Season 7 Episode 1: The Fall Without End (Pt.2 of 2)

worse than they could have imagined. Not only had Frank's death been indirectly caused by the government he devoted his life to, but the CIA had been actively like to the family ever since, and they'd done it through Vincent Ruitt, who had become a trusted friend for both Alice and her by then grown up children. Within days at the report's release, the family held a press conference in their backyard and announced their intention to file a lawsuit against

the CIA. But Alice was also determined to set something straight. Stoically reading out a prepared statement in front of the photographers and reporters, she painted a picture of Olsen in his final days that was at odds with the agencies. He wasn't irrational or mentally unstable, she said. Instead, she felt he was simply consumed by melancholy and had talked repeatedly about leaving his job. Scrambling to contain the fallout, the CIA enlisted some friends in high places to help

with damage control. The Rockefeller report had been damaging enough. If Frank Olsen's family followed through with the lawsuit, it could force the agency to disclose classified information that could put national security at risk. It fell to then President Gerald Ford's chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeldt and his deputy, Dick Cheney, to manage the situation. Their first mission was finding a way to placate the family, and so it was that shortly after the press conference, Alice Olsen received

a letter in the post. Inside she found an invitation to the White House. On July twenty first, nineteen seventy five, Alice and her three children, Eric, Nils, and Lisa arrived at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. It was hard not to be overawed as they were welcomed into the Oval office by President Ford himself, who began by making a formal apology to the family. On behalf of the U s government. He also expressed his personal sympathy for what they'd been through.

White House officials promised the family that there would be no more lies from now on, and that they'd be given all of the facts as soon as possible. It was a week later when Alice and her children met with CIA Director William Colby, who gave them a thick sheaf of declassified documents containing information about Frank's death. After so many years with no answers, it felt like striking gold, But the documents opened up as many questions as they

had answers. As Alice scanned through the pages, she could see immediately that they were not being given the full picture. Line after line had been redacted, leaving only a muddled, bity version of the truth with many crucial details left out. Like most high level CIA employees, Olsen's work with the agency had to be kept absolutely secret. His family had always believed that he was a civilian employee working for the military, and there was nothing in Colby's documents to

contradict that. As far as they knew, Olson's involvement with the CIA had begun just days before his death, when they droped him in as an unwitting guinea pig in their psychedelic drug experiment. Even after reading through the documents, they had no idea just how close Olson's ties to the agency were, or, more perdinently, that he was one of just a handful of men who knew the CIA's

darke As secrets. The document release was the first step and a lengthy negotiation between the American government and the Olsons. After that, the family agreed to a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars settlement in exchange for signing a contract

not to pursue any further legal action. The amount was much less than they'd initially been promised, but perhaps in the absence of the whole truth and knowing what impossible lengths it would take to get it, it provided some closure at least, and with that, just as they had been forced to do two decades earlier, the Olsons tried to move on with their lives, choking back all of their unanswered questions. But Eric, Alice and Frank's oldest son,

just couldn't do it this time. Ever since his father's mysterious death, he'd thought about what it would feel like to finally know the truth. He'd imagined catharsis and a sense of relief, the very least he deserved. Yet now he felt none of that. If the CIA had really come clean, this LSD story was the whole truth, then why did it still feel like the wool was being pulled over his eyes? Like the rest of the surviving family.

For years, Eric turned the events of nineteen fifty three over and over in his head to make the pieces fit together into a coherent story. After weeks of trying, he eventually succeeded in tracking down Sydney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook, the CIA scientists who'd overseen the disastrous LSD experiment that had supposedly sent Olson spiraling into madness. Gottlieb was the one who slipped the drug into the Quontroe that night.

Although disciplinary action had been recommended by the CIA's General Council, he was let off with little more than a slap on the wrist and had remained in senior positions at the age for many years. When Eric showed up at his door, accompanied by his mother Alice and brother Nils, Gottley was polite and apologetic, making all the right noises about the terrible circumstances of Frank's death, but when they left his house later that afternoon, they did so with

nothing they didn't already know. Lashbrook, who'd shared the hotel room with Olson on the night he died, wasn't much more forthcoming. When the family tracked him down in Ohai, California, he invited them to take a seat in the living room, where he proceeded to walk them through everything he remembered. He and Olson had both gone to sleep around ten thirty pm, he said, a few hours later he was

startled awake by the sound of glass breaking. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw the broken glass all over the floor, the smashed out window, and the curtain billowing at the chilly night air, And then he saw that Olson's bed was empty. The man seemed twitchy and nervous as he talked, his eyes darting about the room, seemingly unable to meet with Eric's or any one else. The story was precisely the same as what he'd told the police at the time, and Eric didn't buy any

of it. It was then that Eric decided he had to see the scene of the crime for himself. At some time during the nineteen eighties, Eric Olsen booked a flight to New York and checked into the Statler Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. At the reception desk, he requested Room ten eighteen A on the thirteenth floor, the room in

which his father had spent his final hours. The hotel had changed hands several times in the past three decades, but the structure was the same, not least of all the grand colonnaded lobby from where night manager Armond Pastory witnessed Frank fall to the pavement all those years before. Looking about, Eric shuddered at the thought of it as distorted images of his father's death raced through his mind.

Taking the lift up to the thirteenth floor, of all places, it was hard not to feel the weight of it all as he traced his father's last footsteps to room ten eighteen A, And as soon as Eric walked inside, all of his misgivings about Robert Lashbrook's story only intensified. For one, the room was much much smaller than he'd imagine, and so was the window, that pane of glass which had loomed so largely over him in countless nights for

so many years. So much more compact and mundane. He'd often imagined his father taking a running jump through this closed window and plummeting thirteen stories to his death. But looking at it now, this mental image made no sense. There wasn't enough space in the room to run at any kind of speed or gather enough momentum to shatter glass. There was also a radiator right in front of the window, and the sill was so high that you'd have to

make a significant leap to reach it. In that moment, the official story went from far fetched to just plain bullshit. In Eric's mind, his father's apparent suicide had always been emotionally hard to swallow, but now it also seemed physically impossible. But Eric was powerless to do more. It was clear that the government had closed ranks. Lashbrook and Gottlieb had said all they were ever going to say, and the only other person who knew what really happened inside this

room had been permanently silenced, or had he. The dead tell no tales, but their bodies do. In the usual course of things, when a person dies a violent, unnatural, or mysterious death, a coroner gets the chance to examine their corpse interpret whatever clues are present and determine a cause of death based on the evidence. But no autopsy was ever performed on Frank Olsen. The government had made sure of it. Forty years later, Eric set out to right that wrong. He was going to have his father's

body exhumed. On a bright summer's day in nineteen ninety four, the Linden Hills Cemetery in Frederick, Maryland was unusually busy. Eric Olsen stood beside his father's grave, squinted under the glare of the sun as a mechanical digger clawed its way through the soil, while a small crowd of reporters stood watch around him. Moments later, Frank Olson's now exposed casket was carefully raised from the earth, the word only

slightly decomposed after forty years underground. From there, it was transported to the forensics department of George Washington University Law School, where a team of pathologists began the slow, painstaking process that should have taken place years earlier. In nineteen fifty three, Alice Olsen had been told that Frank's body was too badly damaged for an open casket funeral to be held, and that his face was disfigured from lacerations caused by

the glass breaking around him. But when the forensic team opened the casket, they found an embalmed corpse in close to perfect condition. There were no serious cuts or lacerations on his face at all, and no microscopic shots of glass embedded in his head or neck. Certainly nothing close to the kinds of injuries one would expect to find on a man who'd jumped through a plate glass window

head first. But what the team did find was a large hematoma on Olsen's left temple, a gathering of blood about the size of a fist pulled underneath unbroken skin. They all agreed that this injury could not have been caused by his impact with the ground, because the velocity of that fall would have caused much more extensive damage, and in any case, Olson had reportedly landed on his back, not his side. Opinions varied on what exactly this meant.

One pathologist suggested Olson might have hit his head on the window frame as he jumped, but the others disagreed. To James Stars, the lead pathologist, there was no doubting that the blow to the head had happened before Olson went through the window, someone he believed, though he couldn't prove it at first, not Frank unconscious before he died. Stars and his team spent more than a month studying the body before finally calling a news conference to deliver

their findings. When Stars addressed reporters, he acknowledged that the team hadn't found any smoking guns, there was no scientific evidence to contradict the official narrative. However, he emphasized the inexplicable injury on Old Wilson's temple and the lack of any lacerations consistent with broken glass. He said that in his opinion, the hematoma could only have been caused by a direct, stunning blow to the head, and that he was exceedingly skeptical that Olson had gone through the window

by his own force alone. Asked to clarify what he meant, Stars finally came right out and said it. I think Frank Olsen was intentionally, deliberately and with malicious forethought thrown out of that window. For Eric pathologist James Starr's conclusion felt like coming up for air after two decades swimming underwater, for the first time someone had said out loud what he had long suspected that his father had been murdered, But just why would the CIA want Frank Olsen dead.

To answer that question, it's essential to understand just what exactly Olson was doing at Fort Detrick, where he worked in the decade prior to his death. During World War II, Detric was the U. S Army's base of operations for developing biological weapons, and Olsen was one of the first scientists to join a clandestine team working on aerosol pathogen technologies that is, turning diseases like anthrax into airborne weapons.

For a number of years, he made several visits to a secret military base on an island just off the eastern coast of New York, where the army tested toxins that were considered too dangerous to be brought onto the US mainland. After the war ended, that mission seemed destined to fade into obscurity because the government's focus had shifted to nuclear weapons. But then in nineteen fifty came the Korean War, or the Fatherland Liberation War as it was known in North Korea, and with it a new enemy

with new capabilities. At some point, the CIA became convinced that the North Korean military had developed ways to brainwash American prisoners of war after many of them signed statements criticizing the US government while in captivity. Though there was no concrete evidence that this was true, the fear of psychological warfare became an obsession, and so the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick was given a new mission to

investigate ways in which you can control someone's mind. Scientists like Frank Olsen were tasked with studying the use of drugs for both interrogation and brainwashing as part of a top secret program that began under the name Project art Choke. In that process, they bore witness to horror. Olsen observed the brutal interrogation of prisoners at CIA safe houses in Germany, where men were subjected to torture, hypnosis, and forced drug use.

These interrogations were designed not just to extract information, but also to test the limits of experimental brainwashing techniques. When detainees died, their lives were simply dismissed as collateral damage, the unavoidable cost of protecting US national security. Olson had been upset enough when laboratory monkeys died at Detrich. Seeing human beings being to the watcher to death shattered him completely.

In nineteen fifty three, when Olson officially began working for the CIA project, Artichoke was succeeded by a new program which would expand its extreme interrogation techniques even further. That program was known as MK Ultra. It was in the mk Ultra era that Olson's misgivings really consumed him. In the spring of nineteen fifty three, he flew to England

to visit porton Down the world's oldest chemical warfare facility. There, government scientists were experimenting with newly developed, highly toxic nerve agents. Olson's visit coincided with one of the most controversial events in Port and Down's history. That May, a twenty year old airman named Ronald Madison volunteered as a guinea pig in what he'd been told would be a series of fairly innocuous experiments to help find a cure for the

common cold. In actual fact, Madison had been unwittingly brought in to help test the effects of saren, a highly toxic nerve agent, on the human body. The ultimate aim of the experiment to test what level of exposure was necessary to incapacitate a person On May sixth, nineteen fifty three, but Poorten down. Leading aircraftsman Ronald Madison was layered into

a laboratory and instructed to roll up his sleeve. A man in a white coat with thick protective gloves measured out two hundred milligrams of liquid saren before pouring it onto some material. The material was then tied onto Madison's arm. The effects started slowly at first, the sense of something burning heating up within Madison's body. Soon he was screaming in agony, and moments later he began to convulse, his body and limbs jerking all over the place, as though

he was being electrocuted. His skin seemed to be vibrating. Madison's eyes rolled into the back of his head, and thick bubbles of something viscous, like frogsborn, as one observer later put it, spilled out of his mouth. The men in coats gathered round quickly. He began to panic while some tried to hold Madison's body still. Fifteen minutes later, he lost consciousness. Madison was quickly ferried over to Portendown's medical unit. Eighteen year old Alfred Thornhill was tasked with

carrying him inside. When he arrived, he found the place had been completely cleared of all other patients, and a group of men in white coats were waiting for him next to an empty bed. Thornhill carried Madison over and laid him down, then allegedly watched on in disbelief and terror as Madison's leg inexplicably rose up from the bed, and first his ankle began to turn blue, then his lower leg, then up above the knee, as though a

strange blue liquid were being poured into him. Seconds later, one of the men in coats pulled out a hypodermic syringe and plunged the needle into Madison's body, and shortly after that Madison was declared dead. After everything else that Frank Olsen had witnessed, Ronald Madison's death was a bridge too far. Soon after, he confided in a psychiatrist at Porton down William Sergeant, admitting how disturbed he was by

what he'd seen. He talked not just about Madison, but also about the other atrocities he'd seen at CIA safe houses in Germany, where he'd watched prisoners dying painful deaths from toxins that he'd personally helped to develop. Olsen's guilt was overwhelming, and confessing how he felt would have no doubt, brought some relief. But if he believed he was speaking to Sergeant in confidence, he was mistaken. Sergeant immediately wrote up a report about Olsen's state of mind and submitted

it to his superiors. He wrote that, in his opinion, Olsen was upset enough that he might be unwilling to keep his mouth shut. In other words, he was a liability, and Sergeant wanted to make sure that he had no further access to porton Down. It was around this time, in August of nineteen fifty three, that Olson returned home, and his wife and brother in law noticed he seemed strangely withdrawn and depressed, But the true reason for his mood would only make sense to them many years later.

During World War II, Olson had been proud to be part of the fight against Adolf Hitler's fascist regime in part because of its heinous track record of human experimentation. Now his own country was doing the very same thing. Shortly after Peter Sargeant alerted them, British intelligence officials forwarded his report onto their American counterparts. In Sergeant's opinion. Olsen was deeply dangerously disillusioned with the agency and its entire mission. Many,

including Frank's son Eric, believed the CIA strongly concurred. In nineteen ninety seven, a few years after Frank Olsen's body was exhumed, the CIA inadvertently released a document titled A Study of Assassination. It's essentially an assassination manual, and the very first edition dates back to late nineteen fifty three, precisely when Olsen died. According to this manual, the ideal way to assassinate someone is by dropping them from a height of at least seventy five feet onto a hard surface.

In some cases, the author notes, it's necessary to stun the victim first, ideally with a blow to the temple. Reading this, with all its apparent echoes of his father's own death, was a horrifying experience for Eric Olsen. The manual, in combination with the new autopsy results and what he'd learned about his father's work on MK Ultra, finally seemed to give him the certainty he had longed for his

entire adult life. Eric Olsen was now sure that the CIA's so called mere coulpa in the nineteen seventies, when they admitted to dosing his father with LSD had in fact been part of a much larger cover up. Inadvertently driving a man to suicide through a reckless experiment as a terrible sin, but it would pale in comparison to

the CIA assassinating one of its own. There's no doubt that the Deep Creek Lake retreat really happened, and that Frank Olsen and his colleagues really were dosed WITHSD, But in light of the fact that Olson's bosses likely saw him as a threat, the possible true purpose of it

becomes much murkier. Perhaps the LSD was a test to see if Olsen would confess his misgivings to them under the influence of drugs, Or perhaps it was even more sinister than that, designed to discredit Olson and give the agency a pretext to risk him away to New York for so called treatment and assess just how much of a risk he really posed. During that trip, the only people that Olson saw were on the CIA payroll, Sydney Gottlieb Vincent Ruitt and Harold Abramson, the doctor and John Mulholland,

the magician. His supposed paranoia, and his attempts to get away may in fact have been a perfectly rational response to the realization that he had a target on his back. If the CIA truly believed that Olson posed an imminent threat to national security, then there's no telling what lengths they might go to keep him quiet. And if it was decided that he had to be eliminated, then, according to their own manual, the best way to do it would be a drop from a great height thirteen flaws.

For example, in light of this hypothetical narrative, Robert Lashbrook's strange phone call to Harold Abramsom just after Olsen went out at the window makes a lot more sense. Their peculiar exchange. Well he's gone, said Lashbrook. That's too bad, replied Abramsom. Is nonsensical in the context of a sudden and unexpected suicide, not so in the context of a

meticulously planned murder. In twenty twelve, prosecutors in New York formerly reclassified Olson's cause of death from suicide to unknown, and Eric and his brother Nils promptly filed a suit against the CIA, formally alleging that their father was murdered. Though the suit was dismissed a year later. It was

not due to a lack of merit. In fact, Federal Judge James Boseburg made it clear that, in his opinion, the public record supported many of the allegations, but for a variety of procedural reasons, including the Statute of Limitations and the fact that the family had signed an agreement waiving their right to pursue any further legal action, the case went no further, and so despite the overwhelming evidence pointing in a single direction, it seems Frank Olsen's cause

of death will officially always remain unexplained. This episode was written by Emma Dibden Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble,

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