A Long, Sordid History of US Bioweapons

By Aaron Good, columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

In the fictional world of spies, including works like The Bourne Identity, we often see depictions of the intelligence agencies acting to assassinate their own employees or agents for various reasons. This is a very serious prerogative power to be placed in the hands of government bureaucrats. Although it is widely understood that such practices exist, the public has never been informed about the actual existence of such state powers. 

This is likely because such actions are blatantly unconstitutional. Arbitrarily assassinating a US citizen is a brazen violation of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” Regardless, given the reality of overriding state secrecy, how could we even know that such interventions have taken place and are not merely the product of imaginative fiction writers? As it happens, there is a Cold War “cold case” that may be of particular relevance to the Kennedy campaign. It is a case that not only involves the issue of clandestine assassination; it also involves the very suppressed history of US biowarfare.

Frank Olson, a CIA scientist working on the Agency’s notorious MKULTRA program, died in Manhattan on November 28, 1953, after exiting a window on the 13th floor of a hotel room. It took more than two decades for the world to learn, during a congressional intelligence investigation, that CIA officials had surreptitiously dosed Olson with LSD. 

At first blush, Olson’s death may seem to have little in common with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new book, The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race. However, thanks to the work of various critical researchers, we can today see important threads connecting both the Olson murder and the COVID-19 pandemic to a dark and lawless quadrant of the clandestine state with a long history of making biological weapons.

We are not privy to precisely who killed the CIA’s Frank Olson. At the time, Olson was a scientist working on the ultra-secretive MKULTRA program. His strange death did not sit well with his family. Initially, the family had been told that the death was an accident. In 1975, post-Watergate investigations revealed that about one week prior to Olson’s death, he had been secretly dosed with LSD by CIA officials. According to the Ford administration, the LSD experience led Olson to commit suicide. At the apparent suggestion of two young White House officials – Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney – and with congressional approval, the US government financially compensated the Olson family for his death.

This did not satisfy many critics, including Olson’s son, Eric. Eventually, after the death of Eric’s mother (Frank Olson’s widow), he had his father’s body exhumed. Evidence of an assault suggested that Olson may have been incapacitated before he was thrown out of a window. George Washington University forensic pathologist James Starrs asserted that the discovery was “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.” The Manhattan district attorney officially changed Olson’s cause of death to “unknown.” More recently, Errol Morris released Wormwood, the Netflix documentary on the Frank Olson case. Wormwood suggests Olson was deemed a security risk because he opposed the US government’s Korean War-era biological weapons programs – programs like those Olson had participated in at Fort Detrick as part of the US government’s bioweapons research initiatives. 

USG, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As Stephen Kinzer recounts in his book Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Olson had been working in these areas since the 1940s. Among other things, Olson coauthored “Experimental Airborne Infections,” a major study which reported on experiments dealing with “airborne clouds of highly infectious agents.” Eventually Olson became the acting chief of the Special Operations Division – officially part of the Army but functionally a CIA research division hidden within the US military.

Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh appears in the Wormwood documentary. Hersh had written on the case when it resurfaced in the 1970s. Using his highly placed sources in the CIA, Hersh learned that in truth, Olson had been deemed a risk to national security and was extrajudicially executed. A review of Wormwood in The New York Review of Books described the covert apparatus Hersh identified as being a network tasked with “the execution of internal dissidents by the CIA’s ‘Office of Security.’” This would seem to confirm the 1975 admission of CIA officer and Watergate “Plumber” E. Howard Hunt that the Agency had an outfit responsible for eliminating individuals deemed security risks – including the Agency’s own employees and people suspected of being double-agents.

A Watergate Aside…

Regarding Watergate, there is a disturbing link between Olson’s assassination and the White House “Plumbers.” Back in 1953, the CIA Office of Security official sent to clean up the mess with the Manhattan police was future Watergate burglar James McCord. For all we know, he may have been the officer tasked with organizing Olson’s assassination beforehand. McCord has a connection to the JFK assassination as well. He was one of the Agency men running domestic (therefore illegal) operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). By all appearances, the most noteworthy of these operations was the one in New Orleans in which Lee Oswald, working out of the office of a fanatically anticommunist ex-FBI man, pretended to be a communist FPCC supporter to discredit the organization. How remarkable that this national security official, James McCord, would surface in the final acts of three public officials: Frank Olson, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon! 

If this were not bizarre enough, another of the Watergate burglars had a connection to the JFK assassination. Frank Fiorini, aka Frank Sturgis, was involved in a deception operation immediately after JFK’s murder. Sturgis and other right-wing, Cuban-connected figures attempted to circulate false evidence tying Lee Oswald to Fidel Castro – just as McCord or others appear to have essentially been doing in New Orleans earlier.

Korean War Bioweapons and MKULTRA

As mentioned in the opening, there is more that ties the Olson case to other dark corners of the US clandestine state and to the kinds of bioweapons programs that led to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is controversial and not widely accepted by university historians – a cohort that sadly does not have a good track record when it comes to interrogating the darkest corners of the clandestine national security state. As with events like the Kennedy assassinations, we must turn to the indefatigable critical community if we seek a deeper, less credulous assessment of these events.

Independent researcher and retired psychoanalyst Jeffrey Kaye has spent years trying to uncover the truth about these programs. According to Kaye,

A preponderance of the evidence over the past couple of years has established that the U.S. used biological weapons in its war with North Korea and China in the early 1950s. This is based on CIA, Department of Defense and other government documents, as well as a close reading of the confessions of 25 US airmen.

The MKULTRA program was the CIA’s umbrella program for mind control experiments, which included certain pharmacological and bioweapon programs. Officially begun in April of 1953, MKULTRA grew out of precursor programs like those Olson had been working on. As Kinzer documents in Poisoner in Chief, the MKULTRA consolidation of these programs took place in response to a scandal. Specifically, during the Korean War, captured US airmen confessed to having used biological weapons in Korea. The US government’s public response was to assert that the airmen must have been brainwashed with exotic “oriental” mind control techniques. Thus did MKULTRA officially begin in the spring of 1953. 

Central Intelligence Agency, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The program is so shrouded in myth and secrecy that many people think it is wholly or largely a baseless internet conspiracy theory. In truth, the program is likely darker than a typical internet conspiracist could imagine. This is due to the fact that, as Kinzer details, CIA director Richard Helms ordered all the files destroyed after being told by President Nixon that he would be replaced by a new director at the start of Nixon’s second term. Whether the MKULTRA files were actually destroyed or removed to an even deeper level of classification is unknown. Only a tiny fraction of the operational files survived, including some related to LSD experiments on unwitting subjects. The surviving documentation was enough for a congressional investigation to conclude that “the nature of the tests, their scale and the fact that they were continued for years after the danger of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting individuals was known, demonstrate a fundamental disregard for the value of human life.” 

Under cover of state secrecy, MKULTRA consolidated dark research programs including biowarfare and mind control into one operation. Brianna Nofil provides a good summary: “MK-Ultra’s ‘mind control’ experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals.” As John Marks chronicled in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, the CIA’s mind control experiments would include objectives like improved techniques for interrogation or resistance to interrogation. There were also exotic experiments like the creation of Manchurian candidates – unwitting assassins created through hypnosis and/or the use of psychotropic drugs. 

Biowarfare in Korea: Limiting the Damage

In Poisoner in Chief, Kinzer details how the US had already begun its own mind control research with secret programs like Bluebird and Artichoke which were later folded into MKULTRA. As Kaye has illustrated, the US appears to have indeed been using bioweapons against Korea. Therefore, the Koreans in all likelihood did not have to brainwash, bewitch, or otherwise ensorcell captured US airmen to get them to talk about their biowarfare assignments.

As Jeffrey Kaye documents, the acting director of the US Psychological Strategy Board (PSB – a propaganda agency) wrote hysterically to high officials at the Defense Department, State Department, and CIA about allegations of US atrocities in the Korean War. He described such charges – including those alleging the deployment of biological warfare – as being effectively “a horror-weapon … an attack against the very structure of human civilization.” Months after the July 1953 armistice which ended the war, the PSB acknowledged that the biowarfare charges had not been refuted. In response, the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), a US psychological warfare outfit, called for the secret implementation of a “specific program of US action to destroy and counter-exploit the Soviet bacteriological warfare myth” in order to “to discredit Soviet propaganda and undo and reverse any belief [in the biowarfare allegations].”

The covert side of the program would be handled by the CIA. Operational plans were devised to use “counter-propaganda and personalized seduction and coercion [emphasis added].” Such measures would be “initiated as a matter of urgency against persons and groups where the Soviet [biowarfare publicity] campaign has been especially effective.” The plans were approved, and within two months Frank Olson was murdered. 

Recall that Seymour Hersh’s CIA insider confirmed that Olson had been liquidated as a security risk. Eric Olson believed that the secrecy imperative of the Korean War bioweapons program was the motive. Frank Olson could not be allowed to publicly unburden his conscience about his biowarfare work and MKULTRA. Jeffrey Kaye’s research adds strong circumstantial confirmation to this theory, making it the most plausible explanation for this Cold War cold case.

In 2024, we are not far removed from a much bigger apparent bioweapons debacle – the COVID-19 pandemic. The chair of The Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, stated that he is “pretty convinced [COVID-19] came out of US lab biotechnology.” In The Wuhan Cover-Up, RFK Jr. makes the case that US officials used a network – which included the Wuhan Institute of Virology – to conduct risky gain-of-function research and experiments on human pathogens. These “biodefense” programs are essentially indistinguishable from bioweapons programs; they entail the artificial creation of increasingly dangerous pathogens as a matter of course. Such are the likely origins of the COVID-19 virus, but as with bioweapons in the Korean War, the US government will move heaven and earth to prevent such explosive facts from being disclosed.

The Olson case may also provide insights into other tragic national mysteries. Definitive details regarding his fate have been kept secret for over 70 years. We can surmise that his death was deemed necessary to keep other dark and criminal state secrets from being exposed. In American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, I wrote about how the US clandestine state routinely breaks laws and hides this lawbreaking from the public. This is done constantly in the name of “national security.” Criminally immune state actors hide these practices because not hiding them would damage the US image, which in turn would damage “national security.” Theoretically, the clandestine state could kill someone who might expose how the state murdered Frank Olson because Frank Olson was going to expose US war crimes. And so on….

Given that there is a mechanism that apparently does intervene decisively in such a way, what precludes such “executive action” from being deployed against other officials, even elected ones? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes that his uncle and father were killed by the state because they sought to wind down the Cold War and US global empire. The unadjudicated assassination of Frank Olson informs us that the US regime has an apparatus for extrajudicially executing US citizens – including US officials. The case also informs us that the regime has no interest in justifying or explaining this. Seventy years after the fact, the US government refuses to even acknowledge that it has assumed this prerogative. The apex of the US regime operates in lawless secrecy. 

Given the netherworld of secrecy and state criminality that Americans are confronted with, it is paramount that the US implement Kennedy’s plans for a binding international bioweapons treaty. Additionally, we must follow his call for an American Truth & Reconciliation process to address crimes and tragedies authored by the US government during the era which began after World War II. As it stands, Americans and the rest of the world are in the dark about much of US and world history. With the lab-created COVID-19 virus, we see that what we do not know can hurt or even kill us. A greater measure of democracy must be restored. If we do not end the state’s potentially catastrophic covert programs, these practices may end us.

Aaron Good, PhD, is the author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, host of the American Exception and Devil's Chess Club podcasts (on Patreon), and a columnist at The Kennedy Beacon.