Daily Mail.
The memo was written by CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston, who attended the 1975 hearing into the possible abuse of the CIA and Olson’s death, where he was questioned by Congresswoman Bella Abzug.
Vidich said Abzug asked Houston if the Memorandum meant the CIA had the authority to decide who at the agency receives immunity for things that happened.
During the 1975 hearing, Abzug stated that the Memorandum would ‘included all crime, even murder. Houston replied, ‘Yes, it would have that effect.
Eric Olson believes that regardless of the outcomes in court, the battle for justice for his father has already been won, ‘at least in principle’.
‘An unknown Army biochemist falls from a window in a New York hotel in the middle of the night. He must have had some kind of bad dream,’ he said.
‘That’s what I grew up with. The costs of that lie, never mind the deed itself, have been unimaginable.’
