34 Facts About Frank Olson

Frank Rudolph Emmanuel Olson was an American bacteriologist, biological warfare scientist, and an employee of the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories who worked at Camp Detrick in Maryland.

Frank Olson was born to Swedish immigrant parents in Hurley, Iron County, Wisconsin.

Frank Olson married his classmate, Alice, and would go on to have three children.

Frank Olson enrolled in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps to help pay off his college costs, and was called to active duty at Fort Hood in Texas as the United States entered World War II.

Frank Olson worked for a short time at Purdue University's Agricultural Experimentation Station before being called to active duty.

Frank Olson served as a captain in the US Army Chemical Corps.

Ira had been called to leave his University post to direct a secret program regarding the development of biological weapons, and wanted Frank Olson to join him as one of the first scientists at what would become Fort Detrick.

Frank Olson worked with ex-Nazis who had been brought into the country through Operation Paperclip on the utilization of aerosolized anthrax.

Frank Olson was discharged from the Army in 1944 and remained at Detrick on a civilian contract, continuing his research into aerobiology.

Frank Olson traveled often to Fort Terry, a secret army base off Long Island, where toxins too deadly to be brought onto the US mainland were tested.

Frank Olson became acting chief of SOD within a year of its creation, originally invited to join by colleague and SOD's first chief, John Schwab.

At some point while assigned as a civilian US Army contractor, Frank Olson began working as a CIA employee.

In May 1952, Frank Olson was appointed to the committee for Project Artichoke, an experimental CIA interrogation program.

Frank Olson did stay with SOD, which functioned as a CIA research station hidden within a military base.

Frank Olson did a lot of work at Detrick that his children said had a lasting effect on his psyche.

Journalist Gordon Thomas claims that Frank Olson subsequently visited William Sargant, a British psychiatrist with high level security clearances.

Frank Olson had spent a decade at Detrick and knew all the secrets of the Special Operations Division.

Frank Olson frequently traveled to Germany to witness interrogation sessions in multiple secret prisons, where the victims would occasionally die from trauma of the tactics used.

Frank Olson was one of the several SOD scientists who traveled to, or through, France in the summer of '51 when the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit was poisoned by naturally occurring ergot, the fungus from which LSD was derived.

The next morning, Frank Olson headed back to Maryland a changed man.

Ruwet later recalled that Frank Olson appeared to be agitated, and asked if Ruwet should fire him or if he should quit.

Around 2 am on the morning of Saturday, November 28,1953, Frank Olson plummeted onto the sidewalk in front of the Statler Hilton Hotel.

The night manager rushed to Frank Olson, who was still alive and who "tried to mumble something".

The ensuing police report said that on his last night in Manhattan, Frank Olson purposely threw himself out of the window of his tenth-floor hotel room at the Hotel Statler, which he had been sharing with Lashbrook, and died shortly after impact.

That year, the government admitted that Frank Olson had been dosed with LSD, without his knowledge, nine days before his death.

In 1994, Eric Frank Olson had his father's body exhumed to be buried with his mother.

The 1953 medical report completed immediately after Dr Frank Olson's death indicated that there were cuts and abrasions on the body.

Theories that sparked about Frank Olson having been assassinated by the CIA led to the second autopsy, which was performed by James Starrs, Professor of Law and Forensic Science at the George Washington University National Law Center.

Frank Olson's team searched the body for any cuts and abrasions and found none, though did find a large hematoma on the left side of Olson's head and a large injury on his chest.

Also in 1994, Eric Frank Olson testified before the US House of Representatives' "Legislation and National Security Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations" hearings on the US Government's "Cold War Era Human Subject Experiments".

Frank Olson spoke about how the sudden and mysterious death of his father deeply affected his family and appealed to the Congress to help with their ongoing battle to get the CIA to release more details of his father's final days.

In 1996, Eric Frank Olson approached the US District Attorney in Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, to see if his office would open a new investigation.

On November 28,2012, sons Eric and Nils Frank Olson filed suit in the US District Court in Washington, DC, seeking unspecified compensatory damages as well as access to documents related to their father's death and other matters that they claimed the CIA had withheld from them.

Frank Olson said that Frank Olson was a victim of this and an ongoing cover-up after his death.