By JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON — Nearly 60 years after the death of a government scientist who had been given LSD by the Central Intelligence Agency without his knowledge, his family says it plans to sue the government, alleging that he was murdered and did not commit suicide as the C.I.A. has long maintained.
Eric and Nils Olson, whose father, Frank Olson, was the scientist, said
they plan to file a lawsuit in United States District Court here on
Wednesday accusing the C.I.A. of covering up the truth about Mr. Olson’s
death in 1953, one of the most infamous cases in the agency’s history.
During the intelligence reforms in the 1970s, the government gave the
Olson family a financial settlement after the C.I.A. was forced to
acknowledge that Mr. Olson had been given the hallucinogenic drug nine
days before his death. President Gerald R. Ford met with the Olson
family at the White House and apologized.
At the time, the government said Mr. Olson had killed himself by jumping
out of a hotel window in Manhattan. But the Olsons came to believe that
he had been murdered to keep him from talking about disturbing C.I.A.
operations that he had uncovered.
Mr. Olson’s sons said that their past efforts to persuade the agency to
open its files and provide them with more information had failed, and
that a court challenge is the only way to find out the truth.
“The evidence points to a murder, and not a drug-induced suicide,” said
Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s older son, who has devoted much of his life to
investigating his father’s death. When the government told his family
that his father had committed suicide, “one set of lies was replaced
with another set of lies,” he said.
Jennifer Youngblood, a C.I.A. spokeswoman, said the agency does not
comment on pending court cases, but she noted that the C.I.A.’s most
controversial episodes from the early cold war years, like Mr. Olson’s
death, “have been thoroughly investigated over the years, and the agency
cooperated with each of those investigations.”
The Olson case was one of the most explosive revelations about the
C.I.A. during the post-Watergate investigations of the United States
intelligence community in the mid-1970s, and was part of a series of
disclosures about a C.I.A. program known as MK-Ultra, which included
brainwashing, mind control and other human behavioral control
experiments during the early days of the cold war.
Over the decades, the Olson case has gained a kind of pop culture status
as one of the signature examples of government secrecy and abuse, and
references to the death have been made in television, film, books and
music.
“The C.I.A.’s wrongful conduct in this case continues under the present
administration,” said Scott Gilbert, a Washington lawyer representing
the Olson brothers. “I have met personally with senior agency officials
who still refuse to acknowledge the truth and to provide us with all
documents relevant to this matter.”
Frank Olson was a bioweapons expert working at the special operations
division of the Army’s Biological Laboratory at Fort Detrick in
Maryland. The C.I.A. worked jointly with the special operations
division, researching biological agents and toxic substances.
In 1953, Mr. Olson traveled to Europe and visited biological and
chemical weapons research facilities. The Olson family lawsuit alleges
that during that trip, Mr. Olson witnessed extreme interrogations, some
resulting in deaths, in which the C.I.A. experimented with biological
agents that he had helped develop. Intelligence officials became
suspicious of him when he seemed to have misgivings about what he had
seen, the lawsuit contends. Eric Olson said Frank Olson also appeared to
have deep misgivings about the use of biological weapons that was
alleged in the Korean War.
A few months later, he attended a meeting with officials from both the
special operations division and the C.I.A. at Deep Creek Lake, Md.
Sometime during the meeting on Nov. 19, 1953, he was given a drink of
Cointreau that had been secretly spiked with LSD by C.I.A. officials.
Mr. Olson returned home, and over the following weekend told his wife
that he wanted to leave his job. Eric Olson said his mother later
recalled that Frank Olson did not seem suicidal or psychotic that
weekend, but was reflective about his work.
In the 1990s, the family had Mr. Olson’s body exhumed and an autopsy
performed, and the New York district attorney’s office later conducted
an inconclusive investigation into the death.
Eric Olson says that his father’s death and its aftermath had
devastating consequences for his family. He said his mother, who is now
dead, suffered from alcoholism. “We want justice,” Mr. Olson said. “This
has cost me an immense amount of time and years of my life.”
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