Vincent Ruwet

Vincent L. Ruwet was a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who served as chief of the Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, the secret biological-warfare unit that worked with the CIA under MKNAOMI. He was the immediate superior of Frank Olson, the SOD biochemist whose death in November 1953, days after the CIA covertly dosed him with LSD, became one of the central episodes of MKULTRA.¹

Deep Creek and Olson's Death

On November 18, 1953, Ruwet led a group of SOD scientists, including Olson and Benjamin Wilson, to a retreat at Deep Creek Lodge in western Maryland with Sidney Gottlieb and his CIA colleagues. Without warning the Detrick men, Gottlieb spiked their after-dinner Cointreau with LSD. Olson, who had seemed in good spirits before, fell into a severe depression over the following days. The Monday after the retreat he came to Ruwet's office and said he wanted to resign, telling Ruwet he had "messed up the experiment" and should never have been in the work. Ruwet, who had known Olson for years and considered him a friend, decided Olson needed psychiatric attention and contacted Gottlieb and his deputy Robert Lashbrook.¹

Ruwet and Lashbrook took Olson to New York, ostensibly to be examined by a physician with experience in the effects of LSD, the allergist and CIA contractor Harold Abramson. Over several days the three men shuttled between New York and Washington. In the early morning of November 28, 1953, Olson went through the window of Room 1018A of the Statler Hotel and fell to his death; Lashbrook was in the room. Ruwet broke the news to Olson's wife Alice and their children, telling them only that Olson had jumped or fallen, and saying nothing about the LSD. The family did not learn that Olson had been drugged by the CIA until the Rockefeller Commission 1975 disclosures more than two decades later.¹

The December 1953 Statement

On December 1, 1953, three days after Olson's death, Ruwet gave a written statement providing a firsthand account of Olson's last days and of his state of mind during and after the Deep Creek experiment. The statement, preserved in CIA files and later released through the National Security Archive, is one of the primary contemporaneous records of the sequence of events.² In the CIA Inspector General's investigation that followed, Lyman Kirkpatrick recommended reprimands for Gottlieb and his TSS superiors; Ruwet, an unwitting victim of the dosing himself, continued his Army career. He later gave testimony when the Olson case was reopened by federal investigators and the Olson family in the 1970s.¹