No One Told Them

If there is a family in the U.S. with a just grievance against the CIA, it is the Olsons of Frederick, Md. The widowed mother, her married daughter and two grown sons felt compelled last week to call a press conference in the backyard of the mother's rural home to talk about what they had endured. They wanted everyone to know how an agency of their Government had driven Frank R. Olson --the man they knew as husband and father--to commit suicide, and then left them for 22 years to wonder why.

In 1953 Olson was a civilian biochemist employed by the Army at Fort Detrick, Md., the Army's supremely secret biological-warfare center, which was closed in 1971. Olson was working on a highly classified project for the CIA, which was interested in learning about the effects of new and powerful drugs that its agents conceivably could use--or have used on them. After spending a five-day period away from home engaged in the research, Olson returned in a state of unusual agitation. His wife was baffled and then alarmed by his moods of self-doubt and self-recrimination. He said nothing about what was bothering him, a fact that his wife attributed to the secrecy of his work. By Sunday he said that he had decided to quit his job.

The next day Olson seemed to get better, but on Tuesday morning he returned from work at 10 o'clock to tell his stunned wife that he had been advised to see a New York City psychiatrist--his colleagues feared he might have become a menace to her. Mrs. Olson accompanied her husband to the airport. She never saw him again.

Psychosis Delusions. Olson was taken to New York by two men, Army Colonel Vincent Ruwet, a colleague at Fort Detrick, and a man named Robert Lashbrook, who the Olson family later said they believed was a CIA agent. A psychiatric examination of Olson was conducted by Dr. Harold Abramson, now 75, who had done pioneering work on LSD. Abramson found that Olson was suffering from "severe psychosis and delusions," and recommended that he enter a sanitarium.

Olson returned to Washington with the intention of spending Thanksgiving with his family, but was so upset that he went back to New York without ever seeing them. This time, according to a New York City police report, he registered at the Statler Hotel along with Robert Lashbrook and went to Room 1018A. At 3:20 a.m., the police said, Lashbrook was awakened by the crash of shattering glass. The window on the Seventh Avenue side was broken, and Olson's body was ten stories below.

The CIA told Mrs. Olson--vaguely and unconvincingly--that the death of her husband was somehow related to his work. No one would say what had actually happened. He was 43.

Unknown Fear. At the time, Eric Olson was nine, Nils was five and Lisa seven. Their mother conveyed to them her feeling that their father must have killed himself in a state of panic brought on by some fear that she did not know. The children tried to conceal the fact that their father had committed suicide. Nils would say that he had died "from a concussion," and Lisa told people that he had died in "an accident."

The Olson family remained baffled and burdened by the death until last month, when the Rockefeller commission issued its report on the CIA. In Chapter 16 it revealed that the CIA in the late 1940s began studying drugs that change behavior, and tests were made on unsuspecting subjects; the practice was not stopped until 1963. The report referred to an incident in 1953: "LSD was administered to an employee of the Department of the Army without his knowledge while he was attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on the drug project." CIA agents had slipped the LSD into an after-dinner drink; 20 minutes later the subject was informed he had been drugged. LSD influences different people in varying ways. In this case, the man developed serious side effects. The Rockefeller report went on to tell how he had been taken to New York City for psychiatric treatment and had jumped from a tenth-floor window. The CIA had simply reprimanded the two men who were responsible for administering the LSD.

After the report was released, the CIA still made no comment, but the Rockefeller commission's staff acknowledged that the man the agency had used as a guinea pig for LSD was, of course, Frank Olson.

Eric Olson is now 30 and a graduate student in clinical psychology at Harvard. He said last week that the family plans to sue the CIA on charges of causing wrongful death: "We know it's going to be in the millions, but we don't know just how much." When he had learned the truth about his father's death, said Olson, "I felt a great sense of relief. I knew it was a CIA atrocity, not a suicide. It meant that we didn't have to live with that mysterious burden any longer."

Alice Olson, 59, a counselor for a mental health association, said that at first she also was greatly relieved. "Then," she said, "a feeling of overwhelming grief set in. Now I'm in a state of anger over the useless loss of life. It's justifiable anger. Sometimes I don't even know how angry I am."

Why had the CIA never told her the truth, not even to this day? "I have no idea," she answered. "I can't explain an agency that won't account for its actions. I guess they just felt it might go unnoticed if they didn't say anything." The more agonizing, unanswerable question: How many other people have been unknowingly victimized by the CIA?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.