At a meeting in rural Maryland, he was covertly dosed with LSD by his colleague Sidney Gottlieb (head of the CIA's MKUltra program) and, nine days later, plunged to his death from the window of the Hotel Statler in New York.

[4] Olson enrolled in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps to help pay off his college costs, and was called to active duty at Fort Hood in Texas as the United States entered World War II.

In December 1942, he got a call from Ira Baldwin, his thesis adviser at UW and the future mentor of Sidney Gottlieb, who would go on to be the CIA's leading chemist and director of MK-ULTRA.

Ira had been called to leave his University post to direct a secret program regarding the development of biological weapons, and wanted Olson to join him as one of the first scientists at what would become Fort Detrick.

At Camp Detrick, Baldwin worked with industrial partners such as George W. Merck and the U.S. military to establish the top secret U.S. bioweapons program beginning in 1943, during World War II, a time when interest in applying modern technology to warfare was high.

Olson traveled often to Fort Terry, a secret army base off Long Island, where toxins too deadly to be brought onto the U.S. mainland were tested.

This was the period where senior military officials and CIA officers were becoming deeply troubled at Soviet progress, and feared they were heading towards mastery of microbe warfare.

Their alarm led to the forming of the Special Operations Division at Detrick in spring of 1949, with the purpose of conducting research on covert ways to utilize chemical weapons.

[5] By the time Olson stepped down as chief of SOD in early 1953, citing "pressures of the job" that aggravated his ulcers, he had officially joined the CIA after working closely with them for years.

"[6] On February 23, 1953, the Chinese broadcast charges that two captured American pilots had claimed the U.S. was conducting germ warfare against North Korea.

[14][15][16] According to coworker Norman Cournoyer, Olson had witnessed interrogations in Europe and become convinced that the United States had used biological weapons during the Korean War.

[13][17] Journalist Gordon Thomas claims that Olson subsequently visited William Sargant, a British psychiatrist with high level security clearances.

He frequently traveled to Germany to witness interrogation sessions in multiple secret prisons (evidence places Olson in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Heidelberg), where the victims would occasionally die from trauma of the tactics used.

Olson was one of the several SOD scientists who traveled to, or through, France in the summer of '51 when the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit was poisoned by naturally occurring ergot, the fungus from which LSD was derived.

On Tuesday, November 24, Olson went to work as usual, but unexpectedly returned home before noon, accompanied by a coworker, John Stubbs.

After the family announced they planned to sue the Agency over Olson's "wrongful death," the government offered them an out-of-court settlement of $1,250,000, later reduced to $750,000 (about $3.8 million in 2021 value [33]), which they accepted.

[1] In 2001, Canadian historian Michael Ignatieff wrote for The New York Times Magazine an account of Eric's decades-long campaign to clear his father's name.

"[40] On November 28, 2012, sons Eric and Nils Olson filed suit in the US District Court in Washington, D.C.,[41] seeking unspecified compensatory damages as well as access to documents related to their father's death and other matters that they claimed the CIA had withheld from them.

[46] In the miniseries, journalist Seymour Hersh says the government had a security process to identify and execute domestic dissidents (perceived to pose a risk).

[40] Writing for The New York Review of Books, scholar Michael Ignatieff concludes "Though I still resist the facts, the facts, as [Eric] Olson’s research has established, are that Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and other unnamed persons at the highest levels of the American government ordered the death of Eric’s father [Frank Olson] because they feared he knew too much about US biological warfare during the Korean War and about the torture and execution of Soviet agents and ex-Nazi "expendables" in black sites in Europe during the early 1950s.

Having killed him, the CIA confected the story that Olson's death was a suicide brought on by stress, and later attributed his jump from the window to the effects of a cocktail laced with LSD.

"[47] Academic Milton Leitenberg strongly disputed Ignatieff's conclusions, arguing that "there was no biological warfare carried out by any agency of the US government during the Korean War, or for that matter by anyone else.