Reporter
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Going After the Biologicals
It was liberating to be away from the intensity and irrationality of a political campaign, but there was the glum reality: I was once again out of work. The New York Review of Books excerpts from my forthcoming book, spread over a dozen pages, ran in late April and early May, and soon I was back doing what I could do best—being a journalist.
The book was published in early June, and a story about its findings made its way to the front page in the first edition of The Washington Post on June 6, 1968, which hit the streets the night before. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated that night, and the friendly dispatch about my book disappeared in later editions of the Post, as it should have. Bobby’s death, along with the ongoing killings in Vietnam and the earlier murder of Martin Luther King Jr., reignited fears regarding the well-being of our society. McCarthy would keep on campaigning, I knew, but he would make no effort to reassure America. It was not his style.
I spent many weeks that summer promoting my book with talks at bookstores and colleges; campus CBW research remained an emotional issue as the military’s growing reliance on defoliation in South Vietnam became more widely reported. Hundreds of American scientists, acting individually or through scientific societies, added their voices to the anti-CBW debate. I struck up an important friendship with Matthew Meselson, the Harvard biochemist who was not interested in another study or any other halfway measure; he wanted an immediate U.S. ban on the development and production of chemical and biological weapons. It took courage for him to be so actively against the weapons, for at the time he was an adviser, with a security clearance, to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The immediate disarmament goal was to update the 1925 Geneva Protocol barring the use of poison gas and biological weapons in warfare. The U.S. position was that the protocol did not apply to the herbicides and souped-up tear gas agents in use in the Vietnam War.
Enter The New York Times Magazine. An editor there—I do not remember who—asked me to do a piece on the CBW issue with the goal of bringing the newspaper’s readers up to speed. I was amazed, since there had been no real interest in the issue, or my book, by the daily Times. There was good reason for the mainstream news media to be interested: In mid-March, a mysterious event had led to the death of more than six thousand sheep in two valleys adjacent to the army’s Dugway Proving Ground, a million-acre top secret CBW test site in rural Utah. As word of the tragedy spread, there were published reports in the Salt Lake City newspapers linking the deaths to “some kind of poison.” The military command at Dugway initially insisted to reporters that no tests had been conducted that week and there was no military responsibility for the loss of sheep. It was a preposterous position, but few in the media, outside the two daily newspapers in Salt Lake City, seemed to care. I began my essay for the magazine with an account of the sheep deaths and noted that it took the army more than a month to acknowledge responsibility for the macabre event, and it did so only after a fact sheet sent to a Utah senator for his personal use was inadvertently made public by an aide.
I ended the article with a plea for transparency and disarmament, and the magazine, to my surprise, let me have my say:
The Pentagon should immediately re-evaluate its security restrictions about C.B.W. If Russia is indeed engaged in a major C.B.W. build-up, this information should be made known. The types of agents, their possible effects and the national policy surrounding actual deployment of chemicals and biologicals should be released for public evaluation.
Americans—and Russians—know a great deal about the horrible consequences of atomic attack; this knowledge is as significant a deterrent as the I.C.B.M. rockets shielded deep in their silos. If the world knew more about the potential horror of nerve gases and deadly biologicals, the drive for de-escalation and disarmament would be increased. And the United States, as one of the leaders of C.B.W. research and development, would have an obligation to lead that drive.
The story snuffed out any worries I had about being blackballed or stigmatized by the mainstream newspaper world for having worked, as a Democrat, in a national antiwar presidential campaign. The combination of my book, the New York Times Magazine article, and my continued speaking out about CBW at colleges and universities generated what every reporter needs—inside sources. I found a retired senior officer of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps who began telling me about research and production facilities that had not been made public but were known to some congressional committees. That contact led me to a young man who, while in the army, had served as a guinea pig for biological experiments at Fort Detrick, the army’s off-limits CBW research facility in Frederick, Maryland, forty-five miles north of Washington. I would learn from a series of letters he wrote to me that he was one of many.
My comfort in getting to know and exchanging views with a wide variety of people generated, I came to understand, from being raised and working in a racially diverse part of Chicago. I had grown up needing to figure out on my own whom to trust and depend on in the community, very likely in an effort to fill in some of the gaps in the parenting I experienced at home. Whatever the reason, I found it easy to be open and connect with scientists, army generals, Republican legislators, and intelligence officials as I moved through my career.
That skill, no matter how useful, did not change the reality: The academic opposition led by Matthew Meselson, my book and other writings, the Elinor Langer essays, and a flicker of campus protest had not created a flood of public indignation. Far from it. But the military, anxious to keep their real secrets hidden, overreacted. The Pentagon’s Public Affairs Office arranged for Mike Wallace, a correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes, the nation’s most watched television news show, to get unprecedented access, with cameras, to three secret CBW facilities. The network aired two segments on germs and gases in late October 1968. The purpose, Wallace explained at the outset, was “to bring CBW into the sphere of rational discussion—sort of delousing it, or debugging it, like kids learning there aren’t any ghosts.” The network then showed footage of facilities for the massive production of diseases such as anthrax, plague, and tularemia, all potential biological warfare agents. Large concentrations of frozen germs were shown rolling off an assembly line.
My newfound friends from inside the CBW world helped me deconstruct the 60 Minutes piece in an essay for The Progressive magazine. The network did not report who took the footage or where the facilities were located, but I wrote that some of the film had been produced by the army at the Pine Bluff Arsenal, a secret facility in Arkansas. CBS did not report that there were at least 251 cold-storage underground vaults, known as igloos, on the Pine Bluff grounds, many of them used to store biological agents. CBS did not report that there were sophisticated weapons assembly lines at the arsenal, capable of filling hundreds of 750-pound bombs within hours with diseases considered worldwide scourges, nor did it report that there had been thirty-three hundred accidents in an eight-year period at Fort Detrick, resulting in the infection of more than five hundred men and three known deaths—two from anthrax. Most important, in my view, CBS did not tell its audience that more than fifty government officials, representing twelve agencies, were given an advance screening of the two 60 Minutes segments before they were aired. The officials suggested some “factual” changes, which were made, and offered other objections to the editorial content, not all of which were entertained.
The CBS report prompted a far more critical follow-up in early February 1969 on First Tuesday, an NBC network news show that owed its existence to the success of 60 Minutes. Viewers were told at the outset, very pointedly, that First Tuesday’s reporting had not been prepared in consultation with the Pentagon. The show produced heart-throbbing scenes of laboratory experiments involving rabbits and mice, along with the bulldozing of dead sheep into huge pits near the Dugway Proving Ground. Most significant, First Tuesday revealed that millions of dollars had been awarded over
six years by the Defense Department to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington for research into the migratory patterns of birds near the U.S.-owned Baker Island, a one-square-mile uninhabited chunk of land seventeen hundred miles southwest of Honolulu. The implication was clear: America was on the hunt for a safe place in the Pacific Ocean for a biological warfare test.
There were some stirrings after the November 1968 election of Richard Nixon to the presidency. In December, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved yet another resolution calling for a major report on the possible use of CBW, and Senator Gaylord Nelson, a liberal Democrat from Wisconsin, made a gutsy speech in which he asked questions that had rarely been asked in the Senate: “What is the United States now doing to insure that this totally destructive and little understood aspect of the arms race is reduced?…We will need to review the entire scope of chemical and biological warfare.” That was his public stance. Privately, a few aides in his Senate office began to fill me in on what they knew was going on, and what they suspected might be. In late April 1969, Meselson was invited by William Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to brief the committee in closed session—no press or public allowed—and Meselson renewed his call for a comprehensive review of America’s CBW policy. Fulbright subsequently wrote to President Nixon urging him to submit the 1925 Geneva Protocol to Congress for ratification. Meselson repeatedly took his plea for a total ban to Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser. Kissinger and Meselson had been faculty colleagues at Harvard and close neighbors in Cambridge.
There was similar movement in the House. I was put in touch in early 1969 with an ambitious second-term Democratic congressman from Buffalo, New York, named Richard D. “Max” McCarthy, a former newspaper reporter. He was eager to run for Senate and knew he needed an issue. He had watched the First Tuesday news show with his wife and children, and all were horrified. His wife shooed the children out of the room, and, as McCarthy recalled in The Ultimate Folly, a book he wrote about his anti-CBW campaign, she said, “You’re a Congressman. What do you know about this?” He answered, “Nothing.” Stopping CBW would be a political plus as well as in the public interest. McCarthy was fortunate to have two skilled aides on his office staff, Wendell Pigman and Peter Riddleberger, who knew Washington and foreign policy. Pigman had worked for Bobby Kennedy until his assassination, and Riddleberger, the son of a prominent postwar U.S. ambassador, had worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Wendell, Peter, and I quickly became friends and collaborators. I was in a journalistic catbird seat—getting information from inside Congress as well as from my insiders, who were educating me on where to look for information that the CBW community did not want the public to know. I published five long magazine pieces on CBW between March and June 1969 and continued to get new data. McCarthy, using information supplied by me and his staff, became more effective among his House colleagues in making clear the peril of CBW research, as did Gaylord Nelson in the Senate. By June, my magazine work on biological warfare was focused on the same theme that I had raised in my AP reporting on the Harrison Salisbury bombing disclosures: The military was not telling the truth. America’s biological warfare program was far more advanced than was known.
I should note here that I am in no way a fanatic, or a prude about lying, and realize that human beings lie all the time. We all know the clichés about the big fish that one caught or the low golf score. My brother and I learned early in life that our mother lied repeatedly, especially about store-bought cookies she claimed to have baked. Not a big deal. I happen to believe, innocently perhaps, that official lying or authorized lying or understood lying about military planning, weapons systems, or intelligence cannot be tolerated. I cannot look the other way.
I had repeatedly challenged the Pentagon’s long-standing defense for its CBW program—that the United States was focused only on defensive research. I reported that the Pine Bluff Arsenal was capable by the late 1960s of producing a full line of ready-to-fire bombs, shells, and even hand grenades filled with virulent, field-tested, lethal anthrax, tularemia, or Q fever germs. Large stocks of anti-crop biological agents, some especially tailored for crops grown in Cuba, also had been manufactured and stored there, as are all biological agents, in igloos that were kept extremely cold. I also learned that CBW agents had been field-tested at Dugway, Utah; at Fort Greely, Alaska; on the Eniwetok Atoll, in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean; and in isolated areas throughout the Pacific. American-sponsored CBW research has been conducted in Malaysia, Japan, England, Ireland, Canada, Sweden, Cyprus, Australia, Germany, and Taiwan. Fort Detrick, the primary base for research into promising biological weapons, had 120 research scientists with doctorates at work there by 1968, and more than 400 more with lesser degrees. There was also no shortage of young research scientists eager to accept grants from the prestigious National Academy of Sciences to work on exotic projects at Fort Detrick. Detrick was one of the world’s largest users, and killers, of laboratory animals; 720,000 animals ranging from guinea pigs to monkeys were put to death each year in experiments. I also learned that thousands of army soldiers and volunteers had participated since the end of World War II as human guinea pigs in experiments aimed at calibrating the impact of various biological agents on human beings. The Seventh-Day Adventist Church had supplied fourteen hundred volunteers by the late 1960s to Fort Detrick for tests involving the spreading of airborne tularemia; the program was known as Operation Whitecoat. At least some of the volunteers, so I was privately told, had no idea what they volunteered for, and consented to, and would learn later what they had been exposed to. Some “volunteers” were given the option after basic training of going to Vietnam as combat medics or joining the Whitecoat program. The diseases they were exposed to included tularemia, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever, and the plague.
I was energized, enjoying what I was doing, but I was still not making very much money. Publishing an article a month in The New Republic, The Progressive, or The New York Review of Books did little more than keep me—now a daddy with rent to pay and a car payment to make—above water. Bob Hoyt of the National Catholic Reporter came to the rescue by agreeing to publish a political or foreign policy essay by me each month—I could choose the subject—and paying me too much. I had another source of income, courtesy of a twentysomething neighbor named David Obst who was the Washington representative of Dispatch, a small antiwar news agency that focused, very critically, on the Vietnam War. David was immensely likable and, like me, not very interested in rules. The son of a jewelry store owner near Los Angeles, he had dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley after a year or so and fled to Taiwan, where he learned Mandarin Chinese and fell in love with a local beauty, only to flee for his life when her parents learned what was going on. He was a natural athlete—we bonded over pickup basketball and touch football games—who was not that much interested in sports. He also was a born salesman and easily convinced me to let him try to syndicate my articles for the National Catholic Reporter to the Sunday opinion sections of major newspapers. My articles, at a cost of fifty or seventy-five dollars each, suddenly began showing up in Sunday opinion sections of The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Providence Journal, and other papers.
In April 1969, Ramparts magazine, then flourishing amid the expanding anti–Vietnam War movement, agreed to fly me to Utah to learn what I could about the sheep kill at the Dugway Proving Grounds. It was the same old story: A local community financially dependent on the military had kept its collective mouth shut. But a few of those who had stayed mum in the days and weeks after the sheep kill were eager to talk now, a year later, and their account was chilling. The Chemical Corps officers running Dugway had been on alert on the day of the disaster because an advanced airborne aerosol delivery system was being tested. The test was being filmed, in color, with two cameras rolling. The purpose of the mission was not to test the
lethal nerve agent involved but to determine how the gas spread when released by a jet into a swirling wind blowing from five to twenty-five miles an hour to the northeast—toward Salt Lake City, eighty miles away. The highly classified film tells what happened: The jet roared over the target at the speed of sound, or above it, and opened its dispersal tanks, which were to close immediately as the jet pulled out of its dive. There was a potentially catastrophic malfunction, and the nerve gas kept on spewing out as the jet climbed to above fifteen hundred feet, where the wind was more active and unpredictable. I was told of one computation indicating that the nerve gas cloud would remain lethal at a range of 394 miles. The army and the citizens of Utah got lucky; the winds shifted an hour later and sheep were the only victims. The cover headline for my reporting, published in the June issue of Ramparts, read, “Nerve Gas Was Tested on 6400 Sheep by the Army, Accidentally. It Works.”
That June, I also wrote a long piece for The New Republic focused on Representative McCarthy and his activism. It told how he broke through on the CBW issue, in terms of public awareness of the peril, a month earlier. McCarthy, in a hearing, had made public a secret Pentagon plan to dump twenty-seven thousand tons of unwanted chemical warfare agents and munitions—twelve thousand of which were nerve gas bombs—into the Atlantic Ocean. More than eight hundred railway cars were to haul the toxic materials from a chemical warfare depot near Denver to Elizabeth, New Jersey. The cars, each one of which was carrying enough poison gas to wipe out a major city, were scheduled to roll through Indianapolis, Dayton, Knoxville, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia before getting to Elizabeth, on the ocean. There was no additional security for the convoy and no advance cautioning notice to officials of the cities along the route. The hearing provoked fear and anger and finally put the CBW issue on the front pages. The army, confronted by a public outcry, quickly announced that the trip was canceled and the toxic goods would be destroyed locally. A major change in American CBW policy was in sight.