Olson was involved with Project Artichoke with moral misgivings, beginning in May 1952: after watching a documentary on Protestant reformation leader Martin Luther, a conscience-stricken Olson informed his bosses he intended to quit the biowarfare program.2 Around the time of that announcement, Olson’s CIA colleague, Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s MKUltra program, covertly dosed him with LSD. A week later, on November 28, 1953, Olson plunged to his death from a window of New York’s Hotel Statler. The US government first described his death as a suicide, and then as misadventure. In 1975,
...more
