CIA Scientist Secretly Dosed with LSD Then Thrown from a 13th-Floor Window

Frank Olson's death should have been straightforward. On November 28, 1953, the 43-year-old biochemist fell from the 13th-floor window of the Statler Hotel in Manhattan. Police ruled it suicide. The case closed. But the real story took decades to emerge—and it forced a reckoning with what American intelligence agencies were willing to do to their own employees.

Olson worked at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the Army's biological warfare research facility. He was respected, accomplished, and by all accounts stable. Nine days before his death, he attended a retreat where CIA official Sidney Gottlieb, the chief of MKUltra—the agency's classified mind-control program—secretly dosed Olson's drink with LSD without his knowledge or consent. Olson spiraled into psychological distress. Within less than two weeks, he was dead.

The CIA's initial response was to say nothing. The agency kept its involvement hidden for two decades. When the MKUltra program was finally exposed in the 1970s, the agency acknowledged that Olson had been dosed but maintained that his death was suicide, unrelated to the experiment. They settled with Olson's family for $750,000 in 1975—a significant sum at the time—but presented no evidence, held no public inquiry, and allowed the suicide ruling to stand unchallenged. The message was clear: this was a closed matter.

In 1994, forensic scientist James Starrs was granted permission to exhume Olson's body and perform an independent autopsy. What he found contradicted the official narrative. Olson's skull bore injuries consistent with blunt-force trauma—evidence of a blow to the head delivered before the fatal fall. A person jumping from a window doesn't typically acquire injuries like these. The medical examiner changed the manner of death from suicide to "unknown," a significant reclassification that left open the possibility of foul play.