Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  Baldwin began his work by hiring a handful of scientists he knew, including several of his former students from the University of Wisconsin. These first few were quickly followed by dozens and then hundreds more. Ultimately about fifteen hundred came to work at Camp Detrick. All were infused with a sense of mission—even a sense that they might hold the fate of humanity in their hands. “They were passionate about their science,” a Camp Detrick historian later asserted. “They were the best in the country. If someone said to you, ‘Here is an unlimited budget, here’s all the equipment you need, tell me which kind of building you want to work in, we’ll build it,’ you would jump at the opportunity. And that’s just what they did. But the imperative was: we need results very quickly.”

  By coming to work at Camp Detrick, these scientists joined one of the world’s most clandestine fraternities. This required them to accept a new moral order. Upon joining, all were required to sign a vow of secrecy that bound them for life and beyond.

  “In the event of my death, I authorize the Commanding Officer at Camp Detrick, Maryland, to make arrangements for and conduct the processing of my remains and to place them in a sealed casket which shall not thereafter be opened,” it said. “I authorize post-mortem examination of my remains to be made exclusively by proper army representatives in their discretion.”

  New arrivals at Camp Detrick, many of them accomplished specialists with advanced degrees, were put through a Special Projects School where they learned “the known technical facts and potentialities of germ warfare.” Courses had names like “Production of Agents” and “Food and Water Contamination.” The scientists developed such enthusiasm for their new work that they even came up with a school cheer:

  Brucellosis, Psittacosis,

  Pee! You! Bah!

  Antibodies, Antitoxin,

  Rah! Rah! Rah!

  Early in 1944, Winston Churchill abruptly changed the bio-weapons order he had sent to President Roosevelt more than a year before. He feared that the Nazis might launch a last-ditch bio-attack on Britain in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of war. Driven by this new sense of urgency, he asked Roosevelt to forget the time-consuming process of developing a new bio-weapon and send him something relatively easy to make: bomblets filled with anthrax spores. He wanted half a million.

  Only a few Americans knew of this request. Not all approved. Roosevelt’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, wrote to his boss that using anthrax as a weapon “would violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of, and all of the known laws of war.” Global conflict was raging, though, and Britain was under threat. Roosevelt agreed to send Churchill the bomblets he believed he needed.

  “Pray tell me when they will be available,” Churchill wrote in reply. “We should regard it as a first installment.”

  Ira Baldwin calculated that tons of anthrax spores would be needed to fill Britain’s order. Since the project had such high priority, he was easily able to commandeer a former munitions factory in Vigo, Indiana, and begin converting it into a plant where the United States would produce biological weapons for the first time. Work was underway when, on May 7, 1945, the Nazi army surrendered.

  Baldwin returned to the University of Wisconsin soon afterward. He had reason to feel satisfied. Under his leadership, the United States had launched its first bio-weapons program. He had built Camp Detrick into a sprawling research complex complete with a railroad depot, a hospital, a fire station, a cinema, and several recreation halls. Hundreds of scientists, described in one official report as “America’s brain trust in their field,” were engaged in more than two hundred projects. They produced industrial quantities of anthrax spores, bred mosquitoes infected with yellow fever, and even developed a “pigeon bomb,” a bird whose feathers were impregnated with toxic spores. Baldwin also directed work at two field testing stations, one at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah and another on Horn Island, off the coast of Mississippi. He did what the army hired him to do: bring biological weapons into America’s arsenal.

  In two and a half years of testing agents for biological warfare, Baldwin and his researchers had learned a fair amount about how to kill large numbers of people with germs. They suspected that Germany and Japan were still far ahead of the United States. Now, with the war over, the key German and Japanese experts were adrift, cast with their priceless knowledge into the post-war chaos. That is why scientists at Camp Detrick were so thrilled when they learned that Kurt Blome had been found and was in Allied custody.

  * * *

  SHOULD EVERYONE WHO helped run the Nazi machine be prosecuted for war crimes, or could some be brought to work for the U.S. government instead? This question came to President Roosevelt in 1944. William Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, asked the president for permission to launch a new recruiting project. Nazi spies were beginning to fall into American hands. Some knew much about the Soviet Union. Donovan wanted authority to grant them immunity from prosecution and “permission for entry into the United States after the war.” Even though this project would recruit spies only, not scientists, Roosevelt refused.

  “The carrying out of any such guarantees would be difficult, and probably be widely misunderstood both in this country and abroad,” he wrote in rejecting Donovan’s request. “We may expect that the number of Germans who are anxious to save their skins and property will rapidly increase. Among them may be some who should properly be tried for war crimes, or at least arrested for active participation in Nazi activities. Even with the necessary controls you mention, I am not prepared to authorize the giving of guarantees.”

  Neither the letter nor the spirit of this directive was ever followed. One of the most senior Nazi intelligence officers, Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, surrendered to American forces in May 1945—a few weeks after Roosevelt’s death—and quickly made a deal under which he turned his spy network over to the Office of Strategic Services in exchange for legal protection and a generous stipend. Once it was established that Nazi intelligence officers could be quietly forgiven and brought into America’s service, a precedent was set for Nazi scientists. The army established a new covert service, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, for the sole purpose of finding and recruiting scientists who had served the Third Reich. Its officers sought to isolate scientists so they could not return to their wartime work fueling German military power; keep them out of Soviet hands; and, when desirable, arrange new jobs for them in the United States.

  At the Kransberg Castle interrogation center, clerks began using paperclips to mark the files of prisoners whose backgrounds presented “the most troublesome cases.” From that practice came the code name of the clandestine project by which Nazi scientists were given falsified biographies and brought to work in the United States: Operation Paperclip. President Harry Truman set it in motion on September 3, 1946. His secret order, drawn up by intelligence officers and approved by Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, authorized the issuance of up to a thousand visas for German and Austrian scientists “in the interest of national security.” It specifically forbade cooperation with anyone who had been “a member of the Nazi Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism.”

  If followed, that restriction would have kept Operation Paperclip small indeed. The operation’s main goal was to recruit German rocket scientists, whose job during the war—producing missiles that killed thousands of civilians in London and other European cities—certainly qualified them as active supporters of Nazi militarism. With remarkable alacrity, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency cast those concerns aside. Operation Paperclip proceeded as if Truman’s stipulation did not exist. Ultimately more than seven hundred scientists, engineers, and other technical specialists who had served the Third Reich came to the United States on Paperclip contracts.

  Soon after the war ended, the Chemical Warfare Service was upgraded in importance and renamed the Chemical Corps. Its commanders watched enviously as Nazi spies
were brought under American protection and as, soon afterward, the welcome was extended to Nazi rocket scientists. They proposed opening the pipeline wider so they could hire the Nazis they coveted: physicians, chemists, and biologists who could give them results of experiments that had been conducted at concentration camps. The officers running Operation Paperclip found this a fine idea. With their help, three German scientists who had worked on chemical and biological warfare projects arrived at Camp Detrick less than a year after the war ended. All had been members of the Nazi Party. Part of their assignment was to teach Americans about sarin, a gas they had helped develop in Germany that seemed especially promising for battlefield use. In their lectures, the new arrivals used records from their wartime experiments. The records showed that most of their subjects died within two minutes after inhaling their first doses of sarin, and that “age of the subject seemed to make no difference in the lethality of the toxic vapor.”

  During World War II, Nazi doctors carried out experiments that led to many deaths. Their work gave them, as it had given spies and rocket engineers, experience that some in Washington believed might prove decisive in a future war. For the officers of Operation Paperclip, it was an easy call. Whenever a scientist they coveted turned out to have a blemish on his record, they rewrote his biography. They systematically expunged references to membership in the SS, collaboration with the Gestapo, abuse of slave laborers, and experiments on human subjects. Applicants who had been rated by interrogators as “ardent Nazi” were re-categorized as “not an ardent Nazi.” References to their exemplary family lives were added. Once they had been thus “bleached,” they became suitable candidates for Paperclip contracts.

  “In effect,” according to one study of this period, “the scientific teams wore blinders. Dazzled by German technology that was in some cases years ahead of our own, they simply ignored its evil foundation—which sometimes meant stepping over and around piles of dead bodies—and pursued Nazi scientific knowledge like a forbidden fruit.”

  This practice did not go unchallenged. The State Department assigned several diplomats to Operation Paperclip, and they objected to “bleaching.” Consular officers threatened to withhold visas for scientists implicated in war crimes. At home, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it would conduct its own checks of former Nazis seeking entry into the United States. The American Federation of Scientists wrote to President Truman warning him that some applicants were hiding bloody pasts. Newspapers reported that one of the first Paperclip contracts had been offered to the industrial chemist Carl Krauch, co-designer of the I. G. Farben chemical plant at Auschwitz, but that before Krauch could be brought to the United States, he was arrested as a war criminal in West Germany and charged with “the enslavement, ill-treatment, terrorization, torture and murder of numerous persons … as well as other crimes such as the production and supply of poison gas for experimental purposes on and the extermination of concentration camp inmates.”

  Some cheered when prominent Nazis were convicted and punished. Captain Bosquet Wev, the pugnacious forty-two-year-old former submarine commander who ran Operation Paperclip, did not. In a stream of vituperative memos to Washington, Wev accused the State Department of sabotaging his operation, “beating a dead Nazi horse” by harping on “picayune details” such as whether a scientist had been an SS member. He warned that if the United States refused to accept tainted Nazi scientists, many could end up working on war-related projects in Germany or the Soviet Union. That prospect, he concluded, “presents a far greater security threat than any former Nazi affiliations which they may have had, or even any Nazi sympathies which they may still have.” The dispute spilled into Congress. Recalcitrant diplomats were pilloried as “sinister figures” and “fellow travelers” whose moralizing endangered American security. Press reports portrayed the conflict as showing, in the words of one television commentator, “how a few minor officials in the State Department have succeeded in blocking a program of high military importance.”

  Once this bureaucratic conflict became political, the outcome was determined. American fears were rising. The Cold War loomed. Diplomats who wished to confine Operation Paperclip within the limits President Truman had set were no match for the combined power of military and security agencies. Their objections were pushed aside.

  Scientists at Camp Detrick were eager to learn what Kurt Blome knew. During extended interrogations in Germany, he slowly lowered his guard—enough to suggest that he was keeping terrible secrets. As a reward, and a sign of respect, he was moved from his cell to an apartment in a lovely chalet. Meanwhile his admirers at Camp Detrick worked to arrange a Paperclip contract that would bring him to Maryland. They almost succeeded.

  * * *

  IN THE MONTHS after Japan surrendered to Allied forces on August 15, 1945, several captured Japanese officers told American interrogators that Japan had maintained a secret germ warfare program. They mentioned rumors that poisons had been tested on human subjects at a base called Unit 731, in the occupied Chinese region of Manchuria. Reports of these interrogations were forwarded to the Biological Warfare Laboratories at Camp Detrick. Scientists there, already excited by the prospect of data from Kurt Blome and other doctors who had served the Nazis, pressed for more. They discovered that the army surgeon who ran Unit 731 was a general named Shiro Ishii, and asked the Counterintelligence Corps to find him, just as it had found Blome in Germany. Their plan was the same: keep him out of Soviet hands, then secure his loyalty by saving him from the gallows.

  Two obsessions, the extremes of Japanese nationalism and the extremes of medicine, shaped Shiro Ishii. He came from a family of rich landowners and was an outstanding medical student at Kyoto Imperial University. During the late 1920s he became fascinated by the Geneva Protocol that bans biological warfare. Japan, like the United States, had refused to sign it. This meant, by Ishii’s reckoning, that it had every right to develop weapons that others could not—and that those weapons could be decisive in a future war. He saw this as his way to contribute to his country’s greater glory.

  In 1928, after finishing medical school, Ishii set out on what became a two-year tour of biology laboratories in more than a dozen countries, including the Soviet Union, Germany, France, and the United States. Upon his return to Japan, he joined the army’s Surgeons Corps. Soon he was helping to run a chemical laboratory where gas masks were tested. Although he became what one writer called “a swashbuckling womanizer who could afford to frequent Tokyo’s upmarket geisha houses,” he remained professionally frustrated. He pressed the army minister, his patron, for a remote tract of land where he could carry out experiments on human subjects as a way to master techniques of germ warfare. In 1936, after the Japanese seized northeast China, he got his chance. Army commanders gave him a plot south of Harbin, the largest city in Manchuria. Eight villages were razed to make way for a four-square-mile complex that came to house more than three thousand scientists and other employees. Officially this was the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Bureau. To those who worked there, and the few others who knew of its existence, it was Unit 731.

  “Our God-given mission as doctors is to challenge all forms of disease-causing micro-organisms, block all paths for their intrusion into the body, annihilate foreign matter resident in our bodies, and devise the best possible treatments,” Ishii told his men as they began work. “The research work on which we are now to embark is the complete opposite of those principles.”

  Japanese soldiers began sweeping up “bandits” and other suspicious people in the local countryside, threw them together with captured Chinese soldiers, anti-Japanese partisans, common criminals, and mental patients, and delivered them in batches to Ishii. Between 1936 and 1942, Ishii received at least three thousand and perhaps as many as twelve thousand of these “logs,” as he and his comrades called them. All were destined for excruciating death. Ishii was driven to learn everything possible about how the body responds to different forms of extreme a
buse. “Logs” were his subjects in almost inconceivable acts of vivisection.

  For the brave of heart and strong of stomach, here are some of the experiments in which the lives of prisoners were taken at Unit 731. They were exposed to poison gas so that their lungs could later be removed and studied; slowly roasted by electricity to determine voltages needed to produce death; hung upside down to study the progress of natural choking; locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out; spun in centrifuges; infected with anthrax, syphilis, plague, cholera, and other diseases; forcibly impregnated to provide infants for vivisection; bound to stakes to be incinerated by soldiers testing flamethrowers; and slowly frozen to observe the progress of hypothermia. Air was injected into victims’ veins to provoke embolisms; animal blood was injected to see what effect it would have. Some were dissected alive, or had limbs amputated so attendants could monitor their slow deaths by bleeding and gangrene. According to a U.S. Army report that was later declassified, groups of men, women, and children were tied to stakes so that “their legs and buttocks were bared and exposed to shrapnel from anthrax bombs exploded yards away,” then monitored to see how long they lived—which was never more than a week. Ishii required a constant flow of human organs, meaning a steady need for “logs.” They included not just Chinese but Koreans, Mongolians, and, according to some reports, American prisoners of war. After each experiment, Ishii’s microbiologists would meticulously remove tissue samples and mount them on slides for study. Technicians used their research to prepare poisoned chocolate and chewing gum, as well as hairpins and fountain pens rigged with toxin-coated needles for use in close-quarters killing. In industrial-scale laboratories they bred plague-infested fleas and manufactured tons of anthrax that were placed in bomb casings and used to kill thousands of Chinese civilians.