Shortly after, Olson attended a work retreat in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, where CIA officials, including the head of MK-Ultra, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, were in attendance. In 1975, the American public discovered that MK-Ultra was a secret CIA project that, between 1953 and 1964, conducted unethical experiments on unknowing subjects with the goal of achieving mind-control. Many of these tests included administering LSD on unsuspecting civilians, which the CIA later acknowledged, “made little scientific sense.”
It was in Deep Creek Lake that Olson became one of the unsuspecting victims of MK-Ultra. There, CIA agents secretly slipped LSD into his drink, as a scene inWormwood’s trailer shows. Olson was told, 20 minutes after the fact, that his drink had been laced, and then he left the retreat in an agitated state. On November 24, he told a colleague and his wife that he planned to resign. But before that could happen, the CIA forced him to attend a “psychiatric evaluation”four days later. On November 28, he was found on the sidewalk after emerging from the window of the Statler Hotel in New York City.
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