Amerithrax (42 page)

survivors were slaughtered. The remarkable durability of an- thrax spores, though, was the main problem with using the disease as a weapon. Safety conditions were so poor the anthrax on Gruinard Island rendered the island uninhabitable for forty-five years.

The British tried everything. They defoliated ten acres of contaminated areas, stripping the land with defoliants. Por- ton Down scientists, using a dilute solution of 30 percent formaldehyde in two thousand tons of sea water, sprayed down the island to a depth of six inches. After deep-soil sampling revealed persistent organisms, they resprayed with eighty tons of formaldehyde. Then they used bleach, but that had to be in contact with spores at least two minutes. Next they tried paraformaldehyde gas, glutaraldehyde, hydrogen peroxide, and peracetic acid, but none stayed in contact with spores long enough.

In 1943, Porton Down planned to use anthrax spores re- leased by five-hundred-pound cluster bombs, each holding more than a hundred small four-pound bomblets containing spores. Tests demonstrated that each cluster bomb produced an effective aerosol concentration that covered one hundred acres from impact area. In the end the British simply charged ordinary cattle cakes with anthrax spores and kept a stockpile of five million cakes that were never used.

In 1997, Porton Down sent the Louisiana State Univer- sity a sample from its freezer. The strain obtained by LSU had been refined. The paperwork noted that the Ames strain had been “cured of the pXO1 and pXO2 virulence plas- mids.” This would be important later. The Porton sequenc- ing project, begun in 1999, was funded by grants from the

U.S. Office of Naval Research, the National Institute of Al- lergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the Department of Energy, and the United Kingdom’s Defense Sciences Tech- nology Laboratory. The anthrax was marked “10-32,” mean- ing number ten of thirty-two samples.

In 1999 a police investigation was begun into some of the Porton Down experiments. Between 1939 and the 1960s Porton Down scientists exposed twenty thousand unknowing volunteers to nerve gas and other biological and chemical agents. The volunteers were led to believe they were helping

to find a cure for the common cold. Years afterward they began suffering from unexplained maladies.

As of January 31, 2002, Fort Detrick was one of about twenty research facilities known to possess the strain of an- thrax bacterium that was used in the attacks in September and October. Which of the twenty known to have worked with the Army’s strain was the one from which the terror- ist’s microbes came? Only four labs in the U.S. might have the capability for weaponizing anthrax—three were at U.S. military labs and one was a government contractor.

What had emerged from the investigation so far was that the anthrax originated not in some Afghan cave or Iraqi laboratory, as first feared, but at one of a handful of other labs involved in defensive U.S. biological warfare research. The Institute was one of those labs and one with a dark secret.

IN
just twenty years, the Institute secretly made American citizens the victims of more intentional biological infections than Amerithrax ever did. Between 1949 and 1969, the In- stitute at Fort Detrick conducted 239 simulated biological weapons tests in urban areas using “relatively” harmless bacteria. Entire American cities were clandestinely sprayed with mild germs so the Institute could assess the likely im- pact of deadly pathogens and their ability to spread through urban centers. Those unwitting subjects totaled in the hun- dreds of thousands, if not millions. Prisoners at the Ohio State Penitentiary were among those exposed. Five thousand

five hundred service members participated in the covert tests as willing or unknowing subjects.

In 1949, the Institute carried on “top secret” biological tests within the Pentagon to see if air-conditioning units and ducts were vulnerable. A minute amount of biological war- fare stimulant inserted into just one air-conditioning unit was rapidly distributed throughout the world’s largest office building. If it had been a real pathogen, large numbers of people inside the building could have easily been incapaci- tated or killed.

In the early 1950s, the CIA cruised around New York City in a car with a modified exhaust pipe that sprayed bac- teria over much of the city. Their results were so impressive that Japanese terrorists later used the same device in Tokyo.

The germ scientists also chose San Francisco in which to conduct domestic vulnerability trials. Theoretically, a minesweeper or an enemy submarine surfacing off a major

U.S. port could secretly release germs at sundown and es- cape undetected. Between September 20 and 26, 1950, two Navy minesweepers cruising two miles off the San Fran- cisco coastline sprayed the Bay Area six times, exposing eight hundred thousand residents in a 117-square-mile area to clouds of
Serratia marcescens
, an anthrax substitute. At the time Fort Detrick thought that SM germs were relatively innocuous.

However, three days later patients with SM infections began appearing at local hospitals. Eleven patients at Stan- ford University Hospital came down with SM infection and one, Edward J. Wevin, died. If live bioweapons had been released by the cruisers, the death toll would have been dev- astating. The Army continued testing with SM until Febru- ary 1951 when they returned to San Francisco to test advanced dispersal methods by spraying supposedly harm- less
Bacillus globigii
all over the Bay Area.
Bacillus globigii
is a relative of the anthrax bacterium and is often used as an anthrax simulant.

Between 1952 and 1953, the U.S. military biological warfare simulants were released all over America and parts of Canada. The Army staged open-air experiments above populated areas from Minneapolis to San Francisco, impos-

ing infections as far away as twenty miles. Soaring planes sprayed clouds of fluorescent particles (inorganic zinc cad- mium sulfide) over populated areas of Fort Wayne, Indiana, rural Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia.

During “Project Saint Jo” 173 dry runs with noninfec- tious wet germs were made over St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg just sixty miles north of the Canada–United States border. Since the three cities were similar in magnitude and climate to key Soviet cities, it enabled the Army to establish how clouds of bacteria drift and decay in the environment and to figure out how Russian cities could best be attacked with anthrax germs. Anthrax simulants rained down on the Canadian citizens of Winnipeg, capital of Manitoba and Canada’s main grain market. Because of the small amounts inhaled, no illnesses were ever connected to the secret aer- osol bombardment.

In the summer of 1955, the main U.S. test facility at the Dugway Proving Grounds in the Utah desert commenced Operation CD-22, Project Whitecoat, called so because there were so many medics. Until 1973, they conducted 153 tests. Dugway, some eighty miles from Salt Lake City, Utah, was six hundred buildings spread across thousands of acres of desert, cactus, and hardscrabble. A large complex designated Life Sciences Lab was a compound of ten buildings. There were sheds for disinfecting equipment and rooms for con- ducting animal autopsies.

Thirty Seventh-Day Adventist soldiers, human guinea pigs, were tied to chairs a half-mile from the center of a circular test grid. Five sprayers in the grid each held an ounce of Q fever slurry. Cages of test animals were scattered all around the men. Like anthrax, Q fever is found in sheep, cattle, and goats and like anthrax the organisms multiply in the lungs. Q fever is not fatal, but it is incapacitating.

The conscientious objectors were volunteers. Though re- fusing to bear arms, they had agreed to be the subjects of the first American trial of actual germ warfare agents on human beings. The vaccinated volunteers and animals waited a week through a number of false starts. Finally, on the night of July 12, a fine aerosol mist of
Coxiella burnetii
emerged from the sprayers and drifted downwind to infect

the test subjects. Afterward, the Army learned that a 5 mph breeze did not spread the mist far enough, while a 30 mph wind degraded the agent.

On another occasion they used the Institute’s giant one- million-liter aerosol testing sphere on a thousand soldiers in a sealed chamber. Volunteers also gathered around the ball’s periphery, donned face masks, and breathed in mists of Q fever germs through rubber hoses connected to the ball’s chamber. Those infected with the moderately mild disease contracted chills, blinding headaches, coughing, muscle and joint pain, trembling, diarrhea, weight loss, and visual and au- ditory hallucinations. They got fevers of up to 104 degrees F. Congestive heart failure was one of the side effects. Though one in a hundred die from Q fever, during this test every one of the volunteers survived.

The newest jet fighter, the sound-breaking F-100 Super Sabre, bled germs into the air over the wilds of the Utah desert. Rigged for nuclear bombs, the F-100 had been refit- ted to scatter liquid germs. Mechanics had strapped a tank of
Coxiella burnetii
onto the plane’s belly and connected it to special nozzles that spewed germs. As the jet streaked, the wind broke the aerosol up into particles fine enough to penetrate human lungs and stick to the wet membrane there. The wet germs were so effective that the pilot became in- fected when he left his jet before it was decontaminated. The test proved that fifty kilograms of
C. burnetii
dumped from an aircraft upwind of a population center would kill 150 people and incapacitate 125,000 citizens.

In 1956 Camp Detrick was renamed Fort Detrick, but those in the know still called it the Institute. In the same year, under Bill Patrick, the Pine Bluff Arsenal was remod- ernized and refitted to make weapons from bacteria and store infectious viral agents in bulk. The Army had cut Pine Bluff Arsenal out of fourteen thousand acres deep in the wilder- ness of central Arkansas. At a cost of ninety million dollars, they constructed a ten-story building and ten giant ferment- ers. In early 1954, the Pine Bluff virus plant (X1002) had gone into operation to mass-produce biological agents. The 858 scientists and technicians working there eventually added anthrax to the mass-production line.

In 1957, the Army initiated Operation Large Area Cov- erage. That operation would measure the feasibility of con- taminating huge sections of the nation with agents dropped from aircraft and rooftops and dispersed from speeding cars. Since fine fluorescent powders—cut down to one micron— covered tens of thousands of square miles under favorable winds, the Army was able to blanket thirty-three urban and rural areas from border to border and coast to coast. The “Honest John” rocket, the first U.S. missile to carry a bio- logical warload, was surpassed by the “Sergeant” missile, which increased the available range for biological rockets to seventy-five miles. Spray tanks on fast-moving planes deliv- ered a wet slurry, but after 1963, viable dry agents became the U.S. goal.

In June 1966, the Army released SM into the New York City subway tunnels, allowing a succession of speeding trains to transport germs from one station to the other through suction. It worked so well, Aum’s Japanese dooms- day cult later used the technique to kill in the Tokyo sub- way, but with nerve gas instead. In 1969, the Army had figured out how to convert anthrax to a usable dry bio- weapons agent. They knew how to protect organisms from decay after spraying. They developed the ability to freeze- dry large amounts of liquid agents and how to fortify agents with unique chemical properties that would keep them stable and virulent during spraying.

The biowarriors at the Institute realized they would have to aerosolize the anthrax germ to be effective. They pro- duced five thousand anthrax bombs, but even the most ef- fective released only 3 percent of its spores; the rest got blown into the ground or vaporized by the heat of detona- tion.

They worked on anthrax for killing enemy troops and to do that they had to encourage the anthrax bug, appropriately gun-shaped and hardy enough to remain viable for decades. The Institute used heat and chemical shock to force the rod- shaped bacteria to convert into spores. Upon being inhaled, the spores would transform back to rods and establish in- fections.

Between 1962 and 1969, as improved live agents devel-

oped by the Institute became available, their scientists made Dugway obsolete as its testing ground for anthrax. In its place the Army sought out a larger-scale venue for testing. Johnston Atoll fit the bill—four coral islands in the central Pacific Ocean 720 nautical miles from Honolulu. They code- named the exercise “Shady Grove.” Invisible biowarfare agents released at night from a spray tank mounted on a low-flying F-105 Navy jet infected three hundred personnel with a whitish spray dispersed at intervals downwind.

In the mid-1960s, the Army conducted test runs to see how their germs behaved in extreme conditions. Thirteen trials in the dry, blazing climate of the Deseret Testing Cen- ter in Utah measured the decomposition rate of liquid Q fever and tularemia aerosols on animals. Four large-scale secret cold-weather experiments held in the Alaska wilder- ness demonstrated how the same germs behaved in frigid conditions. The tests measured the cover rate and decay rate of aerosol bacteria. In cold conditions germs ranged farther and lasted longer than in the desert and atoll tests. However, the Alaska tests also exposed soldiers in protective suits to VX, which was the military’s deadliest nerve agent. Nearly forty years later, the Pentagon acknowledged that some sol- diers engaged in chemical and biological testing may not have been fully informed about the secret Alaska experi- ments. This was also the case with other soldiers tested in Florida, San Francisco, and Hawaii, and at sea. Some of these tests also used VX.