When Your 60-Year-Old Family Mystery Shows Up on Netflix
Frank Olson, the Army bioweapons scientist whose 1953 LSD-linked death is the subject of Errol Morris’s recent six-part Netflix documentary, Wormwood, was my uncle.
Over the years, I have witnessed the government’s efforts to quash a story that now has come to represent some of America’s darkest Cold War secrets, and along the way my curiosity about the men responsible helped shape the protagonists in my two spy novels, An Honorable Man and The Good Assassin.
Wormwood opens with the few indisputable facts of Olson’s death. Around 2:30 am on November 28, 1953 Olson “fell or jumped” from a room on the thirteenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City. Olson worked at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, a top secret US Army facility that researched biological warfare agents. He had been taken to New York by a CIA escort for treatment with a security-cleared psychiatrist after he exhibited symptoms of anxiety, paranoia, and depression. He was returned to his wife in Frederick two days later in a closed casket, and she was discouraged from viewing the body because, she was told, he had suffered disfiguring facial injuries. That was all the family knew for 22 years.
Then in 1975, one additional fact came to light. The Rockefeller Commission, created by President Ford to investigate allegations of CIA misdeeds, contained a brief reference to an Army scientist who’d been unknowingly given LSD at a western Maryland work offsite in 1953, and later died in a fall from his New York hotel room. To the conflicting theories that Olson “fell or jumped” to his death, another possibility emerged—he was pushed. Murdered.
Wormwood explores how Frank Olson’s death was linked to the CIA’s top secret MKULTRA and Artichoke mind control programs, which experimented with LSD, electric shock, and hypnosis to gain control of human behavior. The urge to cover up deeply unsettling stories is the crippling virus of democracy, which is made strong by transparency and accountability, but weakened by men acting in secret thinking they are above the law. It is the story of our greatest scandals—Watergate and the Pentagon Papers—where claims of protecting state secrets are used to abet the irresistible urges of complicit men to hide uncomfortable truths.
Frank Olson left behind his wife, Alice, my aunt, and three children, including Eric, the eldest, whose life-long search to answer the questions—how did my father die and why?—is the lens through which Errol Morris tells the Olson story. As a child I remember visiting the Olsons in their suburban Maryland home. Frank was dead by then, and a ghost in the brick ranch house on Braddock Heights, but his absence was felt in things left behind—the gifts Frank had brought his children from his Army trips to Europe, a wedding album, and a large, formal family photograph above the fireplace mantel showing a tranquil Frank in jacket and tie and his wife with a glowing smile. Frank was not mentioned when we visited at Thanksgiving, or during summer vacations. When I asked about Frank, as I did innocently, ignorant of the circumstances of his death, I felt my cousins’ uncomfortable reticence—the whole topic of their father was not discussed. Frank was gone, disappeared, a term not known then, but now has come to define a person’s inexplicable disappearance under questionable circumstances.
I observed the family tragedy from the tenuous intimacy of our family connection. I saw how Eric’s search for answers was frustrated by an agency clinging to its secrets and how he relentlessly pushed forward, exhuming his father’s body for forensic analysis, provoking a cold case murder investigation by the New York City Police Department only to see it abruptly shut down, and following up on leads that appeared when strangers, who had read a story or seen a documentary on the case, approached him with a new detail. Errol Morris’s remarkable documentary is not so much a testament to his cinematic sleuthing as it is a culmination of Eric’s efforts to bring attention to the case.
Through the years, Eric placed himself in the middle of the dizzying enterprise, prodding the story into existence, keeping it alive, and blinking in disbelief as it grew beyond him. Largely through Eric’s efforts, Frank Olson’s death and the cover-up has come to embody our collective fascination with the Cold War’s darkest secrets, and it has shined a light on the dubious privileges men in the CIA gave themselves in the name of national security.
I have pondered the men behind Olson’s murder, talked to two of them, and researched their lives, but they remain hidden, opaque, and masked, and they embody the baser side of covert work—the narcissism, mean-spiritedness, and contempt for transparency. It was my interest in the psychological reality of these men that drew me to the literary spy novel, first as a reader and then as a writer. None of the volumes of books on the Frank Olson case dig deeply into the minds of the men who inhabited Frank’s world—their yearnings, human frailty, and questions of conscience. These men were highly intelligent, often Ivy League graduates, who were caught up in the great post-World War II enthusiasm to defeat totalitarianism, and yet they became radical pragmatists who objected to letting ends justify the means, but then did so anyway, because, they said, “it’s all we have.”
The literary spy novel puts a human face on the Cold War by focusing on the psychological burdens of its characters. Doubt and paranoia bred in a culture of secrecy characterize these novels as does the sophisticated amorality of the men at the top of the intelligence bureaucracies. These novels—by Greene, Le Carré, Ambler, Kanon—explore the strain that is placed on family, friends, and faith. Men who worked in covert operations—as Frank did—invariably bring some of that darkness into themselves, suffering the moral hazards of a line of work that sanctions lying, deceit, and murder. The interplay of state secrets and individual lives is the trademark of the genre—and this interplay finds full expression in the story of Frank Olson.
Eric has always said to me that people who look at the case find it hard to believe that Frank was murdered by the CIA. Extrajudicial execution—state murder—he says, is America’s darkest secret. It’s repugnant and reprehensible, and it’s not how we think of ourselves as a nation. Morris too is vague in his conclusion. The documentary offers two versions of what happened in Room 1018 early in the morning of November 28, 1953. It’s true that no smoking gun has been found. No confession was ever made. But the slow drip of circumstantial evidence over the past 42 years all points to murder and none of it points away.
The one witness to events in the hotel room, Robert Lashbrook, Olson’s CIA escort, died in 2001 without changing his story. But there is one verified fact from that night. When Olson was dying on the sidewalk, Lashbrook made a call from the hotel room to an outside number. It was a short call—six words—and it was heard by the operator at the hotel switchboard who had stayed on the line and heard the conversation.
“He’s gone.”
“Well that’s too bad.”
Like Eric, I have read and reread, and pondered, those words. I have tried to invent a forgiving scenario for the chilling heartlessness of the conversation and I wondered how their shorthand could convey the shocking facts of the early morning drama in the hotel room unless they knew, by prior agreement, just what “gone” was meant to imply.
It’s a fascinating story—one that deserves to be told fully, as only fiction can, and I tried once and failed. I, like any novelist who tells a story that comes from personal experience, faced the daunting challenge to shed the baggage of all I knew to create characters who live only between the covers of the book. My second effort writes the story from the point of view of the men who I know nothing about—the men who murdered Olson.
