Documentary: The US Government Covered Up Use of Biowarfare in Korea by Killing Its Own Scientist and Then Claiming It Was an LSD Experiment Gone Wrong

The Netflix documentary "Wormwood" is a must see. The US government has a history of using sensationalistic cover stories to obscure the reality of biowarfare and control scientists.

One of the best things I did at the start of the pandemic was watch the Netflix documentary miniseries “Wormwood”.

It shows the lengths the US government will go to suppress information regarding its use of biological warfare: killing its own scientists.

It also exposes the lengths to which the US government will go to create false cover stories, or “limited hangouts”.

The US government initially claimed the 1953 death of Frank Olson, a scientist at the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories at Camp Detrick (now Fort Detrick) in Maryland, was an inexplicable suicide. He had “fallen” out of a hotel window while visiting New York City.

In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission sensationally “disclosed” it was “actually” an LSD experiment gone wrong, part of the MK-Ultra mind control program.

However, it now appears that that was just another cover story. Olson’s death appears to have been an execution to cover up for US biological warfare. 

This is shown in “Wormwood” — directed by Errol Morris and featuring Olson’s son, Eric, and investigative reporter Sy Hersh.

This is backed up by other reporting.

Michael Ignatieff would write in the New York Review of Books shortly after “Wormwood” was release in late 2017: “Though I still resist the facts, the facts, as Olson’s research has established, are that Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and other unnamed persons at the highest levels of the American government ordered the death of Eric’s father because they feared he knew too much about US biological warfare during the Korean War and about the torture and execution of Soviet agents and ex-Nazi ‘expendables’ in black sites in Europe during the early 1950s. Having killed him, the CIA confected the story that Olson’s death was a suicide brought on by stress, and later attributed his jump from the window to the effects of a cocktail laced with LSD. It now appears that the LSD was administered, at a CIA retreat in Maryland, to discover exactly what Olson knew. When this experiment revealed that he was indeed ‘unreliable,’ he was taken to New York and disposed of.”

Similarly, see from Sept. 2019 article in the Guardian by Stephen Kinzer: “From mind control to murder? How a deadly fall revealed the CIA’s darkest secrets.”

A forensic pathologist, James Starrs of George Washington University Law School who examined Olson’s body when it was moved in 1994 declared: “The death of Frank Olson on 28 November 1953 was a murder, not a suicide. This is not an LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in 1975. This is a biological warfare story. Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a ‘bad trip’. He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program in the early 1950s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.”

So, this highlights how the government will use cover stories which might seem like sensationalistic revelations that vindicate people trying to expose the truth when what is being claimed is simply another level of control.

Moreover, in what I’ve read, there’s one unasked and therefore unanswered question: Why wasn’t Olson killed in a less flamboyant manner? Why not a car accident or the like? It seems to me there may be at least one more level of the Olson saga: To send a message to other scientists working on similar projects. That is, while the general public may — in spite of “Wormwood” — be largely unaware of the Olson case, I rather doubt top scientists share that ignorance.