Mark Gagnon

And he didn't stumble into the world of covert programs.

He was literally handpicked for it.

And once he proved that he could handle classified work and then more classified work and then top secret work, he was invited deeper into projects that Americans would never hear about.

If you've never heard of Fort Detrick, that's kind of the point.

So during the Cold War, it was where the U.S.

was attempting to create germs as weapons.

And inside Fort Detrick is one of the most secretive units in the entire U.S.

government, the Special Operations Division, or the SOD.

Now, this is where Frank was assigned, and their job wasn't to cure diseases or make vaccines or any of that stuff.

It was to figure out how to turn biology into a weapon and deploy it without anyone knowing.

And so that means a bunch of different things.

Bioweapons that could be sprayed into the air so that people would breathe them in without realizing it.

Chemical or biological agents that could weaken or...

disorient or even break prisoners during an interrogation, giving them some type of truth serum, and ultimately how to simulate an outbreak that looks like an accident.

Now, Olson also wasn't some low-level assistant in the corner.

He was a senior biochemist with clearance high enough to know what the weapons were and what they were actually meant to do.

Coworkers later said that he was friendly and pretty affable, funny guy, but that the work started to wear on him.

I mean, this type of work is not for the faint of heart.

He was seeing live animals get tested on and understood exactly what these agents could do to a human body and over time watched the theories of what they thought was capable turn into real life practices.

But to understand why Frank Olson became such a problem, you have to understand for Dietrich and the CIA's new obsession with psychological control.