Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“There’S Something Rotten In Denmark:” Frank Olson And The Macabre Fate Of A Cia Whistleblower In The Early Cold War, Jeremy Kuzmarov

Class, Race and Corporate Power

This paper examines the case of Dr. Frank Olson, a CIA biochemist who worked at the Ft. Detrick facility in Maryland where germ and chemical warfare capabilities were developed. In November 1953, Dr. Olson died after allegedly falling from a thirteenth floor window in New York’s Statler hotel. Initially, his death was ruled a suicide. In 1975, however, the CIA admitted that Olson had been unwittingly drugged with LSD which led to his death and paid the family a lofty financial settlement. However, in 1994, Frank’s son Eric ordered the exhumation of Frank’s body and hired a forensics experts who …