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March 13, 2002
Anthrax Investigation Provokes
Charges of Cover-Up
By H.P. Albarelli Jr.
News reports that the FBI is not close to making
an arrest in its investigation of last year's deadly anthrax
mailings and may be "dragging its feet," have provoked
charges of a possible cover-up and secret domestic experiments
conducted during the 1950s by Fort Detrick researchers.
Beginning one week after the September
11 terrorists attacks, anonymous and threatening letters, some
containing anthrax, were mailed from Trenton, New Jersey and
St. Petersburg, Florida to a number of media outlets and Congressional
offices. Eventually, as a result of these mailings, five people
died and twenty-three other people fell seriously ill.
The new charges concerning domestic experiments
center primarily on a 1957 anthrax outbreak in Manchester, New
Hampshire. In August and September of that year, three employees
at the Arms Textile Mill contracted anthrax inhalation and died.
A fourth employee died in October and a few weeks earlier five
other employees came down with cutaneous anthrax, a less dangerous
form of the disease. A fifth employee came down with inhalation
anthrax on September 5, but remarkably recovered from the disease.
A routine activity at the Arms Mill was
the processing of goat's hair imported from Pakistan, Iraq, Iran,
and India for use in the lining of expensive suits and coats.
The mill employed 632 workers spread throughout a complex of
large brick buildings located on the banks of the Merrimack River
and near the edge of downtown Manchester.
Curiously, the mill never ceased operations,
even temporarily, during the outbreak and continued to operate
until 1968 when it went out of business. Two years prior to its
closing a man working in a machinery shop across from the mill
died of anthrax inhalation. State health officials conjectured
that spores remaining from the 1957 incident migrated from the
Arms buildings through a shared ventilation system into the machinery
shop.
Following its closure, state health officials
sealed the mill off while trying to decide the best way to make
the site environmentally safe. Following an expensive decontamination
process in 1971, after which the mill still tested positive for
anthrax, the buildings were demolished. The colossal pile of
rubble was systematically soaked in chlorine for decontamination
and, when that proved ineffective on the mill's huge hickory
beams, an incinerator was erected on the site that burned the
wood to fine ash. The remaining bricks and stone were carted
away for nearby burial. Today the old Arms site is a parking
lot for an upscale commercial area.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control (CDC) in Atlanta, the Arms Mill outbreak is "the
only anthrax epidemic" that occurred in the United States.
The CDC also reports "that only 18 cases of inhalation anthrax
were reported in the U.S. from 1900 to 1978 and that "two
of the cases were laboratory associated."
In an amazing coincidence, at the same
time of the Arms outbreak, the mill was the site of tests using
an experimental anthrax vaccine. The Biological Warfare Laboratories
of the U.S. Chemical Corps at Fort Detrick, Frederick, Maryland,
sponsored the tests, which began quietly in May 1955. Additionally,
Fort Detrick scientist, Dr. George G. Wright, developed the prototype
vaccine used at the mill. The vaccine was briefly produced a
few years later by the pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp &
Dohme, today Merck and Co., Inc. Company head, George W. Merck,
was a principal advocate of biological warfare in the 1940s and
1950s and was a founder of Fort Detrick. Wright's vaccine is
essentially the same serum administered today to American military
personnel and others at risk to anthrax.
Also involved in the 1957 Arms mill tests, according to declassified
Fort Detrick documents and former scientists who worked on the
project, were Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland,
and Britain's top secret Microbiological Warfare Research Laboratories
at Porton Down.
In recent weeks, a number of former Fort
Detrick researchers who have been interviewed by the FBI as possible
sources of information, as well as possible suspects, in the
anthrax-letters investigation, have confidentially expressed
concerns that "the anthrax mailer" may never be arrested
because "he knows too much" about incidents like the
Arms Textile Mill tests and other surreptitious Army experiments
conducted throughout the 1950s.
Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a microbiologist
who chairs the Working Group on Biological Weapons for the American
Federation of Scientists, has also aggressively advanced this
same hypothesis. According to an "Analysis of the Anthrax
Attacks" released by Rosenberg early last month, "the
FBI has known that the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks is
American" for over three months, but speculates Rosenberg,
the perpetrator may be "untouchable to the FBI" because
he may "know something that he believes to be significantly
damaging to the United States." Also, in early February,
Rosenberg told Salon reporter, Laura Rozen: "This
guy knows too much, and knows things the U.S. isn't very anxious
to publicize."
FBI director Robert Mueller has dismissed
Dr. Rosenberg's remarks as "inaccurate" and said that
the FBI "is in no way, shape, or form dragging its feet
in the investigation." Other FBI officials who have declined
to speak on-the-record about the investigation say that it "would
be imprudent to discuss the details of the case publicly at this
juncture."
In all of her statements about the anthrax
mailings, Dr. Rosenberg has said nothing about the attacker's
motivations, but another anthrax expert, Dr. Meryl Nass, has
advanced a provocative theory.
Dr. Nass, a biologist and medical doctor
who spent three years studying the worlds largest anthrax epidemic
in Zimbabwe, said that she believes the motivational factors
in the anthrax mailings may be financial and political. In an
interview this week, Nass said: "To me it appears the attacks
were designed to get publicity, no deaths, and were politically
motivated."
Without doubt, the anthrax investigation,
which thus far has visibly produced little in the way of hard
results, has generated a number of embarrassing reports to the
federal government. First, there was the revelation that the
anthrax strain used in the attacks came from a government-sponsored
laboratory which in turn obtained the anthrax from the British
government's Porton Down facility which in turn obtained it from
Fort Detrick. That strain, commonly called the Ames strain, originated
from specimens taken in 1979 from an infected dead cow by scientists
at Iowa State University's Ames Laboratory. The strain's moniker
came into play in 1980 after Fort Detrick researchers requested
a virulent culture sample from the University. Once received,
the Army dubbed it the "Ames strain."
Second, came reports that the Army has
been unable to account for many of its anthrax specimens and
that, since at least 1992, some have been misplaced, lost, or
stolen. The Army admits that a 1992 audit at Fort Detrick discovered
that nearly a dozen anthrax specimens were missing. Of equal
concern is that the same audit revealed that other specimens
of the deadly Ebola virus were also missing.
Third, is the Army's "lack of security"
at some of its assumed "highly secured" Fort Detrick
laboratories. A January 20, 2002 article in the Hartford Courant
by Jack Dolan and Dave Altimari states that two former Fort Detrick
scientists "said that as recently as 1997, when they left,
controls at Fort Detrick were so lax it wouldn't have been hard
for someone with security clearance for its handful of labs to
smuggle out biological specimens." The same article quotes
the former chief of one of Fort Detrick's laboratories, Lt. Col.
Michael Langford, as saying that the lab he took over in 1992
had "little or no accountability" and that he ordered
an immediate inventory of the facility. According to other former
Fort Detrick scientists, some of the specimens that Langford's
audit revealed missing were "tissue samples" taken
from "dead animals and humans who had been infected with
lethal diseases."
Reports of lack of security perhaps should
come as no surprise to the Army or FBI investigators. In September
1986, Neil Levitt, a former laboratory director at Fort Detrick's
Research Institute on Infectious Diseases, publicly claimed that
security was so lax at the facility that someone walked off with
"more than a quart" of a deadly virus. The virus caused
a disease called Chikungunya, an affliction found in Africa and
Asia that produces rapid and severe flu-like symptoms.
Even earlier in September 1975, Dr. Edward
Schantz, a University of Wisconsin professor and former Fort
Detrick researcher, testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee
on Intelligence Activities, told Sen. John Tower that there was
no "formal process" for handling lethal substances
at the Maryland facility. Schantz said that researchers routinely
"passed [substances] back and forth" to other laboratories
with virtually no controls in place.
Equally embarrassing to the government
have been reports over the past five months that were recently
confirmed by a December 23, 2001 Baltimore Sun article by reporter
Scott Shane. The article revealed that Fort Detrick scientists
had harvested bacteria from the dead bodies of persons "accidentally
infected" with anthrax. Several former Army researchers
who are now retired and live in Florida, including Bill Walter
who to reporter Shane, have reported that at least three people
affiliated with Fort Detrick who died from anthrax had their
cadavers harvested so as to assist in the development of a new
virulent anthrax strain. Army officials dispute these reports
and say that harvesting was never performed at Fort Detrick.
However, the same officials admit that accidental anthrax deaths
did occur at the facility.
One of the allegedly harvested bodies
was that of a Fort Detrick microbiologist, Dr. William A. Boyles.
According to former colleagues, Boyles died on November 25, 1951
after "accidentally inhaling anthrax spores used in a controlled
experiment." Within 48-hours Boyles fell seriously ill and
developed an extremely high fever. According to once classified
Army documents, Boyles was first taken to a public hospital in
Frederick, Maryland and then within hours transferred to the
Fort Detrick Hospital where oddly the day before he had sent
home after being diagnosed as having a common cold. Boyles died
after slipping into a coma five hours after his transfer. The
Army falsified his death certificate and issued a press release
stating he had died from bronchial pneumonia. In 1975, after
the Army admitted covering-up Boyles' death, his widow told reporters
that she was not bitter about the Army's deception, but was angry
that the private physician who admitted her husband to the public
hospital had been harshly reprimanded for bringing in a patient
"with such a contagious disease." (According to the
CDC, anthrax is "not contagious.")
For years speculation that the Arms Textile
Mill anthrax epidemic may have been far more than an accidental
occurrence has been the subject of debate among scientists.
In 1999, former United Nations official and BBC correspondent,
Edward Hooper, published a book entitled, "The River: A
Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS." Buried deep within
the 1,070-page tome is a brief section that concerns the Arms
Mill outbreak. Hooper's research inadvertently led him to the
incident through his unrelated interviews with Dr. Stanley A.
Plotkin who at the time of the Arms tests worked for the CDC's
Epidemic Intelligence Service and was assigned to medically evaluating
the anthrax outbreak. In 1960, Dr. Plotkin wrote a medical paper
on the Arms outbreak, which is still widely circulated and studied
today among anthrax experts. Published in the American Journal
of Medicine and entitled, "An Epidemic of Inhalation Anthrax,
the First in the Twentieth Century," it was co-authored
with Dr. Philip S. Brachman who was the U.S. Public Health Service's
chief epidemiology investigator of the 1957 outbreak. Oddly,
the paper, which meticulously details the facts of the Arms Mill
outbreak, makes no mention whatsoever that Fort Detrick had any
involvement in the events surrounding the outbreak or that the
mill had been the simultaneous site of anthrax vaccine tests.
In his book Hooper recounts the basic
facts of the Arms Mill incident and writes: "It may of course
be that [Fort Detrick] scientists were simply very lucky from
a research perspective, and that Mother Nature started an epidemic
of inhalation anthrax at just the right moment to test their
vaccine under field conditions. And yet, of course, there is
another, more ominous possibility. This is that, unbeknownst
to... Plotkin and Brachman, humans played a conscious role, and
that a decision was made by [Fort Detrick] to subject the vaccine
to the ultimate field test-- that of challenge with virulent
anthrax organisms."
The Arms Mill debate came up again recently
at a November 2000 Institute of Medicine, National Academy of
Sciences committee meeting in Washington, D.C. Attending the
meeting as separate expert witnesses were Dr. Meryl Nass and
Dr. Stanley Plotkin. The meeting concerned the Defense Department's
anthrax vaccine program and Nass raised a number of concerns
about safety, which Plotkin strongly rejected. When the subject
of the Arms Mill study came up, Nass remarked that the outbreak
occurred "serendipitously at the same time" that Fort
Detrick scientists were conducting their tests on human subjects.
Plotkin heatedly responded, "I reject any implied or stated
accusation that this was a biological warfare experiment."
In an interview last week, Plotkin said
he didn't "think much of conspiracy theories" and that
author Edward Hooper's "innuendo that we purposely launched
the [Arms Mill] outbreak" is "false and vicious."
Plotkin, who today is a prominent AIDS
researcher and Emeritus Professor of immunology at the University
of Pennsylvania, said he "came to the Anthrax Investigation
Unit in August 1957, fresh from a training course." He continued,
"We had launched a study of anthrax vaccine in May 1957.
I had never been to the mill in question when I received a telephone
call early in September to tell me that anthrax had been diagnosed
in a mill worker in Manchester, New Hampshire. I went t up to
investigate."
Asked why the Army's Fort Detrick was
involved in the tests, Plotkin said, "I think the answer
is obvious. The vaccine had been developed at Fort Detrick and
the purpose of our study, aside from protecting the mill workers,
was to find out what value the vaccine had against an anthrax
attack."
On the question of why the mill was never
closed, even temporarily, because of the epidemic, Plotkin said,
"The outbreak appeared to be over before the issue of what
to do came up. Closing the mill would have been an economic hardship
for the workers. Instead, all workers were offered the vaccine
in November [1957], ending their utility for the study, but protecting
everybody." Asked if any follow-up studies had been conducted
on the Arms workers after the outbreak, Plotkin said, "Not
to my knowledge."
Recently obtained Fort Detrick documents
reveal that interest in the New Hampshire outbreak was ongoing
and intense, and that numerous officials at the installation
closely monitored the outbreak. At the time, the Army was deeply
involved in developing anthrax as an offensive weapon of war.
According to the former chief of Fort Detrick's anthrax production
plant, Orley R. Bourland Jr., throughout the 1950s deadly spores
were manufactured "24 hours a day, seven days a week."
Fort Detrick's massive anthrax fermenters, housed in Building
470, held 1,800 gallons of wet anthrax solution and pumped out
about 7,000 grams of anthrax a week.
One 90-page document, dated June 1958
and stamped "Secret," details a meeting that was attended
by several ranking Fort Detrick officials including the heads
of its Dissemination and Filed Testing Division, its Engineering
and Production Branch, and at least one official from Britain's
Porton Down Biological Warfare Center. Also in attendance were
Dr. Philip Brachman and Dr. Stanley Plotkin representing the
U.S. Public Health Service.
Dr. Riley D. Housewright, Fort Detrick's
Scientific Research Director, opened the meeting by informing
attendees that the gathering was a continuation of Fort Detrick's
commitment to "give maximum support to the BWL [Biological
Warfare Laboratories] program of follow-up investigation on N
resulting from the New Hampshire outbreak of anthrax." For
over a decade, "N" had been the Army's code-letter
for operations involving weapons-grade anthrax.
The document then details Dr. Philip
Brachman's review of "follow-up studies resulting from the
New Hampshire outbreak of anthrax." He explains that "during
a 10-week period" in August to November 1957 there had been
nine cases of anthrax at the mill, five of inhalation anthrax
and four of cutaneous. Reads the report: "Four of the five
inhalation cases were fatal. In three of the four fatal cases,
autopsies were performed, proving the diagnosis; in the instance
of the woman who was buried without an autopsy, it has been impossible
to get permission to exhume the body."
The document describes how Brachman separated
the mill's workers into two categories for purposes of the vaccine
tests, which began, approximately 12-weeks before the first reported
case of anthrax. Workers were deemed either "susceptibles"
or "immune." Simply put, "susceptibles" were
those subjects who were either not given the anthrax vaccine
or those who were given "the control material" or placebo.
"Immunes" were those workers who had "the full
course of the antigenic material," or those "who had
had the disease at some time in the past and were therefore assumed
to be immune."
Here it should be noted that from 1948
through 1956 there had been 63 cases of cutaneous anthrax at
the Arms Mill, a then-common occurrence among workers handling
animal products. Anthrax during the 19th century was called the
"woolsorters' disease" and, according to medical literature,
about 30 percent of those workers stricken with inhalation anthrax
recovered. During the Arms outbreak only 313 of the mills 632
employees received the actual test vaccine. None of the 5 employees
who contracted anthrax had been vaccinated as part of the tests
because 2 received the placebo instead and the remaining 3 did
not participate in the tests.
Midway through his review, Brachman was
asked if the Arms mill was still open to which he replied that
it was "operating full force." However, he explained,
alterations had been made in the mill's operations and that following
the outbreak the controlled tests had been terminated and all
employees had been offered the vaccine.
This question was followed by another
concerning "whether the viable spores," which were
assumed to be still present in the mill, ever got "through
the fabric to infect customers" who purchased the products
produced at the mill. The report reads: "The response was
that this is a touchy question," and that "some products"
did test positive for anthrax, but that after further treatment
they tested negative. Yet, the report goes on to state that an
unidentified "grocery clerk in Philadelphia" came down
with cutaneous anthrax after purchasing "a new woolen coatfour
weeks before his illness."
Later in the same document it is noted
that Fort Detrick pathologist, Dr. Edwin V. Hill, reported that
autopsies had been performed "on monkeys which died following
a respiratory exposure to the anthrax organisms isolated in the
New Hampshire outbreak." The report reads: "These animals
died very suddenly without premonitory symptoms. The gross and
microscopic findings in the autopsies were similar to those observed
in the work with the strain which has been under study in the
past."
Dr. Edwin Hill was certainly no stranger
to the subject of human experimentation. In October 1947, Hill
and another Fort Detrick pathologist, Dr. Joseph Victor, traveled
to Allied-occupied Japan to interview Shiro Ishii, head of Japan's
wartime Unit 731. Ishii is regarded today the Rising Sun's counterpart
to Joseph Mengele because of his diabolical Manchurian experiments
which resulted in the brutal deaths of thousands of people. Upon
returning to the U.S., Hill recommended immunity for Ishii and
his scientists because, as he stated in a letter to his commander,
"Evidence gathered in this investigation has greatly supplemented
and amplified previous aspects of this field [biological warfare].
Such information would not be obtained in our own laboratories
because of scruples attached to human experimentation."
Former Army researchers report that the
Arms Mill was not the only textile operation involved in tests
conducted by Fort Detrick's tests during the 1950s and that "at
least four other mills" were involved. A 1960 medical paper
also authored by Drs. Brachman and Plotkin verifies this. The
paper, entitled, "Field Evaluation of a Human Anthrax Vaccine",
states that "epidemiological studies" were conducted
in "four mills located in the northeastern United States"
where "Bacillus anthracis contaminated raw material were
handled and clinical infections occurred." The paper identifies
the mills only as code-letters: "A, M, P, and S."
The other mills reported no cases of inhalation anthrax but did
experience a total of 17 cases of cutaneous anthrax. The Army
refuses to identify any of the plants involved in the tests,
but other sources have reported that two of the mills were "in
the Philadelphia area" and that another was the Arel Textile
Mill located near Charlotte, North Carolina.
Perhaps significant to note is that in
1995 documents related to the Arms Mill outbreak were turned
over, without explanation, to the National Committee on Human
Radiation Experimentation in response to its request to the Department
of Defense for records related "to human experimentation."
The National Committee was created in January 1994 by President
Bill Clinton to "investigate reports of possibly unethical
experiments funded by the government decades ago." The Committee's
Final Report to the President makes no mention of the Arms Mill
incident.
The 1958 Fort Detrick document also reveals
the Army's involvement in then-ongoing human experiments with
a compound called EA 1729, which was the Army's medical code-name
for LSD. According to former Army scientists, researchers from
Fort Detrick's ultra-secret Special Operation Division conducted
covert experiments using LSD in Western Europe in the early 1950s.
These same scientists say that fears about details of these experiments
becoming known may also contribute to any alleged cover-up in
the FBI's on-going anthrax investigation.
Copyright © H.P. Albarelli Jr. Albarelli
is an investigative journalist and writer who lives in the Tampa
Bay region of Florida.
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