How the U.S. Government Exposed Thousands of Americans to Lethal Bacteria to Tes

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/13/1357237

 

 

 

Wednesday, July 13th, 2005

How the U.S. Government Exposed Thousands of Americans to Lethal

Bacteria to Test Biological Warfare

 

 

 

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The Homeland Security Department last month released what they said

was nontoxic gas into New York's Grand Central Station to trace how

chemicals might flow through the terminal in a terrorist attack. We

speak with biological and chemical terrorism expert Leonard Cole, who

asks what this " nontoxic gas " actually was. He wrote a book about how

- in the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. government scientists ran a series of

tests to determine how easy it would be to expose large numbers of

people to a lethal bacteria. [includes rush transcript] In the

aftermath of the London bombings, the U.S. Government raised the

terrorist threat level to Orange, or " High. " The alert was

particularly applied to the nation's trains and subway systems.

Although far less money has been spent on security measures for public

transportation than for the airline industry, experts say subways and

trains may be particularly vulnerable to chemical and biological

attacks. Late last month, the Homeland Security Department released

what they said was nontoxic gas into New York's Grand Central Station

to trace how chemicals might flow through the terminal in a terrorist

attack.

 

But some government simulations of chemical and biological attacks in

the past have been somewhat different.

 

In the 1950s and sixties, scientists from the Fort Detrick biological

weapons program ran a series of tests to determine how easy it would

be to expose large numbers of people to a lethal bacteria. Containers

of nontoxic bacteria were planted in the New York subway, bacteria was

secretly pumped into the Pentagon ventilation system and clouds of

bacteria were released in San Francisco. And germs that were meant to

sicken but not kill humans were tested on conscientious objectors in

the military.

 

* Leonard Cole, an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at

Rutgers-Newark in New Jersey. An expert in biological and chemical

terrorism, Cole is also the author of " The Eleventh Plague, The

Politics of Chemical and Biological Warfare, " and " The Anthrax

Letters: A Medical Detective Story. "

 

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

 

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AMY GOODMAN: To talk about all this, we are joined by Leonard Cole,

who has written a book about the subject. An expert in biological and

chemical terrorism, his book is called, The Eleventh Plague: The

Politics of Chemical and Biological Warfare. Welcome to Democracy Now!

 

LEONARD COLE: Hi.

 

AMY GOODMAN: It's great to have you with us. In a few minutes, I want

to go to your next book, which is something I think a lot of people

have forgotten about, and that is The Anthrax Letters. That's right.

Who did it, we don't know. But first let's go to this story.

 

LEONARD COLE: Sure.

 

AMY GOODMAN: The Grand Central experiment or the test that was done

just a few weeks ago, do you know anything about it?

 

LEONARD COLE: Only what I saw in the newspaper that was reported just

a few days back that a non-toxic gas was flowed through the Central --

Grand Central Terminal, and as you said, the purpose was to see what

the air flow would be like, so that presumably we could institute some

protections and defenses. What I found interesting was that while the

newspaper article reported that the gas was non-toxic, that it was

invisible, odorless, it did not name the gas, and that would be

interesting for to us find out.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let's go to something we know more about, and that

is a previous experiment in the New York subways. Can you talk about

that in as much detail as you know?

 

LEONARD COLE: Sure.

 

AMY GOODMAN: When did it happen?

 

LEONARD COLE: The test in the subways was in 1966, and it was part of

an experimental program that lasted 20 years, beginning in 1949,

ending only in 1969. During that period, the army acknowledged that

some 239 vulnerability tests had been conducted in which large numbers

of people, of human citizens of this country, were exposed. They

emphasized that the materials that were used to simulate anthrax and

other deadly organisms were harmless. But in my research, and in the

work that was published in the book, it was very clear that some of

the materials were not totally harmless, that when you expose a

million or 2 or 3 million people to relatively harmless materials, you

still have a certain segment of the population that would be at risk.

 

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about specifically what happened in the subway.

 

LEONARD COLE: Sure.

 

AMY GOODMAN: How many agents went underground?

 

LEONARD COLE: When you use the word agent, it has a double meaning.

Sometimes it means human beings who are actually conducting the

experiments, sometimes – and the army refers to them, the test, the

people actually refer to the organisms as agents that were released.

So I'll try to be careful.

 

AMY GOODMAN: So how many agents released agents?

 

LEONARD COLE: Well, we don't know how many individuals went down to

release. There were probably somewhere, my guess is in the order of

anywhere from a half dozen to a dozen. More importantly, the number of

bacterial agents that were released ranged in the trillions. In fact,

the way this was done was kind of bizarre, and yet interesting. A

light bulb was filled with some 87 trillion organisms, something

called bacillus subtilis. And this bacillus, this bacterium, and is

common in nature. And as I said before, most people would not be

affected. However some people in immune compromised situation, very

old people, babies, they would be more susceptible. Trillions and

trillions were released. Light bulbs --

 

AMY GOODMAN: When you say released, you're talking light -- they're

put into light bulbs?

 

LEONARD COLE: They were placed in army laboratories in light bulbs and

mixed with charcoal. The human agent would carry a paper bag

containing some light bulbs filled with bacterium.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Black light bulbs?

 

LEONARD COLE: I don't know what the color of the light bulbs were. But

he would walk down during peak traffic hours to various subway

platforms. This was during in a six-day period in September of 1966.

As the train would be coming into the station, he would take a light

bulb out of the bag, drop it onto the tracks, and as the train

entered, you would see a whoosh of darkened air, darkened clouds. The

darkness came from charcoal that was a mixed with the bacteria,

because the bacteria themselves were invisible. There were various

detection devices set up around the subway system so one could then

estimate how many bacteria had survived, and how many of them had

concentrated in various areas. At the end of six days, as reports were

written, the ultimate report said that if a -- as they said, a

pathogenic organism were released, that more than half of the people

who were riding the subways could have become deathly ill.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Do we know about people who got sick?

 

LEONARD COLE: In the course of research, some years after, when the

public first learned about this, and in writing the book, I wrote to

the New York City Subway System or the -- I guess it was the authority

-- the Subway Authority and asked for absentee records, people who

were not showing up for work, just to see how this was around those

dates, and I got a short reply back saying, when I wrote to them -- it

was in the early 1980s -- they said they don't have records that go

back that far.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Because we do know about what happened in the Bay Area,

right, with the release of toxins. Can you talk about that?

 

LEONARD COLE: Sure. This was perhaps the most dramatic and

well-reported incident, which we learned about only decades after it

was actually conducted. In 1950, another bacterium, and any doctors or

microbiologists will recognize this immediately as not something that

you should play around with, it was called serratia marcescens. These

bacteria were released from the Bay of San Francisco, a boat was

spraying trillions of these bacteria onshore. And this is very

interesting, because in San Francisco in 1950, a major hospital,

university hospital, Stanford University Hospital was located, and

they had never recorded any infections from serratia marcescens.

Unbeknown to the doctors or anybody in the hospital, the army released

the bacteria. Three days later, a case of the serratia marcescens was

discovered in the hospital. A dozen or so occurred in the subsequent

months. One of the patients died of serratia infection.

 

AMY GOODMAN: What does that mean? What happens to the person?

 

LEONARD COLE: These bacteria colonized his heart valve. The bacteria

can infect various organs of the body, particularly with weakened

people. Now, a person who was in the hospital who had had surgery

emerged, became infected, and he died. And what is fascinating is that

when the public first learned about this test, mind you, the test

occurred in 1950, there were news reports about the test for the first

time in the year 1976 and `77. The grandson of the -- the grandson of

the person who died, Edward Nevin, who died, the grandson is named

Edward Nevin the third, was reading about this, as he was commuting

from his home in Berkeley, California, to his law office in San Francisco.

 

AMY GOODMAN: So he's on the BART, and he's reading about these tests.

 

LEONARD COLE: Exactly. And he's reading about it. And then he sees his

grandfather's name mentioned as a person who died from this bacterial

infection. And he said, `Oh, my goodness, that's my grandfather.'

Well, to cut through a couple of years following that, he instituted

suit against the government. In 1981, there was a trial. The Nevin

family sued the US government for these tests, and for the death of

their grandparent, and it -- they lost the case, but in the course of

the trial, he managed to get tons of material that was exposed for the

first time, and the public learned about it, much of which I have

reported in my own research and book.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Cole, do we have reason to be concerned that

with heightened fear and concern about a biological attack that these

kind of tests to see, for example, air flow, etc., will now continue

today?

 

LEONARD COLE: Oh, I think that there's no reason to think they won't

continue. I mean, certainly, we have evidence by a news report that

they were instituted in Grand Central Terminal. My guess is that that

would not be the only location. On the other hand, in fairness, we do

have to understand that we want to defend ourselves against the

possible release of these materials. The question is how you do it,

what the material is that you are using as a test agent. If we use

anything like the bacteria that were used in the 50s and 60s, we're

creating risk situations for millions of people.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Professor Leonard Cole. He teaches

political science at Rutgers-Newark. His book is called The Eleventh

Plague: The Politics of Biological and Chemical Warfare. You have also

written The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story. We're talking

about terrorist attacks right now. We know about September 11, we

certainly know about Madrid, and what happened in London. Everyone was

afraid when the anthrax letters targeted the National Enquirer and

killed the post office workers, but seems to hardly ever have been

raised. President Bush certainly hardly raises this. What do we know

about who sent them soon after September 11?

 

LEONARD COLE: Soon, indeed. The first postmarked letters that were

later identified were September 18; exactly one week later, they had

been sent out. We don't know who did it. When I say we, I mean, the

public. The FBI has focused on the notion that it was probably a lone

disaffected American domestic scientist who had access to these

bacteria, highly refined virulent bacteria, dangerous bacteria, access

to them in one of the laboratories in the US.

 

There are a lot of things that have happened in retrospect that sound

amazing. For example, it wasn't until two years ago or three years

ago, actually, in the year 2001, that we even had regulations that

required scientists who handle these virulent dangerous bacteria to

report to the Centers for Disease Control that they have them in

stock. But until now, or until that period, people had stocks of

terribly dangerous materials in their laboratories, and nobody would

necessarily know about them, except they themselves who had them

there. And that was perfectly legal. So, at the time that these

bacteria were released, there were possibilities for access, getting

to these materials by a lot of people. So, we don't know who did it.

 

It is -- I find it quite interesting that the notion that the bacteria

were sent out exactly seven days, the first letters were sent out

seven days after September 11, and then a whole bunch of other

circumstantial dots, as I suggest, would suggest that maybe there was

some, at least, awareness by whoever sent them out about September 11

in advance because to prepare this material, to find out who you want

to send these poisoned letters to, to get them out and write the

letter, and do it all in six days' time, while it's certainly

physically possible, but it would be an awful stretch to think that it

could be done easily.

 

AMY GOODMAN: What is the profile the government has of who this person

or people are?

 

LEONARD COLE: Amazingly specific. And I can cut through by saying that

the profile that they offered on the website, the FBI put on its site,

ultimately closely fits somebody who was actually named in the year

2002 by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, as quote, " a person of

interest. " The man's name is Steven Hatfill. Hatfill has never been

charged. And when the press asked the Attorney General, `Well, is he a

suspect?' the Attorney General said, `No, no. He's just a person of

interest.' No other persons of interest were named, although

ostensibly there were dozens who were being looked at. Hatfill, since

his being named, lost his job, can't get a job anyplace and has sued

the government for millions of dollars. And his case is still pending.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think if the person of interest had been a

different ethnic background or religious background, that there would

have been a great deal more of attention paid, media focusing on this

issue?

 

LEONARD COLE: There was a gentleman of Egyptian extract who worked at

Fort Detrick, and he was also investigated. He was never named

publicly, but the word got out through, I guess through the gossip

mill at Fort Detrick and elsewhere that a man of Arab extract who said

that he had been discriminated -- suffered discrimination there in any

case ultimately was being investigated carefully. There were probably

scores of scientists, scores of people who fit the profile, but the

only one named, as I say, was Hatfill.

 

AMY GOODMAN: And what is your conclusion?

 

LEONARD COLE: I would -- my conclusion -- I don't mean to be glib or

flip, I would just say that there's a very good chance that a year

from now we will be asking the same question, what is my thought? I

don't know who did it. I would say that all options are open. If the

FBI has information more than has been released to the public, I think

we ought to be hearing more about it.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Leonard Cole, I want to thank you for being with us,

Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, Newark. Author of

The Eleventh Plague: The Politics of Biological and Chemical Warfare

and his latest book, The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story.