Chapter 4
The Road to Fort Detrick Runs Through Bethesda
ONCE again, from the bowels of Countway's dusty basement came a wealth of information about Fort Detrick. As the WHO and NCI viral research quietly expanded, a growing wave of world opposition to biological weapons (BW) came crashing down on Detrick's gate. The scene was set in 1968 as these Army biowarfare labs were operating at full tilt on numerous assignments, including the testing of synthetic viruses designed to attack the very nature of human immunity.
At the same time, medical experts and political leaders
from around the world shamed America for its continued BW program
and its use of chemical weapons in Vietnam. As a calculated public
relations ploy designed to bolster sagging public opinion and
counter threatened congressional funding, Detrick's public relations
department announced the Fort's plan to celebrate its silver
anniversary.
In response, protests erupted on Detrick's perimeter.
[1-8]
Detrick's Silver Anniversary Fort Detrick was the nation's, and likely the world's, "largest and most sophisticated" BW testing center.
The facility employed some
300 scientists, including 140 microbiologists, 40 of whom had PhDs,
150 specialists "in other disciplines ranging from plant pathology
to mathematical statistics," and between 700 and 1,000 supporting
staff.
The operation occupied "some 1,230 acres of federally owned
land" upon which 450 structures were maintained. It produced
annually "some 900,000 mice, 50,000 guinea pigs, 2,500 rabbits...
and 4,000 monkeys."
There was also a large "corral" area for holding
larger animals such as horses, cattle, and sheep. The cost of
running Detrick's BW research alone was reported as $21.9 million in
1969. [1-3] Among the academic festivities planned for Detrick's
twenty-fifth anniversary was an international symposium dealing with
the "entry and control of foreign nucleic acid" into cells during
the process of human and animal immuno-suppression. The frank threat
of manipulating nature's own genetic blueprint for life, and
celebrating its possibilities, brought sharp protests from leading
scientists.
Despite their harshest warnings, on April 4 and 5, 1969, Detrick played host to the
American Institute of Biological Sciences
(AIBS) - sponsored event. The AIBS involvement additionally outraged
conscientious objectors.
A boycott ensued that was believed to be unparalleled in the "stormy history of relationships between the military and the scientific community." [4] Science news reported:
Mark Ptashne, a Harvard graduate researcher, declined on the grounds
that he found Detrick's work "highly repellant" and did "not want my
name associated with Fort Detrick." Dean Fraser, a professor of
microbiology at Indiana University, balked at celebrating research
conducted in an effort to develop BW.
He wrote in declining his
invitation,
Even some AIBS officials appealed the
event. Dr. John Allen and a group of AIBS board members published a
clarification notice in 'Science' citing their principal concerns:
World consensus among physicians and scientists was much the same.
Calling Fort Detrick Considering that the symposium papers on the "entry and control of foreign nucleic acid" might hold important information, I decided to call the library at Fort Detrick. By this time, I realized the NCI had been the Fort's chief tenant for over two decades. After phoning directory assistance for their number, I soon contacted one of the NCI's chief librarians. It took her several hours to field my request for the papers generated during the beleaguered symposium.
Unfortunately, the Army's Cancer Research Facility librarian
reached a similar dead end. She called me back and said,
Within minutes, I was speaking with
Mr. Norman M. Covert, the chief public relations officer for the
United States Army Garrison at Fort Detrick. What a great name for a
secret military facility's public relations officer, I mused. I
found Mr. Covert exceptionally knowledgeable about the history of
The Fort, and very kind as well.
He recalled the late 1960s being a
period of widespread dissent but could not recall the symposium.
Two days later, 'Cutting Edge' [9] arrived in the mail,
and I devoured the eighty-seven page hardcover in a few hours.
Merck - On the Cutting Edge of Biological Warfare According to Covert's version of Detrick's anthology, The Fort celebrated its "Birth of Science" in 1943 for two purposes defined by President Roosevelt and the War Department. They were to,
Covert
wrote:
My surprise was based on the knowledge that the hepatitis B vaccine
Strecker alleged infected the American gay community was almost
certainly manufactured by Merck's company. To confirm my suspicions,
I dug out the New England Journal of Medicine report that I had
studied years earlier.
The paper reported that, indeed, the
homosexual hepatitis B vaccine study had been supported "by a grant
from the Department of Virus and Cell Biology of Merck, Sharp and
Dohme Research Laboratories, West Point, PA." The "National Heart,
Lung, and Blood Institute, of the U.S. Public Health Services'
National Institutes of Health" also provided grant money for the
project. [10]
Then I recalled another interesting fact from the
'Deadly Innocence' investigation. Robert Gallo's Cell Tumor Biology
Department at the NCI, that had been credited for having discovered
the AIDS virus in 1984, bore a resemblance to Merck's "Department of
Virus and Cell Biology."
I leafed to the page that discussed the
Merck vaccine and read:
So, they produced the experimental and placebo vaccines. They
allegedly tested them both for "extraneous viruses." But wait, I
thought. It's not clear whether they tested the placebo vaccines.
Perhaps there was no need to test the placebo, but could there have
been a potential for sabotage?
A Mysterious French Connection In fact, a few days later, alone again in Countway's dungeon, I discovered a 1983 'Nature' article" that said that France's Institut Pasteur - credited along with Luc Montagnier for having isolated LAV, the first AIDS virus (identical to Robert Gallo's HTLV-III) - was under suspicion for allegedly importing tainted hepatitis B vaccine serum from the United States.
The news report said:
The report noted the IPP was up against:
With so many millions of doses worth billions of dollars in revenue,
I realized, there was certainly potential motive for industrial
espionage. The article did not cite, however, the source of the
American plasma, an omission possibly due to liability concerns. But
it could have been Merck or one of its subsidiaries, I reckoned. It
was certainly plausible that the imported plasma had been as tainted
as our domestic blood supply had been until screening procedures
began in 1986. If tainted though, I reasoned, it could have just as
easily been sabotage - an intentional targeting of a competitor.
It
would have been easy to hide and hard to trace the source of HIV in
contaminated vaccines months or even years after they were
administered.
That was two years before Gallo announced the
discovery of HIV, I
reflected.
That meant Montagnier and the French had used
Gallo-supplied
anti-bodies for AIDS-like virus testing two years before they
announced the discovery of HTLV-III or LA V-the AIDS virus. How
could that be? I recalled that Margaret Heckler, Secretary of Health
and Human Services, announced in 1984 that they would not have such
a test kit available for at least six months. How bizarre, I
thought.
The article concluded:
In any case, I considered, the fact that the press discovered the
confusion meant they were tipped off, and who stood the best chance
of capitalizing on IPP's negative publicity more than their foremost
competitor - Merck, Sharp and Dohme.
More Merck Nostalgia According to Covert's 'Cutting Edge,' the United States biowarfare effort began "in the fall of 1941 when Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote to Dr. Frank B. Jewett, then president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS):
I noted the reference to the NAS's National Research Council
(NAS-NRC), recalling its part in the DOD appropriations request for
funding AIDS-like virus research and development (see fig. 1.1).
A
year later, Secretary of War Stimson added:
A couple months after this report to President Roosevelt,
Stimson
was authorized to develop a civilian agency to "take the lead on all
aspects of biological warfare." It was assigned to the Federal
Security Agency (FSA) to obscure its existence, and George Merck was
named director of the new War Research Service (WRS). [9]
As a
result of this covert effort, according to Detrick's public
relations director,
These
experiments, Covert wrote, became the "legacies of Fort Detrick, but
it was not done in the Fort Detrick laboratories." In other words, I
thought, the road to Fort Detrick leads through Bethesda. If
Covert
printed the truth, the AIDS-like virus prototypes were developed
outside the Fort and brought in for testing.
The only other regional
facilities with the means and organisms needed to produce
immune-system-destroying viruses, in 1969-1970, was right down the
road in Bethesda at the NCI's labs, [12] or in West Point,
Pennsylvania at MSD's. [10]
The NAS on CBW On October 13, 1969, following the onslaught of opposition to Fort Detrick's silver anniversary festivities and the international CBW race in general, the NAS responded - not by disclosing its clandestine efforts to support the development and testing of BW and antidotes, but by addressing the controversy at a "Symposium on Chemical and Biological Warfare." [13]
The meeting was chaired by
Dr. Matthew S. Meselson, Director of the Biological Laboratories,
Harvard University, and included three presentations from American CBW notables. Attorney
George Bunn, a former General Counsel for the
United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency presented a
session dealing with,
The chairman, commenting on Bunn's presentation, wrote:
Next, Han Swyter, formerly with the DOD, addressed the NAS assembly
with the "Political Considerations and Analysis of Military
Requirements for Chemical and Biological Weapons."
He commented:
The entire chemical and biological warfare research budget for 1969,
Covert reported, was $300 million. Research for herbicides, such as
the ones used in Vietnam that were "designed to kill food crops or
strip trees of foliage to deprive enemy forces of ground cover," was
granted $5 million. [9] I found it interesting that twice this
amount - $10 million - was requested and received by DOD for
developing an AIDS-like virus that same year. [14]
After reading
this, I reflected on Covert's admission in 'Cutting Edge' that
despite preparations for President Nixon to ratify the 1925 Geneva
Accord,
Lt. Col. Lucien Winegar, Covert wrote, said it would "be fair to
assume" that the Frederick, MD labs:
The Grisly Business of CBW
Within months of Winegar's announcement, Swyter said before the NAS:
Failing to describe the benefits of biological versus nuclear
weapons for population control, the former Defense Department
analyst rhetorically concluded that since a "... crude biological
capability is economically available to very many nations."
Ivan L. Bennett, Jr., a former Deputy Director of the
United States
Office of Science and Technology, was the last one to address the
NAS general session. The topic of his presentation was "The
Significance of Chemical and Biological Warfare for the People."
He
began by defining biological weapons as,
Kissinger and Nixon Respond The following month, as a calculated diplomatic measure, Dr. Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Counsel director and foreign policy chief, advised the president to sign the Geneva accord. History proved the act was a public relations ploy intended to silence American BW critics, bolster sagging public opinion regarding American military efforts, and respond to threatened congressional funding for additional BW research.
President
Nixon-pressured on the one hand to respond to growing public
criticism of America's involvement in Vietnam, and on the other by
DOD militarists citing their unwillingness to "sacrifice our
soldiers" should Russia deploy their biological weapons - renounced
the "first use of lethal chemical weapons... incapacitating chemical[s],
... and biological weapons" of any kind in support of
the objectives of the Geneva Protocol of 1925.
Covert wrote:
Nixon's recommendation to Congress went further than the position of
many other countries that had earlier ratified the protocol in
suggesting that "bacteriological weapons will never be used,
whatever other countries may do." [15]
In an accompanying document,
Nixon's Secretary of State William P. Rogers made it clear that "the
United States Government considers that toxins, however
manufactured, will be considered as biological weapons and not
chemical weapons."
In this and other ways, Nature observed, "the
position of the United States on chemical and biological weapons"
had been "transformed within the short space of a year." (see fig.
4.1)
The Ruse
By November 1970, a year after Nixon ratified the Geneva Protocol, nothing had changed except the public's perception of CBW risk. [16] Rather than receive the promised annual cut in biological warfare research funding, the DOD's BW budget increased from $21.9 to $23.2 million. The stockpiled bioweapons Nixon pledged would be rapidly destroyed remained intact in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and the announced transition of Fort Detrick from a BW testing facility to a solely defensive NIH run health research lab had not occurred. 'Nature' carefully followed the events from Washington, Bethesda, and Fort Detrick, and reported:
I later learned that, indeed, Nixon may not have been properly
advised, but the ruse was by no means an accident.
The BPL Exercise
I was interested in
following up a hunch that the CIA, reportedly involved in LSD and
other drug experiments, might have also been involved in viral
research. A Canadian colleague had mentioned the Rockefeller report
might be available through a local library. [17,18]
That afternoon I visited the BPL's government documents office and
asked one of the librarians for assistance in tracking down the CIA
wrong-doing report. "That'll be a few minutes," the librarian
responded after I handed him my completed request form. "Have a seat
and we'll bring it right to you." I made myself comfortable in a
seat adjacent a functioning PC. The screen displayed a search menu
that beckoned my curiosity. Just for the hell of it I thought, I
typed the words, "biological weapons" and "CIA" in the subject
field.
Then I pressed the Enter key. To my surprise, the screen
filled with data-references regarding the CIA and biological
weapons. Somewhat astonished, I suddenly realized how easy it was to
access information I assumed would be classified. I selected and
then output the information to the printer. The hardcopy included
Soviet, Caribbean, and Cuban International Affairs references.
Moments later, the BPL librarian returned with the Rockefeller Commission report about
the CIA. Before he left, I asked how I might locate the documents I
had just learned about. He told me they were on microfilm two floors
up. Within a couple of hours, I had retrieved and read them all.
Apparently, several researchers throughout the world - Dr. John
Seale from London, Dr. Manuel Servin in Mexico, and Dr.
Jacobo Segal
from Berlin - had alleged what Strecker had.
The Russian report even
cited a West German company named OTRAG for having conducted green
monkey virus experiments in Zaire that had allegedly led to the
development of "a mutant virus that would be a human killer." [19]
I
filed these documents neatly away for later reference.
The Rockefeller Commission Report on CIA Wrongdoing In the spring of 1970, after Congress granted DOD funds for the development of AIDS-like viruses, the CIA illegally "forwarded two checks totaling $33,655.68 to the White House... ."
This
money, the report said, was used to help fund Richard Nixon's
upcoming reelection campaign, and was allegedly spent for
direct-mail expenses. [18] So as Nixon administration officials were
stalling the announced biological weapons cutback, the president was
being rewarded by America's espionage establishment, I realized,
though the two may not have been related.
In April 1970, E. Howard
Hunt, most famous for orchestrating the Watergate break - in which
led to President Nixon's resignation, allegedly "retired from the
CIA after having served in it for over twenty years."
With the help
of the CIA's External Employment Affairs Branch, The Rockefeller
Commission reported that Hunt then obtained a job with Robert R.
Mullen and Company, a Washington, D.C., public relations firm, a
CIA
"front". [18]
It took till 1974 before a stunned public learned that at least four
CIA operatives had engineered "Watergate" allegedly to discredit
Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy who was viewed as Nixon's only
formidable Democratic rival.
Nostalgic Foreshadowing In retrospect, Ted Kennedy's brother Bobby had been considered a "shoe-in" for defeating Nixon in the 1968 presidential election. He was assassinated not long after Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed. Besides embodying the Kennedy mystique, Bobby was gaining in the polls for being sharply critical of America's increasingly unpopular involvement in Vietnam.
In particular, both John and Bobby
Kennedy had found the use of chemical and biological weapons
abhorrent. [18,22]
Unlike his brothers, Ted Kennedy's position on CBW and related
"defense" research was one of moderate tolerance. He alleged that
"society must give its informed consent to technological
innovation." On the other hand, he argued that the "prospects of
significant medical advances" surely outweigh the "hazards of saying
no" to such exploration.
Ted Kennedy, I also learned
that afternoon in the government documents library, had been
appointed to serve as vice president of NATO during the Nixon and
Ford administrations. [24]
Onward and Upward With Jack and Bobby out of the way, the King-led civil rights movement in disarray, and Ted on board and politically neutralized, the manufacturers of war and biological weapons got on with their business. Researchers at the NCI were now hard at work filling the DOD's order for AIDS-like viruses. Because of the adverse political climate, and Nixon's superficial endorsement of the Geneva accord, funding needed to be secured covertly through an "amendment to the appropriation bill for the Departments of Labor and of Health, Education and Welfare." [25]
This was how it came to pass that Fort Detrick - the world's largest and most active biological weapons
facility - was virtually overtaken by the NIH and NCI for allegedly
"peaceful uses." The cost of the conversion (approved by the U.S.
Senate) was $15 million. [25]
All of Fort Detrick's staff were, as Nature reported,
Since many scientists at Fort Detrick were,
Not surprisingly then, among the projects
heralded for immediate action at the new NIH-run facility, was
"research on hazardous viruses." The NCI, it was reported, would
"use Fort Detrick for the containment and large scale production of
suspected viral tumor agents." [25] The following year, 1971, in the
heat of his reelection campaign, Nixon launched the "war on cancer"
and soon thereafter, hailed Dr. Robert Gallo, the head of the NIH
and NCI's Section on Cellular Control Mechanisms, for having
discovered leukemia's alleged cause - an "RNA-retrovirus."
It was
then announced that the NCI would have a vaccine for cancer
available by 1976. [26] This knowledge brought me back to Countway
for the final hour of my day. In a mad rush to find anything Gallo
had published, my search led me to a fascinating and disturbing
discovery: As this history-making announcement was being made, Gallo
was drafting a review article describing his group's methods of
injecting ribonucleic acids from one strain of virus into other
strains in an effort to create mutants that functioned just like the
AIDS virus.
In essence, they developed AIDS-like viruses by the
early 1970s. Their stated purpose was to alter a host's genetic
immunity allegedly to control cancer. Experiments were designed to
produce an assortment of lymphocytic leukemias, sarcomas, and
opportunistic infections in chickens, mice, rats, sheep, cats,
monkeys, and humans. [27] Thirteen years later, President Reagan's
Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, hailed Dr.
Gallo for having "discovered the virus which causes AIDS." [28]
The
train ride home that night was one I will always remember. It's
amazing what you can dig up in libraries, I thought as I solemnly
contemplated the lessons of the day.
NOTES
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