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On this day in New York · November 28, 1953

Frank Olson Goes Through a Statler Window

Nine days after the CIA slipped him LSD without telling him, an Army scientist went out a tenth-floor window across the street from Penn Station, and his family spent decades being lied to about why.

Frank Olson Goes Through a Statler Window
Wikimedia Commons / Frank Olson

The facts

Where
Room 1018A, Hotel Statler, on Seventh Avenue across from Penn Station
When dosed
November 19, 1953, at a CIA retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland
Who dosed him
CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, head of the MKUltra program
When the family learned the truth
1975, via the Rockefeller Commission's report on CIA abuses

Around 2 a.m. on November 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a biochemist with the Army's Special Operations Division, fell to his death from room 1018A of the Hotel Statler on Seventh Avenue, directly across from Penn Station. He had been sharing the room with a CIA official, Robert Lashbrook, sent along to keep an eye on him. Nine days earlier, at a CIA retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, Olson's drink had been secretly spiked with LSD by Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist running the agency's MKUltra mind-control program, as an unwitting test. Olson spent his final week agitated, disoriented, and increasingly afraid of what he'd seen and heard inside the program, and was being flown to New York for psychiatric help when he went through the closed window, curtains and all. His family was not told the truth about the drugging until 1975, when the Rockefeller Commission's report on CIA abuses forced it into the open.

In their words

The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.

  1. In all my years in the hotel business, I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn.

    The Hotel Statler's night manager, recalling the scene

    Source: Wikipedia

  2. I've made a terrible mistake.

    Frank Olson, to his wife Alice, days after being secretly dosed with LSD

    Source: Wikipedia

Why it still matters

Olson's death became the case that cracked MKUltra open to public view, forcing the first real government reckoning with what the CIA had done to unwitting Americans and pushing Congress toward the oversight rules the agency still operates under today.

Sources

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