Lab 257
THE DISTURBING GOVERNMENT‘S SECRET STORY OF THE
GERM LABORATORY
BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
6
THE DISTURBING GOVERNMENT‘S SECRET STORY OF THE
GERM LABORATORY
BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
6
Symptoms
I’m not allowed to speak. Please—please! Leave me alone!
—PLUM ISLAND EMPLOYEE
TO CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATOR
Between 1964 and 1997, the government of Cuba accused the
United States of ten biological warfare attacks after infectious disease outbreaks occurred. While none of these accusations were ever
proven conclusively, one event almost certainly occurred.
On May 6, 1971, pigs in a Havana, Cuba, hog farm were diagnosed
with African swine fever virus. The virus spread and some 730,000 pigs
were slaughtered and set ablaze in deep trenches. The United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization called the Cuban virus outbreak
the “most alarming event” of the year. Pork production, one of Cuba’s
few commodities, ground to a halt for months. Facing a severe food
shortage, Havana residents hid their pigs with relatives in the countryside. The African swine fever virus (ASFV) is devastating to swine;
close to 100 percent of infected animals die. Symptoms include acute
fever, diarrhea, skin blotching, anorexia, and spontaneous abortion; the
highly contagious virus is also transmitted by ticks. The virus is a hardy
one—it can survive for months in meat, excretions, and secretions, and
for years stored on ice. There is no vaccine and no cure.
Indigenous to East Africa, African swine fever had never before
appeared in North America. Except at Plum Island. The USDA lab held
no less than seven virus strains in its freezers since 1954, courtesy of the
U.S. Army germ warfare program. In June 1963, Plum Island began a
long-term project to “develop information on the biological and chemical properties of African swine fever virus aiming at recognition of virus
strains. . . .” This research included isolating and growing various virus strains
collected from around the world, running experimental vaccine trials, and
testing modes of virus transmission using test pigs and different types of ticks.
President Fidel Castro charged America with waging germ warfare against Cuba. “It could have been the result of enemy activity. On various occasions, the counterrevolutionary wormpit has talked of plagues and epidemics. . . .” The “wormpit” was a euphemism for the anti-Castro Cuban exiles living in Miami. Considering the lengths taken by some Cuban/American groups in the United States—often in partnership with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency—the accusation was not terribly far-fetched.1 A partially declassified 1964 CIA document on Subproject 146 of MKULTRA (the CIA’s umbrella code name for its biological warfare program) describes an unnamed plant biologist working on a “philosophy of limited anti-crops warfare,” including the use of cane smut against sugarcane— perhaps Cuba’s most important crop—“to formulate a basic approach to an attack on [deleted material].” The redacted name of the foreign country can only be guessed.
1 After relations between Castro and the Eisenhower administration soured, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961. Fearing increasing Soviet influence in Cuba, a scant ninety miles south of Florida, the CIA employed many of the exiles to launch Operation PLUTO—better known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion—a coup d’état which failed miserably after a two-day struggle. In the early 1970s, around the time of the ASFV outbreak, Cuban mercenaries, working with CIA operatives Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and others, staged numerous subversive projects that would wind up under the “Watergate” banner. In addition, it is now known that there were multiple assassination attempts on Castro, code-named Operations MONGOOSE and ALPHA-66. One plot involved an operative handing Castro a poisoned cigar; another scheme would hand him a set of diving gear impregnated with tuberculosis bacteria and a toxic fungus. Still another plan called for a chemical that would make his beard fall out. All three attempts failed.
Castro’s accusation fell on deaf ears until January 1977, when Long Island’s very own Woodward and Bernstein—the Newsday investigative duo of John Cummings and Drew Fetherston 2 —wrote an explosive story under the banner CUBAN OUTBREAK OF SWINE FEVER LINKED TO CIA. Every national newspaper carried the lead the following day. Multiple unnamed sources regaled the two reporters with a tale of intrigue and germ espionage. “With at least the tacit backing of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officials,” they wrote, “operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971.” A source said he was handed the virus at Fort Gulick, a now defunct Army base in the Panama Canal Zone that hosted the Army’s School of the Americas. At Fort Gulick, Green Berets trained mercenaries for jungle warfare, and staged joint Army–CIA covert operations in Latin America and the Caribbean. The virus came ashore from an unidentified vessel that landed at the Canal Zone’s Mindi Pier, and then it was sealed in a unmarked container at Fort Gulick.
2 Cummings would go on to write best-selling exposés about the Mafia and President Bill Clinton.
The source said he brought the virus container to a small motorboat, which sped along the coast of Panama to Bocas del Toro near the Panama– Costa Rica border. There, the package went onto a fishing trawler. A CIA trained source on the fishing trawler told the reporters the virus sailed north through the Caribbean Sea to U.S.-owned Navassa Island, an uninhabited spit that lies between Haiti and Jamaica. After a brief stopover, the package was put ashore one hundred miles north on the eastern shore of Cuba, near the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay in late March. There it was delivered to anti-Castro operatives. Two months later, an outbreak of African swine fever appeared for the first time in North America.
Long Island Congressman Tom Downey expressed outrage. “It is preposterous that the U.S. government tried to destroy portions of the population’s food. Who is it aimed at? Is it influencing a government when you do it clandestinely?” Senators Richard Schweiker and Daniel Inouye, both conducting germ warfare investigations at the time, echoed Downey’s sentiments. “He’s passed the point of being able to be surprised,” said a Schweiker aide of his boss. “So many of these seemingly outrageous stories came true.”
Where did purified vials of African swine fever virus come from?
According to the federal government, Plum Island is the only location in the United States where African swine fever virus is permitted. No one will say on the record that virus for the Cuban mission was prepared on Plum Island and sent to Fort Gulick. However, given the frequent traffic between Plum Island and Fort Detrick, samples—with or without the USDA’s knowledge of the ultimate purpose—could have been sent by courier to Fort Detrick for transshipment to Fort Gulick. Declassified documents uncovered reflect exchanges between the two labs at that time of other virulent germs, like Rift Valley fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, pleuropneumonia-like organisms, tuberculosis (bovine type, strain 854), and equine infectious anemia (New Hampshire virulent strain 1535).
Virologist Dr. Robert Shope (son of the late Rockefeller Institute scientist and Erich Traub’s American mentor, Dr. Richard Shope), who served on Plum Island’s advisory committee, is a nonbeliever. “The Newsday article was absurd,” says Shope. “There’s no grounds for it. It would have been stupid to do such a thing because of the boomerang effect [the virus backlashing on the United States].” Dr. Callis, director at the time of the outbreak, likewise denies any link between Plum Island and the Cuban outbreak. “There are a lot of rumors that the CIA planted it there—well, I’m not a CIA specialist, and I know they’ve done some stupid things, but I don’t think they’d do it that close to the United States. Cuba likely got it from garbage they imported or from returning military staff from their African political programs in Angola.”
Norman Covert, Fort Detrick’s historian, shows how the CIA could easily have been involved—and unwittingly co-opted Plum Island. “There were CIA people who infiltrated the [Fort Detrick] laboratories. They did their own work, and we know now what they did with LSD and other psycho-illnesses. They had their own little cell there—they worked on their own, and I suspect that a very small circle of people knew that.” This type of information isolation—informing people of project details strictly on a need-to-know basis—is the brand of secrecy that might have been used to poison Cuba’s food supply with germs. Compartmentalization of each step made Plum Island an unknowing accomplice when it trafficked in viruses between Fort Detrick and elsewhere.
Efforts to explain away the outbreak as a natural occurrence do not hold up to close examination. The theory that food wastes from Spanish aircraft were fed to domestic pigs fails to address that Cuba, like the United States, had always kept their nation disease-free through strict importation quarantines. Cuban investigators claim ASFV broke out simultaneously in two distant locations; germ warfare experts say that contemporaneous sites of infection are unnatural and point to a deliberately caused outbreak. Because it is impossible to disprove, the logic of a methodical scientist dictates that a germ warfare attack cannot be ruled out. CIA assassination plots (some of which involved germs) and the Bay of Pigs invasion stand as acknowledged covert acts by the United States government to force regime change upon Cuba.
Karl Grossman, short, rotund, and dark-bearded, was then an east end cub reporter for the daily Long Island Press, and managed to claw his way into the media day event. With a circulation of about 600,000, the Press was the seventh largest afternoon daily in the nation, serving Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk counties. The night before media day, he phoned James Reynolds, the USDA’s public relations rep, for details on when to meet in the morning, and they got to chatting. The spokesman, relieved his well-orchestrated press tour was all set, casually told the reporter, “The research also involves building defenses to . . . a foreign nation utilizing biological warfare.” After being egged on by Grossman (“I got him on a run,” says Grossman, “and he just kept going and going”), Reynolds protested. “We’re not a front for the Department of Defense,” but “America must be prepared to protect its food sources. . . .” This was a far cry—wrote Grossman in a story he handed his editor before boarding the ferry to Plum Island the next morning—from the mantra that only civilian research took place on Plum. That had been the company line since dedication day, since Doc Shahan left mention of Colonel Mace and the Army on the cutting room floor.
When the press arrived, Dr. Howard Bachrach held up a tiny glass vial before the crowd of twenty-four newsmen and said its contents could infect not only all the cattle on the Earth, but all the cattle that had ever roamed the Earth. Billions and billions of potential infections were held between the little man’s thumb and forefinger. And they had plenty more of this and other germs on hand.
Another scientist, tired of the journalists’ pestering about biological warfare operations, barked at them in the hallway, “Absolutely ridiculous! Do you see any evidence of such things?” Reporters looked around the lab, eyes darting, unsure if they were missing the big white elephant.
At lunchtime in the cafeteria, Grossman placed his lunch tray down at an empty table. James Reynolds walked into the big room with his PR aides and a few of the national reporters in tow. They picked up their pre ordered lunches and sat down; Reynolds and his aide pointed and sneered at Karl across the room, now sinking his teeth into a soggy tuna fish sandwich.
While Reynolds had been shepherding his flock through the staged laboratory tour, extolling the virtues of Plum Island to the newsmen scribbling on little notepads, Karl Grossman’s story of the night before had made the front page of the morning edition of the Press, and was being read by hundreds of thousands on the mainland. The PR man had been duped the night before.
That was only the beginning.
The story made the Associated Press’s A-Wire, which meant that every news media outlet in the entire country had read an official-looking all-caps news brief off their teletype machines that said Plum Island was a biological warfare center. “These PR guys just knew—” remembers Grossman fondly. “They just knew that if something came across the AP wire, it was like it had come down from Mount Sinai.” Editors around the nation were ordering their desk reporters to write stories based on the wire. With the stroke of his pen, Grossman had dashed the efforts of the USDA, singularly usurping Plum Island’s canned media day. No matter what positive impressions the national reporters returned to their news desks with, they would still be colored by the contents of the authoritative AP story. Grossman wrote a second follow-up story the next day under the banner OUT OF ‘ANDROMEDA STRAIN’... RIGHT HERE ON PLUM ISLAND, where he drew a frightening connection to Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel about a deadly outbreak of viruses caused by the malfunction of a military satellite launched by the U.S. biological warfare program.
When Director Jerry Callis glanced at the cover of the Long Island Press on his desk, he was in utter shock. After disembarking from the 4:30 p.m. ferry off the island, he sped over to Claudio’s in Greenport, hoping to find some of the national reporters to whom he could plead his case. There he came upon a young Boyce Rinsberger, then a junior New York Times reporter (and later an award-winning editor at the Washington Post, and editor of Science magazine). Callis shoved the cover of the Press in his face and gestured wildly.
“You upset?” Rinsberger said, sipping a cocktail at the bar.
“Hell, I’m very upset,” Callis said.
“Well, there’s not a lot you can do. You can write a letter to the editor, put it in your desk drawer, and wait two weeks. See how the other stories come out—put them in an envelope with your letter, and send it all to the Long Island Press. Let the editor there decide whether he has the best writer in the nation on his staff, or the worst.” Callis followed Rinsberger’s detailed instructions. But his letter never ran and he never received a reply from the editor.
Karl Grossman’s 1971 twin stories had set the tone of dialogue and defined the standard by which the public would judge the island. The self described “Plum Island Enemy Number One” recalls running into Callis years later on the mainland. “He screamed at me.” Asked about the reporter, Callis says, “Karl Grossman? I don’t know if I have a word to describe him.” The reporter would continue his role as the ever-prodding thorn in Plum Island’s side, and his scathing pen wasn’t going away anytime soon.
Fresh out of college, and now a member of the House Armed Services Committee, he dove into an investigation into allegations of LSD drug testing and deaths at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal. “I did it simply because I wanted to get some press,” he recalls. “The next day, a Capitol Hill cop comes into my office with a complete dossier including pictures and recruiting brochures and films from the arsenal, where they had him [the police officer was then an Army private] without any antidotes present, taking large doses of LSD. The materials enticed young soldiers to come to the arsenal—‘Come see Washington,’ they said. ‘See the monument, have fun, all while helping your government.’ By taking drugs!” Downey discovered a Long Island man had committed suicide after participating in the program. Before long, the young congressman had Army generals twice his age running for cover, forced the program to close down, and gained national attention.
Downey’s next fight was led by a person even less likely than the twenty-five-year-old newly minted congressman—his twenty-seven-year old intern.
Ron Fitzsimmons attended high school with Downey and worked on the triumphant 1974 campaign. Downey took on his old buddy, “Ronnie”—who had been horsing around on an extended-year, Vietnam era college track at State University of New York at Stony Brook, and was unemployed during the summer of 1976—as an unpaid intern in Washington. Ronnie was assigned to typing envelopes up in “The Cage,” catacombs with wire-cage doors lining the attic crawl space on the top floor of the Cannon House Office Building that had storage spaces for each member. Bored, and thinking Downey was punishing him for something he did, Ronnie walked down to the office and begged chief of staff Fred Kass for something interesting to do.
Rifling through the papers on his desk, Kass uncovered a thin manila file folder and tossed it across his desk at Fitzsimmons. “Here, Ronnie. Check this out.”
Inside were two pieces of paper about Plum Island with rumors about biological warfare. Though he grew up nearby, Ronnie had never heard about the island.
“See what you can find out,” said Kass. “Oh, and here’s the name of a Newsday reporter you can call.”
As Fitzsimmons climbed the flights of marble steps, returning to The Cage, his thoughts raced. An odd inspiration came to him. Only a few months before he had seen All the President’s Men, the blockbuster Watergate film with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodward and Bernstein, the two Washington Post cub reporters who brought down the president. He remembered how they took one morsel of information and expanded on it. It was a list—a list of political contributors, he recalled. And there was that scene where they went through the phone book and made all those phone calls that led to more clues. Now it all fits—things are connecting here, he thought. A sense of purpose came over him with every step he climbed. Soon he was racing down the hallway to his cage. Ronnie harbored an envy of his childhood peer, Tom Downey, and his improbable success. Now, with Woodward and Bernstein as his self-appointed mentors, he would play investigative journalist and congressman. Hunched over his typewriter, he banged out a letter from Downey, asking the secretary of agriculture for a Plum Island phone book and organizational chart. He could hardly contain his excitement. The Plum Island Inquiry had begun.
Days later, the list of employees and a crude chart showed up. Grabbing the local white pages, Fitzsimmons painstakingly cross-referenced the three hundred plus names and penciled in phone numbers on the long list. He studied the chart, tracing the lines from box to box. Now who works for who? Then, starting with the As, he picked up the receiver and began making calls.
“Hi, I’m Ron Fitzsimmons with Congressman Tom Downey. I’m calling from Washington—we’re looking into the operations of Plum Island. . . .”
“I heard lots of stuff,” recalls Fitzsimmons. “But I picked up right away that—much like in the movie—people were afraid to talk. It’s a small community out there—there’s only that one road at the end of the North Fork. I sensed people were concerned about talking.” Many hung up on him. Some agreed to talk, but not over the telephone. “In person,” they said to him. “The phones might be tapped.” The intern decided he must return to Long Island, convinced it was the only way to get the full story. Willing employees insisted they not meet at their homes, worried that neighbors would spy a strange car pulling up to the house. Instead, Ronnie met with them at the park, behind the school, and at their friends’ homes in neighboring towns.
At the suggestion of Kass, Fitzsimmons had hooked up with Newsday’s Cummings and Fetherston. The team had recently uncovered a possible biological attack on Cuba, and unearthed a series of secret outdoor biological warfare tests in U.S. cities orchestrated by Fort Detrick in the 1950s. Although Fitzsimmons recalls being interested only in the “personal lives and health” of Plum Island workers, he thought the two reporters seemed more intrigued by the island’s alleged connections to biological warfare. They all agreed to share sources and research, and spoke once a week thereafter.
The worker interviews, pooled together by the trio, were quite troubling. They heard that women were barred from working in Laboratory 257 for fear that they “would carry infections to their children.” And men could only work on a volunteer basis on subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSP), a disease arising as a complication of the measles that affects children and adult males with personality changes, intellectual deterioration, periodic involuntary movements, and severe dementia. Few patients diagnosed with SSP lived past three years. Paul Rose, the Plum Island union president, told them one section of Lab 257 (he would not identify which) was closed off, and no one was permitted to enter or know what was going on inside. This didn’t seem too far-fetched—a scientist had told a reporter off the record a few years before, “I knew what I and the other three people working with me were up to, but I didn’t know really what the whole place was about. We kept in our own laboratory all day long... there was some talk on the ferry. . . .”
One source, taking the pseudonym “Charlie,” told them there was heavy traffic between Fort Detrick and Plum Island in both directions, as well as from Egypt and Kenya. A document revealed an October 1969 shipment by military escort of “Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis (VEE) virus and antisera,” to “Dr. J. J. Callis, from the Viral and Rickettsial Division, Army Biological Laboratory, Fort Detrick.” VEE had been one of Fort Detrick’s main germ warfare agents for decades, along with anthrax, botulism, and Rift Valley fever; human guinea pigs had been injected with VEE to develop a vaccine called TC-83, under a top-secret program called Operation WHITECOAT. “FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES,” the permit announced. When the Newsday reporters inquired about it, Plum Island assistant director Dr. John Graves said it had been sent to prepare for the disease, which threatened to spread into the United States from Mexico.
Another document described a one-year project called “Pathogenicity and Prophylaxis of Influenza-A Viruses.” Aimed at live and inactivated flu viruses and engineering man-made recombinant DNA flu virus strains, the research tested their effects on pigs and birds. Working on viruses that jumped between pigs and humans, they used pigs as virus production factories. Scientist Dr. Charles Campbell was able to combine human Hong Kong flu strain with a strain of swine flu (that in 1976 killed an Army soldier at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and touched off a national flu panic) and isolated a new, hybrid virus strain that had the characteristics of both. In this regard, Plum Island did not seem to fit its relatively innocuous title of “Animal Disease Center”—this work placed its actual research in a human realm. That year, President Ford authorized an emergency national flu vaccination campaign to combat this same “New Jersey” flu strain now on Plum Island.
Fort Detrick’s animal disease chief, Dr. William Hinshaw, headed up germ warfare against enemy food. Though retired since 1966, he regularly visited Plum Island in the 1970s and served as a “consultant.” Charlie also divulged that a lab chief working on a “very hot” monkey virus—possibly the forerunner of Ebola virus, the new Marburg hemorrhagic fever virus that killed German lab workers with ghastly hemorrhagic fevers at a vaccine plant in Marburg, West Germany. In All the President’s Men, “Deep Throat” implored Woodward in a dimly lit parking garage to “follow the money.” Now, the scene was re-created in the desolate field behind a school, as Plum Island sources told Fitzsimmons to “follow the viruses.”
In 1958, the USDA had quietly pushed through the House of Representatives a measure to allow the transfer of viruses over the mainland to Plum Island. A decade before, when it authorized the construction of an offshore exotic virus lab, Congress specifically banned foreign viruses from the mainland, and from any island connected by bridge or tunnel. Viruses had to be unloaded from giant Navy freighters onto tugs in Gardiner’s Bay that steamed their biological cargo to Plum Island harbor. Requesting the law change, USDA officials told House members, “Only four or five vials of the virus would be delivered over land twice a year” and promised to package those few shipments with the utmost care. The law change would cut costs and do away with a “an inordinately expensive and inconvenient procedure,” they said. Congress agreed and granted them their wish.
The USDA was either ignorant of the level of germ traffic that would ensue or it intentionally lied to the lawmakers. By 1976, huge crates of live viruses were traveling over congested Long Island roads multiple times each day. Germs were shipped off Plum Island, logged only as “biologicals,” with no other description. Virus and bacteria samples coming into the United States were stowed behind the pilot’s seat in a commercial airliner, picked up at Building No. 80 at JFK International Airport, and shifted from one car to another in the parking lot of a department store in the Suffolk town of Sayville. Over the years, thousands of these trips were made through New York City, and over Nassau and Suffolk county roads; local health officials were unaware of potentially deadly biological voyages occurring every day right under their noses. Sometimes the shipments of live exotic virus samples were taken home with the couriers in the evening, placed in household freezers, and brought to Plum Island the next day. A USDA official later admitted to doing just that, but only “once or twice” a month. Couriers weren’t instructed on what the samples contained, which could be as large as a thirty-gallon drum, or how to go about using the emergency decontamination kit in case something spilled. Often the Plum Island scientists themselves had little idea what the blood serum samples contained. Sometimes crates were locked in a freezer in the Orient Point warehouse—but the key to the freezer hung conspicuously on a wooden peg just inside the front door. There were no security guards at the Orient Point facility. They had been dispensed with long ago. And if the package arrived after the last scheduled boat left for Plum Island, it was just left outside the door to the Orient Point office, or on the side of the road, either inside or leaning against the big Plum Island mailbox. The following morning the marine crew took it to the island on the first boat out.
In June 1970, a virus courier named Alfred Von Hassel was killed in a car accident on Northville Turnpike in Riverhead, thirty miles west of Plum Island, while transporting unidentified biologicals. The container— described as an aluminum case one foot wide and one foot deep, and eighteen inches tall with latches—catapulted from Von Hassel’s car on impact. It was retrieved from a field abutting the road where the vehicle had flipped over. Fortunately, Leo Golisz, an off-duty Plum Island security guard, passed by the commotion and recognized the upside-down car with its U.S. GOV’T marking. He identified himself to police and left the scene toting the shiny silver box of biologicals, which he brought to Plum Island. Other foreign shipments were less sturdy and wouldn’t survive such a horrendous accident—one source recalled transporting picnic coolers and leaky cardboard containers with fluid oozing out of the bottom.
The abuses read like a checklist on how to disregard regulations and abandon all common sense. Employees told the investigators that DDT insecticide was still being sprayed liberally on Plum Island, four years after use of the toxic compound was banned by the federal government. Tons of sewage effluent flowed daily into Long Island Sound and Gardiner’s Bay from the two laboratories, untested to ensure that germs had been destroyed by decontamination. Radioactive materials that were incinerated required testing with Geiger counters to monitor fallout, per the Atomic Energy Commission. Nervously wringing their hands as they sat uncomfortably in their friend’s house in East Marion, two employees admitted the incinerator charging room hadn’t been tested for radiation exposure in years. Not only was security at Orient Point nil, but the guardhouses at each of the two lab compounds on the island were unmanned. The once thirty-four-man-strong security patrol had been decimated. A paltry eleven guards covered three 8-hour shifts, seven days a week, 365 days a year. “I could take you to the island on a motorboat,” said a source, “get you ashore and put you in a lab—and no one would ever see us.”
Then there were the illnesses.
“James Robinson,” a worker in the lab glassware department, became sick in 1975 and had to retire early. The USDA offered him a 40 percent disability payment, until the union protested the settlement, stressing he had been exposed to dangerous microbes. The USDA doubled the ante to an 80 percent payment and the employee’s grievance conveniently faded away. A union leader had been filing workplace grievances for years, noting that Plum Island workers occasionally contracted severe rashes. No steps were taken by management toward amelioration.
“Bruce Becker,” a safety technician, also caught something. He began running a low-grade fever and became sluggish. His physician found high blood pressure and diagnosed a flu like virus, and suggested that he have his kidneys checked out. For almost a year, Becker didn’t feel like himself. Then in August 1974, his condition took a turn for the worse. Any physical exertion, however minimal, caused nodules all over his skin that took weeks, sometimes months, to disappear. Plum Island’s nurse, Frances DeCristofaro, arranged an appointment with another medical doctor, who diagnosed infection with an unknown virus. Becker sought a second opinion from a Dr. Georgeson in Riverhead; biopsy samples of the lumps were taken and the results came back negative. Perplexed, Georgeson suggested that Becker try the Leahy Clinic in Boston. When he did, there was still no confirmation. Samples of his kidneys and the lumps were taken at Riverhead Hospital and again at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson. The Leahy Clinic doctor suggested that Becker have one of his kidneys removed, though he would not tell him why. In March 1976, the Workers’ Compensation Board referred him to yet another doctor, “Tom Belford” of Greenport. After examining his patient, Dr. Belford announced, “You’re either okay or you’re not in the books.” Belford sent for tests from the CDC in Atlanta to explore the possibility of animal diseases. Becker was given two shots, and his arm blotched and swelled in both places. When he returned in April for more tests, Dr. Belford brushed his patient away. “I’m getting too much pressure,” he said. “If Georgeson wants to give you these shots, I’ll give him the serum.” The doctor would not elaborate.
While Woodward and Bernstein parsed through stacks of circulating cards in the ornate rotunda of the Library of Congress, Fitzsimmons and a fellow intern barged into the offices of the Suffolk Times and other local weeklies, spoke to the editors about Plum Island, and pored over their vertical files, reading old newspaper clippings. Then one summer day, Ronnie decided to roll the dice and personally investigate the Orient Point warehouse and ferry dock to Plum Island. Switching cars halfway to avoid detection, the intern-turned-sleuth slipped into the parking lot near the ferry launch. “I got out and went into the building,” he recalls. “I saw a fridge in the corner and opened it. Inside were bottles with yellow stuff in them, labeled with Latin names. I’m not a scientist—but it looked like bacteria or something. I walked around some more.” He encountered no security. Satisfied, Fitzsimmons jumped in the car and sped off.
They were probing deeper than ever before, and seemed to be getting somewhere. But by August 1976, someone pulled the plug on the investigation. One scientist who agreed to meet changed his mind, saying his superiors had advised him not to speak. Another source told Fitzsimmons, “It shouldn’t surprise you, then, if I told you that Callis has told people not to talk to you.” Lower-echelon lab techs and dockworkers would only mutter, “Speak to Callis,” and turn away when approached. “When it became clear we were snooping around, contacts would say, ‘I know who you are,’ and hang up. A few who had offered information were now recanting, they were so concerned that we might publish the information, and they would be fired.” One woman broke down and cried to Fitzsimmons over the phone, wailing, “I’m not allowed to speak. Please, please! Leave me alone!”
After compiling his extensive research, and reviewing his pre-gag-order interviews, he compared notes with the Newsday reporters. Fitzsimmons then typed up letters from Downey addressed to the Army and the USDA, demanding detailed responses to the results of the investigation. The Army’s terse response, perhaps with a dose of condescension, was addressed to “Mr. Downey” (“It’s interesting,” says Tom Downey now. “Why wasn’t it ‘Dear Congressman’?”). The letter noted that the Army had phased out all agriculture-related activities within the last year. Seven years after President Nixon ordered Fort Detrick out of the offensive biological warfare business, the Army was just now turning over the big Detrick greenhouses used for anticrop germ warfare to the USDA. Acknowledging the agreement that likewise turned over Plum Island to the USDA, “along with defense of our livestock against biological attack,” the Army also admitted the ongoing relationship between Fort Detrick and Plum Island. “Army interest... was one of keeping abreast of closely related efforts in microbiological research. . . . Throughout the ensuing years, there has been a cooperative effort between the Department of the Army and the Department of Agriculture in this area... liaison was maintained at the working level. . . .” This relationship dated back to the construction of an Army germ warfare lab there, Laboratory No. 257, in 1952.
Two more letters were sent to the USDA, including a lengthy single spaced, five-page dispatch to Dr. Callis, demanding all information on Plum Island’s shadowy past and current condition.
The letters presented a thorny problem for Callis: not only was Downey a local congressman, but he also served on the Agriculture Committee. Plum Island would have to tread very carefully here. Fitzsimmons, in the name of Congressman Downey, asked Plum Island officials for names, lists, reports, correspondence, files—anything that proved an existing relationship between Plum Island and Fort Detrick. Attempting to follow leads developed by the Newsday reporters, the letter demanded information on a “swine flu” being sent to Fort Detrick, the Panama Canal Zone, and any other installation. In all, fifty-six specific and open-ended requests were made of Plum Island, many of which contained multiple subrequests.
The letters closed, “Due to the nature of the information requested above and the importance of this subject, I ask that you act at greatest dispatch. Your prompt attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.” Truth was, there really was no rush. The summer was winding to a close, and intern Ronnie Fitzsimmons had to go back to college.
Awaiting the USDA’s reply at the end of August, Ronnie typed up a “summary” for his boss. The three-inch-thick report bowled over the congressman and chief of staff Kass. “Tom was flabbergasted,” says Fitzsimmons, “I wasn’t getting paid—I did it on my own—and I guess I just ran with it.” They each took a piece of the tome and fanned through its legalized pages. They scanned the interview transcripts and flipped through the “Items” section, which included a possible link between Plum Island and an outbreak of swine flu in Cuba. It also documented hearsay of a conversation hinting “President Ford knew of some kind of leak of shellfish toxin and swine fever within the past several years.”3 They read the one-page “Possible Stories,” that spoke of the island’s “shabby operation,” “off-limits” laboratory, and unwarranted gag order (“Why can’t a congressman’s office get straight answers from government employees?”).4 Downey was visibly impressed and clearly surprised.
3 The year before, CIA Director William Colby told the Senate’s Church Committee, then looking into intelligence activities, that the CIA had a secret cache of ultra deadly shellfish toxin stored in a Fort Detrick vault, even though President Nixon had ordered the destruction of such weapons back in 1969.
4 The final part of the otherwise sobering report reflected a vindictiveness on the part of its author, perhaps brought on by the gag order Fitzsimmons faced when trying to interview sources: “For The National Enquirer, Dr. Callis is reportedly homosexual.”
Then the USDA replied to Downey, answering the five-page inquisition in the most general of terms. For the first time, however, it acknowledged research on behalf of the Army in the early 1950s on vesicular stomatitis, brucellosis, and Newcastle disease, an exotic viral illness that affects the nervous and respiratory systems of birds. Laboratory infections of the latter disease have been known to occur in people, and it causes the death of nearly 100 percent of flocks that contract it. The USDA continued working with the Army, maintaining a liaison at Fort Detrick. In 1962, said the letter, the USDA provided farm plots in Oklahoma and North Dakota for the Army’s open-air trial on cereal rust of wheat, one of Detrick’s major anticrop germ agents. While the Army told Downey the relationship was at a “working level,” the USDA stated it was “executively directed.” It was probably both.
Throughout the investigation, Dr. Callis repeatedly offered Fitzsimmons and his boss an opportunity to visit Plum Island to obtain information firsthand. Downey hardly knew the extent of Fitzsimmons efforts, and the intern balked. He would say almost three decades later that an official visit would have amounted to “total bullshit. . . . We felt they would show us a laboratory building we wouldn’t understand or know anything about.” Instead of attending a dog-and-pony show, he preferred to stand on his interviews with current and former employees, who he figured knew the real Plum Island.
To Fitzsimmons chagrin, the story that reporters Cummings and Fetherston published in Newsday that fall noted the links between Plum Island and Fort Detrick, but didn’t address employee safety and health, issues he believed were vital. Titled “THE PLUM ISLAND LAB: FOR MANKIND OR AGAINST IT?”, the article did not mention employees like Bruce Becker with his mysterious illness brought on by the lab. It failed to mention the lone medical official stationed on the island, a part-time nurse who confessed she did little more than dispense aspirin and Ace bandages. Nor did it address the assistant director who placed a package of live virus on the seat next to him on a trans-Atlantic commercial airline flight. Fitzsimmons had shared his painstakingly detailed notes with Cummings and Fetherston, and little of it made print. “I was frustrated,” he says, “hoping [the Newsday investigators] would report about the people and how they were getting sick from exposure to these deplorable conditions.” Plum Island management branded the article as a distortion of facts written to sell newspapers, brazenly denying any germ warfare research. “This center has not been, nor is it now, engaged in biological warfare,” said Director Callis.
Making matters worse for the probing intern, the Suffolk Times rushed to the aid of Plum Island and publicly whipsawed the “college students” and the “irresponsible” actions of Newsday. “The desire to uncover another Watergate scandal runs strong in the hearts of all investigative reporters,” the paper acknowledged, but tarnishing reputations and suggesting the island was a cover-up for biological warfare was appalling. Fitzsimmons had acted recklessly. And noting that the Marxist-Communist publication Daily Worker charged Plum Island with germ warfare back in 1952—sending comrades to fight the laboratory during the public hearings—the editorial mused it was “somewhat surprising to find Newsday following the Communist party line” today. The Suffolk Times had done everything but brand Ronnie Fitzsimmons a hippie Communist and Newsday an organ of the Soviet Politburo. The editorial marked the apex of the local community’s support of Plum Island, support that would wane soon enough.
“I felt they did something on Plum Island—even though they always denied it. The very nature of the secrecy of the place gave fuel to the rampant speculation that existed,” says Downey, today one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists, still youthful three decades later at age fifty-four.
“Because they wouldn’t tell you anything, everybody believed the worst,” Downey says. “And who would believe them? This was a period of time when lying was part of the operation. People wouldn’t tell you the truth—they didn’t tell the soldiers the truth [at Edgewood Arsenal] and they’re giving them these drugs.” After the LSD scandal, “It would not have been a long shot to think that the Army was testing biological agents at Plum Island or working with the USDA—it would have been an easy connection to make. I never believed that—with all due respect to the Army, not that they are inherently dishonest people—but I never believed they told the whole truth. We just assumed they were not going to tell the truth about things, until you beat them to death with it. And they didn’t.
“It was a rough time, a time very, very different from today,” Downey continues. “The 1970's was the end of an era for them, too. You had a post Vietnam period, and the military was up against it. And to [be browbeaten by] some freshman member of the House Armed Services Committee? They weren’t going to pay attention to me, they were just hoping I went away.”
Which he did. Or rather, his intern did. A Newsday editorial called Downey’s Plum Island inquiry “not enough.” Busy with other high-profile matters, Tom Downey launched no formal investigation. And Ronnie Fitzsimmons went back to Stony Brook to finish up college.5
5 Later, he would find the recognition in the political arena he so desperately sought, when he became the first man ever hired by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, better known as NARAL. Today, he lives with his wife and two children in the Washington, D.C., area, and is the national spokesperson for an association of abortion clinics.
Years after the Downey–Plum Island inquiry, Fred Kass confessed to Ronnie that they never expected anything to come of his work.
It was, after all, just another summer intern project.
Just eight more hours left in the week, but for now, Billy Doroski would have to deal with the consequences of the booze. The early boat to Plum Island was typically a unique but enjoyable commute—like an oversized carpool where a shared and sheltered camaraderie reigned. The regulars were always there to goof around with on the way over, and most of the stuffed-shirt scientists usually caught the later 8:00 a.m. boat. No fun this morning, though. A tall coffee nursed the pressing pain at the back of Billy’s neck, but didn’t do a thing for his ailing stomach, which churned with each methodical thud of the boat over the Gut’s strong currents. A laboratory technician, Billy was responsible for all the preparatory work for the scientists—inoculate the animals with viruses, draw blood serum samples, culture viruses in dishes, and prepare sample slides. In reality, Billy handled the lion’s share of the labor so the doctor could stroll in, take a look at his work, and postulate.
Leaving the ferry, he boarded the old school bus stenciled LAB 257, and slowly eased himself down into the small seat. He exhaled. Yeah, this is going to be some day—some day. Now why the hell did you have to go and do that to yourself? He slumped over and rested his palm squarely on his forehead as the bus careered south along the narrow path, past the marshy lake, before screeching to a halt a few minutes later at 257. Billy waited patiently for his turn to stand and exit, then filed into the compound through the guardhouse door at the outer fence along with twenty-five or so other techs and building engineers, before passing through the gray airlock entrance into the animal corral chute. Today, he would be assisting Dr. Ahmed H. Dardiri, the chief of Lab 257, who was conducting the annual foreign animal disease school, teaching doctors and veterinarians from around the country how to recognize the symptoms of exotic virus and bacteria infections. That morning, the doctor planned to demonstrate the effects of bovine herpes mammillitis virus, and asked Billy to set things up. Or, in other words, to inject the animals with the virus.
Billy entered the change room, closed the door behind him, switched from his street clothes into his government-issued pale blue lab smock, and, big virus syringe in hand, opened the door to the animal cubicle. He gazed at the animals through his tired, bloodshot eyes. Then he walked closer and squinted at them.
Oh shit—they already got it?!
Billy was startled by what he found. Two steers were stumbling around in the yellow-tiled cellblock, drooling profusely and foaming at the mouth, muttering low groans. This can’t be, he thought, there’s no way. Maybe he was in the wrong lab. Maybe the pounding headache was mixing him all up. No, he thought, this is the lab room I’m supposed to be in—I know it is! They have to be clean, these animals, the handlers just brought these two in here from the Old Cow Barn yesterday. The aftermath of last night’s festivities was impairing his judgment. Well, there’s still a little time left—let’s try this over again. Perplexed, Billy rubbed his tired eyes, left the cubicle, closed the air-lock door behind, took a decontamination shower in the change room, and regrouped for a moment. The symptoms he saw bothered Billy, and with good reason: he had once contracted an exotic animal disease after accidentally injecting his cuticle with live viruses. He sat down, scanned the newspaper, and sipped some more coffee—the brief rest would sober him. Then he slowly got up and went back in.
Same thing. He looked at the weeping cattle, checked his clipboard, then looked at the animal again, shaking his head. Something was terribly wrong. He showered out and tried a third time, but same thing again.
This isn’t me anymore—I’ve got some really sick animals in here!
Billy phoned Dr. Dardiri, who had just arrived on the later boat, and the doctor rushed up to the animal containment room. Opening each animal’s jaw and inspecting their hooves, the doctor observed signs of disease in the mouth and feet and confirmed his tech’s dire assessment. Dardiri called Plum Island Director Jerry Callis at 9:30 a.m. and informed him of what they discovered, noting that the animals came from the Old Cow Barn, officially known as Building 62, one of the three outside animal holding pens. Dr. Callis instructed him to swab some samples and start a laboratory diagnosis immediately.
School would be cancelled that day.
With the receiver still in his hand, Dr. Callis toggled the hook and rang Dr. Louis Jennings, the chief of animal supply, ordering him to Building 62 to see if the animals there were showing any unusual symptoms. Racing into the pens, Jennings grabbed hold of the nearest steer. It looked pretty bad—sullen-faced, the poor beast was drooling and foaming at the mouth. Around 11:00 a.m., Jennings phoned Callis and confirmed their worst fears—the very first animal he examined was ailing from . . . well, from something. He scraped samples of the steer’s tongue tissue and gave them to a safety officer, who rushed them over to Dardiri in Lab 257.
Dr. Dardiri had long experience in diagnostic methods—he and his staff had designed scores of them for countless germs. Science, by its nature, is inexact, a constantly evolving body of knowledge among learned men and women. Identifying viruses is no different, as a microbiologist must put an unknown sample through the step-by-step process of reasoned elimination. So first, Dardiri looked at the virus’s history. In this case, this step was unusually easy, because it came out of a lab upstairs, rather than from a test tube flown in from the jungles of the Congo. So the historical deductive reasoning was a snap: clear symptoms of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) virus meant he could proceed straight to the reagents. Normally, he’d have to grow a sample to provide enough material to set up various test cultures and find the culprit. Since there are seven strains and multiple subtypes of the virus, a bunch of reagents were brought out of the freezer.
A reagent is a specific substance that reacts only to the disease substance (called the antigen) it binds it to. For example, reagents can be antibody proteins that a test mouse produces to fight a certain strain of a virus. Fluorescent antibody stains light up on a slide when they come in contact with the viruses, which are invisible to the eye (except with the help of an electron microscope). However, one can witness the known, visible reagent substance reacting to the invisible virus, which can often be identified by the ruptured cells, where they have attacked. Measuring the holes created by the dead cells indicates the potency of the virus. By manufacturing reagents using live viruses on different test animals, the Plum Island staff had assembled a veritable library of most known germs.
Pulling out the test kits from the walk-in freezer, Dr. Dardiri first tested the samples Billy extracted from the animals upstairs against each strain of FMD and a match was made: Type O-1. Then the moment of truth. The samples from Animal Supply Building No. 62 also reacted to Type O-1 virus.
Oh God—an outbreak!
Viruses had escaped from at least one of the two labs. Foot-and-mouth disease virus had broken out. Who knew what other germs had escaped and where they had gone? A rattled Dr. Dardiri left the laboratory room and typed a terse message addressed to J. J. Callis, Director: “Summary: Foot and-mouth disease positive.”
cull: 1. to pick, to gather . . . 3. to select and separate out as inferior or worthless.
A plague had ravaged much of Europe and parts of the Middle East. Though it sounds like a historical account from the Middle Ages, this culling took place in February 2001. For some, the grisly images of the mass graves and carnage were reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps and Stalin’s Great Purge.
The culling was a response to foot-and-mouth disease virus, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center’s cause célèbre.
Foot-and-mouth disease has been among us for many centuries, and maybe far longer. Some believe it was the fifth of the ten biblical plagues, the disease with which God smote Egyptian livestock. The journal of Hieronymus Fracastorius, a fifteenth-century Italian monk from Verona, noted an epidemic of cattle herds, an account that closely mirrored the disease’s symptoms. It mostly attacks cloven-hoofed animals—cattle, pigs, and sheep. Large blisters form on the animal’s mouth and feet, and grow up to two inches in diameter. Healthy cells underneath liquefy, and pus swells inside viral blisters until they burst, leaving behind painful ulcers. The pain of the infection on the foot renders the animal lame and immobilized. Blisters on the mouth and tongue make it impossible to eat. Compounding the problem, opportunistic bacteria enter the raw, exposed areas and cause infections ranging from the shedding of hooves and tongue to sudden death. While the virus itself rarely kills the victim, complications from it can be fatal. For many who have seen the effects of foot-and-mouth disease, it is extremely saddening to observe a stricken animal, standing helpless as its ailing body gradually wastes away.
To this day, there is no cure.
Were it not for the founding fathers of Plum Island, foot-and-mouth disease never would have been wiped out of North America in a 1948 eradication campaign.
And, but for the existence of Plum Island, it would not have returned to the continent in 1978.
While Dr. Dardiri was confirming his worst suspicions, Dr. Callis had gathered the lab chiefs and management staff to his office in Building 54, perched on a bluff overlooking Gardiner’s Bay and the faint shoreline of Montauk Point in the distance. He briefed the group and dusted off a copy of the 1969 emergency operations plan, the most recent one they had. Though the plan called for a secret code to be used in the event of an outbreak inside U.S. borders to avoid public alarm—“Rumen” for rinderpest virus, “Nada” for foot-and-mouth disease virus—no code names were necessary internally.
The plan called for Armageddon—destroy every living thing on the island except humans. Somebody provided a head count of all fauna: ninety-four cattle, eighty-seven pigs, sixty-six lambs, twenty-eight rabbits, twenty-seven chickens, thirteen goats, six horses, and two ducks, and colonies of mice and guinea pigs. The test animal population on this isle, combined with the flocks of wild birds, deer, insects, and other small critters, was larger than Noah’s Ark.
“We can’t dispose of the carcasses by burial as the plan calls for—it would take far too long. The risk of epidemic increases every moment infected animals remain alive. I’m going to need everyone’s support here.” When Dardiri called and confirmed a virus outbreak, the group unanimously agreed to burn the place up and scurried off to tell their subordinates. To ease their minds, the line workers were told the escaped virus rarely affected humans, though many of them knew about Billy Doroski’s infection, when he accidentally injected himself with a healthy dose of the virus.1 Billy stuck himself with a needle when inoculating guinea pigs, and soon after, his finger swelled and he contracted flu like symptoms. Plum Island scientists confined him in quarantine, inside the containment laboratory, for a full week. When they tested his blood, they found antibodies and confirmed he had indeed been infected with foot-and-mouth disease virus. They freed him only after the virus had run its course. After being released from biological quarantine, he went home and wore a rubber glove on the infected hand for five days, and then returned to work.
1 The first human case of foot-and-mouth disease virus was reported in the hamlet of Yetlington, England, in 1966. There, farmhand Robert Brewis contracted large blisters on his hands and inside his mouth. He also suffered grogginess and other flulike conditions. Attacked by a swarm of reporters, he managed a joke for the English tabloids. The doctors said he would recover and would not have to follow the fate of lower animals who caught the virus. “My only worry was that I might have to be destroyed,” Brewis said of his infection.
All workers were directed to cease all work and await further instructions. The first order of business was to decontaminate and evacuate everyone on the island, except for the outbreak control team. Then every single animal would be hauled into the lab and, after blood and tissue samples were taken, incinerated. Meanwhile, everything on the island would be sprayed down and chemically scorched. Washington would have to be notified and, only if absolutely necessary, the public at large. Any chance there was to keep this under wraps, however, was negated by the presence of sixty-five private contractor workers then building a massive extension onto Lab 101. Carpenters had been hacking and sawing away at the building for two years now, and there wasn’t a soul in Callis’s office that afternoon who didn’t suspect they were the cause of this mess. The foreman was called over to be briefed on measures his men would be expected to follow.
Dr. Callis’s phone rang. It was Dardiri again. The director’s expression turned grim. More bad news. The people aboard the ferry that had been launched at noon for Orient Point were now potential traveling mobile disease vectors. Alarmed, they radioed the ferry captain just before the boat docked at its destination. Now the mainland knew something had gone wrong. A crowd of people, who had gathered to meet their family members after a half-day shift, watched curiously as the boat approached and then mysteriously circled around and sped back to Plum Island. Dr. Callis ordered the emergency plan into immediate action. From this point forward, Plum Island would be under a full lockdown. No one was permitted to leave. The director now faced the most painful task of his career—issuing a press release announcing the island’s very first virus outbreak.
Now, the walls on the “inside” were closing in. Those with telephones contacted their spouses (which took infinite attempts because the switchboard was jammed) to tell them what had happened and that they wouldn’t be home for dinner, but they were okay. Dr. House’s lab partner that day was a visiting scientist in from Paris. She planned to train him on the latest diagnostic techniques, but all research work was called off and the two sat around twiddling their thumbs. “It was kind of funny, because he thought we did this every day, and my French wasn’t good enough to tell him this day was very different.”
Hours later, the 390 workers finally permitted to leave Plum Island—but they had to be decontaminated first. Crews went into each laboratory change room, bagged and labeled everyone’s street clothes, and took them away. In place, they laid out one-size-fits-all sterilized white coveralls and white slip on tennis shoes. Personal belongings, like watches, jewelry, pocketbooks, and wallets, were removed from the change-room lockers. Car keys and eyeglasses would be permitted—after all, people had to drive their cars home— but only after they were carefully dipped in an acetic acid bath. Idling in the cramped containment rooms, pacing endlessly back and forth, began to drive people batty. Finally, minutes before 8:00 p.m., they were released. Entering the change rooms, the staff members showered out without towels and put coveralls on their wet bodies. They were going home.
Exiting the laboratories en masse, the workers looked like a horde of invading aliens in baggy white spacesuits. The 325 staff and the 65 construction workers evacuated in a quiet, orderly fashion. By then they were too tired to say anything. The sharp odor of burning hay was in the air as they filed onto a bus, which splashed through a makeshift decontamination lagoon before pulling up to the decontaminated ferry. Other than the thirty-five-man cleanup crew, everyone was off the island by 8:45 p.m. Frances Demorest, Plum Island’s assistant librarian, recalls getting home at midnight and greeting her husband. “I woke Harrison up, and he just looked at me and let out a great laugh. My hair was hanging and I was wearing size forty white coveralls and plastic sneakers. Oh, what a mess!”
The first load of Hereford steers left the animal pen, Building 62, at 9:00 p.m. and boarded the cattle truck bound for the east animal wing of Lab 101. Animal handlers hauled the goats, sheep, horses, and pigs from their stalls into the west animal wing, then onto the loading platform. As they emptied the pens, the areas were sprayed down with a lye solution to kill live germs that escaped. Within two hours, all of the animals moved out of Building 62. The men showered, changed clothes, and went on to the larger task of removing the animals held in Building 21 and in the old Army bunker, Battery Steele. That took until daybreak on Saturday. Downstairs, in the rear of the building, workers cranked up the oil-fired incinerator.
Up the ramp, at the head of the necropsy room’s “disassembly line,” stood veterinarian Donald Morgan, dressed in a white smock and skullcap, who closely inspected each cow marching toward him in a jagged line. He drew a blood sample and, donning rubber gloves and grabbing a scalpel from the knives and chisels laid out along the cutting table, clipped off some pieces of fleshy body tissue.
Two animal handlers then alternated kills with overdoses of anesthetics or a special gun that fired a lethal bolt of compressed air. Each animal was then hacked up with power saws and knives and disposed of. Big chunks of flesh were sent down the chute into the incinerator. The necropsy room was a muddle, strewn with blood and pieces of flesh. Inside, a cacophony of animal moans, groans, and squeals filled the air, along with saws buzzing and chains clanking, and the echoes of parts thumping down the chute. Animals were euthanized outside of the laboratory, too; there was simply not enough kill space inside Labs 257 and 101 to do all the killing. Those carcasses were carted into Lab 257 and sent up the cargo elevator to Dr. Morgan on the second floor.
Each time the room filled up, the phone rang in the incinerator charging room. “Okay, ready? Here it comes!” One floor above, two animal handlers chained up the hind legs of each carcass and swung it over to the chute built into the floor. One lifted the steer’s forelegs up over the lip of the chute while the other pushed it over. Then they lowered the chain over the winch and let it slide.
The incinerator area was considered the “hottest” area on the island, for the high levels of contamination and for the searing heat emitting from the furnace. Regular incinerator duty was grueling, exhausting work, the worst job on the whole line. Plant management crews took turns doing it and they loathed it. There were some interesting perquisites, however. For starters, there was a wide assortment of pornography piled high in the corner of the charging room. “You never had to worry about any women being in that room,” says one worker. “And if a woman or a supervisor came in, you could always quickly toss the porn into the fire.” The other perk strains credulity, had not multiple sources confirmed it. “On kill day, the guys upstairs would carve up steaks sometimes, put them in plastic bags, and toss them down the chute to us.” From sirloins, to chicken breast cutlets, to pork chops—not USDA Grade A, but USDA Grade V (for virus riddled)—they were all broiled up in the incinerator wing kitchen. “Everyone, to a man, would deny it,” says another employee. “But we did it—we ate the meat.”
During the outbreak, it was without a doubt the most dangerous place to be, putting staff members at great risk. Down the chute came animal parts and cell cultures, teeming with germs, mixing together, floating around the charging room area, and then entering the fire pit. Normal laboratory operations called for “kill day” once every other week to dispose of test animals. This would be “kill weekend.” Down the stainless steel chute came bloody animal parts of all shapes and sizes—legs, midsections, entrails—pouring into the wagon cart bin in the charging room. It was a macabre sight. Cattle, sheep, and horse heads rolled down the slide after their detached bodies.
Once the cart was full, the weary incinerator crew, dressed in bright red coats and skullcaps (to indicate the severity of contamination), chained it to a slaughterhouse hoist and ran the cart along a track to the other side of the charging room. There they opened the two black cast-iron sliding doors and were immediately blasted with heat from 2,000 degrees of oil-stoked fire raging seven feet below. “The smell and the heat were unbelievable,” said one worker. “The closest thing to hell you’ve ever seen or felt.” Each man grabbed a side of the cart and tilted it, dumping the cargo in. Flames immediately shot up from the nine-by-twelve-foot lake of fire. Burning fat and flesh popped and hissed. Sliding the hatch back into place, the charging room cooled a bit—down to 120 degrees Fahrenheit—and they watched the pyre grow higher and higher through the tiny thick glass porthole. When the flames retreated, workers dumped in more animal refuse, 1,500 pounds every hour, cartload after cartload. The roast lasted into the night and through the next day, for forty-eight consecutive hours, a period that far exceeded the design capacity specifications of the twenty-six-year-old oven. Some said the bricks ran so hot the eighty-four-foot-tall stack glowed red in the night sky like a molten beacon. Others recalled that the concrete wall of the incinerator cracked that weekend and had to be repaired. That Sunday evening, the crew pressure-washed the heaps of guts, excrement, and blood caked all over the charging room. One employee who was there describes the odor that came forth that night. “Imagine a roast beef left on high heat for eight hours, then left out rotting for eight more—it was a butcher shop gone wrong on the rainiest day.”
The laboratories would need disinfecting with caustic soda lye, paraformaldehyde, and acetic acid. There was plenty of paraformaldehyde on hand, but only small amounts of the two other chemicals. Two tons of lye arrived within twenty-four hours on a barge. The safety officer ordered an employee to the mainland to buy up every last bottle of vinegar on the shelves in area supermarkets. Crews garbed in thick black rubber suits and fishing hats mopped the laboratory floors with acetic acid solution (using the vinegar), then scrubbed the yellow tile walls and ceilings. Over the next three days, the three outdoor animal holding pens were sprayed down with lye, as were the roads and walkways, the exteriors of all cattle trucks and cars (the insides were wiped down with the vinegar), and the administration buildings. Emergency crews wore protective suits to avoid chemical burns. Truckloads of manure were sprayed with lye and buried in a six-foot-deep trench covered with topsoil, which was also sprayed. Clothing was gassed with paraformaldehyde, and bales of hay, straw bedding, and animal feed burned in a colossal bonfire.
“The whole island was lyed, everything burned and died,” says a decon team member. “Grass, trees, animals—all dead. The whole island was covered with ash. It looked like snow—all white.” To complete the cleanup, Plum Island remained shut down on Monday. As the spray on the roadway was drying, the first ferry with returning employees pulled into Plum Island harbor at 8:00 a.m. Tuesday morning.
It took the incinerator over a week to cool down. Then workers carefully opened the crematory, crawled inside and shoveled the tons of ash and bone that had accumulated. Wearing flimsy paper masks and boots, they packed the ash into drums, topped them off with water and lye, and let them sit in the air lock for a day. The contaminated ash mixture was then emptied from the drums on the island grounds, and piled into large mounds.
“Foot-and-mouth disease has been diagnosed in cattle in a pre-experimental animal holding facility at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center,” began the press release. The first line of the release was wordsmithing at its best, patently unintelligible to people unacquainted with the science. But lines like “Authorities do not consider this a threat . . .” and “This is the first infection to occur outside the high-security laboratory . . .” and “It rarely affects humans. However, the disease could cause economic disaster . . .” made the reality slowly begin to register with weekend desk editors. Weekend or not, this was a major story to be covered.
In 1971, the USDA had total confidence its exotic virus laboratory, boasting,
Plum Island is considered the safest in the world on virus diseases. As proof of this statement, there has never been a disease outbreak among the susceptible animals maintained outside the laboratory on the island since it was established.
Now, sorting through the hazily written press release, the message became clear: “The World’s Safest Lab” had failed.
By Sunday, Newsday had no less than four reporters on the case, phoning all over Plum Island and hunting the mainland for leads. The paper ran three successive stories that first week with increasingly ominous banners: US TRACKING PLUM ISLAND VISITORS,SOURCE OF PLUM ISLAND GERM LEAK SOUGHT, AND EXPERTS PROBE ANIMAL DISEASE.
When the fourth Newsday story was published in as many days, the sputtering Plum Island spin machine kicked into gear. Laboratory chief Dr. Charles Campbell told a reporter, “I believe all the people here feel we’ve contained the disease.” Applying blame, he postulated that violations of the biological safety procedures by construction workers caused the outbreak. Rumors that migratory fowl like ducks, Canadian geese, osprey, and seagulls were dying were flatly denied, and no one came forward with evidence of any birds killed. Was there a possibility of sabotage by a visitor? A trespasser? A disgruntled worker? “One or two people have mentioned that possibility,” said Campbell. “It’s conceivable, but we feel it’s highly unlikely.” What began to alarm people most wasn’t the fear of being attacked by foot-and-mouth disease virus, but by other germs from Plum Island. Was this an isolated incident?
The team studied what little evidence was available. Less than a full day after discovery, it was too early to determine the specific cause of the outbreak. To the epidemiologists, speculating was wasting valuable time. Instead, Dr. Newcombe and the team shifted from determining the what to examining the how. They ventured three guesses. The virus could have “(1) escaped from the high security research building on Plum Island to the quarantine area; or (2) been introduced onto Plum Island from elsewhere, off the island,” and in either case, “(3) been carried from Plum Island to susceptible animals on Long Island and elsewhere.”
Looking through the records of the two laboratory buildings, they first determined that Type-O virus was being worked on. Lab 257 hadn’t worked on it for months, but three of Lab 101’s four lab modules were studying it. So the virus likely originated on the island, and Lab 101 was likely the culprit. Then they addressed what could easily transfer virus to the mainland: humans, deer, and air. Like mosquitoes carry West Nile virus and ticks carry Lyme disease, people can carry millions of germs on their skin, in their hair, even inside their mouths. When a reporter asked Dr. Newcombe about deer that swam from Plum Island to Long Island, he replied that herds of deer could be infected, but the urban setting of Queens (which is really western Long Island) formed a natural barrier where there were few, if any susceptible animals. Still, that left all of Long Island in the virus’s path. There was also the question of airborne transmission. Some argued the virus lasted only a few hours in the open air. But Dr. Callis believed the virus could travel long distances by “hitchhiking on air particles.”2
2 Later, the “Yellow Winds” of China would be blamed for an outbreak of virus that traveled clear across the Yellow Sea to Japan in early 2000.
First, the team put the Plum Island employees aside. They were low risk because they followed systematic decontamination procedures every day and knew what to regularly avoid on the mainland. Then, from the visitor logs and contractor’s employee manifest, they compiled a list of nonemployees who’d had contact with Plum Island in the last sixty days. All were potential vectors. Of the 103 people they pinpointed, all resided within the New York City metropolitan area; other than the Frenchman in Dr. Carol House’s 257 lab room, there had been no visiting foreign scientists or students.
The immediate priority was to get to the seventy-seven construction workers. They posed the highest risk because they didn’t know a thing about infectious disease. Their actions over the next few days could spread the virus far and wide, resulting in monumental disaster. Each team member worked the phones from the command center asking questions. “Have you been near or at any animal farms? Stockyards? Packinghouses? Sale barns?” None of the urban hard-hats had. Some of the questions even prompted chuckles and snorts. “Do you keep any cows, goats, or pigs at home?” Other questions were more alarming. “Have you sent or received any packages or had any contact with people from a foreign country?” And some hit closer to home. “Have you been to any pet stores that had birds? How about any state fairs? Have you been to the Bronx Zoo? Any other zoos or amusement parks with those drive-through animal kingdoms? Have you traveled out of the New York metropolitan region? Where exactly did you go and what did you do there?” The replies brought good news. There had been a few family excursions within the suburbs and one visit to a pet store, but no potentially dangerous biological contacts. Spot checks at their homes confirmed they owned no livestock animals.
Scientists traveled in pairs to each known animal farm in the region: seven dairy herds totaling nine hundred milk cows. Standing at a healthy distance, the medical officers observed the animals for signs of disease, then sprayed themselves down with disinfectant, changed clothes, and proceeded to the next farm. There was real concern about the Long Island Game Farm, a three-hundred-acre zoo in nearby Manorville. This popular children’s zoo made an ideal breeding ground because it was home to many susceptible animals, including ring-tailed lemurs, buffalo, squirrel monkeys, cows, cougars, horses, giraffe, sheep, zebra, and ostriches. If the virus existed on the mainland, then it probably would have turned up here. Sighs of relief overcame the medical inspection team when the game farm received a clean bill of health.
Within six days, EDO completed its germ hunt. Dr. Newcombe filed his report with the best analysis he could render. Most scientists refuse to render absolute conclusions (the possibilities, after all, fuel the discipline of 100 Michael Christopher Carroll science). Dr. Newcombe was no different. “Transmission to susceptible animals off of Plum Island is improbable, although not impossible . . . it would appear equally improbable that the outbreak on Plum Island resulted from virus introduced from off the island.” He told a reporter, “Our faces are red, but we don’t think it got off the island.” This disease is not normally contracted by humans, he said. “That’s not true of all animal diseases, but it is true of this one.” The virus was one of over twenty-five pathogens regularly studied on Plum Island. Why was it the only one being traced by the virus hunters?
Back in Lab 257, Dr. Donald Morgan was working feverishly with his team testing the two hundred plus samples they had taken from the destroyed animals. When a virus is discovered, the strain isolated is often named after the location where it was found. Morgan named the virus “P.I.S.S.,” for “Plum Island Sub Strain.” The USDA chiefs in Washington went livid. A foot-and-mouth virus outbreak in the United States would prompt a worldwide ban on American meat imports, tank the agriculture sector, and wreck the economy. They ordered Plum Island to cease using “P.I.S.S.” or the word “outbreak.” Henceforth, the gregarious Morgan and his colleagues were only to use the phrase “The Incident.” The USDA refused to admit its folly to the world. Dr. Morgan paid no mind and flagrantly violated the edict, dubbing it alternatively “The Outbreak” or his favorite, “The Disastrous Incident.” Morgan’s eight-year-old daughter Margaret evidently shared his sense of humor. Upon his return home after kill weekend, she greeted him at the door wearing a T-shirt he had given her. It read “Prevent Foot-and-Mouth Disease—Vaccinate Twice a Year.” For the first time in days, a weary Morgan cracked a smile.
To this day, the official line from Washington, blindly echoed in papers from the Washington Post to the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, is that the last outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease virus in the United States occurred in 1929. However, it is clear that the last outbreak in the United States occurred on September 15, 1978—on Plum Island.
September 1978 was to be the month of the grand opening of Dr. Callis’s newly renovated, state-of-the-art facility. Instead, it marked a low point of Plum Island and its director’s storied career. By this time, the contractor had only finished “a rather small portion of the whole thing,” said Callis. Barely halfway completed, the skeletal addition—amid all the dirt, piled-up materials, scaffolds, and equipment crowding the whitewashed Lab 101—looked and felt more like a war zone than a construction zone. Worse yet, it would soon fall under federal investigation for virus leaks and defective construction.
The contractors were working to extend Plum Island’s scant laboratory space. In 1952, the USDA hadn’t been able to build its desired facility, as Congress approved only one-third of their original request. They settled on just two buildings, and each lab wing could host one germ at a time due to the possibility of cross-contamination. Plum Island simply had too little lab space to study too many exotic foreign diseases emerging on the world scene.
The new state-of-the-art 70,000-square-foot addition to Lab 101 would include a third animal holding wing and associated research and autopsy laboratories; a vaccine plant capable of making 30 million doses a year (8,220 each day) and a refrigerated warehouse for virus storage; and a stylish entrance foyer in place of the menacing perimeter gatehouse. The additional space would bring the facility up to the size the USDA originally envisioned, enabling more research and more staff (adding 50 employees to the existing 330). More research meant more chances for scientific breakthroughs.
Or so they thought.
Over the next couple of weeks, Dr. Callis turned up the rhetoric on the contractors. “We feel [the outbreak is] connected to construction or the changes in operating procedures that had to be made to accommodate the construction. We let people inside the compound wall [whom] we normally wouldn’t have let in.” Some were confused by his reasoning. Admitting construction workers inside the fenced compound could not, on its own, cause an outbreak, since all experiments were conducted inside the laboratory. Unless, of course, an agent escaped from the building into the outdoor compound. Or unless there was outdoor testing on Plum Island.
Ten days after the outbreak, Merlon Wiggin wrote a five-page memorandum titled “The Committee Dilemma.” As chief of engineering and plant management, Wiggin was in charge of every function on Plum Island other than research: marine transportation, wastewater treatment, water supply, electricity, the emergency power plant, motor pool, metal shop, fire department, grounds crew, laundry, boiler plants, cafeteria, general maintenance, and biological containment. Second only to Director Callis, Wiggin oversaw non research functions on the island and had twice as many people under his command. If the buck stopped with anyone other than Callis, it stopped with Merlon Wiggin. Hailing from a small town in Maine, Wiggin married his wife, Isabelle, just six months after he met her on a bus ride to nearby Portland. After working at Air Force bases, the thirty-year-old engineer with tousled brown hair applied for a position at Plum Island. Doc Shahan hired him while the facility was in its infancy, providing more than enough intricate mechanical projects and glitches to satisfy the young engineer.
Most disturbing in Wiggin’s memo was his casual admission about the most dangerous part of the facility:
The Incinerator Area. Tests of this area show that hundreds of cubic feet of air a minute from a highly potential contaminated area have been escaping.
“Another area that comes to mind would be the exhaust air from the laboratory.” Wiggin suggested testing the 107 filter units on the roof that trapped pathogens as air exited the building. “For nearly ten years, I have recommended that these filters be tested after each change (we have the equipment on hand to do it) and have also recommended that their efficiency be improved by replacement.” He did not mention who exactly was preventing Wiggin, the chief of all plant management, from ordering a test inspection and replacement of the filters. Regardless of what an inspection of the air filters might yield, “It seems quite obvious the virus was transported by humans to the animals in Building 62,” he wrote, which “seems to rule out transmission by aerosol all the way from Lab 101.” If indeed that was correct, it meant the biological safety measures were disregarded by an animal handler—a scientific staffer—and therefore not an employee in Wiggin’s bailiwick.
Oddly, Wiggin ruled out the heavy construction going on on all four sides of Lab 101, particularly in the area of the incinerator. “We have carefully checked and tested other areas, such as the Contractor Sites, and have found nothing.” This too, was in Wiggin’s self-interest. He was the federal government’s contracting officer and project liaison to Joseph Morton Company, the contractor. “I think we need to realize at least for the present our laboratory buildings are not perfect secure envelopes,” he concluded. Despite that, shutting down was not in Plum Island’s best interests. “I see little to gain and much to lose (monies, work, training, improvements, repairs, etc.) by delaying the return to normal operations. . . .”
Earlier in the day, the Lab 101 foreman, Truman Cook, and his men were busy spraying down the incinerator room with lye, even though he had been ordered the week before not to decontaminate or change any filters in the incinerator room until further notice; the investigation committee planned to inspect the area. After Wiggin learned Cook was deconning the area and attempting to change the old air filters, he told Cook to stop immediately.
The next morning, when investigators entered the incinerator charging room, they noted intense heat emanating off the sliding hatch doors and the smell of charred, rotten meat. Cook and his maintenance crew were nowhere to be found. All had called in sick that day, something that had never occurred before. Safety officer Dr. Jerry Walker—once described by a reporter as “thin, of average height, sort of Southern-square looking... reserved to the extreme . . . in all, decidedly odd”—was chair of the investigation committee. He led an examination of the crime scene. The air intake had been blocked, and the supply intake ducts to the incinerator were jammed wide open. Outside light shined into and air flowed out of the room, a chamber that was supposed to be sealed to the outside world. A committee member pointed out lead tape applied across the latch of the emergency door, which now hung slightly ajar. Dr. Walker ordered the openings blocked at once. The filter housings had been sprayed with lye by Cook’s crew, so they couldn’t be tested. But then they spotted an unthinkable sight. “Several filter units had media improperly installed with gaps up to three-quarters of an inch,” the committee reported. That meant that at any one given time, no less than 750,000 viruses could be exiting the building, marching out side by side. When Wiggin turned on the air pressure system, the supply fan started before the exhaust fan. For the air pressure to contain germs properly within the room, it had to start in reverse order. Stunningly, the electricians had wired the safety interlock backward.
Dr. Walker paged through the incinerator log and spoke with the employee who kept it. He shook his head as he read the same static pressure number recorded for each and every kill day. Either the gauge did not function, or the worker dummied the logs. Standing over the shoulder of the log keeper, listening to him try to explain the log entries, Walker realized the numbers “had little meaning to him.” Concealing disgust, he flatly reported, “It is apparent that a knowledge of pressures is essential by someone during incineration with responsibility to maintain control of the pressure required.”
During the following week, Merlon Wiggin and his assistant climbed up onto the Lab 101 roof and inspected the 107 air-filter units. On the roof stood a mechanical garden of metal stacks that sprouted out of the black tar roof—some short and some long, some wider and taller than the men—all anchored with wire stays. As a nippy October wind swept off the Sound and crept up their backs, they heard the collective whirr of the air filter fans.
If the incinerator was in bad shape, the condition of the roof was even worse. The rubber gaskets designed to seal the gaps between the air filters and roof masonry were brittle, cracked, and leaky. Some gaskets were altogether missing. The filter housings were installed in such a way as to leave openings “allowing the complete passage of air without the benefit of filtration.” It was as if someone with no training ripped an old one out and slapped a new one in, giving the task zero thought. The ductwork had holes punched into it. Replacement filters were much thinner in size than those used in years past. Wiggin’s roof tour was disturbing, and its ramifications were nothing short of terrifying.
The inside review was just as scandalous. The air pressure logbook for experiment rooms during four weeks prior to the outbreak wasn’t even dummied like the incinerator logbook—the pages were blank. Wiggin found many lab rooms way out of proper air balance and some were positive to the outside, meaning that germs were being circulated through the entire laboratory building. Bad air, “hot” with viruses, was being forced to exit somewhere. It had a choice of possibilities—through heavy paper and charcoal filters designed to catch germs or through the easier path, via gaping holes in the roof. To top it all off, he found no air filter maintenance. The rubber gaskets hadn’t been changed in nearly thirty years (when they were first installed in the early 1950s), rendering each air filter between the defective gaskets virtually useless. And they weren’t the only filters in question; some of the sewage vent filters, which strained biologicals out of animal wastes, were in poor condition, and a few were even missing. The appalling condition of the laboratory shocked Wiggin.
It became painfully clear why Wiggin’s foreman, Truman Cook, and his crew were feverishly tinkering with repairs the day before, and why they called in sick today, the day the committee began its investigation.
Try as he may, there was no way the chief engineer could bring himself to certify the blatantly porous building as safe. “Recommend that Lab 101 not be considered as a safe facility in which to do work on exotic disease agents,” Merlon Wiggin told the investigation committee, “until corrective action is accomplished.” That included smoke-testing each filter after the repairs to see if any air continued to escape.
Digesting Wiggin’s disquieting findings, Director Callis and safety officer Dr. Walker grew increasingly uncomfortable. Research experiments were backing up and a special project with the Rift Valley fever virus project was far too important to be delayed. Unwilling to accept the dire assessment, they ordered Wiggin to begin smoke tests and continued virus production and animal experiments under a pack of faulty air filters. “No new activities are expected to be taken on over the next several weeks . . .” wrote Dr. Callis in a letter to Washington, “. . . beyond those commitments already made.” In other words, on with the work. Setting off smoke bombs in the incinerator and lab rooms, Dr. Walker and Mr. Wiggin watched harmless white wisps of smoke waft through cracks, gaps, and holes, visible stand-ins for deadly germs hundreds of times smaller that were escaping. Not one of the laboratory’s 107 air filters was salvageable. All of them had to be scrapped and new mountings installed.[man this really makes me want to cuss,putting the American people at risk to this sh*t! The part that pisses me off is that they are still at it! DC]
But well before the air filters were fixed, Plum Island scientists continued their infectious virus research, in a porous lab facility they knew was inadequate to contain the germs safely.
The committee rendered its final report to Dr. Callis on January 9. Of Plum Island’s three lines of defense—the containment laboratories, restrictions on personnel and material, and the island location—the first two had failed. Their best guess as to what happened went like this: one of the animal handlers walked into the Building 62 holding pens to feed the animals as he routinely did. While they ate, the handler cooed at the beasts and petted them lovingly, as they were prone to do, and unwittingly fed them helpings of viruses along with their meals.
But that didn’t explain how one of the animal handlers, restricted by the rules from entering the laboratory building, became a carrier of the virus. Investigators turned their attention to the incinerator room and the 107 air filters on the lab roof. Dr. Walker’s impressions of the incinerator logbook were true. For years, no one set the internal air pressure equal to the atmosphere, as required by the rules during a burn. Because of this negligence, “the entire area had been pressurized to the outside atmosphere,” which meant the exhaust was literally blowing contamination out of every crack and crevice into the sky.
The other theories, not fully reviewed by the investigators, involved the construction work. During heavy rains, water seeped under a plywood barrier into the incinerator room and then retreated back out. “They were digging the hole for the flue and chimney stack and we had torrential rain for a week,” remembers one worker. Dirt near the plywood was excavated and hauled to a site three hundred yards from the Building 62 pens. The committee omitted another occurrence that may have played a role. “Supposedly it was caused by a leakage of sewage,” says Ben Robbins, a retired Plum Island engineer. A local subcontractor ruptured an underground pipe that carried contaminated wastewater from Lab 101 to Building 102, the decontamination plant. Perhaps infected sewage seeped into the dirt that was later moved next to Building 62.
The investigators interviewed workers and explored related worries. They learned from their support staff that emergency backup power generators were “old and in critical need of updating.” They listened to “much concern” among the ranks for the deterioration in the island’s biological safety measures. Frequent travel-related absences of safety officer Dr. Jerry Walker were cited. The committee told Dr. Callis there existed a “general breakdown of security procedures that [once] served psychologically as constant reminders of the need to practice safety.”
How and why the facilities were in such wretched shape were questions “which have to be answered,” they said. “Certainly, however, the increase in scientific work... age of the facilities... reduction in staff... restricted budgets... [and] inflation” had something to do with it. Lack of sufficient plant management and safety personnel was a factor. “Whether there are in fact too few or those available are not being properly utilized is a question to be answered.”
“It is unlikely that the exact route of infection... will ever be known,” the committee concluded. Among the men who signed the report were the two most responsible for the disaster: safety officer Walker and chief engineer Wiggin.
It was time to run for cover.
Dr. Callis notified Washington that swift measures were taken to ameliorate the deplorable conditions. Building 62 was closed because the contractor stored much of its materials in the vicinity. Air filters were replaced except those over Lab C, which were expected to be completed by February. Two new safety positions were added to assist Dr. Walker in carrying out daily air filtration checks. He assured the laboratory brass that Lab 257 checked out fine and was ready for the Rift Valley fever virus research program. “We are anxious to complete these remaining operations . . . so that we can all get back to more productive endeavors.”
Dr. Callis formed two more committees, an ad hoc operations review committee to evaluate inadequacies in material and staffing, and a safety committee to conduct the witch hunt. For reasons unknown, the latter included Dr. Walker as one of the members—the “safety officer” minding the store during the outbreak. On February 14, 1979, the committees sent a secret memorandum to Dr. Callis that placed the outbreak squarely upon the shoulders of Merlon Wiggin. “Mismanagement of Engineering and Plant Management operations,” began the valentine, “resulted in circumstances which led to the escape of the virus from Lab 101 and certainly violated the spirit and intent of the Agent Safety Program at Plum Island.” Work orders for new items and change orders with the contractor took precedence over routine laboratory maintenance. An “appalling lack of effective communication” between Wiggin and the lab foreman, Truman Cook, existed, they said. Furthermore, lab foremen had no appreciation for containment, “specifically, air-handling equipment and its function in the building.” Wiping the egg off committee member Dr. Walker’s face, the memo noted that no one had notified the safety office about any of these conditions. This, they concluded, was the sole responsibility of chief of engineering and plant management Merlon Wiggin, and Lab 101 foreman Truman Cook.
Dr. Callis chose this time to abscond to Florida on a winter vacation, leaving the most onerous task for his assistant director, Dr. John Graves. Within days of Callis’s departure, Dr. Graves ordered Wiggin and Cook suspended immediately without pay. Dr. Graves told the press that Wiggin and Cook were being held responsible for not maintaining the air-filtering system. No action was taken against Dr. Walker or against Dr. Jennings, who was in charge of the animal supply pens. One scientist says Jennings regularly shuttled between the lab and animal supply without following proper showering-out procedures. “They didn’t want to go after Jennings,” says Merlon Wiggin, mentioning his senior scientist, tenured status. Shortly after the outbreak, Dr. Jennings quietly retired from Plum Island.
The next morning, Graves and security guard Ed Wolf physically blocked Wiggin from boarding the ferry to Plum Island, ordering him to remain in the Orient Point dock warehouse office.
One unnamed official called the two fingered men “scapegoats . . . We could all be blamed for the outbreak. The buck stops at the top.” Wiggin and Cook filed grievances with the USDA. Then they took their case to the people. “There are other people who have just as much responsibility as we had. It was a kangaroo court,” Truman Cook told Newsday. “When the right time comes, I’m sure that I will get a chance to say who’s responsible,” said Merlon Wiggin. Back from his sunny Florida sojourn, Dr. Callis criticized their “poor supervisory and management practices... poor safety practices . . . and lack of communication.”
After three weeks, Wiggin was readmitted to Plum Island, but barred from entering his office. Dr. Callis then called a rare all-hands meeting inside the old Army chapel to announce that Lab 101 was returning to full operations. The ad hoc committee, he said, had completed its report on recommendations that were now being implemented. At that moment, Wiggin realized that in addition to everything else, he had also been frozen out of the ad hoc committee, to which Callis had appointed him a member. Wiggin went home and stewed over the weekend. I am not the only person responsible for this! He decided to give the director a piece of his mind.
“Perhaps I was not notified as to when the committee was to meet because I ask questions the Chairman Assistant Director Dr. Graves and the Safety Officer Dr. Walker find embarrassing,” Wiggin told Dr. Callis in a letter he handed him on Monday. Safety officer Dr. Walker appeared not to know whether the filters were tested to catch germs as small as 0.3 microns or 3 microns wide. “This to some may be not important, but it is off by a factor of 10.” To those who knew, it meant the difference between no viruses escaping the building and thousands escaping every second. Most alarming was Wiggin’s charge that Drs. Walker and Graves brushed off seriously flawed test results of the new Lab 101 air filters. “Dr. Walker was frequently getting test results of 100% and that was an impossibility using deep bed media [air filters] which only test 85 to 90%. . . .” Before placing the lab back on-line at full capacity, Wiggin implored Dr. Callis, “I wondered if you were concerned about the following:
Vent filters—I understand they have all yet to be checked and the leaking ones changed.
Sanitary drainage system—We know from the recent findings that we had some badly corroded piping.
Material support—A lack of warehouse parts and supplies was a deterrent to the level of maintenance in this [laboratory] building.
Referring to the draft report Callis circulated, Wiggin questioned why it stated unequivocally that Plum Island could return to full operations. Callis replied, “We’ll discuss it later, Merlon.” But Dr. Callis paid little mind. To him, Merlon Wiggin was a disgruntled former engineering chief now trying to make hay. Lab 101 was back in business. On with the show.
Meanwhile, the Plum Island blue-collar workforce seethed over Truman Cook’s suspension. They knew that Cook was management’s fall guy. “Truman was a good guy, and everybody liked him,” remembers one employee, “or was related to him.” His family had been in the Southold area since the 1600s. The Cook family was a proud, honest family, and Truman was no different. No way these out-of-town scientists were going to turn a local good ol’ boy into a poster boy of shame. More than 150 employees—most of the support staff—signed a petition that protested Cook’s suspension and vehemently demanded his reinstatement. Fearing open mutiny on the island (and loss of community support off the island), management buckled and restored Cook to his position. “I’m very relieved,” he told a reporter who broke the news to him. “I think that’s about all I’d better say.”
A second petition drive began, this time to reinstate Wiggin as chief engineer, but management nipped the nascent movement in the bud, ordering it withdrawn from circulation. Unlike Cook’s petition, this one specifically stated the safety office was to blame for the outbreak. The union representing the Plum Island workforce wrote Dr. Callis asking why the safety office was not held at least partially responsible for the outbreak. There was no reply. An investigation committee member then came forward, anonymously, to a local newspaper, and condemned the singling out of Merlon Wiggin. “You can’t really put the blame on one person. To say one or two people are responsible is ridiculous. In fact, our report strongly implies involvement by the safety office.” Against Dr. Callis scientific appointee, Dr. Walker, Wiggin lost the wrestling match. Scientists, after all, were the reason Plum Island existed.
One former employee dispenses with the finger pointing and recriminations, and gives due credit to the policy of keeping animals outdoors on the Plum Island—animals that acted as dutiful sentinels. “Thank God we had those animals in the Old Cow Barn [Building 62],” says an employee. They were, after all, the canaries in the mine. Without them, the outbreak wouldn’t have been discovered until it was too late.
Since the groundbreaking two years earlier, the bulk of Merlon Wiggin’s time was spent tending to an unusually large number of change orders, which were revisions to the design specifications. Over 240 change orders were issued. Original plans called for masonry, but concrete had to be used for proper biocontainment. Metal air-lock doors were coated with the wrong epoxy and severely blistered; it was so bad that 320 doors had to be removed and replaced. The roof was faulty and moisture seeped into the lining. The contractor, Joseph Morton Company, estimated an additional $5 million in cost overruns, 50 percent above the original budgeted cost of the project.
As Plum Island’s house of cards came falling down, Wiggin fired off a lengthy missive detailing scores of design flaws and contractor blunders to the USDA’s head contracting officer in Washington. It addressed the faulty construction project he said he had labored to rectify, and addressed what he saw coming:
[The rehabilitated laboratory building] will not be an agent safe, energy efficient, bio-containment facility that can be utilized without repair or changes.
Within the next few months, I expect there will be an attempt to discredit me and my reputation. There is possible evidence of criminal neglect in relation to the recent outbreak at Plum Island.
To preserve the record and protect himself, he sent copies to a friend in Texas for safekeeping.
The USDA owed Joseph Morton Company over $1.5 million for all the change orders. “If we are paid for the work we’ve already done,” Morton told the department, “we can complete the renovation in four months.” A dark cloud continued to swirl over Merlon Wiggin. “He’s not free of responsibility on the design errors,” a source told the Suffolk Times. “Some of them might have been caught by him ahead of time.” Were his hands unclean because of the virus outbreak, the construction debacle, or now both?
On March 5, 1979, a letter of default went out from USDA headquarters addressed to Joseph Morton Company, canceling its $10.7 million rehabilitation contract. Just the week before, Morton had wired Washington, demanding back payment by the end of the week of at least $500,000 to continue. Morton laid off all of the construction workers except a few supervisors, and expected to cancel the contract themselves.
Then things got even uglier. April showers rained down on the construction site. No one in management thought to tell any of the 150 plus physical plant employees to secure the partially completed construction from the elements. Corrosive saltwater seeped into seams and in between beams, rusting and decaying the steel framing and construction materials. In June the USDA advertised for proposals from contractors to complete the project, and by the middle of July, it had fourteen bids. But the USDA sat on those bids.
Dr. Callis informed Wiggin that his suspension would continue. The Office of the Inspector General was now focusing on allegations that Wiggin received kickbacks from the contractor on the construction project. And so, too, was a federal grand jury. The grand jury issued subpoenas to Joseph Battaglia, president of Joseph Morton Company, and Samuel Semble, a Morton executive. The subpoenas called for documents, books, and records. The two men testified to the grand jury but provided no records. The records had been shredded.
Wiggin decided to swing back at Plum Island to get some leverage before the federal grand jury closed in on him, so he filed another employee grievance with the USDA. In a slap at Callis, USDA headquarters in Washington sided with Wiggin in a letter they wrote him: “We do not concur with [Plum Island’s] conclusion that the outbreak was a direct result of performance deficiencies on your part since the file contains inconclusive and contradictory information.” Washington admitted Wiggin alone had been hung for the collective negligence of the whole gang.
Wiggin and his wife then filed a $1 million defamation lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court, charging slander and defamation of character. The complaint laid out his side of the outbreak and stressed that for years he warned higher-ups that the buildings had cracks and leaks, and told them—Drs. Callis, Graves, and Walker—that the Lab 101 incinerator was ineffective in containing viruses. Plum Island administration officials “conspired to destroy [Wiggin’s] reputation by not only falsely imputing blame to him for the outbreak, but in addition, to defame him of committing felonious crimes,” including allegedly accepting $500,000 in bribe money by the Joseph Morton Company.
Dr. Graves refuted the charges by noting that Wiggin never sounded any specific alarms. “Any problems were in his sphere to remedy,” he said. “He was not a third party standing on the sidelines—he was the one to do it.”
With the tide turning in Wiggin’s favor, his comeback came to a screeching halt.
Merlon Wiggin calls it quits at plum island, announced the Suffolk Times. “I don’t feel there’s a future here,” the forty-eight-year-old engineer said, announcing his departure at the end of August after eighteen years on Plum Island; twenty-five years of federal service now made him eligible for early retirement. Ten years ago, he had been tapped by NASA to design a containment lab at the Houston Space Flight Center to hold moon rocks. The Australians wanted him to help set up their own version of Plum Island. Now he was leaving under a dark cloud.
“They offered me an early out,” says Wiggin. “Financially, it was almost too good an offer to refuse. But at first I didn’t like the idea.” He initially wanted to return and set the record straight and clean things up. USDA officials in Washington, who had absolved him of any personal wrongdoing, told him he wouldn’t be returning to the most pleasant work environment, and that he should strongly consider retirement from federal service. He says he had also heard that there would soon be a move to privatize the Plum Island workforce, and he felt that privatization wouldn’t go over well. Though Wiggin claimed he rode off into the sunset smiling, others said there was more to it. One administrative source says he retired “after we told him he would lose his retirement benefits if he was indicted by the grand jury.” It seems Plum Island traded his freedom for his silence, a silence concerning problems so embarrassing, so potentially dangerous that, if disclosed, would have put Plum Island out of business.
They say time heals all wounds. Merlon Wiggin proves that axiom with his reminiscences. “I think it was the nicest job I ever had,” says Wiggin. “I enjoyed the ability we had to make anything and do everything. We had a great group of people—real pleasures, a real family. It was good working for Drs. Shahan and Callis.” Let bygones be bygones, he says. Life after Plum Island has treated him well. He embarked on a private consulting career and worked on biocontainment projects around the globe. He participated in community efforts as president of the North Fork Environmental Council, founded Suffolk for Safe Energy, and now leads the effort to save the crumbling Plum Island Lighthouse. Today, the seventy-three year-old engineer refuses to surrender to autumnal drift, still working as national expert on the mechanical aspects of biocontainment.
After Wiggin left Plum Island, the Office of the Inspector General dropped their kickback inquiry, and Wiggin dropped his defamation lawsuit and cooperated with the OIG investigation. Participating in a sting operation, he met with executives from the Joseph Morton Company on several occasions at a local restaurant, wearing a concealed wire recording device. “When the man over at the bar took out his cigar case, that was my cue to turn on the wire,” Wiggin recalls with a chuckle. After the meal G-men would follow his car, recording more revealing information that would be later put before a federal grand jury. The federal grand jury indicted Morton company president Joseph Battaglia and Samuel Semble— but not chief engineer Merlon Wiggin—on counts of fraud and obstruction of justice. Both Battaglia and Semble were convicted at trial and sentenced to prison for crimes of fraud and conspiracy, having bilked taxpayers out of millions. The Joseph Morton Company then filed for bankruptcy in March 1980 at the same time that the USDA was trying to recover the money it paid the company for its sub-par construction work. Hearing of the bankruptcy, Deputy Agriculture Secretary James Williams said, “Everybody thought it was going to be worked out.... I’m mad as seven hundred dollars.” Williams should have been about $1,999,300 angrier, because the USDA would be out $2 million in taxpayers’ money.
The project, which originally was to have cost $11,000,000, is now estimated to cost approximately $25,000,000 to complete.
The contracting officer... performed only a superficial credit check. Had a sufficient check been performed, the information would have raised serious questions about [ Joseph Morton Company’s] ability to perform....
Management knew that the contractor was not: correcting major construction deficiencies; protecting equipment and facilities from deterioration due to the weather; paying subcontractors; and paying workmen the prevailing wage rate.
In addition, they found that the USDA paid Morton 80 percent of the cost when only 58 percent had been completed, and withheld not one dollar for defective workmanship. They found leaky roofs, beams practically rusted through, misaligned foundations, and stainless steel pitted from a leaking wall. They came across an entire incinerator unit ruined, left uncovered in a ditch and half submerged in murky rainwater. In short, they found a total mess. While the Inspector General’s Office called for disciplinary action, they didn’t name any names.
When the USDA came to Capitol Hill asking for another $13.4 million (a far cry from the $1.8 million Dr. Callis told the press he needed at the start) to complete the construction project, the Senate had this to say:
The history of the use of the $10,000,000 [appropriated in 1976 by Congress for the Plum Island rehabilitation] including its management . . . is a unique “horror story” in contemporary contracting. Although the Committee has, through its normal oversight mechanisms, attempted to keep apprised of the situation, it has been hampered by disingenuous statements of Federal officials, incompetence, and near-incredible bungling.
The Committee believes that given the present situation, with the contractor having been defaulted by the Government and under indictment in a U.S. court, with facilities only partially completed and unusable, with a severe report by the Inspector General, and with a history of the Department’s unwillingness or inability to keep the Congress properly informed, firm action must be taken immediately. Our preference would be that all responsible parties be disciplined prior to providing any additional appropriations.
While Congress agreed to appropriate another $10 million to complete the project, the money would be available only after the secretary of agriculture demonstrated to the committee that he was taking “severe disciplinary measures” and legal action to recover funds from the surety company. The USDA promised to act, but apart from Merlon Wiggin, no one else was “severely disciplined.”
The money from Washington didn’t arrive. First, Dr. Callis announced the construction would be completed, finally, by spring 1981. Then, Dr. Graves estimated, June 1982. Then they simply said “no comment.” Congress showed its displeasure with the USDA’s negligence by impounding the funds.
Armed with fraud and obstruction of justice convictions, the U.S. Attorney General filed a $14 million lawsuit against Joseph Morton Company’s insurer to seek payment on a performance bond. In April 1987, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a lower federal court’s jury award of $10,631,326 to the USDA—$17 million with judgment interest applied—the largest federal jury award in the history of New York State at the time. Rehabilitation of the old laboratory facilities began again, this time with new contractors and under new Plum Island management.
Plum Island’s two-year laboratory rehabilitation project took nineteen years to complete. It was finished in 1995.
next...Rift Valley Fever131s
President Fidel Castro charged America with waging germ warfare against Cuba. “It could have been the result of enemy activity. On various occasions, the counterrevolutionary wormpit has talked of plagues and epidemics. . . .” The “wormpit” was a euphemism for the anti-Castro Cuban exiles living in Miami. Considering the lengths taken by some Cuban/American groups in the United States—often in partnership with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency—the accusation was not terribly far-fetched.1 A partially declassified 1964 CIA document on Subproject 146 of MKULTRA (the CIA’s umbrella code name for its biological warfare program) describes an unnamed plant biologist working on a “philosophy of limited anti-crops warfare,” including the use of cane smut against sugarcane— perhaps Cuba’s most important crop—“to formulate a basic approach to an attack on [deleted material].” The redacted name of the foreign country can only be guessed.
1 After relations between Castro and the Eisenhower administration soured, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961. Fearing increasing Soviet influence in Cuba, a scant ninety miles south of Florida, the CIA employed many of the exiles to launch Operation PLUTO—better known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion—a coup d’état which failed miserably after a two-day struggle. In the early 1970s, around the time of the ASFV outbreak, Cuban mercenaries, working with CIA operatives Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and others, staged numerous subversive projects that would wind up under the “Watergate” banner. In addition, it is now known that there were multiple assassination attempts on Castro, code-named Operations MONGOOSE and ALPHA-66. One plot involved an operative handing Castro a poisoned cigar; another scheme would hand him a set of diving gear impregnated with tuberculosis bacteria and a toxic fungus. Still another plan called for a chemical that would make his beard fall out. All three attempts failed.
Castro’s accusation fell on deaf ears until January 1977, when Long Island’s very own Woodward and Bernstein—the Newsday investigative duo of John Cummings and Drew Fetherston 2 —wrote an explosive story under the banner CUBAN OUTBREAK OF SWINE FEVER LINKED TO CIA. Every national newspaper carried the lead the following day. Multiple unnamed sources regaled the two reporters with a tale of intrigue and germ espionage. “With at least the tacit backing of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officials,” they wrote, “operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971.” A source said he was handed the virus at Fort Gulick, a now defunct Army base in the Panama Canal Zone that hosted the Army’s School of the Americas. At Fort Gulick, Green Berets trained mercenaries for jungle warfare, and staged joint Army–CIA covert operations in Latin America and the Caribbean. The virus came ashore from an unidentified vessel that landed at the Canal Zone’s Mindi Pier, and then it was sealed in a unmarked container at Fort Gulick.
2 Cummings would go on to write best-selling exposés about the Mafia and President Bill Clinton.
The source said he brought the virus container to a small motorboat, which sped along the coast of Panama to Bocas del Toro near the Panama– Costa Rica border. There, the package went onto a fishing trawler. A CIA trained source on the fishing trawler told the reporters the virus sailed north through the Caribbean Sea to U.S.-owned Navassa Island, an uninhabited spit that lies between Haiti and Jamaica. After a brief stopover, the package was put ashore one hundred miles north on the eastern shore of Cuba, near the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay in late March. There it was delivered to anti-Castro operatives. Two months later, an outbreak of African swine fever appeared for the first time in North America.
Long Island Congressman Tom Downey expressed outrage. “It is preposterous that the U.S. government tried to destroy portions of the population’s food. Who is it aimed at? Is it influencing a government when you do it clandestinely?” Senators Richard Schweiker and Daniel Inouye, both conducting germ warfare investigations at the time, echoed Downey’s sentiments. “He’s passed the point of being able to be surprised,” said a Schweiker aide of his boss. “So many of these seemingly outrageous stories came true.”
Where did purified vials of African swine fever virus come from?
According to the federal government, Plum Island is the only location in the United States where African swine fever virus is permitted. No one will say on the record that virus for the Cuban mission was prepared on Plum Island and sent to Fort Gulick. However, given the frequent traffic between Plum Island and Fort Detrick, samples—with or without the USDA’s knowledge of the ultimate purpose—could have been sent by courier to Fort Detrick for transshipment to Fort Gulick. Declassified documents uncovered reflect exchanges between the two labs at that time of other virulent germs, like Rift Valley fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, pleuropneumonia-like organisms, tuberculosis (bovine type, strain 854), and equine infectious anemia (New Hampshire virulent strain 1535).
Virologist Dr. Robert Shope (son of the late Rockefeller Institute scientist and Erich Traub’s American mentor, Dr. Richard Shope), who served on Plum Island’s advisory committee, is a nonbeliever. “The Newsday article was absurd,” says Shope. “There’s no grounds for it. It would have been stupid to do such a thing because of the boomerang effect [the virus backlashing on the United States].” Dr. Callis, director at the time of the outbreak, likewise denies any link between Plum Island and the Cuban outbreak. “There are a lot of rumors that the CIA planted it there—well, I’m not a CIA specialist, and I know they’ve done some stupid things, but I don’t think they’d do it that close to the United States. Cuba likely got it from garbage they imported or from returning military staff from their African political programs in Angola.”
Norman Covert, Fort Detrick’s historian, shows how the CIA could easily have been involved—and unwittingly co-opted Plum Island. “There were CIA people who infiltrated the [Fort Detrick] laboratories. They did their own work, and we know now what they did with LSD and other psycho-illnesses. They had their own little cell there—they worked on their own, and I suspect that a very small circle of people knew that.” This type of information isolation—informing people of project details strictly on a need-to-know basis—is the brand of secrecy that might have been used to poison Cuba’s food supply with germs. Compartmentalization of each step made Plum Island an unknowing accomplice when it trafficked in viruses between Fort Detrick and elsewhere.
Efforts to explain away the outbreak as a natural occurrence do not hold up to close examination. The theory that food wastes from Spanish aircraft were fed to domestic pigs fails to address that Cuba, like the United States, had always kept their nation disease-free through strict importation quarantines. Cuban investigators claim ASFV broke out simultaneously in two distant locations; germ warfare experts say that contemporaneous sites of infection are unnatural and point to a deliberately caused outbreak. Because it is impossible to disprove, the logic of a methodical scientist dictates that a germ warfare attack cannot be ruled out. CIA assassination plots (some of which involved germs) and the Bay of Pigs invasion stand as acknowledged covert acts by the United States government to force regime change upon Cuba.
THE A-WIRE
The USDA devised a strategy to quiet the mounting concerns over Plum
Island being raised by the press: it would host a national media day. Fifteen
years after dedication day, Plum Island again opened its gates to reporters.
Meddling local reporters with on-island deep background sources weren’t
telling the story the government wanted to tell; national reporters from the
New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune would.
The USDA figured it could trump local reportage by spoon-feeding Plum
Island positively to a captive, less informed national press. Karl Grossman, short, rotund, and dark-bearded, was then an east end cub reporter for the daily Long Island Press, and managed to claw his way into the media day event. With a circulation of about 600,000, the Press was the seventh largest afternoon daily in the nation, serving Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk counties. The night before media day, he phoned James Reynolds, the USDA’s public relations rep, for details on when to meet in the morning, and they got to chatting. The spokesman, relieved his well-orchestrated press tour was all set, casually told the reporter, “The research also involves building defenses to . . . a foreign nation utilizing biological warfare.” After being egged on by Grossman (“I got him on a run,” says Grossman, “and he just kept going and going”), Reynolds protested. “We’re not a front for the Department of Defense,” but “America must be prepared to protect its food sources. . . .” This was a far cry—wrote Grossman in a story he handed his editor before boarding the ferry to Plum Island the next morning—from the mantra that only civilian research took place on Plum. That had been the company line since dedication day, since Doc Shahan left mention of Colonel Mace and the Army on the cutting room floor.
When the press arrived, Dr. Howard Bachrach held up a tiny glass vial before the crowd of twenty-four newsmen and said its contents could infect not only all the cattle on the Earth, but all the cattle that had ever roamed the Earth. Billions and billions of potential infections were held between the little man’s thumb and forefinger. And they had plenty more of this and other germs on hand.
Another scientist, tired of the journalists’ pestering about biological warfare operations, barked at them in the hallway, “Absolutely ridiculous! Do you see any evidence of such things?” Reporters looked around the lab, eyes darting, unsure if they were missing the big white elephant.
At lunchtime in the cafeteria, Grossman placed his lunch tray down at an empty table. James Reynolds walked into the big room with his PR aides and a few of the national reporters in tow. They picked up their pre ordered lunches and sat down; Reynolds and his aide pointed and sneered at Karl across the room, now sinking his teeth into a soggy tuna fish sandwich.
While Reynolds had been shepherding his flock through the staged laboratory tour, extolling the virtues of Plum Island to the newsmen scribbling on little notepads, Karl Grossman’s story of the night before had made the front page of the morning edition of the Press, and was being read by hundreds of thousands on the mainland. The PR man had been duped the night before.
That was only the beginning.
The story made the Associated Press’s A-Wire, which meant that every news media outlet in the entire country had read an official-looking all-caps news brief off their teletype machines that said Plum Island was a biological warfare center. “These PR guys just knew—” remembers Grossman fondly. “They just knew that if something came across the AP wire, it was like it had come down from Mount Sinai.” Editors around the nation were ordering their desk reporters to write stories based on the wire. With the stroke of his pen, Grossman had dashed the efforts of the USDA, singularly usurping Plum Island’s canned media day. No matter what positive impressions the national reporters returned to their news desks with, they would still be colored by the contents of the authoritative AP story. Grossman wrote a second follow-up story the next day under the banner OUT OF ‘ANDROMEDA STRAIN’... RIGHT HERE ON PLUM ISLAND, where he drew a frightening connection to Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel about a deadly outbreak of viruses caused by the malfunction of a military satellite launched by the U.S. biological warfare program.
When Director Jerry Callis glanced at the cover of the Long Island Press on his desk, he was in utter shock. After disembarking from the 4:30 p.m. ferry off the island, he sped over to Claudio’s in Greenport, hoping to find some of the national reporters to whom he could plead his case. There he came upon a young Boyce Rinsberger, then a junior New York Times reporter (and later an award-winning editor at the Washington Post, and editor of Science magazine). Callis shoved the cover of the Press in his face and gestured wildly.
“You upset?” Rinsberger said, sipping a cocktail at the bar.
“Hell, I’m very upset,” Callis said.
“Well, there’s not a lot you can do. You can write a letter to the editor, put it in your desk drawer, and wait two weeks. See how the other stories come out—put them in an envelope with your letter, and send it all to the Long Island Press. Let the editor there decide whether he has the best writer in the nation on his staff, or the worst.” Callis followed Rinsberger’s detailed instructions. But his letter never ran and he never received a reply from the editor.
Karl Grossman’s 1971 twin stories had set the tone of dialogue and defined the standard by which the public would judge the island. The self described “Plum Island Enemy Number One” recalls running into Callis years later on the mainland. “He screamed at me.” Asked about the reporter, Callis says, “Karl Grossman? I don’t know if I have a word to describe him.” The reporter would continue his role as the ever-prodding thorn in Plum Island’s side, and his scathing pen wasn’t going away anytime soon.
CONGRESS FIRES A WARNING SHOT
The media’s new interest in Plum Island piqued the interests of local officials, including freshman Congressman Thomas J. Downey. For a politician, 1974 was the year to be a Democrat. With the resignation of President
Nixon and the word “Watergate” on the lips of every American, Republicans had little hope of winning elections to public office. The Democrats
even won an upset in overwhelmingly Republican Suffolk County, where
they had fielded Tom Downey just to have a name on the ballot. One of the
youngest ever to serve in Congress, he was barely twenty-five (the minimum age set forth in the Constitution) when he took his oath on the Capitol steps. Pictured on the front page of the New York Times playing basketball with his younger brother in his parents’ driveway, Downey became the
poster child of the Congressional Class of 1974, the “Watergate Class.” Fresh out of college, and now a member of the House Armed Services Committee, he dove into an investigation into allegations of LSD drug testing and deaths at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal. “I did it simply because I wanted to get some press,” he recalls. “The next day, a Capitol Hill cop comes into my office with a complete dossier including pictures and recruiting brochures and films from the arsenal, where they had him [the police officer was then an Army private] without any antidotes present, taking large doses of LSD. The materials enticed young soldiers to come to the arsenal—‘Come see Washington,’ they said. ‘See the monument, have fun, all while helping your government.’ By taking drugs!” Downey discovered a Long Island man had committed suicide after participating in the program. Before long, the young congressman had Army generals twice his age running for cover, forced the program to close down, and gained national attention.
Downey’s next fight was led by a person even less likely than the twenty-five-year-old newly minted congressman—his twenty-seven-year old intern.
Ron Fitzsimmons attended high school with Downey and worked on the triumphant 1974 campaign. Downey took on his old buddy, “Ronnie”—who had been horsing around on an extended-year, Vietnam era college track at State University of New York at Stony Brook, and was unemployed during the summer of 1976—as an unpaid intern in Washington. Ronnie was assigned to typing envelopes up in “The Cage,” catacombs with wire-cage doors lining the attic crawl space on the top floor of the Cannon House Office Building that had storage spaces for each member. Bored, and thinking Downey was punishing him for something he did, Ronnie walked down to the office and begged chief of staff Fred Kass for something interesting to do.
Rifling through the papers on his desk, Kass uncovered a thin manila file folder and tossed it across his desk at Fitzsimmons. “Here, Ronnie. Check this out.”
Inside were two pieces of paper about Plum Island with rumors about biological warfare. Though he grew up nearby, Ronnie had never heard about the island.
“See what you can find out,” said Kass. “Oh, and here’s the name of a Newsday reporter you can call.”
As Fitzsimmons climbed the flights of marble steps, returning to The Cage, his thoughts raced. An odd inspiration came to him. Only a few months before he had seen All the President’s Men, the blockbuster Watergate film with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodward and Bernstein, the two Washington Post cub reporters who brought down the president. He remembered how they took one morsel of information and expanded on it. It was a list—a list of political contributors, he recalled. And there was that scene where they went through the phone book and made all those phone calls that led to more clues. Now it all fits—things are connecting here, he thought. A sense of purpose came over him with every step he climbed. Soon he was racing down the hallway to his cage. Ronnie harbored an envy of his childhood peer, Tom Downey, and his improbable success. Now, with Woodward and Bernstein as his self-appointed mentors, he would play investigative journalist and congressman. Hunched over his typewriter, he banged out a letter from Downey, asking the secretary of agriculture for a Plum Island phone book and organizational chart. He could hardly contain his excitement. The Plum Island Inquiry had begun.
Days later, the list of employees and a crude chart showed up. Grabbing the local white pages, Fitzsimmons painstakingly cross-referenced the three hundred plus names and penciled in phone numbers on the long list. He studied the chart, tracing the lines from box to box. Now who works for who? Then, starting with the As, he picked up the receiver and began making calls.
“Hi, I’m Ron Fitzsimmons with Congressman Tom Downey. I’m calling from Washington—we’re looking into the operations of Plum Island. . . .”
“I heard lots of stuff,” recalls Fitzsimmons. “But I picked up right away that—much like in the movie—people were afraid to talk. It’s a small community out there—there’s only that one road at the end of the North Fork. I sensed people were concerned about talking.” Many hung up on him. Some agreed to talk, but not over the telephone. “In person,” they said to him. “The phones might be tapped.” The intern decided he must return to Long Island, convinced it was the only way to get the full story. Willing employees insisted they not meet at their homes, worried that neighbors would spy a strange car pulling up to the house. Instead, Ronnie met with them at the park, behind the school, and at their friends’ homes in neighboring towns.
At the suggestion of Kass, Fitzsimmons had hooked up with Newsday’s Cummings and Fetherston. The team had recently uncovered a possible biological attack on Cuba, and unearthed a series of secret outdoor biological warfare tests in U.S. cities orchestrated by Fort Detrick in the 1950s. Although Fitzsimmons recalls being interested only in the “personal lives and health” of Plum Island workers, he thought the two reporters seemed more intrigued by the island’s alleged connections to biological warfare. They all agreed to share sources and research, and spoke once a week thereafter.
The worker interviews, pooled together by the trio, were quite troubling. They heard that women were barred from working in Laboratory 257 for fear that they “would carry infections to their children.” And men could only work on a volunteer basis on subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSP), a disease arising as a complication of the measles that affects children and adult males with personality changes, intellectual deterioration, periodic involuntary movements, and severe dementia. Few patients diagnosed with SSP lived past three years. Paul Rose, the Plum Island union president, told them one section of Lab 257 (he would not identify which) was closed off, and no one was permitted to enter or know what was going on inside. This didn’t seem too far-fetched—a scientist had told a reporter off the record a few years before, “I knew what I and the other three people working with me were up to, but I didn’t know really what the whole place was about. We kept in our own laboratory all day long... there was some talk on the ferry. . . .”
One source, taking the pseudonym “Charlie,” told them there was heavy traffic between Fort Detrick and Plum Island in both directions, as well as from Egypt and Kenya. A document revealed an October 1969 shipment by military escort of “Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis (VEE) virus and antisera,” to “Dr. J. J. Callis, from the Viral and Rickettsial Division, Army Biological Laboratory, Fort Detrick.” VEE had been one of Fort Detrick’s main germ warfare agents for decades, along with anthrax, botulism, and Rift Valley fever; human guinea pigs had been injected with VEE to develop a vaccine called TC-83, under a top-secret program called Operation WHITECOAT. “FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES,” the permit announced. When the Newsday reporters inquired about it, Plum Island assistant director Dr. John Graves said it had been sent to prepare for the disease, which threatened to spread into the United States from Mexico.
Another document described a one-year project called “Pathogenicity and Prophylaxis of Influenza-A Viruses.” Aimed at live and inactivated flu viruses and engineering man-made recombinant DNA flu virus strains, the research tested their effects on pigs and birds. Working on viruses that jumped between pigs and humans, they used pigs as virus production factories. Scientist Dr. Charles Campbell was able to combine human Hong Kong flu strain with a strain of swine flu (that in 1976 killed an Army soldier at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and touched off a national flu panic) and isolated a new, hybrid virus strain that had the characteristics of both. In this regard, Plum Island did not seem to fit its relatively innocuous title of “Animal Disease Center”—this work placed its actual research in a human realm. That year, President Ford authorized an emergency national flu vaccination campaign to combat this same “New Jersey” flu strain now on Plum Island.
Fort Detrick’s animal disease chief, Dr. William Hinshaw, headed up germ warfare against enemy food. Though retired since 1966, he regularly visited Plum Island in the 1970s and served as a “consultant.” Charlie also divulged that a lab chief working on a “very hot” monkey virus—possibly the forerunner of Ebola virus, the new Marburg hemorrhagic fever virus that killed German lab workers with ghastly hemorrhagic fevers at a vaccine plant in Marburg, West Germany. In All the President’s Men, “Deep Throat” implored Woodward in a dimly lit parking garage to “follow the money.” Now, the scene was re-created in the desolate field behind a school, as Plum Island sources told Fitzsimmons to “follow the viruses.”
In 1958, the USDA had quietly pushed through the House of Representatives a measure to allow the transfer of viruses over the mainland to Plum Island. A decade before, when it authorized the construction of an offshore exotic virus lab, Congress specifically banned foreign viruses from the mainland, and from any island connected by bridge or tunnel. Viruses had to be unloaded from giant Navy freighters onto tugs in Gardiner’s Bay that steamed their biological cargo to Plum Island harbor. Requesting the law change, USDA officials told House members, “Only four or five vials of the virus would be delivered over land twice a year” and promised to package those few shipments with the utmost care. The law change would cut costs and do away with a “an inordinately expensive and inconvenient procedure,” they said. Congress agreed and granted them their wish.
The USDA was either ignorant of the level of germ traffic that would ensue or it intentionally lied to the lawmakers. By 1976, huge crates of live viruses were traveling over congested Long Island roads multiple times each day. Germs were shipped off Plum Island, logged only as “biologicals,” with no other description. Virus and bacteria samples coming into the United States were stowed behind the pilot’s seat in a commercial airliner, picked up at Building No. 80 at JFK International Airport, and shifted from one car to another in the parking lot of a department store in the Suffolk town of Sayville. Over the years, thousands of these trips were made through New York City, and over Nassau and Suffolk county roads; local health officials were unaware of potentially deadly biological voyages occurring every day right under their noses. Sometimes the shipments of live exotic virus samples were taken home with the couriers in the evening, placed in household freezers, and brought to Plum Island the next day. A USDA official later admitted to doing just that, but only “once or twice” a month. Couriers weren’t instructed on what the samples contained, which could be as large as a thirty-gallon drum, or how to go about using the emergency decontamination kit in case something spilled. Often the Plum Island scientists themselves had little idea what the blood serum samples contained. Sometimes crates were locked in a freezer in the Orient Point warehouse—but the key to the freezer hung conspicuously on a wooden peg just inside the front door. There were no security guards at the Orient Point facility. They had been dispensed with long ago. And if the package arrived after the last scheduled boat left for Plum Island, it was just left outside the door to the Orient Point office, or on the side of the road, either inside or leaning against the big Plum Island mailbox. The following morning the marine crew took it to the island on the first boat out.
In June 1970, a virus courier named Alfred Von Hassel was killed in a car accident on Northville Turnpike in Riverhead, thirty miles west of Plum Island, while transporting unidentified biologicals. The container— described as an aluminum case one foot wide and one foot deep, and eighteen inches tall with latches—catapulted from Von Hassel’s car on impact. It was retrieved from a field abutting the road where the vehicle had flipped over. Fortunately, Leo Golisz, an off-duty Plum Island security guard, passed by the commotion and recognized the upside-down car with its U.S. GOV’T marking. He identified himself to police and left the scene toting the shiny silver box of biologicals, which he brought to Plum Island. Other foreign shipments were less sturdy and wouldn’t survive such a horrendous accident—one source recalled transporting picnic coolers and leaky cardboard containers with fluid oozing out of the bottom.
The abuses read like a checklist on how to disregard regulations and abandon all common sense. Employees told the investigators that DDT insecticide was still being sprayed liberally on Plum Island, four years after use of the toxic compound was banned by the federal government. Tons of sewage effluent flowed daily into Long Island Sound and Gardiner’s Bay from the two laboratories, untested to ensure that germs had been destroyed by decontamination. Radioactive materials that were incinerated required testing with Geiger counters to monitor fallout, per the Atomic Energy Commission. Nervously wringing their hands as they sat uncomfortably in their friend’s house in East Marion, two employees admitted the incinerator charging room hadn’t been tested for radiation exposure in years. Not only was security at Orient Point nil, but the guardhouses at each of the two lab compounds on the island were unmanned. The once thirty-four-man-strong security patrol had been decimated. A paltry eleven guards covered three 8-hour shifts, seven days a week, 365 days a year. “I could take you to the island on a motorboat,” said a source, “get you ashore and put you in a lab—and no one would ever see us.”
Then there were the illnesses.
“James Robinson,” a worker in the lab glassware department, became sick in 1975 and had to retire early. The USDA offered him a 40 percent disability payment, until the union protested the settlement, stressing he had been exposed to dangerous microbes. The USDA doubled the ante to an 80 percent payment and the employee’s grievance conveniently faded away. A union leader had been filing workplace grievances for years, noting that Plum Island workers occasionally contracted severe rashes. No steps were taken by management toward amelioration.
“Bruce Becker,” a safety technician, also caught something. He began running a low-grade fever and became sluggish. His physician found high blood pressure and diagnosed a flu like virus, and suggested that he have his kidneys checked out. For almost a year, Becker didn’t feel like himself. Then in August 1974, his condition took a turn for the worse. Any physical exertion, however minimal, caused nodules all over his skin that took weeks, sometimes months, to disappear. Plum Island’s nurse, Frances DeCristofaro, arranged an appointment with another medical doctor, who diagnosed infection with an unknown virus. Becker sought a second opinion from a Dr. Georgeson in Riverhead; biopsy samples of the lumps were taken and the results came back negative. Perplexed, Georgeson suggested that Becker try the Leahy Clinic in Boston. When he did, there was still no confirmation. Samples of his kidneys and the lumps were taken at Riverhead Hospital and again at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson. The Leahy Clinic doctor suggested that Becker have one of his kidneys removed, though he would not tell him why. In March 1976, the Workers’ Compensation Board referred him to yet another doctor, “Tom Belford” of Greenport. After examining his patient, Dr. Belford announced, “You’re either okay or you’re not in the books.” Belford sent for tests from the CDC in Atlanta to explore the possibility of animal diseases. Becker was given two shots, and his arm blotched and swelled in both places. When he returned in April for more tests, Dr. Belford brushed his patient away. “I’m getting too much pressure,” he said. “If Georgeson wants to give you these shots, I’ll give him the serum.” The doctor would not elaborate.
While Woodward and Bernstein parsed through stacks of circulating cards in the ornate rotunda of the Library of Congress, Fitzsimmons and a fellow intern barged into the offices of the Suffolk Times and other local weeklies, spoke to the editors about Plum Island, and pored over their vertical files, reading old newspaper clippings. Then one summer day, Ronnie decided to roll the dice and personally investigate the Orient Point warehouse and ferry dock to Plum Island. Switching cars halfway to avoid detection, the intern-turned-sleuth slipped into the parking lot near the ferry launch. “I got out and went into the building,” he recalls. “I saw a fridge in the corner and opened it. Inside were bottles with yellow stuff in them, labeled with Latin names. I’m not a scientist—but it looked like bacteria or something. I walked around some more.” He encountered no security. Satisfied, Fitzsimmons jumped in the car and sped off.
They were probing deeper than ever before, and seemed to be getting somewhere. But by August 1976, someone pulled the plug on the investigation. One scientist who agreed to meet changed his mind, saying his superiors had advised him not to speak. Another source told Fitzsimmons, “It shouldn’t surprise you, then, if I told you that Callis has told people not to talk to you.” Lower-echelon lab techs and dockworkers would only mutter, “Speak to Callis,” and turn away when approached. “When it became clear we were snooping around, contacts would say, ‘I know who you are,’ and hang up. A few who had offered information were now recanting, they were so concerned that we might publish the information, and they would be fired.” One woman broke down and cried to Fitzsimmons over the phone, wailing, “I’m not allowed to speak. Please, please! Leave me alone!”
After compiling his extensive research, and reviewing his pre-gag-order interviews, he compared notes with the Newsday reporters. Fitzsimmons then typed up letters from Downey addressed to the Army and the USDA, demanding detailed responses to the results of the investigation. The Army’s terse response, perhaps with a dose of condescension, was addressed to “Mr. Downey” (“It’s interesting,” says Tom Downey now. “Why wasn’t it ‘Dear Congressman’?”). The letter noted that the Army had phased out all agriculture-related activities within the last year. Seven years after President Nixon ordered Fort Detrick out of the offensive biological warfare business, the Army was just now turning over the big Detrick greenhouses used for anticrop germ warfare to the USDA. Acknowledging the agreement that likewise turned over Plum Island to the USDA, “along with defense of our livestock against biological attack,” the Army also admitted the ongoing relationship between Fort Detrick and Plum Island. “Army interest... was one of keeping abreast of closely related efforts in microbiological research. . . . Throughout the ensuing years, there has been a cooperative effort between the Department of the Army and the Department of Agriculture in this area... liaison was maintained at the working level. . . .” This relationship dated back to the construction of an Army germ warfare lab there, Laboratory No. 257, in 1952.
Two more letters were sent to the USDA, including a lengthy single spaced, five-page dispatch to Dr. Callis, demanding all information on Plum Island’s shadowy past and current condition.
The letters presented a thorny problem for Callis: not only was Downey a local congressman, but he also served on the Agriculture Committee. Plum Island would have to tread very carefully here. Fitzsimmons, in the name of Congressman Downey, asked Plum Island officials for names, lists, reports, correspondence, files—anything that proved an existing relationship between Plum Island and Fort Detrick. Attempting to follow leads developed by the Newsday reporters, the letter demanded information on a “swine flu” being sent to Fort Detrick, the Panama Canal Zone, and any other installation. In all, fifty-six specific and open-ended requests were made of Plum Island, many of which contained multiple subrequests.
The letters closed, “Due to the nature of the information requested above and the importance of this subject, I ask that you act at greatest dispatch. Your prompt attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.” Truth was, there really was no rush. The summer was winding to a close, and intern Ronnie Fitzsimmons had to go back to college.
Awaiting the USDA’s reply at the end of August, Ronnie typed up a “summary” for his boss. The three-inch-thick report bowled over the congressman and chief of staff Kass. “Tom was flabbergasted,” says Fitzsimmons, “I wasn’t getting paid—I did it on my own—and I guess I just ran with it.” They each took a piece of the tome and fanned through its legalized pages. They scanned the interview transcripts and flipped through the “Items” section, which included a possible link between Plum Island and an outbreak of swine flu in Cuba. It also documented hearsay of a conversation hinting “President Ford knew of some kind of leak of shellfish toxin and swine fever within the past several years.”3 They read the one-page “Possible Stories,” that spoke of the island’s “shabby operation,” “off-limits” laboratory, and unwarranted gag order (“Why can’t a congressman’s office get straight answers from government employees?”).4 Downey was visibly impressed and clearly surprised.
3 The year before, CIA Director William Colby told the Senate’s Church Committee, then looking into intelligence activities, that the CIA had a secret cache of ultra deadly shellfish toxin stored in a Fort Detrick vault, even though President Nixon had ordered the destruction of such weapons back in 1969.
4 The final part of the otherwise sobering report reflected a vindictiveness on the part of its author, perhaps brought on by the gag order Fitzsimmons faced when trying to interview sources: “For The National Enquirer, Dr. Callis is reportedly homosexual.”
Then the USDA replied to Downey, answering the five-page inquisition in the most general of terms. For the first time, however, it acknowledged research on behalf of the Army in the early 1950s on vesicular stomatitis, brucellosis, and Newcastle disease, an exotic viral illness that affects the nervous and respiratory systems of birds. Laboratory infections of the latter disease have been known to occur in people, and it causes the death of nearly 100 percent of flocks that contract it. The USDA continued working with the Army, maintaining a liaison at Fort Detrick. In 1962, said the letter, the USDA provided farm plots in Oklahoma and North Dakota for the Army’s open-air trial on cereal rust of wheat, one of Detrick’s major anticrop germ agents. While the Army told Downey the relationship was at a “working level,” the USDA stated it was “executively directed.” It was probably both.
Throughout the investigation, Dr. Callis repeatedly offered Fitzsimmons and his boss an opportunity to visit Plum Island to obtain information firsthand. Downey hardly knew the extent of Fitzsimmons efforts, and the intern balked. He would say almost three decades later that an official visit would have amounted to “total bullshit. . . . We felt they would show us a laboratory building we wouldn’t understand or know anything about.” Instead of attending a dog-and-pony show, he preferred to stand on his interviews with current and former employees, who he figured knew the real Plum Island.
To Fitzsimmons chagrin, the story that reporters Cummings and Fetherston published in Newsday that fall noted the links between Plum Island and Fort Detrick, but didn’t address employee safety and health, issues he believed were vital. Titled “THE PLUM ISLAND LAB: FOR MANKIND OR AGAINST IT?”, the article did not mention employees like Bruce Becker with his mysterious illness brought on by the lab. It failed to mention the lone medical official stationed on the island, a part-time nurse who confessed she did little more than dispense aspirin and Ace bandages. Nor did it address the assistant director who placed a package of live virus on the seat next to him on a trans-Atlantic commercial airline flight. Fitzsimmons had shared his painstakingly detailed notes with Cummings and Fetherston, and little of it made print. “I was frustrated,” he says, “hoping [the Newsday investigators] would report about the people and how they were getting sick from exposure to these deplorable conditions.” Plum Island management branded the article as a distortion of facts written to sell newspapers, brazenly denying any germ warfare research. “This center has not been, nor is it now, engaged in biological warfare,” said Director Callis.
Making matters worse for the probing intern, the Suffolk Times rushed to the aid of Plum Island and publicly whipsawed the “college students” and the “irresponsible” actions of Newsday. “The desire to uncover another Watergate scandal runs strong in the hearts of all investigative reporters,” the paper acknowledged, but tarnishing reputations and suggesting the island was a cover-up for biological warfare was appalling. Fitzsimmons had acted recklessly. And noting that the Marxist-Communist publication Daily Worker charged Plum Island with germ warfare back in 1952—sending comrades to fight the laboratory during the public hearings—the editorial mused it was “somewhat surprising to find Newsday following the Communist party line” today. The Suffolk Times had done everything but brand Ronnie Fitzsimmons a hippie Communist and Newsday an organ of the Soviet Politburo. The editorial marked the apex of the local community’s support of Plum Island, support that would wane soon enough.
“I felt they did something on Plum Island—even though they always denied it. The very nature of the secrecy of the place gave fuel to the rampant speculation that existed,” says Downey, today one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists, still youthful three decades later at age fifty-four.
“Because they wouldn’t tell you anything, everybody believed the worst,” Downey says. “And who would believe them? This was a period of time when lying was part of the operation. People wouldn’t tell you the truth—they didn’t tell the soldiers the truth [at Edgewood Arsenal] and they’re giving them these drugs.” After the LSD scandal, “It would not have been a long shot to think that the Army was testing biological agents at Plum Island or working with the USDA—it would have been an easy connection to make. I never believed that—with all due respect to the Army, not that they are inherently dishonest people—but I never believed they told the whole truth. We just assumed they were not going to tell the truth about things, until you beat them to death with it. And they didn’t.
“It was a rough time, a time very, very different from today,” Downey continues. “The 1970's was the end of an era for them, too. You had a post Vietnam period, and the military was up against it. And to [be browbeaten by] some freshman member of the House Armed Services Committee? They weren’t going to pay attention to me, they were just hoping I went away.”
Which he did. Or rather, his intern did. A Newsday editorial called Downey’s Plum Island inquiry “not enough.” Busy with other high-profile matters, Tom Downey launched no formal investigation. And Ronnie Fitzsimmons went back to Stony Brook to finish up college.5
5 Later, he would find the recognition in the political arena he so desperately sought, when he became the first man ever hired by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, better known as NARAL. Today, he lives with his wife and two children in the Washington, D.C., area, and is the national spokesperson for an association of abortion clinics.
Years after the Downey–Plum Island inquiry, Fred Kass confessed to Ronnie that they never expected anything to come of his work.
It was, after all, just another summer intern project.
7
“The Disastrous Incident”
A safety-designed building should be constructed in such a
manner that it is virtually fireproof and so that each floor and
room can be considered relatively waterproof, airtight, and
insect and vermin proof. Thus, only the controlled entrances
and intakes and exits and exhausts would need continual
surveillance for trouble on the outside....
—PLUM ISLAND DIRECTOR
JERRY J. CALLIS
September 15, 1978, 7:00 a.m.—
This is going to be a rough day, Billy
thought, holding his stomach and trying to gain some composure
as the ferry bumped and tilted through the choppy waters of Plum
Gut. Thursday nights were always fun nights to put back a few with
the guys at happy hour, their practice run for the weekend. It was
Indian summer, the best time of the year on the North Fork. The
weather was warm, the humidity finally beginning to break and, thank
heavens, those damn city summeristas disappeared on Labor Day.
Every Memorial Day weekend an exodus begins from New York City.
America’s rich and famous (and those aspiring to the same) disperse
into the two forks of eastern Long Island to escape the city’s blistering
heat and cramped quarters. The population of a quaint little enclave
like Southold or Southampton swells to innumerable tallies. For those
without a private helicopter the traffic becomes murderous; and the
local, modest-living populace waits out the summer in agony. Just eight more hours left in the week, but for now, Billy Doroski would have to deal with the consequences of the booze. The early boat to Plum Island was typically a unique but enjoyable commute—like an oversized carpool where a shared and sheltered camaraderie reigned. The regulars were always there to goof around with on the way over, and most of the stuffed-shirt scientists usually caught the later 8:00 a.m. boat. No fun this morning, though. A tall coffee nursed the pressing pain at the back of Billy’s neck, but didn’t do a thing for his ailing stomach, which churned with each methodical thud of the boat over the Gut’s strong currents. A laboratory technician, Billy was responsible for all the preparatory work for the scientists—inoculate the animals with viruses, draw blood serum samples, culture viruses in dishes, and prepare sample slides. In reality, Billy handled the lion’s share of the labor so the doctor could stroll in, take a look at his work, and postulate.
Leaving the ferry, he boarded the old school bus stenciled LAB 257, and slowly eased himself down into the small seat. He exhaled. Yeah, this is going to be some day—some day. Now why the hell did you have to go and do that to yourself? He slumped over and rested his palm squarely on his forehead as the bus careered south along the narrow path, past the marshy lake, before screeching to a halt a few minutes later at 257. Billy waited patiently for his turn to stand and exit, then filed into the compound through the guardhouse door at the outer fence along with twenty-five or so other techs and building engineers, before passing through the gray airlock entrance into the animal corral chute. Today, he would be assisting Dr. Ahmed H. Dardiri, the chief of Lab 257, who was conducting the annual foreign animal disease school, teaching doctors and veterinarians from around the country how to recognize the symptoms of exotic virus and bacteria infections. That morning, the doctor planned to demonstrate the effects of bovine herpes mammillitis virus, and asked Billy to set things up. Or, in other words, to inject the animals with the virus.
Billy entered the change room, closed the door behind him, switched from his street clothes into his government-issued pale blue lab smock, and, big virus syringe in hand, opened the door to the animal cubicle. He gazed at the animals through his tired, bloodshot eyes. Then he walked closer and squinted at them.
Oh shit—they already got it?!
Billy was startled by what he found. Two steers were stumbling around in the yellow-tiled cellblock, drooling profusely and foaming at the mouth, muttering low groans. This can’t be, he thought, there’s no way. Maybe he was in the wrong lab. Maybe the pounding headache was mixing him all up. No, he thought, this is the lab room I’m supposed to be in—I know it is! They have to be clean, these animals, the handlers just brought these two in here from the Old Cow Barn yesterday. The aftermath of last night’s festivities was impairing his judgment. Well, there’s still a little time left—let’s try this over again. Perplexed, Billy rubbed his tired eyes, left the cubicle, closed the air-lock door behind, took a decontamination shower in the change room, and regrouped for a moment. The symptoms he saw bothered Billy, and with good reason: he had once contracted an exotic animal disease after accidentally injecting his cuticle with live viruses. He sat down, scanned the newspaper, and sipped some more coffee—the brief rest would sober him. Then he slowly got up and went back in.
Same thing. He looked at the weeping cattle, checked his clipboard, then looked at the animal again, shaking his head. Something was terribly wrong. He showered out and tried a third time, but same thing again.
This isn’t me anymore—I’ve got some really sick animals in here!
Billy phoned Dr. Dardiri, who had just arrived on the later boat, and the doctor rushed up to the animal containment room. Opening each animal’s jaw and inspecting their hooves, the doctor observed signs of disease in the mouth and feet and confirmed his tech’s dire assessment. Dardiri called Plum Island Director Jerry Callis at 9:30 a.m. and informed him of what they discovered, noting that the animals came from the Old Cow Barn, officially known as Building 62, one of the three outside animal holding pens. Dr. Callis instructed him to swab some samples and start a laboratory diagnosis immediately.
School would be cancelled that day.
With the receiver still in his hand, Dr. Callis toggled the hook and rang Dr. Louis Jennings, the chief of animal supply, ordering him to Building 62 to see if the animals there were showing any unusual symptoms. Racing into the pens, Jennings grabbed hold of the nearest steer. It looked pretty bad—sullen-faced, the poor beast was drooling and foaming at the mouth. Around 11:00 a.m., Jennings phoned Callis and confirmed their worst fears—the very first animal he examined was ailing from . . . well, from something. He scraped samples of the steer’s tongue tissue and gave them to a safety officer, who rushed them over to Dardiri in Lab 257.
Dr. Dardiri had long experience in diagnostic methods—he and his staff had designed scores of them for countless germs. Science, by its nature, is inexact, a constantly evolving body of knowledge among learned men and women. Identifying viruses is no different, as a microbiologist must put an unknown sample through the step-by-step process of reasoned elimination. So first, Dardiri looked at the virus’s history. In this case, this step was unusually easy, because it came out of a lab upstairs, rather than from a test tube flown in from the jungles of the Congo. So the historical deductive reasoning was a snap: clear symptoms of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) virus meant he could proceed straight to the reagents. Normally, he’d have to grow a sample to provide enough material to set up various test cultures and find the culprit. Since there are seven strains and multiple subtypes of the virus, a bunch of reagents were brought out of the freezer.
A reagent is a specific substance that reacts only to the disease substance (called the antigen) it binds it to. For example, reagents can be antibody proteins that a test mouse produces to fight a certain strain of a virus. Fluorescent antibody stains light up on a slide when they come in contact with the viruses, which are invisible to the eye (except with the help of an electron microscope). However, one can witness the known, visible reagent substance reacting to the invisible virus, which can often be identified by the ruptured cells, where they have attacked. Measuring the holes created by the dead cells indicates the potency of the virus. By manufacturing reagents using live viruses on different test animals, the Plum Island staff had assembled a veritable library of most known germs.
Pulling out the test kits from the walk-in freezer, Dr. Dardiri first tested the samples Billy extracted from the animals upstairs against each strain of FMD and a match was made: Type O-1. Then the moment of truth. The samples from Animal Supply Building No. 62 also reacted to Type O-1 virus.
Oh God—an outbreak!
Viruses had escaped from at least one of the two labs. Foot-and-mouth disease virus had broken out. Who knew what other germs had escaped and where they had gone? A rattled Dr. Dardiri left the laboratory room and typed a terse message addressed to J. J. Callis, Director: “Summary: Foot and-mouth disease positive.”
cull: 1. to pick, to gather . . . 3. to select and separate out as inferior or worthless.
—WEBSTER’S NEW INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY
Armies across Europe erected giant funeral pyres and set carcasses of
cattle, pigs, and sheep ablaze. Open pits of fire dotted the countryside.
They crackled, hissed, and popped with burning fat and flesh. Clouds of
thick black smoke billowed high into the sky and traveled for miles. In the
end, fifteen million animals were slaughtered over a span of four months,
reduced to tons of black-gray ash and smoke. The governments called it
“culling.” A plague had ravaged much of Europe and parts of the Middle East. Though it sounds like a historical account from the Middle Ages, this culling took place in February 2001. For some, the grisly images of the mass graves and carnage were reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps and Stalin’s Great Purge.
The culling was a response to foot-and-mouth disease virus, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center’s cause célèbre.
Foot-and-mouth disease has been among us for many centuries, and maybe far longer. Some believe it was the fifth of the ten biblical plagues, the disease with which God smote Egyptian livestock. The journal of Hieronymus Fracastorius, a fifteenth-century Italian monk from Verona, noted an epidemic of cattle herds, an account that closely mirrored the disease’s symptoms. It mostly attacks cloven-hoofed animals—cattle, pigs, and sheep. Large blisters form on the animal’s mouth and feet, and grow up to two inches in diameter. Healthy cells underneath liquefy, and pus swells inside viral blisters until they burst, leaving behind painful ulcers. The pain of the infection on the foot renders the animal lame and immobilized. Blisters on the mouth and tongue make it impossible to eat. Compounding the problem, opportunistic bacteria enter the raw, exposed areas and cause infections ranging from the shedding of hooves and tongue to sudden death. While the virus itself rarely kills the victim, complications from it can be fatal. For many who have seen the effects of foot-and-mouth disease, it is extremely saddening to observe a stricken animal, standing helpless as its ailing body gradually wastes away.
To this day, there is no cure.
Were it not for the founding fathers of Plum Island, foot-and-mouth disease never would have been wiped out of North America in a 1948 eradication campaign.
And, but for the existence of Plum Island, it would not have returned to the continent in 1978.
While Dr. Dardiri was confirming his worst suspicions, Dr. Callis had gathered the lab chiefs and management staff to his office in Building 54, perched on a bluff overlooking Gardiner’s Bay and the faint shoreline of Montauk Point in the distance. He briefed the group and dusted off a copy of the 1969 emergency operations plan, the most recent one they had. Though the plan called for a secret code to be used in the event of an outbreak inside U.S. borders to avoid public alarm—“Rumen” for rinderpest virus, “Nada” for foot-and-mouth disease virus—no code names were necessary internally.
The plan called for Armageddon—destroy every living thing on the island except humans. Somebody provided a head count of all fauna: ninety-four cattle, eighty-seven pigs, sixty-six lambs, twenty-eight rabbits, twenty-seven chickens, thirteen goats, six horses, and two ducks, and colonies of mice and guinea pigs. The test animal population on this isle, combined with the flocks of wild birds, deer, insects, and other small critters, was larger than Noah’s Ark.
“We can’t dispose of the carcasses by burial as the plan calls for—it would take far too long. The risk of epidemic increases every moment infected animals remain alive. I’m going to need everyone’s support here.” When Dardiri called and confirmed a virus outbreak, the group unanimously agreed to burn the place up and scurried off to tell their subordinates. To ease their minds, the line workers were told the escaped virus rarely affected humans, though many of them knew about Billy Doroski’s infection, when he accidentally injected himself with a healthy dose of the virus.1 Billy stuck himself with a needle when inoculating guinea pigs, and soon after, his finger swelled and he contracted flu like symptoms. Plum Island scientists confined him in quarantine, inside the containment laboratory, for a full week. When they tested his blood, they found antibodies and confirmed he had indeed been infected with foot-and-mouth disease virus. They freed him only after the virus had run its course. After being released from biological quarantine, he went home and wore a rubber glove on the infected hand for five days, and then returned to work.
1 The first human case of foot-and-mouth disease virus was reported in the hamlet of Yetlington, England, in 1966. There, farmhand Robert Brewis contracted large blisters on his hands and inside his mouth. He also suffered grogginess and other flulike conditions. Attacked by a swarm of reporters, he managed a joke for the English tabloids. The doctors said he would recover and would not have to follow the fate of lower animals who caught the virus. “My only worry was that I might have to be destroyed,” Brewis said of his infection.
All workers were directed to cease all work and await further instructions. The first order of business was to decontaminate and evacuate everyone on the island, except for the outbreak control team. Then every single animal would be hauled into the lab and, after blood and tissue samples were taken, incinerated. Meanwhile, everything on the island would be sprayed down and chemically scorched. Washington would have to be notified and, only if absolutely necessary, the public at large. Any chance there was to keep this under wraps, however, was negated by the presence of sixty-five private contractor workers then building a massive extension onto Lab 101. Carpenters had been hacking and sawing away at the building for two years now, and there wasn’t a soul in Callis’s office that afternoon who didn’t suspect they were the cause of this mess. The foreman was called over to be briefed on measures his men would be expected to follow.
Dr. Callis’s phone rang. It was Dardiri again. The director’s expression turned grim. More bad news. The people aboard the ferry that had been launched at noon for Orient Point were now potential traveling mobile disease vectors. Alarmed, they radioed the ferry captain just before the boat docked at its destination. Now the mainland knew something had gone wrong. A crowd of people, who had gathered to meet their family members after a half-day shift, watched curiously as the boat approached and then mysteriously circled around and sped back to Plum Island. Dr. Callis ordered the emergency plan into immediate action. From this point forward, Plum Island would be under a full lockdown. No one was permitted to leave. The director now faced the most painful task of his career—issuing a press release announcing the island’s very first virus outbreak.
☣☠☣☠☣☠
"Everybody got a call to go in and see if their animals were sick,” remembers Dr. Carol House, who was working in Lab 257 at the time. “Then
we were told to sit tight.” Researching in the windowless, fluorescent-lit
containment lab rooms on a typical day was difficult enough. “You don’t
know what time it is, you lose track of things and become very focused.
Some people developed light deprivation and seasonal affective disorder,”
recalls a Plum Island researcher. Once the air-lock doors began to hiss and
inflate behind them, researchers hunched over their lab benches, amid the
low hum of the air blowers, burying themselves in their work with no connection to the outside world. At Plum Island, isolation and compartmentalization became a way of life. Now, the walls on the “inside” were closing in. Those with telephones contacted their spouses (which took infinite attempts because the switchboard was jammed) to tell them what had happened and that they wouldn’t be home for dinner, but they were okay. Dr. House’s lab partner that day was a visiting scientist in from Paris. She planned to train him on the latest diagnostic techniques, but all research work was called off and the two sat around twiddling their thumbs. “It was kind of funny, because he thought we did this every day, and my French wasn’t good enough to tell him this day was very different.”
Hours later, the 390 workers finally permitted to leave Plum Island—but they had to be decontaminated first. Crews went into each laboratory change room, bagged and labeled everyone’s street clothes, and took them away. In place, they laid out one-size-fits-all sterilized white coveralls and white slip on tennis shoes. Personal belongings, like watches, jewelry, pocketbooks, and wallets, were removed from the change-room lockers. Car keys and eyeglasses would be permitted—after all, people had to drive their cars home— but only after they were carefully dipped in an acetic acid bath. Idling in the cramped containment rooms, pacing endlessly back and forth, began to drive people batty. Finally, minutes before 8:00 p.m., they were released. Entering the change rooms, the staff members showered out without towels and put coveralls on their wet bodies. They were going home.
Exiting the laboratories en masse, the workers looked like a horde of invading aliens in baggy white spacesuits. The 325 staff and the 65 construction workers evacuated in a quiet, orderly fashion. By then they were too tired to say anything. The sharp odor of burning hay was in the air as they filed onto a bus, which splashed through a makeshift decontamination lagoon before pulling up to the decontaminated ferry. Other than the thirty-five-man cleanup crew, everyone was off the island by 8:45 p.m. Frances Demorest, Plum Island’s assistant librarian, recalls getting home at midnight and greeting her husband. “I woke Harrison up, and he just looked at me and let out a great laugh. My hair was hanging and I was wearing size forty white coveralls and plastic sneakers. Oh, what a mess!”
The first load of Hereford steers left the animal pen, Building 62, at 9:00 p.m. and boarded the cattle truck bound for the east animal wing of Lab 101. Animal handlers hauled the goats, sheep, horses, and pigs from their stalls into the west animal wing, then onto the loading platform. As they emptied the pens, the areas were sprayed down with a lye solution to kill live germs that escaped. Within two hours, all of the animals moved out of Building 62. The men showered, changed clothes, and went on to the larger task of removing the animals held in Building 21 and in the old Army bunker, Battery Steele. That took until daybreak on Saturday. Downstairs, in the rear of the building, workers cranked up the oil-fired incinerator.
Up the ramp, at the head of the necropsy room’s “disassembly line,” stood veterinarian Donald Morgan, dressed in a white smock and skullcap, who closely inspected each cow marching toward him in a jagged line. He drew a blood sample and, donning rubber gloves and grabbing a scalpel from the knives and chisels laid out along the cutting table, clipped off some pieces of fleshy body tissue.
Two animal handlers then alternated kills with overdoses of anesthetics or a special gun that fired a lethal bolt of compressed air. Each animal was then hacked up with power saws and knives and disposed of. Big chunks of flesh were sent down the chute into the incinerator. The necropsy room was a muddle, strewn with blood and pieces of flesh. Inside, a cacophony of animal moans, groans, and squeals filled the air, along with saws buzzing and chains clanking, and the echoes of parts thumping down the chute. Animals were euthanized outside of the laboratory, too; there was simply not enough kill space inside Labs 257 and 101 to do all the killing. Those carcasses were carted into Lab 257 and sent up the cargo elevator to Dr. Morgan on the second floor.
Each time the room filled up, the phone rang in the incinerator charging room. “Okay, ready? Here it comes!” One floor above, two animal handlers chained up the hind legs of each carcass and swung it over to the chute built into the floor. One lifted the steer’s forelegs up over the lip of the chute while the other pushed it over. Then they lowered the chain over the winch and let it slide.
The incinerator area was considered the “hottest” area on the island, for the high levels of contamination and for the searing heat emitting from the furnace. Regular incinerator duty was grueling, exhausting work, the worst job on the whole line. Plant management crews took turns doing it and they loathed it. There were some interesting perquisites, however. For starters, there was a wide assortment of pornography piled high in the corner of the charging room. “You never had to worry about any women being in that room,” says one worker. “And if a woman or a supervisor came in, you could always quickly toss the porn into the fire.” The other perk strains credulity, had not multiple sources confirmed it. “On kill day, the guys upstairs would carve up steaks sometimes, put them in plastic bags, and toss them down the chute to us.” From sirloins, to chicken breast cutlets, to pork chops—not USDA Grade A, but USDA Grade V (for virus riddled)—they were all broiled up in the incinerator wing kitchen. “Everyone, to a man, would deny it,” says another employee. “But we did it—we ate the meat.”
During the outbreak, it was without a doubt the most dangerous place to be, putting staff members at great risk. Down the chute came animal parts and cell cultures, teeming with germs, mixing together, floating around the charging room area, and then entering the fire pit. Normal laboratory operations called for “kill day” once every other week to dispose of test animals. This would be “kill weekend.” Down the stainless steel chute came bloody animal parts of all shapes and sizes—legs, midsections, entrails—pouring into the wagon cart bin in the charging room. It was a macabre sight. Cattle, sheep, and horse heads rolled down the slide after their detached bodies.
Once the cart was full, the weary incinerator crew, dressed in bright red coats and skullcaps (to indicate the severity of contamination), chained it to a slaughterhouse hoist and ran the cart along a track to the other side of the charging room. There they opened the two black cast-iron sliding doors and were immediately blasted with heat from 2,000 degrees of oil-stoked fire raging seven feet below. “The smell and the heat were unbelievable,” said one worker. “The closest thing to hell you’ve ever seen or felt.” Each man grabbed a side of the cart and tilted it, dumping the cargo in. Flames immediately shot up from the nine-by-twelve-foot lake of fire. Burning fat and flesh popped and hissed. Sliding the hatch back into place, the charging room cooled a bit—down to 120 degrees Fahrenheit—and they watched the pyre grow higher and higher through the tiny thick glass porthole. When the flames retreated, workers dumped in more animal refuse, 1,500 pounds every hour, cartload after cartload. The roast lasted into the night and through the next day, for forty-eight consecutive hours, a period that far exceeded the design capacity specifications of the twenty-six-year-old oven. Some said the bricks ran so hot the eighty-four-foot-tall stack glowed red in the night sky like a molten beacon. Others recalled that the concrete wall of the incinerator cracked that weekend and had to be repaired. That Sunday evening, the crew pressure-washed the heaps of guts, excrement, and blood caked all over the charging room. One employee who was there describes the odor that came forth that night. “Imagine a roast beef left on high heat for eight hours, then left out rotting for eight more—it was a butcher shop gone wrong on the rainiest day.”
The laboratories would need disinfecting with caustic soda lye, paraformaldehyde, and acetic acid. There was plenty of paraformaldehyde on hand, but only small amounts of the two other chemicals. Two tons of lye arrived within twenty-four hours on a barge. The safety officer ordered an employee to the mainland to buy up every last bottle of vinegar on the shelves in area supermarkets. Crews garbed in thick black rubber suits and fishing hats mopped the laboratory floors with acetic acid solution (using the vinegar), then scrubbed the yellow tile walls and ceilings. Over the next three days, the three outdoor animal holding pens were sprayed down with lye, as were the roads and walkways, the exteriors of all cattle trucks and cars (the insides were wiped down with the vinegar), and the administration buildings. Emergency crews wore protective suits to avoid chemical burns. Truckloads of manure were sprayed with lye and buried in a six-foot-deep trench covered with topsoil, which was also sprayed. Clothing was gassed with paraformaldehyde, and bales of hay, straw bedding, and animal feed burned in a colossal bonfire.
“The whole island was lyed, everything burned and died,” says a decon team member. “Grass, trees, animals—all dead. The whole island was covered with ash. It looked like snow—all white.” To complete the cleanup, Plum Island remained shut down on Monday. As the spray on the roadway was drying, the first ferry with returning employees pulled into Plum Island harbor at 8:00 a.m. Tuesday morning.
It took the incinerator over a week to cool down. Then workers carefully opened the crematory, crawled inside and shoveled the tons of ash and bone that had accumulated. Wearing flimsy paper masks and boots, they packed the ash into drums, topped them off with water and lye, and let them sit in the air lock for a day. The contaminated ash mixture was then emptied from the drums on the island grounds, and piled into large mounds.
☣☠☣
After the lab chiefs left his office, Jerry Callis slumped into his office
chair. How could this have happened? It seemed impossible, unthinkable even, and now he had to tell the whole world. This was the worst day
of his scientific career. Well, it was a Friday. By the time they cobbled
together a press release and distributed it late in the day, it would get buried
in Saturday’s newspapers. Weekends were the best times to leak bad news;
people paid more attention to recreation than hard news. And the significance could be dampened further with the right word crafting. “Foot-and-mouth disease has been diagnosed in cattle in a pre-experimental animal holding facility at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center,” began the press release. The first line of the release was wordsmithing at its best, patently unintelligible to people unacquainted with the science. But lines like “Authorities do not consider this a threat . . .” and “This is the first infection to occur outside the high-security laboratory . . .” and “It rarely affects humans. However, the disease could cause economic disaster . . .” made the reality slowly begin to register with weekend desk editors. Weekend or not, this was a major story to be covered.
In 1971, the USDA had total confidence its exotic virus laboratory, boasting,
Plum Island is considered the safest in the world on virus diseases. As proof of this statement, there has never been a disease outbreak among the susceptible animals maintained outside the laboratory on the island since it was established.
Now, sorting through the hazily written press release, the message became clear: “The World’s Safest Lab” had failed.
By Sunday, Newsday had no less than four reporters on the case, phoning all over Plum Island and hunting the mainland for leads. The paper ran three successive stories that first week with increasingly ominous banners: US TRACKING PLUM ISLAND VISITORS,SOURCE OF PLUM ISLAND GERM LEAK SOUGHT, AND EXPERTS PROBE ANIMAL DISEASE.
When the fourth Newsday story was published in as many days, the sputtering Plum Island spin machine kicked into gear. Laboratory chief Dr. Charles Campbell told a reporter, “I believe all the people here feel we’ve contained the disease.” Applying blame, he postulated that violations of the biological safety procedures by construction workers caused the outbreak. Rumors that migratory fowl like ducks, Canadian geese, osprey, and seagulls were dying were flatly denied, and no one came forward with evidence of any birds killed. Was there a possibility of sabotage by a visitor? A trespasser? A disgruntled worker? “One or two people have mentioned that possibility,” said Campbell. “It’s conceivable, but we feel it’s highly unlikely.” What began to alarm people most wasn’t the fear of being attacked by foot-and-mouth disease virus, but by other germs from Plum Island. Was this an isolated incident?
THE VIRUS HUNTERS
One federal outfit that took the outbreak seriously was the Emergency
Disease Organization (EDO), based out of Washington, D.C. By close of
business Friday, the USDA swung EDO into action. The next day, Dr.
Stanley Newcomb and his eight-person team descended upon Riverhead,
Long Island, and set up a crisis command center at a local motel. The team
conferred on the epidemiology of the virus—the how and where of an epidemic. If a germ outbreak’s evidence reveals how it occurred, then scientists
can trace its path and guess where it might lead. The team studied what little evidence was available. Less than a full day after discovery, it was too early to determine the specific cause of the outbreak. To the epidemiologists, speculating was wasting valuable time. Instead, Dr. Newcombe and the team shifted from determining the what to examining the how. They ventured three guesses. The virus could have “(1) escaped from the high security research building on Plum Island to the quarantine area; or (2) been introduced onto Plum Island from elsewhere, off the island,” and in either case, “(3) been carried from Plum Island to susceptible animals on Long Island and elsewhere.”
Looking through the records of the two laboratory buildings, they first determined that Type-O virus was being worked on. Lab 257 hadn’t worked on it for months, but three of Lab 101’s four lab modules were studying it. So the virus likely originated on the island, and Lab 101 was likely the culprit. Then they addressed what could easily transfer virus to the mainland: humans, deer, and air. Like mosquitoes carry West Nile virus and ticks carry Lyme disease, people can carry millions of germs on their skin, in their hair, even inside their mouths. When a reporter asked Dr. Newcombe about deer that swam from Plum Island to Long Island, he replied that herds of deer could be infected, but the urban setting of Queens (which is really western Long Island) formed a natural barrier where there were few, if any susceptible animals. Still, that left all of Long Island in the virus’s path. There was also the question of airborne transmission. Some argued the virus lasted only a few hours in the open air. But Dr. Callis believed the virus could travel long distances by “hitchhiking on air particles.”2
2 Later, the “Yellow Winds” of China would be blamed for an outbreak of virus that traveled clear across the Yellow Sea to Japan in early 2000.
First, the team put the Plum Island employees aside. They were low risk because they followed systematic decontamination procedures every day and knew what to regularly avoid on the mainland. Then, from the visitor logs and contractor’s employee manifest, they compiled a list of nonemployees who’d had contact with Plum Island in the last sixty days. All were potential vectors. Of the 103 people they pinpointed, all resided within the New York City metropolitan area; other than the Frenchman in Dr. Carol House’s 257 lab room, there had been no visiting foreign scientists or students.
The immediate priority was to get to the seventy-seven construction workers. They posed the highest risk because they didn’t know a thing about infectious disease. Their actions over the next few days could spread the virus far and wide, resulting in monumental disaster. Each team member worked the phones from the command center asking questions. “Have you been near or at any animal farms? Stockyards? Packinghouses? Sale barns?” None of the urban hard-hats had. Some of the questions even prompted chuckles and snorts. “Do you keep any cows, goats, or pigs at home?” Other questions were more alarming. “Have you sent or received any packages or had any contact with people from a foreign country?” And some hit closer to home. “Have you been to any pet stores that had birds? How about any state fairs? Have you been to the Bronx Zoo? Any other zoos or amusement parks with those drive-through animal kingdoms? Have you traveled out of the New York metropolitan region? Where exactly did you go and what did you do there?” The replies brought good news. There had been a few family excursions within the suburbs and one visit to a pet store, but no potentially dangerous biological contacts. Spot checks at their homes confirmed they owned no livestock animals.
Scientists traveled in pairs to each known animal farm in the region: seven dairy herds totaling nine hundred milk cows. Standing at a healthy distance, the medical officers observed the animals for signs of disease, then sprayed themselves down with disinfectant, changed clothes, and proceeded to the next farm. There was real concern about the Long Island Game Farm, a three-hundred-acre zoo in nearby Manorville. This popular children’s zoo made an ideal breeding ground because it was home to many susceptible animals, including ring-tailed lemurs, buffalo, squirrel monkeys, cows, cougars, horses, giraffe, sheep, zebra, and ostriches. If the virus existed on the mainland, then it probably would have turned up here. Sighs of relief overcame the medical inspection team when the game farm received a clean bill of health.
Within six days, EDO completed its germ hunt. Dr. Newcombe filed his report with the best analysis he could render. Most scientists refuse to render absolute conclusions (the possibilities, after all, fuel the discipline of 100 Michael Christopher Carroll science). Dr. Newcombe was no different. “Transmission to susceptible animals off of Plum Island is improbable, although not impossible . . . it would appear equally improbable that the outbreak on Plum Island resulted from virus introduced from off the island.” He told a reporter, “Our faces are red, but we don’t think it got off the island.” This disease is not normally contracted by humans, he said. “That’s not true of all animal diseases, but it is true of this one.” The virus was one of over twenty-five pathogens regularly studied on Plum Island. Why was it the only one being traced by the virus hunters?
Back in Lab 257, Dr. Donald Morgan was working feverishly with his team testing the two hundred plus samples they had taken from the destroyed animals. When a virus is discovered, the strain isolated is often named after the location where it was found. Morgan named the virus “P.I.S.S.,” for “Plum Island Sub Strain.” The USDA chiefs in Washington went livid. A foot-and-mouth virus outbreak in the United States would prompt a worldwide ban on American meat imports, tank the agriculture sector, and wreck the economy. They ordered Plum Island to cease using “P.I.S.S.” or the word “outbreak.” Henceforth, the gregarious Morgan and his colleagues were only to use the phrase “The Incident.” The USDA refused to admit its folly to the world. Dr. Morgan paid no mind and flagrantly violated the edict, dubbing it alternatively “The Outbreak” or his favorite, “The Disastrous Incident.” Morgan’s eight-year-old daughter Margaret evidently shared his sense of humor. Upon his return home after kill weekend, she greeted him at the door wearing a T-shirt he had given her. It read “Prevent Foot-and-Mouth Disease—Vaccinate Twice a Year.” For the first time in days, a weary Morgan cracked a smile.
To this day, the official line from Washington, blindly echoed in papers from the Washington Post to the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, is that the last outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease virus in the United States occurred in 1929. However, it is clear that the last outbreak in the United States occurred on September 15, 1978—on Plum Island.
September 1978 was to be the month of the grand opening of Dr. Callis’s newly renovated, state-of-the-art facility. Instead, it marked a low point of Plum Island and its director’s storied career. By this time, the contractor had only finished “a rather small portion of the whole thing,” said Callis. Barely halfway completed, the skeletal addition—amid all the dirt, piled-up materials, scaffolds, and equipment crowding the whitewashed Lab 101—looked and felt more like a war zone than a construction zone. Worse yet, it would soon fall under federal investigation for virus leaks and defective construction.
The contractors were working to extend Plum Island’s scant laboratory space. In 1952, the USDA hadn’t been able to build its desired facility, as Congress approved only one-third of their original request. They settled on just two buildings, and each lab wing could host one germ at a time due to the possibility of cross-contamination. Plum Island simply had too little lab space to study too many exotic foreign diseases emerging on the world scene.
The new state-of-the-art 70,000-square-foot addition to Lab 101 would include a third animal holding wing and associated research and autopsy laboratories; a vaccine plant capable of making 30 million doses a year (8,220 each day) and a refrigerated warehouse for virus storage; and a stylish entrance foyer in place of the menacing perimeter gatehouse. The additional space would bring the facility up to the size the USDA originally envisioned, enabling more research and more staff (adding 50 employees to the existing 330). More research meant more chances for scientific breakthroughs.
Or so they thought.
Over the next couple of weeks, Dr. Callis turned up the rhetoric on the contractors. “We feel [the outbreak is] connected to construction or the changes in operating procedures that had to be made to accommodate the construction. We let people inside the compound wall [whom] we normally wouldn’t have let in.” Some were confused by his reasoning. Admitting construction workers inside the fenced compound could not, on its own, cause an outbreak, since all experiments were conducted inside the laboratory. Unless, of course, an agent escaped from the building into the outdoor compound. Or unless there was outdoor testing on Plum Island.
INVESTIGATION
Putting aside the serum samples from the animals in Building 21 and the
Battery Steele holding pens, Dr. Morgan focused his investigation on the
samples from Building 62. Of the animals killed in the outbreak, those in
the middle pens, Nos. 5 and 6, had high antibody counts, while those in the
side and end pens were low, indicating that the virus may have been walked
in by an animal handler (lurking on his hands, or his sleeve, possibly) or
brought in with the airflow current (if it had leaked from the laboratory
construction site). The antibody counts indicated two to three cycles of disease. The virus had been multiplying and spreading for an entire week. Ten days after the outbreak, Merlon Wiggin wrote a five-page memorandum titled “The Committee Dilemma.” As chief of engineering and plant management, Wiggin was in charge of every function on Plum Island other than research: marine transportation, wastewater treatment, water supply, electricity, the emergency power plant, motor pool, metal shop, fire department, grounds crew, laundry, boiler plants, cafeteria, general maintenance, and biological containment. Second only to Director Callis, Wiggin oversaw non research functions on the island and had twice as many people under his command. If the buck stopped with anyone other than Callis, it stopped with Merlon Wiggin. Hailing from a small town in Maine, Wiggin married his wife, Isabelle, just six months after he met her on a bus ride to nearby Portland. After working at Air Force bases, the thirty-year-old engineer with tousled brown hair applied for a position at Plum Island. Doc Shahan hired him while the facility was in its infancy, providing more than enough intricate mechanical projects and glitches to satisfy the young engineer.
Most disturbing in Wiggin’s memo was his casual admission about the most dangerous part of the facility:
The Incinerator Area. Tests of this area show that hundreds of cubic feet of air a minute from a highly potential contaminated area have been escaping.
“Another area that comes to mind would be the exhaust air from the laboratory.” Wiggin suggested testing the 107 filter units on the roof that trapped pathogens as air exited the building. “For nearly ten years, I have recommended that these filters be tested after each change (we have the equipment on hand to do it) and have also recommended that their efficiency be improved by replacement.” He did not mention who exactly was preventing Wiggin, the chief of all plant management, from ordering a test inspection and replacement of the filters. Regardless of what an inspection of the air filters might yield, “It seems quite obvious the virus was transported by humans to the animals in Building 62,” he wrote, which “seems to rule out transmission by aerosol all the way from Lab 101.” If indeed that was correct, it meant the biological safety measures were disregarded by an animal handler—a scientific staffer—and therefore not an employee in Wiggin’s bailiwick.
Oddly, Wiggin ruled out the heavy construction going on on all four sides of Lab 101, particularly in the area of the incinerator. “We have carefully checked and tested other areas, such as the Contractor Sites, and have found nothing.” This too, was in Wiggin’s self-interest. He was the federal government’s contracting officer and project liaison to Joseph Morton Company, the contractor. “I think we need to realize at least for the present our laboratory buildings are not perfect secure envelopes,” he concluded. Despite that, shutting down was not in Plum Island’s best interests. “I see little to gain and much to lose (monies, work, training, improvements, repairs, etc.) by delaying the return to normal operations. . . .”
Earlier in the day, the Lab 101 foreman, Truman Cook, and his men were busy spraying down the incinerator room with lye, even though he had been ordered the week before not to decontaminate or change any filters in the incinerator room until further notice; the investigation committee planned to inspect the area. After Wiggin learned Cook was deconning the area and attempting to change the old air filters, he told Cook to stop immediately.
The next morning, when investigators entered the incinerator charging room, they noted intense heat emanating off the sliding hatch doors and the smell of charred, rotten meat. Cook and his maintenance crew were nowhere to be found. All had called in sick that day, something that had never occurred before. Safety officer Dr. Jerry Walker—once described by a reporter as “thin, of average height, sort of Southern-square looking... reserved to the extreme . . . in all, decidedly odd”—was chair of the investigation committee. He led an examination of the crime scene. The air intake had been blocked, and the supply intake ducts to the incinerator were jammed wide open. Outside light shined into and air flowed out of the room, a chamber that was supposed to be sealed to the outside world. A committee member pointed out lead tape applied across the latch of the emergency door, which now hung slightly ajar. Dr. Walker ordered the openings blocked at once. The filter housings had been sprayed with lye by Cook’s crew, so they couldn’t be tested. But then they spotted an unthinkable sight. “Several filter units had media improperly installed with gaps up to three-quarters of an inch,” the committee reported. That meant that at any one given time, no less than 750,000 viruses could be exiting the building, marching out side by side. When Wiggin turned on the air pressure system, the supply fan started before the exhaust fan. For the air pressure to contain germs properly within the room, it had to start in reverse order. Stunningly, the electricians had wired the safety interlock backward.
Dr. Walker paged through the incinerator log and spoke with the employee who kept it. He shook his head as he read the same static pressure number recorded for each and every kill day. Either the gauge did not function, or the worker dummied the logs. Standing over the shoulder of the log keeper, listening to him try to explain the log entries, Walker realized the numbers “had little meaning to him.” Concealing disgust, he flatly reported, “It is apparent that a knowledge of pressures is essential by someone during incineration with responsibility to maintain control of the pressure required.”
During the following week, Merlon Wiggin and his assistant climbed up onto the Lab 101 roof and inspected the 107 air-filter units. On the roof stood a mechanical garden of metal stacks that sprouted out of the black tar roof—some short and some long, some wider and taller than the men—all anchored with wire stays. As a nippy October wind swept off the Sound and crept up their backs, they heard the collective whirr of the air filter fans.
If the incinerator was in bad shape, the condition of the roof was even worse. The rubber gaskets designed to seal the gaps between the air filters and roof masonry were brittle, cracked, and leaky. Some gaskets were altogether missing. The filter housings were installed in such a way as to leave openings “allowing the complete passage of air without the benefit of filtration.” It was as if someone with no training ripped an old one out and slapped a new one in, giving the task zero thought. The ductwork had holes punched into it. Replacement filters were much thinner in size than those used in years past. Wiggin’s roof tour was disturbing, and its ramifications were nothing short of terrifying.
The inside review was just as scandalous. The air pressure logbook for experiment rooms during four weeks prior to the outbreak wasn’t even dummied like the incinerator logbook—the pages were blank. Wiggin found many lab rooms way out of proper air balance and some were positive to the outside, meaning that germs were being circulated through the entire laboratory building. Bad air, “hot” with viruses, was being forced to exit somewhere. It had a choice of possibilities—through heavy paper and charcoal filters designed to catch germs or through the easier path, via gaping holes in the roof. To top it all off, he found no air filter maintenance. The rubber gaskets hadn’t been changed in nearly thirty years (when they were first installed in the early 1950s), rendering each air filter between the defective gaskets virtually useless. And they weren’t the only filters in question; some of the sewage vent filters, which strained biologicals out of animal wastes, were in poor condition, and a few were even missing. The appalling condition of the laboratory shocked Wiggin.
It became painfully clear why Wiggin’s foreman, Truman Cook, and his crew were feverishly tinkering with repairs the day before, and why they called in sick today, the day the committee began its investigation.
Try as he may, there was no way the chief engineer could bring himself to certify the blatantly porous building as safe. “Recommend that Lab 101 not be considered as a safe facility in which to do work on exotic disease agents,” Merlon Wiggin told the investigation committee, “until corrective action is accomplished.” That included smoke-testing each filter after the repairs to see if any air continued to escape.
Digesting Wiggin’s disquieting findings, Director Callis and safety officer Dr. Walker grew increasingly uncomfortable. Research experiments were backing up and a special project with the Rift Valley fever virus project was far too important to be delayed. Unwilling to accept the dire assessment, they ordered Wiggin to begin smoke tests and continued virus production and animal experiments under a pack of faulty air filters. “No new activities are expected to be taken on over the next several weeks . . .” wrote Dr. Callis in a letter to Washington, “. . . beyond those commitments already made.” In other words, on with the work. Setting off smoke bombs in the incinerator and lab rooms, Dr. Walker and Mr. Wiggin watched harmless white wisps of smoke waft through cracks, gaps, and holes, visible stand-ins for deadly germs hundreds of times smaller that were escaping. Not one of the laboratory’s 107 air filters was salvageable. All of them had to be scrapped and new mountings installed.[man this really makes me want to cuss,putting the American people at risk to this sh*t! The part that pisses me off is that they are still at it! DC]
But well before the air filters were fixed, Plum Island scientists continued their infectious virus research, in a porous lab facility they knew was inadequate to contain the germs safely.
The committee rendered its final report to Dr. Callis on January 9. Of Plum Island’s three lines of defense—the containment laboratories, restrictions on personnel and material, and the island location—the first two had failed. Their best guess as to what happened went like this: one of the animal handlers walked into the Building 62 holding pens to feed the animals as he routinely did. While they ate, the handler cooed at the beasts and petted them lovingly, as they were prone to do, and unwittingly fed them helpings of viruses along with their meals.
But that didn’t explain how one of the animal handlers, restricted by the rules from entering the laboratory building, became a carrier of the virus. Investigators turned their attention to the incinerator room and the 107 air filters on the lab roof. Dr. Walker’s impressions of the incinerator logbook were true. For years, no one set the internal air pressure equal to the atmosphere, as required by the rules during a burn. Because of this negligence, “the entire area had been pressurized to the outside atmosphere,” which meant the exhaust was literally blowing contamination out of every crack and crevice into the sky.
The other theories, not fully reviewed by the investigators, involved the construction work. During heavy rains, water seeped under a plywood barrier into the incinerator room and then retreated back out. “They were digging the hole for the flue and chimney stack and we had torrential rain for a week,” remembers one worker. Dirt near the plywood was excavated and hauled to a site three hundred yards from the Building 62 pens. The committee omitted another occurrence that may have played a role. “Supposedly it was caused by a leakage of sewage,” says Ben Robbins, a retired Plum Island engineer. A local subcontractor ruptured an underground pipe that carried contaminated wastewater from Lab 101 to Building 102, the decontamination plant. Perhaps infected sewage seeped into the dirt that was later moved next to Building 62.
The investigators interviewed workers and explored related worries. They learned from their support staff that emergency backup power generators were “old and in critical need of updating.” They listened to “much concern” among the ranks for the deterioration in the island’s biological safety measures. Frequent travel-related absences of safety officer Dr. Jerry Walker were cited. The committee told Dr. Callis there existed a “general breakdown of security procedures that [once] served psychologically as constant reminders of the need to practice safety.”
How and why the facilities were in such wretched shape were questions “which have to be answered,” they said. “Certainly, however, the increase in scientific work... age of the facilities... reduction in staff... restricted budgets... [and] inflation” had something to do with it. Lack of sufficient plant management and safety personnel was a factor. “Whether there are in fact too few or those available are not being properly utilized is a question to be answered.”
“It is unlikely that the exact route of infection... will ever be known,” the committee concluded. Among the men who signed the report were the two most responsible for the disaster: safety officer Walker and chief engineer Wiggin.
It was time to run for cover.
Dr. Callis notified Washington that swift measures were taken to ameliorate the deplorable conditions. Building 62 was closed because the contractor stored much of its materials in the vicinity. Air filters were replaced except those over Lab C, which were expected to be completed by February. Two new safety positions were added to assist Dr. Walker in carrying out daily air filtration checks. He assured the laboratory brass that Lab 257 checked out fine and was ready for the Rift Valley fever virus research program. “We are anxious to complete these remaining operations . . . so that we can all get back to more productive endeavors.”
Dr. Callis formed two more committees, an ad hoc operations review committee to evaluate inadequacies in material and staffing, and a safety committee to conduct the witch hunt. For reasons unknown, the latter included Dr. Walker as one of the members—the “safety officer” minding the store during the outbreak. On February 14, 1979, the committees sent a secret memorandum to Dr. Callis that placed the outbreak squarely upon the shoulders of Merlon Wiggin. “Mismanagement of Engineering and Plant Management operations,” began the valentine, “resulted in circumstances which led to the escape of the virus from Lab 101 and certainly violated the spirit and intent of the Agent Safety Program at Plum Island.” Work orders for new items and change orders with the contractor took precedence over routine laboratory maintenance. An “appalling lack of effective communication” between Wiggin and the lab foreman, Truman Cook, existed, they said. Furthermore, lab foremen had no appreciation for containment, “specifically, air-handling equipment and its function in the building.” Wiping the egg off committee member Dr. Walker’s face, the memo noted that no one had notified the safety office about any of these conditions. This, they concluded, was the sole responsibility of chief of engineering and plant management Merlon Wiggin, and Lab 101 foreman Truman Cook.
Dr. Callis chose this time to abscond to Florida on a winter vacation, leaving the most onerous task for his assistant director, Dr. John Graves. Within days of Callis’s departure, Dr. Graves ordered Wiggin and Cook suspended immediately without pay. Dr. Graves told the press that Wiggin and Cook were being held responsible for not maintaining the air-filtering system. No action was taken against Dr. Walker or against Dr. Jennings, who was in charge of the animal supply pens. One scientist says Jennings regularly shuttled between the lab and animal supply without following proper showering-out procedures. “They didn’t want to go after Jennings,” says Merlon Wiggin, mentioning his senior scientist, tenured status. Shortly after the outbreak, Dr. Jennings quietly retired from Plum Island.
The next morning, Graves and security guard Ed Wolf physically blocked Wiggin from boarding the ferry to Plum Island, ordering him to remain in the Orient Point dock warehouse office.
One unnamed official called the two fingered men “scapegoats . . . We could all be blamed for the outbreak. The buck stops at the top.” Wiggin and Cook filed grievances with the USDA. Then they took their case to the people. “There are other people who have just as much responsibility as we had. It was a kangaroo court,” Truman Cook told Newsday. “When the right time comes, I’m sure that I will get a chance to say who’s responsible,” said Merlon Wiggin. Back from his sunny Florida sojourn, Dr. Callis criticized their “poor supervisory and management practices... poor safety practices . . . and lack of communication.”
After three weeks, Wiggin was readmitted to Plum Island, but barred from entering his office. Dr. Callis then called a rare all-hands meeting inside the old Army chapel to announce that Lab 101 was returning to full operations. The ad hoc committee, he said, had completed its report on recommendations that were now being implemented. At that moment, Wiggin realized that in addition to everything else, he had also been frozen out of the ad hoc committee, to which Callis had appointed him a member. Wiggin went home and stewed over the weekend. I am not the only person responsible for this! He decided to give the director a piece of his mind.
“Perhaps I was not notified as to when the committee was to meet because I ask questions the Chairman Assistant Director Dr. Graves and the Safety Officer Dr. Walker find embarrassing,” Wiggin told Dr. Callis in a letter he handed him on Monday. Safety officer Dr. Walker appeared not to know whether the filters were tested to catch germs as small as 0.3 microns or 3 microns wide. “This to some may be not important, but it is off by a factor of 10.” To those who knew, it meant the difference between no viruses escaping the building and thousands escaping every second. Most alarming was Wiggin’s charge that Drs. Walker and Graves brushed off seriously flawed test results of the new Lab 101 air filters. “Dr. Walker was frequently getting test results of 100% and that was an impossibility using deep bed media [air filters] which only test 85 to 90%. . . .” Before placing the lab back on-line at full capacity, Wiggin implored Dr. Callis, “I wondered if you were concerned about the following:
Vent filters—I understand they have all yet to be checked and the leaking ones changed.
Sanitary drainage system—We know from the recent findings that we had some badly corroded piping.
Material support—A lack of warehouse parts and supplies was a deterrent to the level of maintenance in this [laboratory] building.
Referring to the draft report Callis circulated, Wiggin questioned why it stated unequivocally that Plum Island could return to full operations. Callis replied, “We’ll discuss it later, Merlon.” But Dr. Callis paid little mind. To him, Merlon Wiggin was a disgruntled former engineering chief now trying to make hay. Lab 101 was back in business. On with the show.
Meanwhile, the Plum Island blue-collar workforce seethed over Truman Cook’s suspension. They knew that Cook was management’s fall guy. “Truman was a good guy, and everybody liked him,” remembers one employee, “or was related to him.” His family had been in the Southold area since the 1600s. The Cook family was a proud, honest family, and Truman was no different. No way these out-of-town scientists were going to turn a local good ol’ boy into a poster boy of shame. More than 150 employees—most of the support staff—signed a petition that protested Cook’s suspension and vehemently demanded his reinstatement. Fearing open mutiny on the island (and loss of community support off the island), management buckled and restored Cook to his position. “I’m very relieved,” he told a reporter who broke the news to him. “I think that’s about all I’d better say.”
A second petition drive began, this time to reinstate Wiggin as chief engineer, but management nipped the nascent movement in the bud, ordering it withdrawn from circulation. Unlike Cook’s petition, this one specifically stated the safety office was to blame for the outbreak. The union representing the Plum Island workforce wrote Dr. Callis asking why the safety office was not held at least partially responsible for the outbreak. There was no reply. An investigation committee member then came forward, anonymously, to a local newspaper, and condemned the singling out of Merlon Wiggin. “You can’t really put the blame on one person. To say one or two people are responsible is ridiculous. In fact, our report strongly implies involvement by the safety office.” Against Dr. Callis scientific appointee, Dr. Walker, Wiggin lost the wrestling match. Scientists, after all, were the reason Plum Island existed.
One former employee dispenses with the finger pointing and recriminations, and gives due credit to the policy of keeping animals outdoors on the Plum Island—animals that acted as dutiful sentinels. “Thank God we had those animals in the Old Cow Barn [Building 62],” says an employee. They were, after all, the canaries in the mine. Without them, the outbreak wouldn’t have been discovered until it was too late.
☠☣☣☠
On the same day that the suspension ax came down on Merlon Wiggin
and Truman Cook, the USDA’s Office of the Inspector General
announced a federal investigation into the Lab 101 rehabilitation project.
“We’re concerned with the quality of the construction. Some things that
happened... just don’t add up,” said a spokesman. Since the groundbreaking two years earlier, the bulk of Merlon Wiggin’s time was spent tending to an unusually large number of change orders, which were revisions to the design specifications. Over 240 change orders were issued. Original plans called for masonry, but concrete had to be used for proper biocontainment. Metal air-lock doors were coated with the wrong epoxy and severely blistered; it was so bad that 320 doors had to be removed and replaced. The roof was faulty and moisture seeped into the lining. The contractor, Joseph Morton Company, estimated an additional $5 million in cost overruns, 50 percent above the original budgeted cost of the project.
As Plum Island’s house of cards came falling down, Wiggin fired off a lengthy missive detailing scores of design flaws and contractor blunders to the USDA’s head contracting officer in Washington. It addressed the faulty construction project he said he had labored to rectify, and addressed what he saw coming:
[The rehabilitated laboratory building] will not be an agent safe, energy efficient, bio-containment facility that can be utilized without repair or changes.
Within the next few months, I expect there will be an attempt to discredit me and my reputation. There is possible evidence of criminal neglect in relation to the recent outbreak at Plum Island.
To preserve the record and protect himself, he sent copies to a friend in Texas for safekeeping.
The USDA owed Joseph Morton Company over $1.5 million for all the change orders. “If we are paid for the work we’ve already done,” Morton told the department, “we can complete the renovation in four months.” A dark cloud continued to swirl over Merlon Wiggin. “He’s not free of responsibility on the design errors,” a source told the Suffolk Times. “Some of them might have been caught by him ahead of time.” Were his hands unclean because of the virus outbreak, the construction debacle, or now both?
On March 5, 1979, a letter of default went out from USDA headquarters addressed to Joseph Morton Company, canceling its $10.7 million rehabilitation contract. Just the week before, Morton had wired Washington, demanding back payment by the end of the week of at least $500,000 to continue. Morton laid off all of the construction workers except a few supervisors, and expected to cancel the contract themselves.
Then things got even uglier. April showers rained down on the construction site. No one in management thought to tell any of the 150 plus physical plant employees to secure the partially completed construction from the elements. Corrosive saltwater seeped into seams and in between beams, rusting and decaying the steel framing and construction materials. In June the USDA advertised for proposals from contractors to complete the project, and by the middle of July, it had fourteen bids. But the USDA sat on those bids.
Dr. Callis informed Wiggin that his suspension would continue. The Office of the Inspector General was now focusing on allegations that Wiggin received kickbacks from the contractor on the construction project. And so, too, was a federal grand jury. The grand jury issued subpoenas to Joseph Battaglia, president of Joseph Morton Company, and Samuel Semble, a Morton executive. The subpoenas called for documents, books, and records. The two men testified to the grand jury but provided no records. The records had been shredded.
Wiggin decided to swing back at Plum Island to get some leverage before the federal grand jury closed in on him, so he filed another employee grievance with the USDA. In a slap at Callis, USDA headquarters in Washington sided with Wiggin in a letter they wrote him: “We do not concur with [Plum Island’s] conclusion that the outbreak was a direct result of performance deficiencies on your part since the file contains inconclusive and contradictory information.” Washington admitted Wiggin alone had been hung for the collective negligence of the whole gang.
Wiggin and his wife then filed a $1 million defamation lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court, charging slander and defamation of character. The complaint laid out his side of the outbreak and stressed that for years he warned higher-ups that the buildings had cracks and leaks, and told them—Drs. Callis, Graves, and Walker—that the Lab 101 incinerator was ineffective in containing viruses. Plum Island administration officials “conspired to destroy [Wiggin’s] reputation by not only falsely imputing blame to him for the outbreak, but in addition, to defame him of committing felonious crimes,” including allegedly accepting $500,000 in bribe money by the Joseph Morton Company.
Dr. Graves refuted the charges by noting that Wiggin never sounded any specific alarms. “Any problems were in his sphere to remedy,” he said. “He was not a third party standing on the sidelines—he was the one to do it.”
With the tide turning in Wiggin’s favor, his comeback came to a screeching halt.
Merlon Wiggin calls it quits at plum island, announced the Suffolk Times. “I don’t feel there’s a future here,” the forty-eight-year-old engineer said, announcing his departure at the end of August after eighteen years on Plum Island; twenty-five years of federal service now made him eligible for early retirement. Ten years ago, he had been tapped by NASA to design a containment lab at the Houston Space Flight Center to hold moon rocks. The Australians wanted him to help set up their own version of Plum Island. Now he was leaving under a dark cloud.
“They offered me an early out,” says Wiggin. “Financially, it was almost too good an offer to refuse. But at first I didn’t like the idea.” He initially wanted to return and set the record straight and clean things up. USDA officials in Washington, who had absolved him of any personal wrongdoing, told him he wouldn’t be returning to the most pleasant work environment, and that he should strongly consider retirement from federal service. He says he had also heard that there would soon be a move to privatize the Plum Island workforce, and he felt that privatization wouldn’t go over well. Though Wiggin claimed he rode off into the sunset smiling, others said there was more to it. One administrative source says he retired “after we told him he would lose his retirement benefits if he was indicted by the grand jury.” It seems Plum Island traded his freedom for his silence, a silence concerning problems so embarrassing, so potentially dangerous that, if disclosed, would have put Plum Island out of business.
They say time heals all wounds. Merlon Wiggin proves that axiom with his reminiscences. “I think it was the nicest job I ever had,” says Wiggin. “I enjoyed the ability we had to make anything and do everything. We had a great group of people—real pleasures, a real family. It was good working for Drs. Shahan and Callis.” Let bygones be bygones, he says. Life after Plum Island has treated him well. He embarked on a private consulting career and worked on biocontainment projects around the globe. He participated in community efforts as president of the North Fork Environmental Council, founded Suffolk for Safe Energy, and now leads the effort to save the crumbling Plum Island Lighthouse. Today, the seventy-three year-old engineer refuses to surrender to autumnal drift, still working as national expert on the mechanical aspects of biocontainment.
After Wiggin left Plum Island, the Office of the Inspector General dropped their kickback inquiry, and Wiggin dropped his defamation lawsuit and cooperated with the OIG investigation. Participating in a sting operation, he met with executives from the Joseph Morton Company on several occasions at a local restaurant, wearing a concealed wire recording device. “When the man over at the bar took out his cigar case, that was my cue to turn on the wire,” Wiggin recalls with a chuckle. After the meal G-men would follow his car, recording more revealing information that would be later put before a federal grand jury. The federal grand jury indicted Morton company president Joseph Battaglia and Samuel Semble— but not chief engineer Merlon Wiggin—on counts of fraud and obstruction of justice. Both Battaglia and Semble were convicted at trial and sentenced to prison for crimes of fraud and conspiracy, having bilked taxpayers out of millions. The Joseph Morton Company then filed for bankruptcy in March 1980 at the same time that the USDA was trying to recover the money it paid the company for its sub-par construction work. Hearing of the bankruptcy, Deputy Agriculture Secretary James Williams said, “Everybody thought it was going to be worked out.... I’m mad as seven hundred dollars.” Williams should have been about $1,999,300 angrier, because the USDA would be out $2 million in taxpayers’ money.
“INCREDIBLE BUNGLING”
The Office of the Inspector General issued a damning 190-page report condemning the USDA’s poor management of the Plum Island rehabilitation: The project, which originally was to have cost $11,000,000, is now estimated to cost approximately $25,000,000 to complete.
The contracting officer... performed only a superficial credit check. Had a sufficient check been performed, the information would have raised serious questions about [ Joseph Morton Company’s] ability to perform....
Management knew that the contractor was not: correcting major construction deficiencies; protecting equipment and facilities from deterioration due to the weather; paying subcontractors; and paying workmen the prevailing wage rate.
In addition, they found that the USDA paid Morton 80 percent of the cost when only 58 percent had been completed, and withheld not one dollar for defective workmanship. They found leaky roofs, beams practically rusted through, misaligned foundations, and stainless steel pitted from a leaking wall. They came across an entire incinerator unit ruined, left uncovered in a ditch and half submerged in murky rainwater. In short, they found a total mess. While the Inspector General’s Office called for disciplinary action, they didn’t name any names.
When the USDA came to Capitol Hill asking for another $13.4 million (a far cry from the $1.8 million Dr. Callis told the press he needed at the start) to complete the construction project, the Senate had this to say:
The history of the use of the $10,000,000 [appropriated in 1976 by Congress for the Plum Island rehabilitation] including its management . . . is a unique “horror story” in contemporary contracting. Although the Committee has, through its normal oversight mechanisms, attempted to keep apprised of the situation, it has been hampered by disingenuous statements of Federal officials, incompetence, and near-incredible bungling.
The Committee believes that given the present situation, with the contractor having been defaulted by the Government and under indictment in a U.S. court, with facilities only partially completed and unusable, with a severe report by the Inspector General, and with a history of the Department’s unwillingness or inability to keep the Congress properly informed, firm action must be taken immediately. Our preference would be that all responsible parties be disciplined prior to providing any additional appropriations.
While Congress agreed to appropriate another $10 million to complete the project, the money would be available only after the secretary of agriculture demonstrated to the committee that he was taking “severe disciplinary measures” and legal action to recover funds from the surety company. The USDA promised to act, but apart from Merlon Wiggin, no one else was “severely disciplined.”
The money from Washington didn’t arrive. First, Dr. Callis announced the construction would be completed, finally, by spring 1981. Then, Dr. Graves estimated, June 1982. Then they simply said “no comment.” Congress showed its displeasure with the USDA’s negligence by impounding the funds.
Armed with fraud and obstruction of justice convictions, the U.S. Attorney General filed a $14 million lawsuit against Joseph Morton Company’s insurer to seek payment on a performance bond. In April 1987, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a lower federal court’s jury award of $10,631,326 to the USDA—$17 million with judgment interest applied—the largest federal jury award in the history of New York State at the time. Rehabilitation of the old laboratory facilities began again, this time with new contractors and under new Plum Island management.
Plum Island’s two-year laboratory rehabilitation project took nineteen years to complete. It was finished in 1995.
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