On a grim November night in 1953, Frank Olson, a scientist involved in biological warfare, tragically plunged to his death from a New York City hotel room. This mysterious event set off a chain of bewildering occurrences that continue to raise questions to this day.
Immediately after Olson’s fall, a phone call was placed from his hotel room to Harold Abramson, a notable doctor and consultant for the CIA. The conversation was terse and unsettling. “Well, he’s gone,” stated the caller, to which Abramson responded, “Well, that’s too bad.” This exchange was overheard by a vigilant switchboard operator who had been listening in.
When authorities arrived at the scene, they found CIA operative Robert Lashbrook in a state of distress, sitting in the bathroom with his head buried in his hands. The circumstances surrounding Olson’s death and the peculiar call to Abramson have fueled speculation and intrigue, casting a long shadow over this historical incident.
“Well, that’s too bad,” Abramson replied.
The phone call ended after that brief exchange, with the entirety of the conversation heard by an eavesdropping switchboard operator.
When police entered the room, CIA operative Robert Lashbrook was sitting on the toilet with his head in his hands.
“In all my years in the hotel business, I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn,” the hotel manager later said.
Olson’s death was officially listed as a suicide.
But it took more than 20 years for the events leading up to his death to become known.
What had not been disclosed was that nine days before his death, Olson had been given a dose of “potential truth serum” without his knowledge.
The truth serum was actually LSD, a drug the CIA had been experimenting with.
Ironically enough, Olson had been part of a discussion of the morality of dosing people with drugs without their knowledge just 20 minutes earlier.
Under the MKUltra program, the CIA was developing methods to brainwash and psychologically torture people.
Part of that program involved giving unwitting subjects doses of drugs like LSD.
The primary function of Olson being drugged was to question him while under the influence.
The experimenters wanted to test if Olson would give up sensitive information about his job.
In the days following the drugging, Olson’s family and co-workers felt he was behaving in an out-of-character way.
He was taken to see Abramson, who had been consulting with the CIA about LSD use, as well as a magician who tried to hypnotise him.
All of this was kept from Olson’s family until 1975.
After the family sued the CIA, the government settled for a nearly $7 million payout in today’s dollars.
When Olson’s body was exhumed in 1994, investigators concluded he had suffered blunt force trauma to the head and chest which had preceded the fall.
Professor of Law and Forensic Science James Starrs called the case “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide”.
“I think Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window,” he said.
Nevertheless, the US District Attorney in Manhattan declined to send a case to the grand jury.
