Mark Gagnon

which, again, in retrospect, people say is not the kind of thing you would expect from someone that just hits the ground.

Now, all of this sounds like a man who was potentially knocked unconscious and then tossed out the window rather than someone that consciously jumped.

But at the time, none of this was public.

To the outside world, even to Frank's family, it was just a tragic suicide of a troubled scientist on a business trip that was having a hard time with the work that he was doing.

However, to the CIA, it's now clear that this could be a huge security risk and that investigators were scrambling to succeed in one thing, and that is ultimately containing what had happened.

So from the moment that Olson hit the ground, the CIA's top priority was ultimately to create a narrative.

I mean...

Within hours, officials were deciding what the family would be told and how his coworkers would be instructed to talk about it.

They told his wife and his children that Frank had suffered a sudden and severe mental breakdown and framed it as stress and work pressure, no mention of a secret program or LSD, and no mention of those nine days leading up to his death.

At Fort Detrick, coworkers were instructed to just be quiet, keep their mouth shut as the files related to the incident were ultimately classified and sealed.

Now, if this were truly a straightforward case by just ordinary depression or a mental break, there would be no need to lie about the drugging or the nature of his work, and definitely no need to send agency men to lie to the family about what happened.

Now, fast forward more than 20 years to the mid-1970s.

Watergate had...

fundamentally shattered public trust and Congress is finally digging deep into the intelligence community's ties to secret programs.

This ultimately led to two major investigations.

First, the Church Committee in the Senate and the Rockefeller Commission appointed by President Gerald Ford.

One of the biggest threads they uncovered was that for years, the CIA had been running human experiments with LSD and other drugs, and many of those experiments were done without the subject's knowledge or their consent.

But buried in the files was a reference to a civilian scientist who died after being dosed with LSD by the CIA at a retreat in 1953.

And that scientist was Frank Olson.

Now, the discovery was massive.