Frank Olson

Case background and investigation

Frank Olson, born July 17, 1910, was a scientist who worked on biological weapons at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and with the Central Intelligence Agency. According to the facts recited in a later federal court opinion, a CIA employee put LSD into a bottle of Cointreau from which Olson drank. He had not been told. The dosing took place on November 19, 1953.

Days later Olson was in New York, staying at the Hotel Statler in Manhattan, where he shared a room with CIA employee Robert Lashbrook. At about 2 a.m. on November 28, 1953, Olson went through the window of the room and fell to the street. He died shortly afterward. The death was treated as a suicide.

The LSD experiment became public in 1975, when the Rockefeller Commission's report on CIA activities led to the disclosure that CIA personnel had been given drugs in covert tests, including Olson nine days before his death. The government acknowledged the drugging, and Congress passed a private law in 1976 under which the family received $750,000, or $187,500 for each of four family members, in full settlement of claims arising from the death.

Olson's sons continued to doubt the official account. In 1994 they had their father's body exhumed and examined by a team led by forensic scientist James Starrs. According to published accounts of the findings, the team reported an injury to the head that most of its members believed had been inflicted before the fall, and Starrs described the evidence as suggestive of homicide. The Manhattan District Attorney's office opened an inquiry in 1996 but concluded that there was not enough evidence to take the matter to a grand jury.

On November 28, 2012, Eric and Nils Olson sued the United States in federal court in Washington, alleging that CIA personnel had killed their father and concealed it. On July 17, 2013, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg dismissed the case, holding that the claims were filed too late and were barred by the 1976 settlement. According to Courthouse News Service, the judge observed that the public record supported many of the family's factual allegations, but he did not rule on how Olson died.

No one has ever been charged in connection with Frank Olson's death, and no court or official body has determined that it was a homicide.