Wormwood: How Netflix Exposed the CIA's Secret LSD Murder
Errol Morris investigates the 1953 death of Frank Olson, a biological warfare scientist unknowingly dosed with LSD by U.S. intelligence officials
Quick Facts
On December 15, 2017, Netflix released Wormwood, a six-part docudrama miniseries directed by acclaimed filmmaker Errol Morris. The series examines one of Cold War America's darkest secrets: the death of Frank Olson, a biological warfare scientist whose life and death became entangled with the CIA's classified MK-Ultra program.
Frank Olson worked for the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland. In 1953, while attending a work retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Olson was given LSD in a spiked drink without his knowledge or consent. The person responsible was Sidney Gottlieb, the head of Project MK-Ultra—the CIA's notorious mind-control and behavioral modification initiative.
Nine days after being dosed, Olson fell from a window at the Statler Hotel (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) in New York City. The government's initial narrative was straightforward: accidental death, or possibly suicide. For decades, this remained the official story.
But the truth had a shelf life. In 1975, President Gerald Ford issued a formal apology to the Olson family, acknowledging the covert LSD experiment. That same year, CIA Director William Colby released documents confirming the agency's role in administering the drug. The family ultimately received a $750,000 settlement—a financial acknowledgment of state wrongdoing, though not an answer to the central question: how did a man fall from a hotel window days after the CIA poisoned his mind?
This ambiguity is what drives Wormwood. Morris approaches the Olson case not as a closed historical file, but as an active investigation. The documentary weaves together declassified government records, interviews, archival footage, and dramatic reconstructions to create a compelling portrait of a man whose death remains contested more than 70 years later.
