Lab 257
THE DISTURBING GOVERNMENT‘S SECRET STORY OF THE
GERM LABORATORY
BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
14
THE DISTURBING GOVERNMENT‘S SECRET STORY OF THE
GERM LABORATORY
BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
14
The Homeland
The further you get into this, the more mind-boggling it will
become.
Dr. Breeze physically departed Plum Island in 1995, but he continued calling the shots from his new office in Washington as a procession of faceless directors came and went. Breeze finally got his man in sixty-five-year-old Dr. David L. Huxsoll, whom he appointed Plum Island’s director in June 2000. “Roger handpicked him,” says one scientist familiar with the decision. “He has that biological warfare background that Roger likes. Breeze has always been into germ warfare. He loves the mystery, and the intrigue—he’s really into it.” Dr. Huxsoll grew up on a farm in the rural town of Aurora, Indiana, where he recalls being so attached as a child to his family’s livestock, he cried for days when the fattened baby calves he had named and petted were sold at market. Like Dr. Callis, Huxsoll attended Purdue University, but the comparisons end there. After a brief vet practice stint in northern Illinois, Huxsoll was drafted into military service and embarked on a three decade military career chasing diseases around the globe. Colonel Dr. Huxsoll was named commander of the Fort Detrick biological warfare laboratories in 1983, the first veterinarian to hold that command, bringing full circle the veterinarian connection to biological warfare that Plum Island founding father Dr. Hagan began in 1941. “The most valuable thing out there,” says Dr. Huxsoll, “it’s not the gun, it’s not the tank, it’s not the jet fighter—it’s man. So we do whatever can be done to prevent illness, and should illness occur, restore that person to operational status.”
As Fort Detrick’s 1 commander, Colonel Huxsoll saw heavy action during the now-infamous Ebola virus outbreak in Reston, Virginia, featured in Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone. He made the controversial decision to send the Army into a domestic matter that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—lacking any hands-on expertise—was having a difficult time managing. “At that time, I considered everything, the potential hazards, and the safety issues.... There comes a point in time when you see—and you know—the only logical response is to make that uncomfortable decision with the best interests of lots and lots of people in mind.” The decision was the right one. Huxsoll’s well-trained medical soldiers—led by virus hunter C. J. Peters, who stalked Rift Valley fever through Egypt a decade before— successfully beat back the Ebola virus.
1 By this point, the Fort Detrick biological warfare laboratories had assumed a friendlier-sounding name: U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID.
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Huxsoll served on three U.N. biological warfare inspection teams in Iraq, leading two of them. In Iraq he interrogated directors and middle managers of medical and academic facilities like the University of Baghdad and the College of Agriculture. As with the United States, following the veterinarians revealed clues about germ warfare. Says Huxsoll, “Probably the greatest capability in addressing the biological villains, and those having a true understanding of it, was at the veterinary vaccine places.” Special military satellite image maps enhanced by computer line drawings afforded the inspection team an uncanny recreation—down to exact shapes and sizes—of each suspected germ weapon manufacturing plant. Among the long sheet maps Huxsoll unfurled in front of his impressed Iraqi hosts (“I think it got to the point they probably thought we had more capability than we really did”) was a single-cell protein facility at Al-Hakam. Ostensibly, that operation grew colonies of bacteria in big fermenter vats to be dried and milled into high-protein animal feed. But the team discovered a fair amount of evidence that it was used for biological agents, and ultimately the Iraqis admitted it. It wasn’t easy to determine, however. “The plant that would produce biological agents for weapons purposes,” Huxsoll notes, “may not look too much different from the plant that produces biological agents for vaccine purposes or for making beer.” Chemical agents are another story. Chemical plants have what is called a large “signature,” while biological facilities have a far smaller footprint. “If you’re going to dump chemical agents on a significant portion of Long Island,” Dr. Huxsoll postulates, “you have to have tons of the stuff. Now, in the case of biological [agents], you can measure what you need for the same area on Long Island in kilograms, not tons. That’s because you can disseminate them in an aerosol, and if you are good at this, you can spread it over a huge distance.” Following those tiny footprints all throughout Iraq, Huxsoll’s teams uncovered volumes of anthrax, botulinum toxin, ricin, gas gangrene, and other anticrop and anti-livestock germs being prepared and weaponized on the tips of bombs.
Before the first Gulf War, says Huxsoll, little effort was put into biological warfare intelligence. But after he helped uncover the Iraqi program, America turned its eyes to the rapidly disappearing Soviet Union, and Huxsoll inspected weapons plants there, too. “Their programs were far beyond the imaginations of anybody,” he says. “We’re talking about big facilities. Huge. Huge beyond the imagination. Incomprehensible. Very plain, very stark. Desolate and unattractive. Nothing decorative about it.” In the vanquished Iraq, Huxsoll’s horde of UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission on Iraq) scientists, interpreters, communications officers, and photographers could go anywhere and be as intrusive as it pleased. When it came to Russia, however, for every suspected facility the American inspectors asked to see, the Russians could see an American one in return. “And that really begins to create some problems. Not that you are trying to hide anything, but to have them go into Eli Lilly and Merck and take samples?”
One of the doors the Russians would pry open was the door to Plum Island.
The first thing Dr. Huxsoll did after accepting the Plum Island directorship (he refers to it as just “one more interesting type of experience”) was to call a truce with the community. He raised the white flag by proposing to open the island to public tours, perhaps once a week, so the public could learn more about the mysterious animal virus kingdom. “There’s nothing to hide,” says Huxsoll. “No need to hide anything at all. I can be extremely proud of what we do here, and extremely proud of why we’re doing it.” But the half-hearted olive branch never materialized, and the September 11, 2001, attacks foreclosed the idea of an open-door policy for the foreseeable future.
With Huxsoll in control, Plum Island finally appeared to be in capable hands, under the leadership of this tested, experienced ex-military commander. That is, until one hears the island’s previous directors talk about him. “Dave Huxsoll is a really good guy,” says Dr. Breeze. “But he doesn’t have the power that I did. The bean counters are running that in a way that actually isn’t the right way to do it. . . .” And Dr. Callis, in a rare statement about Plum Island leadership, admitted, “Huxsoll is there just because the USDA thinks it can upgrade [to biosafety level four].”
What about Plum Island itself and anthrax? The USDA made it a priority after the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001 to state repeatedly that it did not have and never had anthrax on Plum Island. If that really is true, it is quite curious that the FBI’s lie detector tests for scientists suspected of the anthrax attacks included these three questions:
• Have you ever been to Plum Island?
• Do you know anybody who works at Plum Island?
• What do they do there?
As noted earlier, the Army’s housewarming gift to the USDA upon bequeathing Plum Island in 1954 was 131 strains of germs, including 12 vials of “N,” the now-declassified code name for the original weapons grade anthrax designed by Plum Island founding father Dr. Hagan. If Plum Island never worked on anthrax or kept it in its freezers, then the USDA must explain when the code name “N” changed from anthrax to another germ. And if there is no anthrax on Plum Island, the USDA has both the FBI and its own founding fathers fooled.
The New York Times revealed in late 1999 that the USDA was quietly upgrading Plum Island from a biosafety level three to a biosafety level four laboratory. The story provoked a howl of protest from Long Island’s east end communities. The structural difference between BSL-3 and -4 is minimal—face respirators are worn while working with “hot” agents in a level three facility, while level four requires full-body spacesuits. Here’s the important difference: the level four germs. Once upgraded, Plum Island joins charter members CDC and Fort Detrick in an exclusive club whose membership benefits include working with agents, lethal ones that have no vaccine and no cure. These include mad cow disease, the Nipah pig virus (that killed a million pigs and 265 people in Malaysia in 1999), and the Ebola, Marburg, and Machupo hemorrhagic fever viruses (all related to Rift Valley fever virus). Biosafety level distinctions, however, never deterred Plum Island research in the past. For example, Rift Valley fever virus and glanders bacteria are classified borderline germs, lying between biosafety levels three and four. Both are biological warfare agents and have been studied intensively at Plum Island. Some literature classifies glanders, the bacteria used by Germany in World War I, as level three, yet a federal government document relating to 1989 Plum Island research is titled “Biosafety for Animal Rooms with Glanders—Biosafety Level 4.”
Despite the USDA’s secret efforts, Congressman Mike Forbes, Hochbrueckner’s successor, who had eyed Plum Island skeptically since his surprise visit with Karl Grossman, intervened and killed the BSL upgrade line item in the 2001 federal budget. For the first time, the local community triumphed over the USDA’s designs for Plum Island. The USDA again pushed to upgrade Plum Island after September 11, 2001, but it has been fought off thus far by Forbes’s two successors.
When news of the BSL-4 upgrade came out on the heels of the 1999 West Nile virus outbreak, former employees and local environmental groups bombarded local officials—including New York State Assemblywoman Patricia Acampora—with phone calls. Acampora grew up on Long Island knowing little about Plum Island. “When you take the ferry over to mainland Connecticut, you see this big island,” she says. “All the other islands out there are small and don’t have much to them. Then you wonder, ‘Wait, what are those buildings over there?’”
In her five years on the job, Acampora had never concerned herself with Plum Island. Now, resolving to take the bull by the horns, she formed a task force to address the upgrade and all the strange things she was hearing. “Even though it’s federal property, if something awful happens there, it affects the people of my district, no doubt about it. I had to speak out.” Rather than a soapbox for disgruntled workers or a USDA admiration society, this would be, for the first time, a serious and inclusive effort to get real answers. It took political courage to do it, because the issue cut both ways. Many voters called to berate and accuse her of trying to shut the island down. “ ‘Look, I couldn’t shut the place down if I tried,’ ” she remembers telling them. “ ‘I only want to start communicating. That’s what we’re trying to do here.’ ”
Acampora drafted political leaders, former scientists, engineers, USDA officials, New York State environmental officials, and county health officials. Seeking to legitimize her efforts with Plum Island officials, Acampora included experts like former Chief Engineer Merlon Wiggin and the respected former Plum Island scientist Dr. Carol House. “When you are dealing with the scientific community, right away they always get defensive,” Acampora says. “They feel that no one but them can understand their work. Now I may not be a scientist, but I’m no dummy either.”
The plan, she says, was to “make them talk to us about what was going on there.” The group had five marathon-length meetings in which the USDA was “pummeled” with questions, with the assemblywoman leading the charge. “I asked them point-blank, ‘Can you tell me that you have a fail-safe facility?’ ‘Can you tell me that nothing can go wrong, and that nothing has ever gone wrong?’ And they didn’t want to answer these questions.” Plum Island’s leadership still seemed unwilling to come clean. Dr. Huxsoll sent the task force a letter stating that unlike his predecessors, he would be open to communication. “And that’s the last we heard from him,” says Acampora. Huxsoll also failed to appear at a March 2001 community meeting, prompting one politician on the committee to exclaim, “I am stunned. . . . It’s these types of actions that have created this atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion. . . .”
Dr. Breeze hovered over the proceedings, and attended meetings here and there. “I spoke to him, too,” says Acampora, referring to Breeze. “They’re all the same.” Except for another former director. Coming out of retirement to lend a hand was Dr. Jerry Callis, who was “very helpful” to Acampora and helped explain the science to the task force. At one open meeting, a boisterous crowd of detractors and supporters quieted as the white-haired Callis slowly rose from the back of the audience to speak. “I plead for your understanding,” he began in low, measured tones. “These discussions remind me of 1953, the year I moved here. I wasn’t welcome back then. I had my career here. . . . It was a very fine career.” Then he spoke to the issues at hand. “We all make mistakes . . . we make poor decisions. All of us are becoming more aware about what we need to do to protect the environment. We can do dangerous work and protect the public. I can’t address the need to improve the facility [to BSL-4], but they [the USDA] will listen to your concerns.”
One of the few task force members supporting the upgrade, Greenport mayor David Kapell seemed “practically ecstatic about the prospects for local development,” in the words of the New York Times. “There’s always a concern,” he told a reporter, “but it’s got to be considered in light of the 50 years of history of a safe operation....I have faith in the government.” The Times noted that as a real estate broker, the mayor had already sold at least half a dozen homes to Plum Island scientists over the years and stood to sell many more after an upgrade.
Plum Island, in a rare twist, then produced some good news. In April 2001, Plum Island’s Dr. Fred Brown developed a “rapid test” that shrank the testing time for diagnosing foot-and-mouth disease virus from two days to ninety minutes. “The rapid test we developed is the most important discovery in fifty years,” adds Dr. Breeze. The test is linked to an Internet based epidemic management system in real time. “I’m working on this with the military—all kinds of people immediately start to work on the problem, and that completely changes what’s possible.” Said USDA spokeswoman Sandy Miller Hays, “This is not a magic bullet.” But it’s a commendable stride in the right direction, the kind of positive output the public would expect from Plum Island’s animal disease research.
Hamptons-area environmentalist Robert DeLuca wasn’t impressed. “Short of being on a geological fault,” he said of the Plum Island upgrade, “I don’t think you could find a worse place” for the laboratory. Thor Hansen, a World War II naval officer, stood up and said he’d been through three typhoons in the South Pacific and he knew rough weather better than anyone. In his opinion, the east end of Long Island had plenty of it and he was deeply troubled by the laboratory’s location in the middle of a hurricane path.
“What disturbs me,” wrote a state senator on the task force, “is the consistent flow of misinformation....I feel that some of the misinformation borders on a cover-up. It shakes the foundation of our very form of government.” Committee member Dr. Carol House witnessed an all-too familiar routine. “I think the task force went a long way. But Plum Island didn’t help themselves on that committee. They were caught up constantly. The problem was that there was no continuity in leadership, so no one in management—those answering the questions—knew the answers. . . .”
One comment in particular stoked the community’s ire, according to reporter Karl Grossman. USDA official Wilda Martinez told the task force, “We’ll listen to you and the community. But in the end, the federal government will decide what to do upon its own and move forward.” They did just that. Despite the community’s uproar, Dr. Huxsoll went ahead with a Request for Proposals to construct a $125 million laboratory renovation. The USDA, of course, said the largest renovation in Plum Island history had nothing to do with a BSL-4 upgrade.
The aggressive task force gained some ground in other ways. They successfully lobbied the USDA to remove sensitive material available on its Internet site, like maps and charts of the laboratories. Yet other dangerous items still remained on-line, waiting to be preyed upon.2
2 Conducting Internet research for this book, I uncovered many schematic and other diagrams of Plum Island available on-line, including a cache of sketches and documentation from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from a study they conducted of Plum Island in the early 1990s. Ancillary to a free and democratic society, this and much other material is available on the Internet, including a virtual how-to guide published in 2000 by virus hunter Dr. C. J. Peters, titled “Are Hemorrhagic Fever Viruses Practical Agents for Biological Terrorism?” It reports the kill ratios of various quantities of Rift Valley fever virus, Marburg virus, yellow fever virus, and anthrax spores.
The task force uncovered another disturbing finding. The USDA, after all these years—and after all the EPA environmental law violations—still had stockpiled hazardous waste and still flushed contaminated sewage into area waters. Unable to order in the EPA as a state official, Acampora turned instead to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) for help. A July 2000 DEC inspection report uncovered what it called “very troubling” environmental pollution on Plum Island, including solid waste, incinerator, hazardous waste, and sewage discharge violations— the same multiple infractions for which the EPA had cited Plum Island a decade ago. Not surprisingly, the USDA hadn’t bothered to ameliorate the mess. New York State Attorney General Dennis Vacco filed a lawsuit against Plum Island, and Vacco’s spokesman scolded Plum Island: “If the federal government doesn’t follow environmental rules, who does?” In a June 2001 court-approved consent order, the USDA admitted violating three sewage effluent limitations. It exceeded permitted discharge by over 39,000 gallons daily and flushed out high fecal coliform levels (the dangerous barometer of other toxic animal viruses and bacteria) to the tune of 60,000 gallons a day. Once again, Plum Island agreed to stop fouling the water. Six months later, not much had changed. In December 2002, the National Resources Defense Council listed Plum Island second on its “Dirty Dozen” roll of the twelve biggest polluters in New Jersey and New York.
How does Plum Island get away with it time and again, and for so long? For one, as mentioned earlier, until 1991 Plum Island was an extremely close-knit family of workers, hailing from a band of sleepy colonial-era villages that preferred tranquillity to making trouble. “Loose lips sink ships,” went the philosophy. Another reason lies with its harmless-sounding, and patently misleading, name: “The Plum Island Animal Disease Center.” The 1999 West Nile virus outbreak and the 2001 anthrax attacks showed the public that humans caught animal diseases, too—and died from them. The USDA presented a formidable barrier of secrecy that newspaper and television reporters—all with ephemeral attention spans—could never fully cross. Whenever its culpability was called into question—which was more often than not—the USDA could always hide behind its shield of government secrecy and national security, no matter how insecure its facilities were. Finally, and perhaps most important, as its own island it enjoys total freedom, and no public accountability. A arm of the federal government, Plum Island has no constituents, or media, or shareholders to report to. And short of a congressional law or presidential executive order, no one can stop it.
The USDA fancies calling Plum Island “The Alcatraz of Animal Disease.” This is terribly misleading. Unlike the prisoners of Alcatraz, live germs on Plum Island have made it out alive on two proven occasions, from each of the island’s two laboratory buildings. And those are the known outbreaks; many more no doubt escaped detection. Employees have been infected with animal germs, and some have become violently and permanently ill. The USDA prefers to shrug its shoulders and demand impossible proof. Plum Island has proven to be an environmental catastrophe and a workplace safety nightmare, chronicled on multiple occasions by its own sister government agencies, the EPA and OSHA. Given the direct facts and circumstantial evidence, the insidious connections between Plum Island and the initial outbreaks of three infectious diseases—West Nile fever in 1999, Lyme disease in 1975, and Dutch duck plague in 1967—are far too coincidental to be dismissed. Liaisons between Plum Island and a top Nazi germ warfare scientist smuggled into the United States under a top secret military program add a new slate of questions to the already murky formative years of joint USDA-Army biological warfare activities there. The most burning revelations lie in the consistently ineffective biological security measures, which let unknown viruses and bacteria find their way through supposed decontamination filters and systems and into the air and local waters to this day.
All of this should be terrifying science fiction, but it’s worse. Because it’s all real.
Clearly, Plum Island is no CDC or Fort Detrick. Except in one important way. Plum Island—funded and run more like a small town high school biology lab than a high-containment virus laboratory—works on germs as deadly as the other two: microbes that cause AIDS, Rift Valley fever, polio, West Nile fever, Japanese encephalitis, swine flu, mad cow disease, to name a few, and countless others in Plum Island freezers (not to mention anthrax).
Looking at the 1956 vintage Lab 101 in full operation, and viewing Plum Island’s past to see its future, one thing is clear. Alcatraz is indeed a misleading comparison.
Where and why did it go wrong?
Money. Power. Duplicity. Politics. Glory. All had a hand in shaping this twisted animal kingdom. Political support for Plum Island ran from nonexistent to hotly antagonistic to almost laughable. From U.S. Senators Ives and Lehman’s 1952 desire for public hearings on the lab’s location, to a local congressman’s plea to choose an island elsewhere, to Congressman Forbes’s 1995 successful fight to halt the controversial BSL-4 upgrade— federal officials have viewed Plum Island as a pariah. Other than nuclear waste depots, Plum Island may be the only federal facility in America where locally elected federal officials flatly refuse to lend any support. Other facilities, like the nearby Groton nuclear submarine base, just across 228 Michael Christopher Carroll the Long Island Sound in Connecticut, can count on support from their congressmen and senators because of their boost to the local economies and the steady jobs they provide. Not so on Plum Island, where officials vacillate between investigating it (or pretending to) and ignoring it. The community never wanted the laboratory there to begin with, and though many locals—whose sons and daughters and brothers and sisters worked there— buried the proverbial hatchet, the politicians kept theirs in an easy-to-reach place. Had the USDA and Army established their labs in locales where the community and its political leadership actually supported it, like Maine, or Montana, or Washington State, or on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, it would have been different. But they didn’t. They plunked a biological warfare lab down in a populated region that begged them, “Please. Don’t put it here. Not in my backyard.” Right on the edge of the largest population center in the United States.
When the Army left in 1954, it took its deep pockets and congressional war-hawk caucus with it. Left with no funding from the military complex and zero political support, Plum Island found itself, literally and metaphorically, out at sea, forever swimming in the red with never enough money to meet its skeletal budget. It became a forgotten orphan in an obscure research division of a federal agency that had its priorities—and political supporters— based far away from New York, nestled deep within the farmbelt. Contrast this with the Ames federal laboratory (the USDA’s domestic disease version of Plum Island), always championed by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who also happens to be the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Agriculture Committee. During its half-century of existence, Plum Island has never had a Tom Harkin. But it sorely needed one.
Plum Island endures a vicious cycle of bottom-of-the-barrel annual appropriations that leads to decisions that cut corners and sacrifice safety and security. In the 1970s and 1980s, Plum Island’s engineering and plant management department cited “insufficient personnel” as the prime reason for its lack of preventative maintenance, proper training, and multiple containment leaks riddling Lab 101’s roof. In the 1990s, the private contractor Burns & Roe cited financial woes when it refused to staff the sewage decontamination plant twenty-four hours a day, even after a massive toxic spill occurred. Funding issues at Plum Island have not only impaired its performance, but have adversely affected the island’s dated, crumbling infrastructure as well.
These types of priority decisions—untenable choices between science and biological safety—made each year on Plum Island are never forced onto Fort Detrick or CDC. The CDC received approximately $2 billion from Congress in 1998. In that year, the Fort Detrick laboratories received $25 million and millions more in in-kind support from the Army. Plum Island skimped by on about $12 million. It appears that the 2004 Plum Island budget, now under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), will be approximately $16 million. Do animal and zoonotic science and health just not rate? Is it poorly understood or not explained well enough, compared to purely human health priorities? Is there no recognition of the susceptibility of humans to animal diseases accidentally or intentionally released on the population?
When residents protest Plum Island’s geographic location as unfit, the USDA time and again points to the CDC. USDA officials say the CDC has been operating safely for years in downtown Atlanta—“CDC is immediately adjacent to a child care center in a very highly populated city,” in the words of one official. By inference then, Plum Island, off the mainland in a less populated, immediate geographical area, should be acceptable. However, the USDA overlooks three important realities. For starters, Plum Island conducts its business entirely by itself on a private island off-limits to the public, where there is no opportunity for the slightest oversight of its activities, inside or outside the laboratory. The CDC’s very location in downtown Atlanta under the public’s watchful gaze keeps it honest, while Plum Island—out of sight, out of mind—is afforded ample opportunity for liberties when it comes to safety. Countless safety and security breaches go unnoticed every day because no one is watching. Second, what is now known about the USDA’s privately contracted activities on Plum Island— poor biological safety and island security, a reprehensible attitude toward workplace safety, and a lengthy track record of polluting the environment—speaks for itself. Past events prove the USDA to be an unfit steward of the island’s laboratories, bequeathed to it by the Army half a century ago. Finally, Plum Island is a Third World republic compared to the CDC and Fort Detrick in funding, in scientific talent, and in biological safety expertise. Neither of the other institutions has had a germ outbreak; Plum Island has had two verified outbreaks. Neither of them has been assailed for violations of environmental and workplace safety laws; Plum Island has repeatedly run afoul of such important laws.
The Plum Island task force surveyed the island’s security, and found two unarmed guards. “A bunch of teenagers were over there—just before September 11th—and Plum Island officials didn’t even know it,” remembers Acampora. “The kids came back and told us they went onto the island.” Acampora, a Republican, teamed up with Democrat U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer to issue a bipartisan call for the federal government to re-federalize Plum Island. “The federal government is the only agency that has the expertise and manpower to ensure that Plum Island will be monitored by electric sensors and patrolled by boats and helicopters,” said Acampora. The time for talk was over. “The health, safety, and welfare of our community and the nation are at stake, and we will prevail.” But their plaintive calls fell upon deaf ears. As of this writing, the only change the USDA has made is arming the two private security guards, one at Orient Point and the other on the island, who secure the entire facility. DHS claims to have added some security cameras. As for the other critical island functions? “I think federal oversight has to be there,” Acampora says. “At least federal background checks to ensure we have the right people there, like at the airports.”
The task force had tried in vain to bring accountability to Plum Island, and disbanded after the BSL-4 upgrade was stopped. While the task force remained active, management placed people at the Orient Point ferry dock to check identification badges, just like they had when the island opened for business in the 1950s. But Acampora found the ID check gone by January 2002. It had all been for show. “There we go again,” she says. “They need to have someone with their thumb on them. I don’t really think it’s my job, but I helped get the ball rolling.” If it’s not the local assemblywoman’s job, then somebody else needs to mind the store where Plum Island is concerned—which is the strongest argument yet for moving the USDA’s facility from the creaky old virus laboratory onto a bustling, conspicuous downtown street on the mainland.
THE USDA’S MAGIC TOUCH
You may live three miles, three hundred miles, or even three thousand miles from Plum Island. In every case, the same central question may be asked: would you want Plum Island in your backyard? Remember—if it isn’t in your vicinity, what happens there still has the potential to reverberate throughout the nation: the 1979 meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania is proof of that.
Plum Island’s future has never appeared more nebulous. As part of the emergency appropriation doled out in the wake of September 11, 2001, the USDA received $23 million for Plum Island, which is less than half of what the Ames, Iowa, domestic-germ laboratory received. Despite the smaller appropriation, the USDA maintains the funds are solely for implementation of security improvements—good news, because that kind of money can buy a lot of new air filters, armed security guards, and marine patrols.
In 2002, the Bush administration began the largest reorganization of the federal government since President Truman formed the National Military Establishment in 1947. The new federal reshuffling moved two federal laboratories into a new Department of Homeland Security: the small Environmental Measurements Laboratory in lower Manhattan, which protects against potential radiological and nuclear events, and Plum Island.
There remains speculation that the homeland security funds and the reorganization were a mere cover to upgrade the lab to BSL-4. New York’s junior U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton, raised concerns that the upgrade will allow Plum Island to research deadlier germs and endanger millions of New Yorkers. Yet Plum Island already works on deadly germs that pose genuine dangers. Of course, there are a few supporters of an upgrade. “Plum ought to be the leading site in the country for animal disease defense against these foreign threats—accidental or deliberate—it should be the leading lab,” huffs Dr. Roger Breeze. “If the county doesn’t want us to have a BSL-4 laboratory, we won’t have the defense, that’s fine by me—I just need to get on with my business.” Breeze envisions the new improved Plum Island boasting “ten times as many scientists than are there right now.”
Plum Island officially moved into the new Department of Homeland Security on June 1, 2003. At the time of this writing, Dr. Huxsoll packed up and left, and there is no director in place on Plum Island. All media or public inquiries about the island are referred to the DHS public relations office in Washington. The homeland security legislation included a provision that the president must notify Congress 180 days prior to any change in the island’s biosafety level. The clause is eerily reminiscent of the 1952 Plum Island public hearings provision inserted by Senators Lehman and Ives— and we know how that one turned out. It’s all too clear from the law that once 180 days expire, Plum Island may be upgraded to biosafety level four at the whim of the federal government, no matter how strongly the people and their elected representatives protest.
In March 2003, Plum Island Assistant Director Carlos Santoyo told the Associated Press that the transfer of Plum Island from USDA to Homeland Security would be little more than a “paper transfer.” Nonetheless, moving Plum Island out of the hands of the USDA and into the DHS might raise the island’s profile and could get it the funding it so desperately needs. Throwing money at the problem won’t solve it, but in this case, spending large sums reasonably and responsibly may be the only way to resuscitate the moribund island. Knocking down Lab 101 and building a modern containment facility from scratch would seem to be a good start, but a wrecking ball may not be possible. Lab 101 has become so virus-ridden over the years it may have to be fumigated, locked up, and mothballed, like its older brother, the ghostly Lab 257, and its first cousin at Fort Detrick, the boarded-up 1950s-era “Anthrax Hotel.”
There is one reason above all why transferring Plum Island from the USDA to the DHS might be the best thing that ever happened to Plum Island and its threatened environs: the USDA itself.
Plum Island has taught us that veterinarians aren’t all of the Dr. Dolittle variety, and that there’s plenty more to the United States Department of Agriculture than USDA Grade-A eggs and the food pyramid (or, if you’re a traditionalist, the four food groups). Most people know that agriculture relates to a most basic human need: food. But beyond that, what exactly is agriculture? Traditionally defined as the science of crop and livestock production, it represents a sea change in humanity—from that of primitive hunter-gatherer to organized planter and rancher. This science is relatively brand new; a study in 1968 noted that agriculture has been practiced for less than 1 percent of human history. Over the last half-century, the USDA has emerged as its greatest power and tireless promoter, taking modern science methodologies and applying them to foods grown and raised, processed, and shipped into the American marketplace.
In a postwar fervor that can best be seen as a scientific “Manifest Destiny,” the aggies aided and abetted the demise of the family farm in favor of agribusiness, trading localized production for the largest units of mass food production obtainable. Like a “boiler room” stockbroker, American agriculture has become enslaved to the incessant march of increasing numbers.
In 1976, the average U.S. farmworker fed fifty-two mouths, while the Russian worker fed only seven; livestock production per animal was up 130 percent from the previous fifty years. That was a quarter-century ago—since then, production has grown exponentially.
The USDA has accomplished this growth through proselytizing the new religion of science with an uncanny blind faith, ignoring any fallout over the last half-century. It claimed with certainty that its chemical DDT would not contaminate the wildlife and marine ecosystem. Thanks in large part to Rachel Carson, the USDA now admits it does.
The USDA championed chemical pesticides—scientifically engineered to quell insects that threatened exponential agricultural growth—and maintained they were food-friendly. But now, it grudgingly admits the chemicals are infused into the food products people eat, and wreak havoc upon wildlife.
The USDA said that fertilizer nitrates used on large farms would increase crop yields, and they would never reach groundwater aquifers. Today, the USDA admits that nitrates have seeped into and blighted potable water supplies in dangerous concentrations.
The USDA promoted dieldrin—a compound twenty times more toxic than DDT—to eliminate the Argentinean fire ant in a $156 million federal crop spraying program. Over time, the fire ant grew more resistant to pesticides and tripled its original geographic range. Says Smithsonian historian Pete Daniel, “The lost war against the fire ants should have been a cautionary, a warning against hubris and unintended consequences. Instead, it typified a mind-set that substituted faith in science and bureaucratic expertise for common sense.”
The USDA has always denied it had anything to do with biological warfare on Plum Island, but such assertions ring hollow. There is its early germ warfare work for the Army in the 1950s, and the joint USDA-Army work on the Rift Valley fever virus in the 1970s and 1980s. A July 13, 1992, Plum Island visitors’ manifest lists fourteen visiting Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army, and Pentagon officials. According to the document, the purpose of the visit was “to meet with Plum Island staff regarding biological warfare.” The visitors were part of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency reviewing the dual-use capabilities of the facility.
The Soviet Union didn’t buy the USDA line. Former Soviet biowarrior Dr. Ken Alibek wrote in his 1999 book Biohazard that Plum Island “had figured in our intelligence reports for years. It was used during the war to test biological agents.” I ask Alibek to explain those reports about Plum Island. “We had these ‘Special Information Reports’ that came from KGB and GRU [Soviet military intelligence] that described Plum Island, Fort Detrick, and Dugway Proving Ground as biological warfare sites.
“There’s no question that Plum Island was a threat—you know, at that time—I cannot even translate for you in Russian how ‘Plum Island’ would sound. Today I know what a ‘plum’ is and what ‘island’ is, but then,” he says, laughing, thinking of the fear the strange-sounding name instilled. “Someone had told me they worked in exotic livestock diseases, foot-and mouth virus and such.” As part of a 1994 arms agreement brokered between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the United States, each side was permitted to choose three suspected germ warfare sites for full inspection. When the Russian team arrived in February 1994, they visited their first two choices while aboard Air Force Two: Vigo and a Pfizer pharmaceutical plant in Groton, Connecticut.3 Then the team announced their third and final snap inspection: Plum Island. Dr. Breeze ventures a guess on why they chose Plum Island out of all places in the United States. “It used to be a military base with all these old underground bunkers, right across [the Long Island Sound] from a nuclear submarine base. We were doing a lot of reconstruction, and I think they looked at their satellite photographs and saw all this construction going on.”
3 Vigo was a long-abandoned World War II–era Army germ weapons plant in Terre Haute, Indiana, that had since been sold to Pfizer.
Upon arriving, the Russians first demanded a tour through the Army bunkers, searching in vain for a trapdoor leading to an underground complex. Then they walked around Lab 101, blueprints in hand, pointing and insisting to be shown the basement, except that the portion of 101 they were interested in didn’t have one. The plans showed the area as an “unexcavated” crawl space, yet the Russians refused to believe it. It was plainly apparent to the Plum Island staff that not all the Russians sniffing around were scientists. Though Dr. Alibek defected two years earlier, he confirms that inspection team members Grigoriy Shcherbakov and Aleksey Stepanov were two of his subordinates working on weaponizing genetically engineered anthrax. Dr. Carol House recalls, “A couple of them were green-beret types, who would take anybody out without thinking twice, and there were some intelligence agents, too. It wasn’t well hidden.”
Then there was a question-and-answer session on the viruses being studied there. Team leader Oleg Ignatiev, a short man with a low, booming voice, told Newsday reporter John McDonald afterward, “We find this is a very large center. It does very important work—but we have to work on it and think it over before reaching a conclusion.” Days after the Russians returned home, the newspaper Izvestiya reported that the United States was in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.
According to Alibek, the violation was mutual. The Soviet Union had a biological warfare program against livestock, code-named “Ecology,” that boasted thousands of scientists in multiple facilities. One Ecology-designed weapon he heard being discussed was called R-40. “Whether it was some new fever or new foot-and-mouth disease virus, I don’t know. What was interesting is that this weapon agent was cultivated in cattle; then, when the virus concentration was high, they bled them and made weapons from cattle blood.” Primitive science, but deadly.
The Soviet threat remains strong. Many of the program’s scientists, faced with starvation or working for rogue nations, chose the latter. And to this day, Russia still has three “former” biological warfare facilities that continue to be off-limits to the West. “Closed,” says Dr. Alibek in his gruff Russian accent. “Top secret—and nobody knows what they do behind those closed doors.” The former biowarrior now works for a Virginia biotech company with Pentagon contracts, developing defenses against the recombinant DNA germs he helped create, such as an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax. He’s even visited Dr. Huxsoll on Plum Island to interest the USDA in some business. Dr. Alibek says of Plum Island, “It’s a struggling facility trying to find adequate funding. This is what I know.”
The catastrophes at Plum Island did not occur in a vacuum. The single minded zeal of the USDA’s science mantra ends in wreckage far and wide. What happens when the blind pursuit of science is taken too far? When scientific glory is pursued for glory’s sake? In Plum Island’s case, the not-so-invisible hand of government prioritizes an abundance of food(really the livestock from which food is derived) ahead of its human workforce and the public health. Plum Island runs at the sufferance of deep pocketed agribusiness. One political scientist put the USDA’s thinking in no uncertain terms. “Critics inside the establishment are not appreciated, and outside criticism that cannot be dismissed as malicious, romantic, or uninformed is viewed as trivial in the context of agriculture’s record of increased food production.” There are no signs that DHS will change this modus operandi.
Then there is the question of the animals themselves. Plum Island has sacrificed hundreds of thousands of them, in all shapes and sizes, in an ambitious effort to tame foreign animal germs. Yet fifty years later, there is still no cure or silver-bullet vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease virus— Plum Island’s cause célèbre—or any of the other germs studied there. Is all this animal carnage necessary? If the modest success of the past is a barometer of future successes, productivity at Plum Island needs to be addressed.
The best solution may be not to rebuild on Plum Island, but to pack up instead and leave the mess behind. In this case, the USDA and DHS should consult those communities in Maine, Montana, Washington, and the Virgin Islands that actually wanted the lab during the first go-around in the 1950s. Generations from now, after the germs have long subsided, Suffolk County can establish that magnificent park preserve it wanted to build on Plum Island before the Army canceled its sale of the island.[Yet somehow the replacement finds it's way to the very heartland of the country in Manhattan Kansas DC]
In its final battle, Pat Acampora’s task force faced down mad cow disease. At an early morning meeting in Acampora’s office, with Dr. Breeze present, USDA officials were asked if Plum Island had ever studied bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. This animal infection’s human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, gnaws away at brain tissue and has a 100 percent mortality rate.4 The Plum Island officials told the group they had not worked on mad cow and weren’t equipped to study it. But a few months later, when 255 sheep in Vermont were suspected of contracting mad cow, the USDA made plans to ship the carcasses to Plum Island for necropsy, tissue and blood samples, and incineration. Tipped off of the plan, Acampora went livid. When she confronted Plum Island about it, the USDA told her, “Well, the situation has changed.” “They don’t even have a state permit for their incinerator!” she roared, and threatened a showdown: if they carted the sheep carcasses through Manhattan or Connecticut onto Long Island soil, she would get the police in Nassau and Suffolk counties to barricade the roads.
4 Mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are caused not by live germs, but inanimate “prions,” free floating snippets of infectious DNA material that lack the structure that characterize viruses and bacteria. More resilient than any known germ, they resist the decontaminating processes of steam autoclaving and even incineration. Little is known about prions, but they are known to be extremely dangerous to animal and human life.
Fearing a public relations debacle with national implications, the USDA backed off, and trucked its infected sheep refuse to the Ames, Iowa, laboratory. “It became such a hassle, they decided not to do it,” Acampora recalls with modesty; the truth is, she was the hassle. So many others— politicians, media, community groups—had failed over the years in trying to fight Plum Island. Finally, the task force had won a battle. It was a start.5
5 Later, the USDA disclosed that tissue samples from the infected sheep had been sent previously to Plum Island and, unknown to the task force and the local community, were used in tests there.
“Look at our space shuttle,” Acampora says. “We spent billions of dollars on the space mission, hundreds of engineers, technicians, scientists, and safety experts to make sure the flight was fail-safe. We watched in awe. We clapped. And then it exploded in horror. That’s what I’m worried about.” Even to this day, while other local officials have accepted tour invitations, the feisty assemblywoman won’t go to Plum Island. Why is that? “It’s really a simple reason,” she laughs. “They say that when you go there, you have to scrub down, and get all washed up. And no one’s going to see my hair wet.” One gets the impression her fears go far beyond a bad hair day. “There have been a lot of mishaps out there,” she says, “and let’s face it— Long Island has a lot of wind, and should something happen there, and the wind’s blowing in the wrong direction, that could be pretty problematic.
“When you are a mile off the coast of a heavily populated area, an area for which we have no real evacuation, I have a concern.” Indeed, there is only one arterial road off the North Fork and one out of the Hamptons, spilling into the heart of Long Island. From there, Long Island’s 7.2 million people bottleneck into ten narrow bridges and tunnels that themselves empty into the cluttered congestion of New York City, where 11 million more people reside.6 Indeed, Plum Island lies on the periphery of the largest population center in the United States.
6 As of 2000, the island of Long Island holds 2.6 million people in Nassau and Suffolk counties, 2.2 million in Queens, and 2.4 million in Brooklyn.
“You know, a lot of people really don’t know Plum Island even exists,”
Acampora muses as her smile fades to a smirk. “People move here from
New York City, they come here, play here—and they have no idea what’s
going on one mile off the coast.”
Whether the nation’s exotic animal disease laboratory should remain on Plum Island remains the central question. “When the Manhattan Project was developed during World War II,” Karl Grossman points out, “they selected places that would be safe. The Manhattan Project laboratories were inland, at places like Oak Ridge in Tennessee, and Los Alamos. If it was a small island in the Pacific doing very sensitive research, through radar you could make sure no vessels came within a certain distance. But Plum Island... man.” Grossman lets out a long sigh. “Plum Gut on a summer day is a main street for boaters and fishermen. If they aren’t moving in, they are moving out. You can’t screen [marine traffic] until they are onshore. There is a war consciousness today—is it appropriate to have [the laboratory] on an island that is jutting out there in the Atlantic, with lots of traffic?”
Can Plum Island’s facilities be moved to the mainland, like the National Academy of Sciences urged back in 1983? Asked this question in his Plum Island office, Dr. Huxsoll says, “With the biocontainment technology today, you can probably put this anywhere. But the stakeholders are more comfortable with it being there because of the geographic location.” Yes, the “stakeholders”—a fancy euphemism for the $100 billion agribusiness empire that claims this research is essential, but won’t spend a dollar of its own money to do it itself. “The reason Plum Island survives today is money,” says ex–union chief Ed Hollreiser. “The cattlemen and pig and poultry farmers want it continued.”
“You could put it in the middle of New York City and obtain the right biosecurity,” Huxsoll asserts. Sounds crazy, but he’s right. While it sounds ironic, the work is safest not on an island but right next door, like the CDC in Atlanta, where tens of thousands of people mill past it each day. Why? Because that kind of closeness demands (and in the case of the CDC, enjoys) the most stringent protocols of safety possible. If past history has taught us any lessons, it’s that Plum Island desperately needs a babysitter.
If Plum Island should go, there will be yet another accompanying consequence, though perhaps not as weighty as national and regional safety and security—the demise of a local economy. Dr. Breeze’s ploy to split the workforce between New York and Connecticut crippled a good part of the east end tax base, and far fewer federal dollars were spent locally. With the departure of those skilled and professional positions remaining on Plum Island, the “brain drain” of educated folks will continue, leaving behind empty nesters and dwindling farm families.
The government closed Lab 257 for good in the spring of 1995. They cited the building’s outdated biocontainment facilities and crumbling old age—eighty-four strenuous years of service under its belt, forty-one of them as a exotic germ laboratory—as reasons for the shutdown. All of Lab 257’s laboratory operations were consolidated within the other research facility, Lab 101 on the island’s northwest shore.
Although scheduled to be fully decontaminated and demolished in 1996, Lab 257 still stands today, rotting from weathered decay, harboring who knows what deep within. On one of my voyages to Plum Island, I had an opportunity to investigate it up close. It was an eerie, post apocalyptic scene. Corrugated metal plates clamored loudly against the lab’s wall. Scores of rusty pipes sprouted out of the flat tar roof. A lonely two-story skeletal extension was partially connected to the near side of the building, exposing rusted beams. Pipes snaked around the insides, some twisting into air vents, others ending in midair with no connection. Two short, thick pipes rose along the side of the building, like turbines in a ship’s boiler room.
The door to the gatehouse hung open, creaking away in the whistling wind. I carefully inched inside. On the right was a padlocked wooden box marked suggestions. The guard’s desk, straight ahead, was covered with a thick coat of soot. There was a flip calendar on the desk, one page half turned over—paused on January 13, 1995. The clock overhead, stopped dead at 9:12 and some seconds. Leather bound logbooks were piled haphazardly in the middle of the desk, just below the calendar. Sand blown in from the beach was piled in five-inch drifts at the floor’s corners. It was a ghost lab.
Nailed to the door leading into the lab compound were rusted warning signs, stamped biohazard. They were signs reminiscent of Lab 257’s shadowy past.
And a mile away, Lab 101 marched—and continues to march on.
It is dead serious, and we really are at war. They want to get us, they want to get our economy, they want to kill us, they want to make us sick, get us out of the global marketplace and they want us to get out of their part of the world. And they have very few constraints about how they want to go about it.... When people lose their faith in government to protect the food supply, there’s big trouble. This is ice cream for the average terrorist, and it’s something we have to worry about every day here.
When Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood was caught red-handed in Kabul, Afghanistan, with a dossier on Plum Island, Horn’s startling warning became a grim reality.
Tom Ridge, secretary of the DHS, said in June 2003, “I understand completely that Plum Island is the first line of defense in agroterrorism. I mean, that’s where we’re going to see the contaminants. That’s where we’re going to identify the pathogens. . . .” And, said another DHS official, the aim of Plum Island “is not just science, it’s protecting U.S. agriculture from agroterrorism.” If this is what DHS chiefs expect from Plum Island, they may end up shortchanged.
Karl Grossman used to think it was a joke. Always the thorn in Plum Island’s side, he playfully wrote in a 1995 column, “As to what nation has been interested in poisoning America’s pigs and assassinating our chickens, that has been very unclear.” But after September 11, 2001, and revelations of an Iraqi anti-agricultural and antipersonnel germ warfare program, Karl has had a change of heart. “After September 11th, it seems to me—finally— that with these people doing crazy things, that al Qaeda and the Islamic extremist movement attacking food and livestock is a real possibility. We are dealing with a challenging, inventive, and nutty enemy. So the defensive biological warfare mission on Plum Island suddenly has—and I don’t know if it should be on Plum Island, that’s another issue—but the mission itself suddenly has validity.”
While calls to improve homeland defense are focused on airports and biological attacks on people, a ready-made terrorist opportunity lurks elsewhere. A terrorist could use germs targeted at animals, but like Rift Valley fever, the animal viruses could be zoonotic agents that infect animals and people simultaneously. Infecting domestic (and wild) animal populations that act as vectors would spread and amplify the disease in the very same manner that Lyme disease, West Nile virus, and Dutch duck plague spread from the New York area to the rest of the nation in a matter of years. Economically speaking, a non-zoonotic virus—one affecting only animals—directed against domestic livestock would be nearly as damaging.
Though we require it to live, food is a luxury taken for granted in America. For millions of urban, suburban, and exurban dwellers, food comes from the sparkling clean thirty-five-aisle supermarket, or the Friday’s chain bistro in the shopping mall, or the McDonald’s just off the highway exit. Rarely do we ever think about where our food comes from. It’s that ignorance that terrorists will look to exploit. Recent events serve as a harbinger for things that may come.
It would be very easy to destroy the American food supply. In fact, if you wanted to, you could do it all by yourself. I sat down with a veterinarian microbiologist named “Todd Barker” and discussed this possibility. “It’s amazing what lab equipment you can buy on-line,” says Todd. Websites like www.labjunk.com sell old equipment at bargain-basement prices, and from there you can start assembling your very own kitchen laboratory. Over the Internet, you can purchase anaerobic fermenters, a good centrifuge, a pressure cooker, bacterial media, and a milling device. A crude kitchen lab environment will be messy and things tend to spill, so you would want to go to a feed store out west to pick up antibiotics and vaccines meant for cattle. “You’ll get a sore arm and a reaction,” says Todd of the crude animal prophylactics. But it will still protect you while you’re playing mad scientist.
Then you will need a starter germ, and all that takes is some fake letterhead. “You could write someone and say you are a scientist from a phony lab, and you need it to test and make a diagnosis—and you’ll get it. It’s a common courtesy.” If that doesn’t come through, you can always go abroad and obtain viruses like foot-and-mouth disease virus and rinderpest in European and African countries where they are endemic, like Dr. Erich Traub did in Turkey during World War II for SS Reichsführer Himmler. If those two options fail, you can try to follow the Long Island researchers who recently created the first synthetic live virus (polio virus, to be exact): by using genetic recipes available over the Internet and mail-ordering the component gene snippets.
Then you set your target. Modern agribusiness presents the nation’s most vulnerable bioterrorism target. In the last fifteen years, virtually all livestock farms have been vertically integrated. Take swine, for example. There is no national tag system. Pigs go into a sale barn where they mix with thousands of other pigs and then ship out. Every pig that is reared and fattened for slaughter has some one thousand miles of travel on it. They go from Arkansas to North Carolina to Indiana, then to market in Chicago. Over twelve thousand pigs move out of North Carolina a day, and they head out for contract barns in ten different states; if it has to, a pig producer will move pigs two thousand miles to a contract barn with an open slot. Two weeks later, it’s off to twenty-odd swine-producing states. Using sophisticated computer inventory systems, it is no more difficult than Home Depot moving hardware inventory between store locations.
Cattle ranches orchestrate similar movements of “product” through sale barns to large stockyards. A million head will go through sale barns to market in a span of three months. Dairy “farms,” as they are still called, are no different. Comparing today’s dairy industry to his roots growing up on a small dairy farm, Dr. Huxsoll says, “You wouldn’t recognize a single similarity—except maybe the presence of a cow.” Several thousand cows are milked mechanically twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, on a mere forty acres of land. It’s not really a farm anymore. Their milk goes directly to a six-thousand-gallon tanker truck; when the tanker’s full, it pulls away and goes to the dairy processing plant to cool for a while. This is where the vulnerabilities arise. Sixty vehicles drive in and out of those dairy operations every day, bringing in feed, hauling off milk, driving workers to work, you name it. And germs travel extremely well when suspended in milk. Many of the sale barns are wide open places, and only a few have even token security, says Todd. “These operations claim to have real biosecurity, but it’s superficial.” Infiltrating these facilities, then, is not all that difficult.
But Todd has a far easier target for you: a cattle truck. There’s not much biosecurity to a cattle truck sitting at a rest stop, on its way to a contract farm or a sale barn. Your compact rental car can pull right alongside the truck loaded full of animals after the driver steps into the Waffle House for a plate of eggs and cup of coffee. You can walk up to the side of the long open-corral trailer with your test tube of—insert virus of your choice here, say foot-and-mouth disease virus, held in liquid slurry form—uncork it, and swat its contents inside, like a priest anointing his congregation with holy water. On roughly the seventh day, results should materialize.
Your macabre blessing, unleashed on a truckload of cattle, just created a wide-scale food shortage and in so doing, proceeds to tank over one-tenth of America’s total economic output.1 You’ve sent America a brutal reminder of where its abundant food comes from, and created national mass hysteria in the process. Says Dr. Huxsoll, “If you had a major agricultural catastrophe, you’d see the disappearance of a lot of family farms and the disappearance of a lot of small rural communities.”
1 The American livestock industry makes up 13.3 percent of the entire U.S. gross domestic product, accounting for $100 billion in sales every year
Attacking the American food supply is the simplest form of biological warfare available to a terrorist. United States agriculture is vertically integrated, accessible, and concentrated. The fact that American livestock has been fortunate enough to be disease-free has a downside. Not being needed, vaccines aren’t widely used, making herds extremely susceptible to infectious foreign germs. And because of the high level of animal intermingling and herd combination, recombination, and consolidation, there’s no way an infection can be limited to an isolated occurrence, and there’s no way it can be traced. “We’re such a wide-open target, it’s just unbelievable,” Todd laments. “Because we’re so damn incredibly efficient. Agribusinesses move pigs like Wal-Mart moves toilet paper and motor oil.” There’s significantly less bioprotection in place for animals than there is for humans; and there’s no expensive research and development, mass production, or bomb delivery device prerequisites either. A kitchen laboratory and chemistry textbook would suffice. If left unguarded, we won’t know what hit us until that animal truck strewn with disease begets millions of hungry and panicked Americans scouring empty supermarket shelves coast to coast.
The worst part of this scenario is that it pales in comparison to what the al Qaeda terrorist network or a well-trained scientist-cum-terrorist already has in mind, waiting for the right moment to unleash upon an unsuspecting—and strikingly vulnerable—America.
In August 2002, CNN broadcast excerpts from al Qaeda videotapes showing three tests of a white oozing liquid being unleashed on Labradors, romping around in a closed test room. On film, the trapped dogs quickly turn dour. They begin to yelp and writhe in pain and go on to suffer agonizing deaths from these mysterious chemical or biological agents. Made available to a CNN reporter outside of Kabul, Afghanistan (home of Bashiruddin Mahmood’s “charity”), the disturbing tapes show “meticulous planning and attention to the tradecraft of terror,” in the words of terrorist expert Magnus Ranstorp. Recently, an Algerian terrorist cooperating with U.S. authorities testified he was taught by al Qaeda how to smear biological toxins on doorknobs. The techniques are similar to those used by German terrorists who smeared glanders bacteria on the gums of horses in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York during World War I.
If you don’t think agro- or bioterrorism could be coming soon to an American town near you, you need to think again.
A former military intelligence commando, Gary Stubblefield runs a consulting firm that specializes in ultra-high security. Four years ago he was writing a report on the national security threats of radiological emission devices (REDs) and national food security, warning of possible terrorist threats. “All the national labs just looked at us and laughed,” he recalls, when they read his report. “Said it was ridiculous.” Today, no one is laughing, and the hulky Stubblefield is spending seventy-five hours a week flying all over the world for the Pentagon to stymie the threat of REDs, or “dirty bombs.” Yet with all his time spent confronting the dirty bomb threat, he hasn’t forgotten about the food security issues he also once raised. “They laughed us out of the room back then on that one, too,” he recalls. But people are starting to realize that our food supply may be the next target.
“Here’s one of the scary things,” Stubblefield says. “Those guys watch CNN just like we do, they see what happened economically to us, and how we reacted to that small anthrax situation—and I only say small because it didn’t spread widely. They recognize this, and it has been written in their intercepted literature that ‘We can bring down the giant economically, and that too will kill him.’ If they can find a way to stop our food supply, they believe they will bring America to a halt.” Stubblefield says that since its inception, al Qaeda’s modus operandi involves simultaneously attacking multiple targets, which can include planned attacks on our food.
The state of Montana decided to get serious. After September 11, 2001, officials asked Stubblefield to come up with a plan to protect the agriculturally rich state from agroterrorism. Among other defense options, Stubblefield proposed fiber-optic detection cables, run along fence lines. “If anything gets inside,” he says, “an alarm will go off and tell you exactly where it was set off.” Though Stubblefield’s fiber-optic security solution is effective and easy to install, the cable is fairly expensive, and no one is stepping forward to pick up the tab. “The rancher doesn’t feel he has to pay because he says it isn’t his problem. His mission in life is to raise stock and sell it—they don’t understand this. I don’t think they have a clue.” What about the USDA? “The feds are saying they can’t do it because it’s not their responsibility either. Everybody is sidestepping the issue.” Montana hasn’t implemented a full agroterrorism program, and no other state has either. Is the food supply close to being protected? “We are quite far away,” he says. “I think we are still at the discussion level, and that is shortsighted. We should be more proactive.”
One of the most insightful analyses of ways to defend against agroterrorism comes from Anne Kohnen, who designed specific recommendations in her October 2000 Harvard master’s degree thesis. Kohnen proposed a four-level counterattack, from the organism level to the farm, sector, and national levels. The report requires Plum Island be upgraded to BSL-4 to combat all exotic animal diseases. When asked about the impact of her thesis—which is perhaps the most comprehensive report publicly available on the subject—Kohnen, who now works on nuclear proliferation, laments the inattention agroterrorism still receives. “Until now, it has been overlooked. Not of much interest to the policymakers—it’s not a sexy topic like arms control or international trade. It hasn’t received much press. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing—I’d just as soon have fewer articles out there about how easy it is.” Gary Stubblefield takes the opposite approach. “I don’t like putting these things out in the news. But sometimes it doesn’t hurt to advertise that we are working on things.” Speaking of our homeland security, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry said on Meet the Press that there are “enormous gaps and deficits in the preparedness level. . . .” Given the lack of preparedness, federal and state officials need to work much harder.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks on America, homeland security has become paramount to the nation’s survival. Plum Island can play an important role in securing the home front. But not the Plum Island that exists today.
There are two worthy options for the island’s future: closure or total rebirth. In 1983, the National Academy of Sciences implored the USDA to close Plum Island down, eight years before it was foolishly privatized. “Limitations of time and budgets, shortage or lack of primary containment equipment, and lack of a sufficient number of engineering and safety staff trained in biomedical containment facilities have made it difficult. . . .” Had the public known of this report, the shop would have long been closed. But they hadn’t, and Plum Island still limps along, plagued by those same limitations and shortages. Plum Island management is asleep at the wheel, waiting to be jolted awake by an employee dying from contact with deadly exotic animal virus, or by a scientist burning in a laboratory fire the volunteer bucket brigade couldn’t put out because the emergency exit door was locked, or by large numbers of swimmers in the Hamptons coming down with strange untraceable illnesses, or a boater in the Long Island Sound hooking a box full of test tubes.
The second possibility, a born-again Plum Island, must take strict measures in biological safety and biological security, truly separate matters that are too often confused. Science, security, and safety must go hand in hand and rate equally; never should one be sacrificed for another. Should there be an imbalance, it must tip in favor of security and safety, and rather than the pursuit of science.
In this end, a “Plum Island Prescription” follows:
Biological Safety—It begins with the transportation of virus and bacteria samples to Plum Island. When the USDA convinced Congress to let it transfer viruses over the mainland in the late 1950s, it duped the lawmakers by saying there would be only a few trips a year. That wasn’t true then and it’s not true today, as samples make their way anonymously along highways and local roads multiple times each day. Dr. Callis used a USDA courier to transport samples, saying, “We do not trust the mails.” Today, Plum Island is far more trusting, entrusting germ samples to the U.S. Postal Service, airport limousines, and private shipping companies like Federal Express. Drivers don’t know their packages’ contents, nor are they trained on handling an accidental spill.
The USDA’s private courier is marginally better. The precious cargo is placed in the trunk of a compact car or in the backseat of a Dodge Caravan minivan, and an unarmed driver takes it for a two-hour spin from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Plum Island. Nothing will break in the sturdy containers if dropped from heights of up to twenty-seven feet. Physics dictate, however, that a dropped box from that height will be traveling at 29 miles per hour upon ground impact. A 60 mph car crash will subject the same box to twice the force. That’s far from unbreakable.
Virus shipments should arrive either by the original method of Navy ship transport or by armed escort over New York City and Long Island roads. In this case, notification of each trip must be given to emergency responders like fire and police departments, along with the nature of the samples and what to do in case of an accident (including a fatal one, like the deadly accident in 1970 involving the Plum Island germ courier).
It should go without saying that biological samples should be brought immediately to Plum Island and locked away in storage and never be left on the side of Route 25 or in the Plum Island mailbox. At 7:05 p.m. on May 19, 2002, Southold town police received a worried call from the Orient Point private security guard. Someone had placed a suspicious-looking package inside the oversized black Plum Island mailbox along Route 25. The road was cordoned off, and 350 passengers on two Connecticut ferries were detained on the boats for more than three hours. The police called in the Suffolk County emergency services unit, who donned protective gear to rip open the mailbox and expose its contents. “After this examination,” said the police report, “the items found in the mailbox were determined not to be of suspicious nature.” The package was an envelope containing junk mail. Had it not been a false alarm, a three-hour response such as this would have posed tragic consequences.
The Plum Island safety office needs to be taken seriously and augmented with seasoned professionals, returning to the policy that the director of safety is a trained scientist. The Plum Island frying pan affair clearly demonstrates this. As part of a 1993 renovation of sixty thousand square feet in Lab 101, the windows needed to be replaced. The entire wing was opened to the atmosphere for the first time since 1956. The safety department hatched a jerry-rigged decontamination operation using two hundred electric frying pans, three hundred power extension cords, eighty rolls of duct tape, and a bunch of household fans. With frying pans placed on the floor every few feet, the safety office heated eighteen-gram blocks of solid formaldehyde to 450 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour, turning the solids into a poisonous decontaminating gas. When the cloud dissipated days later, they would collect 600 test strips of the Bacillus subtilis spore, a germ known for its hardiness (the same germ used in Fort Detrick’s germ warfare tests in the New York City subway), to see if the formaldehyde had fully decontaminated the area. Climbing into the air lock and collecting the test strips, workers in space suits found that more than 120 of the strips turned murky with bacteria spores. The decontamination failed. On the second try, poisonous gaseous formaldehyde, in concentrations far greater than those that sickened Fran Demorest, leaked into the adjacent lab and forced a full evacuation to the Army chapel. Again, Plum Island escaped the reaper—no one was seriously injured.
What caused this potentially deadly leak? It was something that plagued Labs 257 and 101 often in the past, particularly during Hurricane Bob. On the day of the second try, a power outage just after 7:30 a.m. shorted out the negative airflow system and stopped the forward airflow. Soon after, thirty unsuspecting people working in the laboratory smelled a pungent odor, and their eyes began to tear. No viruses escaped, the USDA said. Just formaldehyde gas.2 The USDA blamed it on the Long Island Power Company, which in turn blamed it on an osprey that crashed into a power line, disrupting the power running through the undersea cable to Plum Island. Neither mentioned why the emergency generators at the power plant failed to kick in. The same people that cooked up the frying pan fiasco still run the skeletal Plum Island safety office. This critical department, arguably the most important on the island, must be staffed with a multitude of professional experts, rather than a handful of MacGyver like handymen solving biological problems with pots and pans.
2 In an amusing aside, this only-on-Plum Island disaster occurred the same day the battered Dr. Jerry Crawford announced his departure. One can picture Crawford, packing up his desk, breathing a long sigh of relief.
Fire safety remains an important issue. With a single dedicated fireman and a bucket brigade of employees (performing other responsibilities) who are supposed to sprint to the firehouse at the sound of an alarm, the ability of Plum Island to control laboratory fires seems dubious at best. According to workers now on strike, the contractor was essentially forcing workers to be part of the fire brigade. “The sad part about it,” says one worker, “is that we don’t want to—and we never went to school to—fight a fire! And fire training today is a fifteen-minute confined space rescue drill.” On top of that, it appears that crucial mutual aid from nearby Long Island in the event of an out-of-control blaze is a nonstarter. Many firefighters, all community volunteers, privately admit they will not go to Plum Island to fight a fire, fearing biological infection, regardless of any mutual aid agreement. Trained to chop holes in roofs to put out fires, the Long Island fireman would have a far different task inside a biological containment laboratory that must remain sealed to the outside world. There was to be comprehensive fire training on Plum Island—possibly the first of its kind—for the Long Island fire departments. But the training was canceled after the strike. “Even if they went to the fire,” says a former Plum Island fire brigade member of the local fire departments, “how long would it take to get to the island? At full steam that’s still about forty minutes in response time.” At the very least, then, the bucket brigade should be disbanded and the professional fire department reinstated.
My interview with Dr. Huxsoll in his Plum Island office—before he departed, leaving no one on site in charge of the Plum Island helm for months—adds further weight to the vision of chaos that surrounds the island. Our meeting was conducted in stifling heat because, as luck would have it, there was a power outage that morning, forcing the evacuation of all nonessential personnel. I entered Lab 101 to a commotion: workers arguing about how to safely store the arriving boxes, loaded with live biological samples, that had traveled across Plum Gut on the same ferry as me. Because of my meeting with Huxsoll, I was spared from the evacuation and rushed up to his office. We sat there speaking while sweating profusely, both pretending nothing was wrong. We did our best to ignore the loud piercing beeps that periodically blasted from the hallway, reminding us that something was going very wrong, again, on Plum Island.
The safety office should also check employees regularly for exposure to pathogens and provide assistance with medical diagnosis if exposures occur. Plum Island must adhere to the 1982 outside safety review committee report issued in the wake of the virus outbreak: “In the event of active suspected laboratory-associated infections, however, it is recommended that diagnostic examinations be conducted at a facility other than Plum Island.... Examinations of active cases should be conducted with the knowledge and concurrence of the USDA Medical Officer and the employee’s private physician.” Two decades later, the edict remains ignored. Instead, the Plum Island safety office turned its back on Phillip Piegari, Pete Swenson, Shine Mickaliger, and others.
Biological Security—Plum Island needs to be guarded around the clock by a platoon of trained, armed guards, like the thirty-four-man department it used to have in the 1950s. The current force of retired NYPD cops guarding Orient Point and Plum Island isn’t even a start. Since his first visit in 1971, reporter Karl Grossman has seen more of Plum Island than anyone not connected the government. “In my earlier visits,” recalls Grossman, “it looked like what you would expect out of a James Bond movie, with armed federal agents who patrolled the beach constantly. Later they had privatized the security, and you were walking past the kind of people you would see in front of a convenience store in a bad neighborhood.” Regular helicopter and marine patrols, proposed by Senator Schumer and Assemblywoman Acampora, are also imperative.
Plum Island is more vulnerable to enemy and terrorist attack than it Lab 257 249 was prior to September 11, 2001, though the USDA strongly disagrees. “It’s really no more a terrorist target than the local federal courthouse,” says spokeswoman Sandy Miller Hays. “It’s just not that attractive a target.” I suggest that Hays relay the USDA’s viewpoint to Bashiruddin Mahmood, c/o Islamabad, Pakistan, and to his unsavory cohorts. Security needs to be on par with Steve Nostrum’s armed paramilitary unit that protected Shoreham, the nuclear power plant. Thanks to the discovery of Mahmood’s cache, there is proof that Plum Island is as vulnerable a target as a nuclear power plant, and in many ways a far greater one.
After the terrorist attacks, the American public called for increased security at airports, focusing particularly on private companies that hire minimum-wage workers to X-ray baggage and run the passenger metal detectors. By federalizing airport security—placing guards under federal control—better trained and equipped people will vastly improve lax safety measures, say supporters. Plum Island is an installation as vulnerable as any airport and arguably far more exposed. The federal A-76 privatization program stated that the private enterprise system, “characterized by individual freedom and initiative, is the primary source of economic strength.” But wherein lies the primary source of national security strength? Or the strength required to protect the public from biological and environmental harm? That lies with the people’s government, not in the private sector, where the “governing” is motivated by profit. Still, Plum Island’s support functions and its paucity of island security remain in private hands. If there is strength in numbers, then Plum Island is exceptionally weak. From a support staff high of 156 employees before privatization, the workforce was trimmed from 156 to 100, and then pared to 80—half of its original size. In some instances, workers are assigned job tasks once performed by three separate individuals. This is a recipe for disaster, evidenced by this one sewage plant worker who kept a private log:
We proved the problem can be kept under control by concentrating more operator time running the plant. Due to the lack of manpower, we could only do this for a short time by ignoring other island operations, which contributed to the old plant being out of compliance this month.... Requested covers be installed to avoid freezing problems during winter. Request denied due to “Who will pay?” syndrome. Systems around the island that we have been ignoring are beginning to fail. Still no extra manpower as promised. High temperatures shutting down pumps. But EQ tank full. Must let go through plant HOT (100 degrees Fahrenheit]).... Bad storm blew poly pumps and plumbing apart.... Some days with no operator at all! During this time, a major plant spill occurred due to this lack of manpower. Plant is under size for current and future needs of island.... Plant requires much more operator manpower to overcome design problems.... Budget cutbacks have wiped out availability of normal maintenance.
During my personal visits to Plum Island, I noticed that the gates leading into the Lab 101 compound were left open all day, and utility vehicles and box trucks (presumably carrying biological samples and animals) freely moved in and out. The laboratory building itself needs to be better guarded. “Take the new lobby,” says Dr. Carol House of Lab 101, who’s been there a few times since her retirement. “They built that nice brand-new lobby, but the staircase blocks the doors into the lab, and there was no pass card to get into the lab for years. There is now, maybe installed a month ago. Anybody in that building can walk into those laboratories at will. Just look at the physical setup—the security guy sitting at reception is flush with the wall, and if he’s sitting down, he can’t see the entrance to the lab because the staircase is in the way. All you have to do is slip in—I mean, c’mon!”
Maintaining proper biological security also means screening scientists and workers. In the early days, Dr. Callis defended the security checks and taking oaths before researchers were hired, telling a panel, “We wouldn’t want anybody working here who would maliciously sabotage our work.” But over the years Plum Island has welcomed many foreign scientists in residence with little or no background checks, from nations like China, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Uganda, and—of all places—Iraq. While doctors from staunch American allies like Japan and Taiwan should be, and are, welcomed to Plum Island, those hailing from nations with suspect political affiliations ought to be barred. “A highly skilled individual could take advantage of the opportunity afforded by a position of trust in a laboratory . . . in human or veterinary medicine. Such persons would use to full advantage the appearance of loyalty and transparent honesty,” Canadian officials wrote this in December 1941 at a time of world turmoil. It rings just as meaningfully today.
Background checks should be run, like they were in the 1950s, on all nonprofessional personnel as well—yet another discarded procedure. Recently, a worker in charge of preparing Plum Island identification badges was caught making fake badges and was quietly dismissed. Dr. Carol House speaks of a USDA employee who was accused of taking large bribes at the Port of Miami quarantine facility, and was previously convicted for assault and battery. The employee was transferred to work at Plum Island. House noticed the man, an inventory keeper, on Plum Island on a Saturday morning, for no apparent reason. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘This is weird— what’s he doing here on a Saturday?’ He knows where all the keys are, and knows all the combinations to the locks.” On Monday morning, House privately reported her observation to security, who never properly investigated the claim. What had he been doing there that day? “I don’t know,” says House. “I wasn’t going to trail him. I went home earlier in the day and he stayed on after that.” The man mysteriously left Plum Island about two months later. “This was the mentality of security,” House recalls. Bungle it, or honor it in the breach.
A final concern involves Plum Island’s airspace. At some point during the gradual decline of the island’s security, the restricted “no-fly zone” designation over Plum Island’s airspace was suspended. Its airspace should be redesignated restricted on navigational flight charts and enforced by the U.S. Air Force or the National Guard.
Privatization—A democratic government should perform essential functions that are economically and practically infeasible for private citizens and industry to perform themselves. For example, maintaining a private armed security force to guard one’s home is economically beyond most people’s reach, so everyone pays taxes to support a municipal police force that guards one’s person and property. Applied to Plum Island, research on exotic animal disease has been deemed inefficient and impractical for the private sector to finance, so it has been delegated to government. Because of the ultrasensitive nature of operations, its support workers should be of the highest caliber. Skill—not a willingness to work for low wages and benefits—should drive recruitment. Safety and security—not year-end profits realized on a balance sheet—should be the primary motivator. This is not an indictment of the private sector; it is a realization that government takes on inefficient roles to provide a necessary benefit and protect its citizens. Plum Island, like airport security, must be federalized.
A stark reminder of this occurred at midnight on August 13, 2002, when seventy-six workers, with a combined 758 years of professional experience running Plum Island, went on strike for the first time in the island’s history. Citing living wages and medical benefits that lag behind similar operations elsewhere, Local 30, the Plum Island union, took action after going without a contract for eleven months.3 The union asked for a forty cents per hour per worker increase, or $850 per worker. The private contractor rejected their modest demands, and instead airlifted some forty replacement workers (“scabs” in union parlance) from as far away as Colorado to Connecticut, and secretly ferried them to Plum Island under cover of night. The replacements circumvented the twenty-four-hour picket line at the Orient Point dock—christened with a camping tent, a twenty-foot high inflatable balloon rat, and an American flag. The scabs were taking turns working the island’s critical systems and sleeping on cots huddled together in the big warehouse at Plum Island harbor. Food and toiletries were ferried in for them
3 The earlier 1998 contract that expired was only agreed to after a federal mediator was brought in to resolve a threatened strike. The contractor agreed to 3-percent-per-year wage increases, slightly lower than U.S. inflation increases over the same period.
Responding to concerns over whether Plum Island could be safely run during a walkout by the workers trained to sustain it, a USDA spokeswoman said simply, “We do not feel it is necessary to shut down the island.” But the replacement workers’ mishaps contributed to Plum Island’s circus-gone wrong atmosphere. Scabs caused three separate ferryboat incidents: one in which the ferry ran over a buoy in Plum Gut, causing $10,000 in damage; another where the boat crashed into the Old Saybrook, Connecticut, dock; and yet another in which a six-hundred-gallon tank of liquid nitrogen fell off the back of the boat into Plum Island Harbor. Thankfully the tank did not rupture, but the parade of horribles marched on. One worker, placed in charge of the laboratory’s critical negative air containment system, had been previously charged with malicious assault on three occasions. The man went missing for three days, taking with him a laptop computer which remotely controlled the laboratory’s biological containment system by dial-up access. Seven hundred gallons of oil spilled near the power plant (on the same site of a 1,500-gallon spill in 2000), 200 of which seeped into the ground. Two replacement workers drove off with a 2002 Dodge Caravan assigned for local errands and never returned. Later found in New York City, the minivan’s cargo was unknown. OSHA returned, again, to Plum Island and cited the contractor for at least six workplace safety violations, including repeat infractions all too familiar now: poor handling of hazardous materials, inadequate training in blood-borne pathogens, and no radiation hazard training. At this writing, a second laptop computer is missing from inside the biological containment area, one that according to sources contains laboratory experiment data. The DHS is investigating yet another sensitive computer believed to be stolen. And in yet another instance of history repeating itself on Plum Island, there were two power outages, each multiple hours long, in December 2002. The emergency power generators failed, and the ever-vigilant Plum Island safety office attempted to seal containment doors with ordinary duct tape to keep germs from escaping. Although three employees were marooned inside biological containment areas until power could be restored, one scientist referred to the tape-up job as “standard operating procedure.”
On Plum Island, speaking out was forbidden after the strike. Worker Jim McKoy came forward and told USDA and DHS officials about lax safety and security procedures. He told them that he saw employees working with asbestos without proper protections; that he saw visitors walking around and about Plum Island unescorted; and that he exchanged ID badges with another worker as a test of the security system. The ID switch, he said, went unnoticed for a whole day. “I really felt I had to do something,” McKoy told a local newspaper. “I could go anywhere in the lab.... That place is a powder keg.” USDA and DHS told McKoy there would be no retaliation by his employer. Then they changed their tune and said government officials couldn’t get involved in the affairs of a private contractor. The Plum Island contractor fired McKoy. The contractor said that the whistleblower had left his post without permission.
Chaos reined on both sides of the coin. Mark DePonte, in charge of Plum Island’s water treatment plant on the eve of the strike, left a parting gift when he walked off the job: he shut down the complex water supply system, crucial to both fire suppression and biological decontamination. Then he sent DHS Secretary Tom Ridge an e-mail warning of “catastrophe” if the union workers did not return to their posts. Asked by a local reporter about the water crisis, DePonte said everything was fine when he left his post. “I can’t help it if the new workers don’t know which switches to turn on.” After management spent hours figuring out the intricate maneuvers required to restore water, they called in the FBI, which began to investigate. Soon after, DePonte pleaded guilty to tampering with federal government property.4
4 A union source says DePonte shut down the system because the line pump wasn’t working properly, and that following procedure, he entered the shutdown into the logbook and recorded it on a dry-erase system status board in the power plant. Another worker familiar with the situation says it was shut down because from time to time the antiquated system—used in lieu of a recently installed replacement system—did not properly maintain the correct pH level. “This was standard procedure. The new system never worked, and management had it redesigned twice and it still didn’t work right, so the old system is used.” Failing to shut off the system, says the worker, would have caused the pH level to move in the opposite direction. “If [DePonte] left the water system running, they would have said he was trying to poison people.” Why, then, did he plead guilty? “Dollars and cents, plain and simple,” says the union source of DePonte’s mounting legal fees, and calling the affair a “red herring,” points to the fact that despite the extensive FBI investigation, DePonte retains his regulatory operator’s license and is working at a municipal plant in Connecticut. “They could not troubleshoot it [after the strike] because they had no one capable of doing it, so they blamed someone. And they were looking for something they thought would turn the media against us—and it didn’t work.”
Though the whole mess could have been averted with a forty-cent-per hour wage increase for a total of $62,000 a year, the strike cost an additional $12.82 per worker per hour, or $45,000 per week—outrageous expenses passed along to, and essentially a strike shouldered by, the U.S. government and the taxpayers. “I am bewildered at why it had to get to this point,” exclaimed Senator Hillary Clinton to the New York Times when asked about the strike. At the end of the year, Clinton demanded that the USDA cease operations at Plum Island until labor and biological safety lapses were rectified. And along with Republican congressman Rob Simmons from Connecticut, she formally requested that the Plum Island workforce be completely un-privatized and re-federalized. Unfortunately, their urgings fell upon deaf ears.
This is the state of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.
Placing all employees at this germ-ridden utopia—if it is to continue its mission there—on the rolls of a well-trained Department of Homeland Security might prevent it from reaching this point again. It might ensure the safety and biological security of this troubled island laboratory. But this hasn’t been done.
It goes without saying that Plum Island’s transfer to DHS should be far more than a “paper transfer,” as assistant director Santoyo put it. Above all, Plum Island needs something that’s completely new in its long history: transparency. The past has proven, time and again, that the island’s stewards cannot pilot the ship safely without close supervision. This secretive island has been exploited, both as a monarchical fiefdom and as a resumé-building career stepping-stone. It should be neither. If Jerry Callis can be compared to a fallen angel, Roger Breeze can be likened to a vainglorious “doomsday machine,” and privatization to an absentee slumlord.
Former Plum islander Phillip Piegari remembers a saying among the workers: “Plum Island is always taking calculated risks, and somehow they get away with it.” The public must not allow the government to continue its research without being fully supervised, because it’s running Plum Island like it’s a game of Russian roulette—where its luck can only last so long.
The true story of Plum Island reaches a most disturbing conclusion. The laboratory once glorified as the “World’s Safest Lab” is today the world’s most dangerous.
In light of everything presented in these pages, consider these queries:
• Is such a facility necessary and important to the United States and its national security interests?
• Do the past catastrophes, the present level of safeguards, and its future plans justify the laboratory’s existence on Plum Island?
Plum Island is a ticking biological time bomb. The U.S. Department of Agriculture set the timer, and the clock has been ticking away for years. Today the island is more vulnerable than ever before to a germ outbreak, and it remains wide open to sabotage and terrorist attack. Now is the time to reconsider its existence or take meaningful corrective measures. In other words, there’s still some time to dismantle the bomb.
Or will the people of America have to wait until Plum Island reaches the point of no return?
The choice is ours.
Reporters asked the Plum Island scientists, seated behind a makeshift dais, if their sudden openness had anything to do with the book Lab 257, scheduled for national release the following day. “No,” they said. “Absolutely not. Now why would you think such a thing?”
Undeterred, those in the media treated to the quadrennial Plum Island dog and pony show asked the brass what they thought of the new book detailing the past half-century of their island laboratory. Two responses came forth: “What can I say?” a distinguished scientist rhetorically asked the Today show. “This goes to show you, you can’t judge a book by its cover.” And the other, “Sounds more like science fiction that fact.” Off the record, they admitted a not-so-unimportant fact. When a reporter asked if any of them had read the book, all of them responded no, although one “skimmed” it. To this day, not one fact has been successfully challenged. So much then for scientific fact trumping “science fiction.” Since then, Plum Island and its chorus of pseudo-scientific sycophants have called me a lot of things—except “wrong.”
Standing on the side of the road in Orient Point that cold winter morning (now deemed a “security threat,” I was refused access to the island), I held my own press conference. I appeared on national television and radio, and in print. The book made an appearance on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Asked to comment, New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton responded that she hadn’t read the book yet, but it “appeared” to raise the “important issues of safety and security I’ve been raising for over a year.” Hundreds of emails poured into my website from around the country, all concerned about this little known place that clearly had dangerous biological potential, a place targeted by a reputed terrorist. I attended many book signings and book fairs, participated in panel discussions, and appeared on radio talk shows. I spoke to college students in their microbiology classes. Virtually everyone I encountered expressed outrage at a government laboratory in such patent disrepair that it posed a threat to us all.
Ordinary citizens responded by writing letters, like this one that appeared in the New York Times two weeks after the book’s release, where the writer clearly felt I had not gone far enough:
“My agenda is not to close Plum Island, it’s to make it safe,” said Michael Christopher Carroll, author of “Lab 257,” diluting his strong warnings. Why not move it?
What benefit is there from having deadly animal research two miles from such a heavily populated area, when birds and mosquitoes can easily travel that distance and beyond?
Why has nothing been learned from 9/11, anthrax, ricin, West Nile virus, SARS, and bird flu? Why ignore the fact that most new human viruses come from animals and become more deadly when they jump species?
Why do we have to wait until after terrorism, accidents, or naturally occurring dangers create widespread epidemics from Plum Island? Why is there not an outrage from the public, the media, and politicians? And most of all, why are government officials doing nothing but stubbornly defending their unconvincing assurances of safety?
Or this letter, that appeared in a local paper close to Plum Island in late August 2004, which also went further than I did and suggested a solution:
It never ceases to amaze me that for as long as Plum Island has been in existence, we are still talking about breaches of security and safety. What will it take before it is realized that this facility should be close down permanently? . . . Just ask your local police and fire departments how much training they have received in the event of an accident at Plum Island.
One cannot live too far from this facility. I have little confidence that we are told all there is to know about what kind of activity truly goes on there and certainly have no confidence in the security. We should be fearful of what we don’t know about what goes on there: how often security is breached, and how much of that ends up on our trees, fruits, vegetables, and drinking water . . . . Plum Island has outlived its usefulness.
In my defense to these justifiably enraged citizens’ viewpoints, I can only say my goal was to present the evidence best I could, and let the reader decide whether the rewards justify the risks.
Some of the island’s scientists quietly acknowledged their agreement with the concerns raised in the book. Other Plum Island veterans were openly hostile to me. Merlon Wiggin stood up at a public forum, waived his copy of Lab 257 riddled with Post-it notes in the air, and boldly accused me of fabricating direct quotes attributed to him over multiple pages. When I politely reminded him before the assembled crowd that I had talked to him on the phone multiple times, received faxes from him, and spent hours at his East Marion home interviewing him with a tape recorder, he didn’t want to hear anything of it. Also at that forum, Dr. Carol House sharply criticized my book, but later admitted she hadn’t read it because she heard it was “no good.” Finally, I read in a newspaper that Ben Robins, who took me on the “jungle tour” though Plum Island, recently unsheathed his fountain pen and wrote “Blab 257,” which I look forward to reading with great anticipation, should he send me a copy of his tome.
All foolishness aside, two groups remain painfully silent: the current scientists of Plum Island and our elected leaders. It is my opinion that the former group remains mired in bureaucratic inertia and the latter find Plum Island to be an issue far too difficult to tackle because it cannot be dispensed in the twenty-four-hour news cycle to score political points. Instead, they continue to ignore the imminent threat of this book’s subject. Instead, we continue to get more of the same—pretty glossy photo ops, beat-the-drum press releases, and letters crammed with prattle—and nothing changes at one of the most inviting biological soft targets in the nation. I did get an inquiry from the office of Congressman Dan Burton, who sits on the House Government Reform Committee and is known to take on tough issues, but that went nowhere. Of all municipalities adjacent to Plum Island, not one of them asked me to brief them. But members of the Boston City Council invited me to talk about the mistakes made on Plum Island, as Boston University is considering establishing a similar laboratory. Finally, New York Senator Michael Balboni, the chair of his state’s homeland security committee, asked me to brief him before he made an inspection of Plum Island.
Sadly then, the book has largely fallen upon deaf governmental ears. As I write this, Plum Island has suffered yet another germ outbreak, a cross contamination episode inside the laboratory on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary gala that the USDA planned for itself. Instead of spoiling the party, the scientists of Plum Island thought it better to conceal the laboratory accident; only after four weeks did they inform Senator Clinton, the local congressman, and members of a “community forum,” who themselves practiced non-disclosure until an anonymous tip reached the ears of Newsday investigative reporter Bill Bleyer. Apparently this is modus operandi at Plum Island. All this writer can do is detail the recent gaffes and phony window dressing designed to quash public inquiry in this laboratory’s conduct, and hope that perhaps this book will one day fall into the laps of someone who can make a real difference. I had expected real change would have been the norm out there by now. But my expectations have gone unanswered— and we remain at risk.
One of the things that can be fairly said about Lab 257 is that it is historical. It only speaks as of late 2003 when I delivered the final manuscript. A reader might be thinking that a good amount of time has passed for the material to be digested and addressed. Rather than simply state that is not the case, I’ll show through Plum Island’s own words and deeds.
We’re equally proud of our safety record. . . . Not once in our nearly 50 years of operation has an animal pathogen escaped from the island.
—HOME PAGE OF
PLUM ISLAND WEBSITE
If you haven’t skipped to the end of the book, then you are likely shocked at the sheer hubris of this statement. Let’s look at the first sentence. Proud? How on Earth can Plum Island scientists be “proud” of a safety record that boasts germ outbreaks, injured lab workers, and literally hundreds of federal environmental and occupational safety hazard law violations? The second statement is reminiscent of another brassy statement: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,” i.e., a statement of legal technicality. Until we have a comprehensive scientific investigation, we cannot ever know if Lyme disease, West Nile virus, or the Dutch duck plague virus is connected to Plum Island. But, we do know, from their own rare admission that on at least one occasion, germs did escape the “World’s Safest Lab” and infected healthy animals outdoors on Plum Island. We know this only because it was impossible to conceal, because every person had to be evacuated from Plum Island in a spacesuit, and because every animal—healthy or infected—was ordered to be killed. The fact that the outbreak didn’t “escape the island” obscures the fact that they had a massive germ outbreak, yet they don’t get into such little detail on their website. It’s up to the public, now armed with the truth, to call Plum Island on it. Finally, they are again stressing they work only with “animal pathogens,” and have repeatedly taken pains to note they work on diseases affecting animals. Another half-truth. Anthrax, West Nile virus, and the deadly Rift Valley fever virus described in this book may be strictly classified as “animal diseases” in the eyes of Plum Island scientists, but they ought not use this as a PR smoke screen when explaining their work to the public. Those diseases are deadly to humans, and it is incumbent upon them to disclose that to the public.
In July 2004 the Department of Homeland Security finally decided it was time to deploy federal armed guards on Plum Island. As if on cue, the public was treated to another press release, this time from Congressman Timothy Bishop, who succeeds a line of one- and two-term congressmen in the district that includes Plum Island. “We all recognized that unarmed guards alone are not an adequate defense in the face of an attack,” said Bishop. “I applaud the Department of Homeland Security.” But, the guards are a mere window dressing. The guards are only to be stationed on Plum Island during business hours—as if terrorists only attack nine to five. This book detailed the reputed terrorist, a disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist who met with Osama bin Laden multiple times, who was caught in Afghanistan with a dossier on Plum Island—and a part-time placement of guards on Plum Island is “applauded” by the local congressman? Caught in the milieu then: absentee elected officials and USDA scientists, a faulty laboratory researching dangerous germs (and a terrorist target), and us.
Newsday investigative reporter Bill Bleyer just couldn’t believe it. We were talking one morning about the new germ outbreaks on Plum Island that occurred over the summer of 2004, a story Bleyer broke after he received a tip from one of his sources close to the island. In an all too familiar sequence of events, Plum Island engaged in a cover-up of the outbreak. The two laboratory accidents occurred just days before a fiftieth anniversary celebration the scientists were planning. I can tell you from years of research that if Doc Shahan, Plum Island’s first director, were at the helm, a biological event of this magnitude would have prompted him to cancel the festivities and close the lab. Everything I learned about Doc Shahan is summed up in one simple rule he repeated to a reporter in the 1950s: “We take no risks,” Doc Shahan said. “We may be extreme, but I don’t think so. It’s better to be overcautious all the time, than not cautious enough just once.” But that was then. Too much at stake to heed Doc Shahan’s prescient advice, went the current thinking. Probing newspaper and television reporters, and that meddling author would have a field day with this one if we told them about it. Plum Island had organized a full gala, replete with speeches, alumni gatherings, tours, and gauzy media press kits. Nothing would stop it from proceeding. Not even a germ outbreak.
After the excitement faded a month later, the scientists called up Senator Clinton and confessed: “Oops.” A week or so after that, Clinton and Bishop wrote yet another letter, thanking the scientists for “notifying our offices about the two inadvertent foot-and-mouth disease cross contaminations that occurred in the biocontainment areas of Plum Island Animal Disease Center. We urge you to immediately investigate these alarming breaches at the highest levels, and to keep us apprised of all developments.” The immediacy of their letter, tied to a six-week-old germ outbreak was disheartening. Plum Island called it an “incident,” just as they had years ago when germs escaped the laboratory, instead of calling it what it was—a biological outbreak. Same as then, they refused to use the “O word” that prompted scientist Dr. Don Morgan to dub the earlier outbreak the “disastrous” incident.
What actually happened is very easy to understand. On at least two separate occasions, healthy animals on one side of the laboratory—supposedly sealed from the rest of the laboratory compartments and sealed to the outside world—became infected with the same germs being studied in a different laboratory module on the other side of the building. If this germ outbreak doesn’t once and for all condemn this half-century-old laboratory, I’m not certain anything will. Some questions come to mind: Who knew about the outbreak? Why didn’t the scientists disclose the outbreak to the public? How did it happen? Were proper safety measures followed? What are the effects of the germs leaking outside of containment? Who was responsible for the outbreak? What action has been taken against him, her, or them? What kind of repairs and training and education is under way to prevent an outbreak from occurring again? Why elected officials like Clinton and Bishop aren’t taking to the streets after this cover-up is a question whose answer is beyond the scope of this epilogue.
As I’ve written in this book, it is high time to stop the letters, press releases, photo-ops, and empty condemnations, and start doing something meaningful out there.
Perplexed, Bleyer could not reckon why Plum Island officials didn’t call him up and tell him what had happened. He was infuriated—he had reported on the anniversary party days before and given them positive coverage. And months before that, Plum Island had given him an exclusive “Day in the Life” tour of Plum Island that he turned into a comprehensive feature story in his newspaper. They had promised Bleyer they would be forthright about things the public ought to know about, and to him, this certainly topped this list. He was also angry at Clinton and Bishop, who also didn’t tell him what had happened so he could report it (the letter they wrote to Plum Island wasn’t released to the public until he cajoled them into releasing it). Unfortunately, Bleyer didn’t get it. Plum Island used him as free PR tool to promote a positive image of the island, then reneged on their openness pledge the moment it didn’t suit them to keep it.
Perhaps worst of all is what I learned last summer, when giving a talk on tiny Fishers Island, which sits about five miles northeast of Plum Island along the shoreline of Connecticut. Two fine groups, the nature conservancy and the local library, invited me there to address the residents. More than one hundred people showed up to hear what I, and the director of a Long Island group called The North Fork Environmental Council, had to say. It’s not what was said that night, but rather what I later learned wasn’t said which was most troubling.
The talk was after the germ outbreak, but before Bleyer’s Newsday story, so at that time no one except the Plum Island scientists, and the senator and congressman knew. Or so I thought. The evening progressed and the understandably concerned citizens of Fishers Island became increasingly outraged at the antics of their neighboring island, but the invited guest seated to my right knew about the outbreak and didn’t tell the assembled citizenry. She had been part of a select group of “community leaders” briefed by Plum Island scientists. Why she would keep this critical information from the now smoldering neighbors of Plum Island is an enigma. Perhaps this community leader figured she and her group could solve Plum Island’s problems all by herself? One thing is for sure: had not Bleyer stumbled upon the germ outbreak, the public would have known nothing about it.
The Plum Island PR machine keeps on churning. In October 2004, Dr. Dan Bradway, a scientist from Washington State, who put in brief stint researching on Plum Island, weighed in with an opinion piece in Newsday, oddly entitled “‘Mystery Island’ is no threat to us,” (italics mine) when Bradway himself could not live farther away from Plum Island and still be in the continental United States. He playfully discusses Nelson DeMille’s novel Plum Island, and then brushes off my book as another work of fiction:
This history of secrecy has led to all kinds of wild conspiracy and accident theories about diseases escaping from Plum Island. In a recently published book, “Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory,” author Michael Carroll tries to connect Plum Island to Lyme disease and the 1999 outbreak of West Nile virus. Other non-scientist authors have blamed the island for Saint Louis encephalitis virus and even AIDS.
He then goes on to describe how well protected Plum Island is, and meticulously details its biological safety practices. “Conspiracy and accident theories?” Bradway has shown great impudence here, failing to mention the covered-up germ outbreak that occurred two months before he penned his opinion, the two stolen laptop computers, and the workers hired with felony criminal arrest records, among other mishaps. For a place hatched by Nazi Germany’s top germ warfare scientist, host to germ outbreaks (like the two painstakingly detailed in this book), and a myriad of accidents and safety violations sprinkled upon Plum Island like rainbow jimmies on an ice cream cone, this is a fatally flawed opinion. Classic Plum Island spin, Dr. Bradway throws in AIDS and St. Louis encephalitis for good measure to obscure the true facts.
As I’ve said to people looking for links among Plum Island, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus, during my seven years of research I did not happen upon an octogenarian scientist hobbling out from behind a white curtain, exclaiming, “It was me! I did it! I spawned Lyme disease at Plum Island!”
And yet, there’s still an unexplained initial outbreak of Lyme disease occurring nine miles away from an exotic germ laboratory with quarter inch holes in its roof—a lab busy breeding hundreds of thousands of ticks including a tick known to spread Lyme disease with African Swine fever virus cross-contaminated with who knows what—that is worthy of a real, scientific investigation. And a little-known outbreak of West Nile virus, that killed horses on the doorstep of Plum Island weeks before humans first contracted the illness many miles away in New York City in August of 1999, also deserves a real, scientific investigation.
Bradway then concludes, “There is no scientific merit to any of these theories.” He is right in a sense—there is no scientific merit to them— because they have never been investigated by his esteemed brethren, which is the same reason he has no basis to call them conspiracies. Is it logical to conclude that something didn’t cause an event because it hasn’t been investigated? If that is Bradway’s brand of science, then I’m honored to wear his badge of “non-scientist author.” It’s strange that someone who spent such a brief time on Plum Island can post such an elaborate defense of an ill maintained laboratory that doesn’t have one.
Speaking of Lyme disease, a letter that a reader wrote struck a deep chord in me. Those who brush aside any possible connection without giving so much as lip service to conducting an appropriate scientific investigation should take his impassioned opinion to heart:
Fellow Lymies:
I usually don’t post messages, but have replied to many of you privately. In this case, It’s too important to stay quiet. Yes, Tim, Lyme disease has been around longer than Plum Island. But not in this form—not doing the things it does to our bodies, our central nervous system, our minds. We are the last people who should dismiss this book for this simple reason: I don’t want an apology, I don’t care about holding people accountable and the outrage of it all, if it’s true . . . . But if it is true, someone might know something that could help us.
Aren’t you all tired of this disease that is killing us? Are you just a little sick of being on 12 meds which almost cover 40 percent of the symptoms? Have you ever said to yourself, “God, this disease is so unnatural?”
I don’t mean to be strident, but look, just the fact that the American Lyme Disease Foundation came out publicly dismissing this book was a big clue for me. In seven plus years of reading about Lyme disease, almost every statement I’ve ever read from the ALDF is, in my opinion, against patient interest. I would encourage every one of you to get this book and read it. Here is someone who doesn’t even have the disease and who, if nothing else, points out the sheer horror of the experience. Bravo for Michael Carroll, and trust me, if you read the book there is no way you can say, “Aw, I don’t buy it.” On the Today show, they discussed how while they were hosting a tick colony, right across the water from old Lyme, Connecticut, there were holes in the ceiling. Maybe one or two of those 400,000 ticks got out.
Let me make this really clear: I was a healthy guy, a 35-year-old television executive making big money and knowing big people and just starting to get the payoff of 20 years of hard, hard work when this stuff came in and BOOM! It took away my life; it took away my ability to make money, my health, my sex drive, my energy (which used to fuel me through 15-hour shoot days on rigorous television production schedules). I can’t make plans, can’t get to church. . . .
I was invited to go see a member of Congress a few months ago, and I was too sick to go. Too sick to go talk about being too sick. . . . Michael Carroll has taken all of us one step closer to getting the attention, the care, and the respect that we deserve. Okay, that’s all I can say,
I’ve got to go and lie down.
I wonder if the message of Lab 257 gets drowned in its “parade of horribles.” Perhaps people believe that because there is such a lengthy trail of misdeeds, it is impossible to start fixing Plum Island. Or that speaking out about this island is a futile exercise, and that its problems are insurmountable. Allow me to outline four straightforward issues to be addressed, and how to get our leaders to take them seriously and tackle them.
FIRST: Re-establish the thirty-four-man armed guard patrol that protected Plum Island in the 1950s, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Stop cold comforting the public with a nine-to-five security patrol, because it’s not going to stop a terrorist who attacks outside of business hours. Re-establish the Plum Island Fire Department and disband the volunteer bucket bridge of untrained scientists and support workers.
SECOND: Transport the exotic germs that arrive from international airports to Plum Island, that regularly travel along local roads of New York and Connecticut, only by armed courier. Emergency first responders must be notified of each trip to respond to a biological accident or ambush.
THIRD: Lockdown Plum Island airspace from all air traffic and enforce a no-fly zone with the national guard aircraft that are stationed nearby.
FOURTH: Un-privatize the Plum Island support staff, and reestablish full federal control of the island. Plum Island’s sister laboratory in Ames, Iowa holds far less dangerous germs and it has never been privatized, like Plum Island has with a shoestring private contractor that received special preferences—not because it did good work, but because it was owned by an Alaskan Eskimo tribe (yes this is true).
By no means is this list exhaustive, but it is bite-sized and ready for spoon-feeding to anyone who will listen.
I’m often asked by readers, “What can I do to help fix Plum Island?” I suggest first that people tell their friends, family, and neighbors about this precarious island. All the information needed is between these covers and on my website, www.lab257.com. Then, grab a phone book and call your local, state, and federal elected officials, and demand action, for starters, on the four points above. Ask them why they aren’t informing the public about the dangers of Plum Island and more importantly, doing something about it. Failing that, contact the news media and urge them to report on Plum Island to raise public awareness. Finally, it is said that the pen is mightier than the sword—draft a letter to the editor to be included in your town’s local newspaper or church bulletin. No publication is too small to get the word out. The more people who know about Plum Island, the better. The more voices that are raised, the greater likelihood of success there will be in eliminating America’s softest terrorism target. The demands of ordinary citizens like you appears to be the only recourse left to get Plum Island appropriately cleaned up or permanently shut down.
If you have other ideas on how to redress the situation, I want to hear about them. Write me at lab257@att.net, and let’s work together to reveal to the citizenry a Plum Island that, for all the empty political talk and pretty window dressing, remains a biological ticking time bomb.
—PLUM ISLAND EMPLOYEE (1997)
Unfortunately, this story doesn’t have a happy ending where the
troubles work themselves out into tidy solutions. In fact, there is
no ending. The island workforce walked out and went on strike in
August 2002. The following June, President George W. Bush moved the
laboratory from the USDA to the new Department of Homeland Security. The Plum Island saga gets more intriguing with each passing day. Dr. Breeze physically departed Plum Island in 1995, but he continued calling the shots from his new office in Washington as a procession of faceless directors came and went. Breeze finally got his man in sixty-five-year-old Dr. David L. Huxsoll, whom he appointed Plum Island’s director in June 2000. “Roger handpicked him,” says one scientist familiar with the decision. “He has that biological warfare background that Roger likes. Breeze has always been into germ warfare. He loves the mystery, and the intrigue—he’s really into it.” Dr. Huxsoll grew up on a farm in the rural town of Aurora, Indiana, where he recalls being so attached as a child to his family’s livestock, he cried for days when the fattened baby calves he had named and petted were sold at market. Like Dr. Callis, Huxsoll attended Purdue University, but the comparisons end there. After a brief vet practice stint in northern Illinois, Huxsoll was drafted into military service and embarked on a three decade military career chasing diseases around the globe. Colonel Dr. Huxsoll was named commander of the Fort Detrick biological warfare laboratories in 1983, the first veterinarian to hold that command, bringing full circle the veterinarian connection to biological warfare that Plum Island founding father Dr. Hagan began in 1941. “The most valuable thing out there,” says Dr. Huxsoll, “it’s not the gun, it’s not the tank, it’s not the jet fighter—it’s man. So we do whatever can be done to prevent illness, and should illness occur, restore that person to operational status.”
As Fort Detrick’s 1 commander, Colonel Huxsoll saw heavy action during the now-infamous Ebola virus outbreak in Reston, Virginia, featured in Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone. He made the controversial decision to send the Army into a domestic matter that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—lacking any hands-on expertise—was having a difficult time managing. “At that time, I considered everything, the potential hazards, and the safety issues.... There comes a point in time when you see—and you know—the only logical response is to make that uncomfortable decision with the best interests of lots and lots of people in mind.” The decision was the right one. Huxsoll’s well-trained medical soldiers—led by virus hunter C. J. Peters, who stalked Rift Valley fever through Egypt a decade before— successfully beat back the Ebola virus.
1 By this point, the Fort Detrick biological warfare laboratories had assumed a friendlier-sounding name: U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID.
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Huxsoll served on three U.N. biological warfare inspection teams in Iraq, leading two of them. In Iraq he interrogated directors and middle managers of medical and academic facilities like the University of Baghdad and the College of Agriculture. As with the United States, following the veterinarians revealed clues about germ warfare. Says Huxsoll, “Probably the greatest capability in addressing the biological villains, and those having a true understanding of it, was at the veterinary vaccine places.” Special military satellite image maps enhanced by computer line drawings afforded the inspection team an uncanny recreation—down to exact shapes and sizes—of each suspected germ weapon manufacturing plant. Among the long sheet maps Huxsoll unfurled in front of his impressed Iraqi hosts (“I think it got to the point they probably thought we had more capability than we really did”) was a single-cell protein facility at Al-Hakam. Ostensibly, that operation grew colonies of bacteria in big fermenter vats to be dried and milled into high-protein animal feed. But the team discovered a fair amount of evidence that it was used for biological agents, and ultimately the Iraqis admitted it. It wasn’t easy to determine, however. “The plant that would produce biological agents for weapons purposes,” Huxsoll notes, “may not look too much different from the plant that produces biological agents for vaccine purposes or for making beer.” Chemical agents are another story. Chemical plants have what is called a large “signature,” while biological facilities have a far smaller footprint. “If you’re going to dump chemical agents on a significant portion of Long Island,” Dr. Huxsoll postulates, “you have to have tons of the stuff. Now, in the case of biological [agents], you can measure what you need for the same area on Long Island in kilograms, not tons. That’s because you can disseminate them in an aerosol, and if you are good at this, you can spread it over a huge distance.” Following those tiny footprints all throughout Iraq, Huxsoll’s teams uncovered volumes of anthrax, botulinum toxin, ricin, gas gangrene, and other anticrop and anti-livestock germs being prepared and weaponized on the tips of bombs.
Before the first Gulf War, says Huxsoll, little effort was put into biological warfare intelligence. But after he helped uncover the Iraqi program, America turned its eyes to the rapidly disappearing Soviet Union, and Huxsoll inspected weapons plants there, too. “Their programs were far beyond the imaginations of anybody,” he says. “We’re talking about big facilities. Huge. Huge beyond the imagination. Incomprehensible. Very plain, very stark. Desolate and unattractive. Nothing decorative about it.” In the vanquished Iraq, Huxsoll’s horde of UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission on Iraq) scientists, interpreters, communications officers, and photographers could go anywhere and be as intrusive as it pleased. When it came to Russia, however, for every suspected facility the American inspectors asked to see, the Russians could see an American one in return. “And that really begins to create some problems. Not that you are trying to hide anything, but to have them go into Eli Lilly and Merck and take samples?”
One of the doors the Russians would pry open was the door to Plum Island.
The first thing Dr. Huxsoll did after accepting the Plum Island directorship (he refers to it as just “one more interesting type of experience”) was to call a truce with the community. He raised the white flag by proposing to open the island to public tours, perhaps once a week, so the public could learn more about the mysterious animal virus kingdom. “There’s nothing to hide,” says Huxsoll. “No need to hide anything at all. I can be extremely proud of what we do here, and extremely proud of why we’re doing it.” But the half-hearted olive branch never materialized, and the September 11, 2001, attacks foreclosed the idea of an open-door policy for the foreseeable future.
With Huxsoll in control, Plum Island finally appeared to be in capable hands, under the leadership of this tested, experienced ex-military commander. That is, until one hears the island’s previous directors talk about him. “Dave Huxsoll is a really good guy,” says Dr. Breeze. “But he doesn’t have the power that I did. The bean counters are running that in a way that actually isn’t the right way to do it. . . .” And Dr. Callis, in a rare statement about Plum Island leadership, admitted, “Huxsoll is there just because the USDA thinks it can upgrade [to biosafety level four].”
What about Plum Island itself and anthrax? The USDA made it a priority after the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001 to state repeatedly that it did not have and never had anthrax on Plum Island. If that really is true, it is quite curious that the FBI’s lie detector tests for scientists suspected of the anthrax attacks included these three questions:
• Have you ever been to Plum Island?
• Do you know anybody who works at Plum Island?
• What do they do there?
As noted earlier, the Army’s housewarming gift to the USDA upon bequeathing Plum Island in 1954 was 131 strains of germs, including 12 vials of “N,” the now-declassified code name for the original weapons grade anthrax designed by Plum Island founding father Dr. Hagan. If Plum Island never worked on anthrax or kept it in its freezers, then the USDA must explain when the code name “N” changed from anthrax to another germ. And if there is no anthrax on Plum Island, the USDA has both the FBI and its own founding fathers fooled.
The New York Times revealed in late 1999 that the USDA was quietly upgrading Plum Island from a biosafety level three to a biosafety level four laboratory. The story provoked a howl of protest from Long Island’s east end communities. The structural difference between BSL-3 and -4 is minimal—face respirators are worn while working with “hot” agents in a level three facility, while level four requires full-body spacesuits. Here’s the important difference: the level four germs. Once upgraded, Plum Island joins charter members CDC and Fort Detrick in an exclusive club whose membership benefits include working with agents, lethal ones that have no vaccine and no cure. These include mad cow disease, the Nipah pig virus (that killed a million pigs and 265 people in Malaysia in 1999), and the Ebola, Marburg, and Machupo hemorrhagic fever viruses (all related to Rift Valley fever virus). Biosafety level distinctions, however, never deterred Plum Island research in the past. For example, Rift Valley fever virus and glanders bacteria are classified borderline germs, lying between biosafety levels three and four. Both are biological warfare agents and have been studied intensively at Plum Island. Some literature classifies glanders, the bacteria used by Germany in World War I, as level three, yet a federal government document relating to 1989 Plum Island research is titled “Biosafety for Animal Rooms with Glanders—Biosafety Level 4.”
Despite the USDA’s secret efforts, Congressman Mike Forbes, Hochbrueckner’s successor, who had eyed Plum Island skeptically since his surprise visit with Karl Grossman, intervened and killed the BSL upgrade line item in the 2001 federal budget. For the first time, the local community triumphed over the USDA’s designs for Plum Island. The USDA again pushed to upgrade Plum Island after September 11, 2001, but it has been fought off thus far by Forbes’s two successors.
When news of the BSL-4 upgrade came out on the heels of the 1999 West Nile virus outbreak, former employees and local environmental groups bombarded local officials—including New York State Assemblywoman Patricia Acampora—with phone calls. Acampora grew up on Long Island knowing little about Plum Island. “When you take the ferry over to mainland Connecticut, you see this big island,” she says. “All the other islands out there are small and don’t have much to them. Then you wonder, ‘Wait, what are those buildings over there?’”
In her five years on the job, Acampora had never concerned herself with Plum Island. Now, resolving to take the bull by the horns, she formed a task force to address the upgrade and all the strange things she was hearing. “Even though it’s federal property, if something awful happens there, it affects the people of my district, no doubt about it. I had to speak out.” Rather than a soapbox for disgruntled workers or a USDA admiration society, this would be, for the first time, a serious and inclusive effort to get real answers. It took political courage to do it, because the issue cut both ways. Many voters called to berate and accuse her of trying to shut the island down. “ ‘Look, I couldn’t shut the place down if I tried,’ ” she remembers telling them. “ ‘I only want to start communicating. That’s what we’re trying to do here.’ ”
Acampora drafted political leaders, former scientists, engineers, USDA officials, New York State environmental officials, and county health officials. Seeking to legitimize her efforts with Plum Island officials, Acampora included experts like former Chief Engineer Merlon Wiggin and the respected former Plum Island scientist Dr. Carol House. “When you are dealing with the scientific community, right away they always get defensive,” Acampora says. “They feel that no one but them can understand their work. Now I may not be a scientist, but I’m no dummy either.”
The plan, she says, was to “make them talk to us about what was going on there.” The group had five marathon-length meetings in which the USDA was “pummeled” with questions, with the assemblywoman leading the charge. “I asked them point-blank, ‘Can you tell me that you have a fail-safe facility?’ ‘Can you tell me that nothing can go wrong, and that nothing has ever gone wrong?’ And they didn’t want to answer these questions.” Plum Island’s leadership still seemed unwilling to come clean. Dr. Huxsoll sent the task force a letter stating that unlike his predecessors, he would be open to communication. “And that’s the last we heard from him,” says Acampora. Huxsoll also failed to appear at a March 2001 community meeting, prompting one politician on the committee to exclaim, “I am stunned. . . . It’s these types of actions that have created this atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion. . . .”
Dr. Breeze hovered over the proceedings, and attended meetings here and there. “I spoke to him, too,” says Acampora, referring to Breeze. “They’re all the same.” Except for another former director. Coming out of retirement to lend a hand was Dr. Jerry Callis, who was “very helpful” to Acampora and helped explain the science to the task force. At one open meeting, a boisterous crowd of detractors and supporters quieted as the white-haired Callis slowly rose from the back of the audience to speak. “I plead for your understanding,” he began in low, measured tones. “These discussions remind me of 1953, the year I moved here. I wasn’t welcome back then. I had my career here. . . . It was a very fine career.” Then he spoke to the issues at hand. “We all make mistakes . . . we make poor decisions. All of us are becoming more aware about what we need to do to protect the environment. We can do dangerous work and protect the public. I can’t address the need to improve the facility [to BSL-4], but they [the USDA] will listen to your concerns.”
One of the few task force members supporting the upgrade, Greenport mayor David Kapell seemed “practically ecstatic about the prospects for local development,” in the words of the New York Times. “There’s always a concern,” he told a reporter, “but it’s got to be considered in light of the 50 years of history of a safe operation....I have faith in the government.” The Times noted that as a real estate broker, the mayor had already sold at least half a dozen homes to Plum Island scientists over the years and stood to sell many more after an upgrade.
Plum Island, in a rare twist, then produced some good news. In April 2001, Plum Island’s Dr. Fred Brown developed a “rapid test” that shrank the testing time for diagnosing foot-and-mouth disease virus from two days to ninety minutes. “The rapid test we developed is the most important discovery in fifty years,” adds Dr. Breeze. The test is linked to an Internet based epidemic management system in real time. “I’m working on this with the military—all kinds of people immediately start to work on the problem, and that completely changes what’s possible.” Said USDA spokeswoman Sandy Miller Hays, “This is not a magic bullet.” But it’s a commendable stride in the right direction, the kind of positive output the public would expect from Plum Island’s animal disease research.
Hamptons-area environmentalist Robert DeLuca wasn’t impressed. “Short of being on a geological fault,” he said of the Plum Island upgrade, “I don’t think you could find a worse place” for the laboratory. Thor Hansen, a World War II naval officer, stood up and said he’d been through three typhoons in the South Pacific and he knew rough weather better than anyone. In his opinion, the east end of Long Island had plenty of it and he was deeply troubled by the laboratory’s location in the middle of a hurricane path.
“What disturbs me,” wrote a state senator on the task force, “is the consistent flow of misinformation....I feel that some of the misinformation borders on a cover-up. It shakes the foundation of our very form of government.” Committee member Dr. Carol House witnessed an all-too familiar routine. “I think the task force went a long way. But Plum Island didn’t help themselves on that committee. They were caught up constantly. The problem was that there was no continuity in leadership, so no one in management—those answering the questions—knew the answers. . . .”
One comment in particular stoked the community’s ire, according to reporter Karl Grossman. USDA official Wilda Martinez told the task force, “We’ll listen to you and the community. But in the end, the federal government will decide what to do upon its own and move forward.” They did just that. Despite the community’s uproar, Dr. Huxsoll went ahead with a Request for Proposals to construct a $125 million laboratory renovation. The USDA, of course, said the largest renovation in Plum Island history had nothing to do with a BSL-4 upgrade.
The aggressive task force gained some ground in other ways. They successfully lobbied the USDA to remove sensitive material available on its Internet site, like maps and charts of the laboratories. Yet other dangerous items still remained on-line, waiting to be preyed upon.2
2 Conducting Internet research for this book, I uncovered many schematic and other diagrams of Plum Island available on-line, including a cache of sketches and documentation from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from a study they conducted of Plum Island in the early 1990s. Ancillary to a free and democratic society, this and much other material is available on the Internet, including a virtual how-to guide published in 2000 by virus hunter Dr. C. J. Peters, titled “Are Hemorrhagic Fever Viruses Practical Agents for Biological Terrorism?” It reports the kill ratios of various quantities of Rift Valley fever virus, Marburg virus, yellow fever virus, and anthrax spores.
The task force uncovered another disturbing finding. The USDA, after all these years—and after all the EPA environmental law violations—still had stockpiled hazardous waste and still flushed contaminated sewage into area waters. Unable to order in the EPA as a state official, Acampora turned instead to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) for help. A July 2000 DEC inspection report uncovered what it called “very troubling” environmental pollution on Plum Island, including solid waste, incinerator, hazardous waste, and sewage discharge violations— the same multiple infractions for which the EPA had cited Plum Island a decade ago. Not surprisingly, the USDA hadn’t bothered to ameliorate the mess. New York State Attorney General Dennis Vacco filed a lawsuit against Plum Island, and Vacco’s spokesman scolded Plum Island: “If the federal government doesn’t follow environmental rules, who does?” In a June 2001 court-approved consent order, the USDA admitted violating three sewage effluent limitations. It exceeded permitted discharge by over 39,000 gallons daily and flushed out high fecal coliform levels (the dangerous barometer of other toxic animal viruses and bacteria) to the tune of 60,000 gallons a day. Once again, Plum Island agreed to stop fouling the water. Six months later, not much had changed. In December 2002, the National Resources Defense Council listed Plum Island second on its “Dirty Dozen” roll of the twelve biggest polluters in New Jersey and New York.
How does Plum Island get away with it time and again, and for so long? For one, as mentioned earlier, until 1991 Plum Island was an extremely close-knit family of workers, hailing from a band of sleepy colonial-era villages that preferred tranquillity to making trouble. “Loose lips sink ships,” went the philosophy. Another reason lies with its harmless-sounding, and patently misleading, name: “The Plum Island Animal Disease Center.” The 1999 West Nile virus outbreak and the 2001 anthrax attacks showed the public that humans caught animal diseases, too—and died from them. The USDA presented a formidable barrier of secrecy that newspaper and television reporters—all with ephemeral attention spans—could never fully cross. Whenever its culpability was called into question—which was more often than not—the USDA could always hide behind its shield of government secrecy and national security, no matter how insecure its facilities were. Finally, and perhaps most important, as its own island it enjoys total freedom, and no public accountability. A arm of the federal government, Plum Island has no constituents, or media, or shareholders to report to. And short of a congressional law or presidential executive order, no one can stop it.
The USDA fancies calling Plum Island “The Alcatraz of Animal Disease.” This is terribly misleading. Unlike the prisoners of Alcatraz, live germs on Plum Island have made it out alive on two proven occasions, from each of the island’s two laboratory buildings. And those are the known outbreaks; many more no doubt escaped detection. Employees have been infected with animal germs, and some have become violently and permanently ill. The USDA prefers to shrug its shoulders and demand impossible proof. Plum Island has proven to be an environmental catastrophe and a workplace safety nightmare, chronicled on multiple occasions by its own sister government agencies, the EPA and OSHA. Given the direct facts and circumstantial evidence, the insidious connections between Plum Island and the initial outbreaks of three infectious diseases—West Nile fever in 1999, Lyme disease in 1975, and Dutch duck plague in 1967—are far too coincidental to be dismissed. Liaisons between Plum Island and a top Nazi germ warfare scientist smuggled into the United States under a top secret military program add a new slate of questions to the already murky formative years of joint USDA-Army biological warfare activities there. The most burning revelations lie in the consistently ineffective biological security measures, which let unknown viruses and bacteria find their way through supposed decontamination filters and systems and into the air and local waters to this day.
All of this should be terrifying science fiction, but it’s worse. Because it’s all real.
Clearly, Plum Island is no CDC or Fort Detrick. Except in one important way. Plum Island—funded and run more like a small town high school biology lab than a high-containment virus laboratory—works on germs as deadly as the other two: microbes that cause AIDS, Rift Valley fever, polio, West Nile fever, Japanese encephalitis, swine flu, mad cow disease, to name a few, and countless others in Plum Island freezers (not to mention anthrax).
Looking at the 1956 vintage Lab 101 in full operation, and viewing Plum Island’s past to see its future, one thing is clear. Alcatraz is indeed a misleading comparison.
Where and why did it go wrong?
Money. Power. Duplicity. Politics. Glory. All had a hand in shaping this twisted animal kingdom. Political support for Plum Island ran from nonexistent to hotly antagonistic to almost laughable. From U.S. Senators Ives and Lehman’s 1952 desire for public hearings on the lab’s location, to a local congressman’s plea to choose an island elsewhere, to Congressman Forbes’s 1995 successful fight to halt the controversial BSL-4 upgrade— federal officials have viewed Plum Island as a pariah. Other than nuclear waste depots, Plum Island may be the only federal facility in America where locally elected federal officials flatly refuse to lend any support. Other facilities, like the nearby Groton nuclear submarine base, just across 228 Michael Christopher Carroll the Long Island Sound in Connecticut, can count on support from their congressmen and senators because of their boost to the local economies and the steady jobs they provide. Not so on Plum Island, where officials vacillate between investigating it (or pretending to) and ignoring it. The community never wanted the laboratory there to begin with, and though many locals—whose sons and daughters and brothers and sisters worked there— buried the proverbial hatchet, the politicians kept theirs in an easy-to-reach place. Had the USDA and Army established their labs in locales where the community and its political leadership actually supported it, like Maine, or Montana, or Washington State, or on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, it would have been different. But they didn’t. They plunked a biological warfare lab down in a populated region that begged them, “Please. Don’t put it here. Not in my backyard.” Right on the edge of the largest population center in the United States.
When the Army left in 1954, it took its deep pockets and congressional war-hawk caucus with it. Left with no funding from the military complex and zero political support, Plum Island found itself, literally and metaphorically, out at sea, forever swimming in the red with never enough money to meet its skeletal budget. It became a forgotten orphan in an obscure research division of a federal agency that had its priorities—and political supporters— based far away from New York, nestled deep within the farmbelt. Contrast this with the Ames federal laboratory (the USDA’s domestic disease version of Plum Island), always championed by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who also happens to be the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Agriculture Committee. During its half-century of existence, Plum Island has never had a Tom Harkin. But it sorely needed one.
Plum Island endures a vicious cycle of bottom-of-the-barrel annual appropriations that leads to decisions that cut corners and sacrifice safety and security. In the 1970s and 1980s, Plum Island’s engineering and plant management department cited “insufficient personnel” as the prime reason for its lack of preventative maintenance, proper training, and multiple containment leaks riddling Lab 101’s roof. In the 1990s, the private contractor Burns & Roe cited financial woes when it refused to staff the sewage decontamination plant twenty-four hours a day, even after a massive toxic spill occurred. Funding issues at Plum Island have not only impaired its performance, but have adversely affected the island’s dated, crumbling infrastructure as well.
These types of priority decisions—untenable choices between science and biological safety—made each year on Plum Island are never forced onto Fort Detrick or CDC. The CDC received approximately $2 billion from Congress in 1998. In that year, the Fort Detrick laboratories received $25 million and millions more in in-kind support from the Army. Plum Island skimped by on about $12 million. It appears that the 2004 Plum Island budget, now under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), will be approximately $16 million. Do animal and zoonotic science and health just not rate? Is it poorly understood or not explained well enough, compared to purely human health priorities? Is there no recognition of the susceptibility of humans to animal diseases accidentally or intentionally released on the population?
When residents protest Plum Island’s geographic location as unfit, the USDA time and again points to the CDC. USDA officials say the CDC has been operating safely for years in downtown Atlanta—“CDC is immediately adjacent to a child care center in a very highly populated city,” in the words of one official. By inference then, Plum Island, off the mainland in a less populated, immediate geographical area, should be acceptable. However, the USDA overlooks three important realities. For starters, Plum Island conducts its business entirely by itself on a private island off-limits to the public, where there is no opportunity for the slightest oversight of its activities, inside or outside the laboratory. The CDC’s very location in downtown Atlanta under the public’s watchful gaze keeps it honest, while Plum Island—out of sight, out of mind—is afforded ample opportunity for liberties when it comes to safety. Countless safety and security breaches go unnoticed every day because no one is watching. Second, what is now known about the USDA’s privately contracted activities on Plum Island— poor biological safety and island security, a reprehensible attitude toward workplace safety, and a lengthy track record of polluting the environment—speaks for itself. Past events prove the USDA to be an unfit steward of the island’s laboratories, bequeathed to it by the Army half a century ago. Finally, Plum Island is a Third World republic compared to the CDC and Fort Detrick in funding, in scientific talent, and in biological safety expertise. Neither of the other institutions has had a germ outbreak; Plum Island has had two verified outbreaks. Neither of them has been assailed for violations of environmental and workplace safety laws; Plum Island has repeatedly run afoul of such important laws.
The Plum Island task force surveyed the island’s security, and found two unarmed guards. “A bunch of teenagers were over there—just before September 11th—and Plum Island officials didn’t even know it,” remembers Acampora. “The kids came back and told us they went onto the island.” Acampora, a Republican, teamed up with Democrat U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer to issue a bipartisan call for the federal government to re-federalize Plum Island. “The federal government is the only agency that has the expertise and manpower to ensure that Plum Island will be monitored by electric sensors and patrolled by boats and helicopters,” said Acampora. The time for talk was over. “The health, safety, and welfare of our community and the nation are at stake, and we will prevail.” But their plaintive calls fell upon deaf ears. As of this writing, the only change the USDA has made is arming the two private security guards, one at Orient Point and the other on the island, who secure the entire facility. DHS claims to have added some security cameras. As for the other critical island functions? “I think federal oversight has to be there,” Acampora says. “At least federal background checks to ensure we have the right people there, like at the airports.”
The task force had tried in vain to bring accountability to Plum Island, and disbanded after the BSL-4 upgrade was stopped. While the task force remained active, management placed people at the Orient Point ferry dock to check identification badges, just like they had when the island opened for business in the 1950s. But Acampora found the ID check gone by January 2002. It had all been for show. “There we go again,” she says. “They need to have someone with their thumb on them. I don’t really think it’s my job, but I helped get the ball rolling.” If it’s not the local assemblywoman’s job, then somebody else needs to mind the store where Plum Island is concerned—which is the strongest argument yet for moving the USDA’s facility from the creaky old virus laboratory onto a bustling, conspicuous downtown street on the mainland.
THE USDA’S MAGIC TOUCH
You may live three miles, three hundred miles, or even three thousand miles from Plum Island. In every case, the same central question may be asked: would you want Plum Island in your backyard? Remember—if it isn’t in your vicinity, what happens there still has the potential to reverberate throughout the nation: the 1979 meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania is proof of that.
Plum Island’s future has never appeared more nebulous. As part of the emergency appropriation doled out in the wake of September 11, 2001, the USDA received $23 million for Plum Island, which is less than half of what the Ames, Iowa, domestic-germ laboratory received. Despite the smaller appropriation, the USDA maintains the funds are solely for implementation of security improvements—good news, because that kind of money can buy a lot of new air filters, armed security guards, and marine patrols.
In 2002, the Bush administration began the largest reorganization of the federal government since President Truman formed the National Military Establishment in 1947. The new federal reshuffling moved two federal laboratories into a new Department of Homeland Security: the small Environmental Measurements Laboratory in lower Manhattan, which protects against potential radiological and nuclear events, and Plum Island.
There remains speculation that the homeland security funds and the reorganization were a mere cover to upgrade the lab to BSL-4. New York’s junior U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton, raised concerns that the upgrade will allow Plum Island to research deadlier germs and endanger millions of New Yorkers. Yet Plum Island already works on deadly germs that pose genuine dangers. Of course, there are a few supporters of an upgrade. “Plum ought to be the leading site in the country for animal disease defense against these foreign threats—accidental or deliberate—it should be the leading lab,” huffs Dr. Roger Breeze. “If the county doesn’t want us to have a BSL-4 laboratory, we won’t have the defense, that’s fine by me—I just need to get on with my business.” Breeze envisions the new improved Plum Island boasting “ten times as many scientists than are there right now.”
Plum Island officially moved into the new Department of Homeland Security on June 1, 2003. At the time of this writing, Dr. Huxsoll packed up and left, and there is no director in place on Plum Island. All media or public inquiries about the island are referred to the DHS public relations office in Washington. The homeland security legislation included a provision that the president must notify Congress 180 days prior to any change in the island’s biosafety level. The clause is eerily reminiscent of the 1952 Plum Island public hearings provision inserted by Senators Lehman and Ives— and we know how that one turned out. It’s all too clear from the law that once 180 days expire, Plum Island may be upgraded to biosafety level four at the whim of the federal government, no matter how strongly the people and their elected representatives protest.
In March 2003, Plum Island Assistant Director Carlos Santoyo told the Associated Press that the transfer of Plum Island from USDA to Homeland Security would be little more than a “paper transfer.” Nonetheless, moving Plum Island out of the hands of the USDA and into the DHS might raise the island’s profile and could get it the funding it so desperately needs. Throwing money at the problem won’t solve it, but in this case, spending large sums reasonably and responsibly may be the only way to resuscitate the moribund island. Knocking down Lab 101 and building a modern containment facility from scratch would seem to be a good start, but a wrecking ball may not be possible. Lab 101 has become so virus-ridden over the years it may have to be fumigated, locked up, and mothballed, like its older brother, the ghostly Lab 257, and its first cousin at Fort Detrick, the boarded-up 1950s-era “Anthrax Hotel.”
There is one reason above all why transferring Plum Island from the USDA to the DHS might be the best thing that ever happened to Plum Island and its threatened environs: the USDA itself.
Plum Island has taught us that veterinarians aren’t all of the Dr. Dolittle variety, and that there’s plenty more to the United States Department of Agriculture than USDA Grade-A eggs and the food pyramid (or, if you’re a traditionalist, the four food groups). Most people know that agriculture relates to a most basic human need: food. But beyond that, what exactly is agriculture? Traditionally defined as the science of crop and livestock production, it represents a sea change in humanity—from that of primitive hunter-gatherer to organized planter and rancher. This science is relatively brand new; a study in 1968 noted that agriculture has been practiced for less than 1 percent of human history. Over the last half-century, the USDA has emerged as its greatest power and tireless promoter, taking modern science methodologies and applying them to foods grown and raised, processed, and shipped into the American marketplace.
In a postwar fervor that can best be seen as a scientific “Manifest Destiny,” the aggies aided and abetted the demise of the family farm in favor of agribusiness, trading localized production for the largest units of mass food production obtainable. Like a “boiler room” stockbroker, American agriculture has become enslaved to the incessant march of increasing numbers.
In 1976, the average U.S. farmworker fed fifty-two mouths, while the Russian worker fed only seven; livestock production per animal was up 130 percent from the previous fifty years. That was a quarter-century ago—since then, production has grown exponentially.
The USDA has accomplished this growth through proselytizing the new religion of science with an uncanny blind faith, ignoring any fallout over the last half-century. It claimed with certainty that its chemical DDT would not contaminate the wildlife and marine ecosystem. Thanks in large part to Rachel Carson, the USDA now admits it does.
The USDA championed chemical pesticides—scientifically engineered to quell insects that threatened exponential agricultural growth—and maintained they were food-friendly. But now, it grudgingly admits the chemicals are infused into the food products people eat, and wreak havoc upon wildlife.
The USDA said that fertilizer nitrates used on large farms would increase crop yields, and they would never reach groundwater aquifers. Today, the USDA admits that nitrates have seeped into and blighted potable water supplies in dangerous concentrations.
The USDA promoted dieldrin—a compound twenty times more toxic than DDT—to eliminate the Argentinean fire ant in a $156 million federal crop spraying program. Over time, the fire ant grew more resistant to pesticides and tripled its original geographic range. Says Smithsonian historian Pete Daniel, “The lost war against the fire ants should have been a cautionary, a warning against hubris and unintended consequences. Instead, it typified a mind-set that substituted faith in science and bureaucratic expertise for common sense.”
The USDA has always denied it had anything to do with biological warfare on Plum Island, but such assertions ring hollow. There is its early germ warfare work for the Army in the 1950s, and the joint USDA-Army work on the Rift Valley fever virus in the 1970s and 1980s. A July 13, 1992, Plum Island visitors’ manifest lists fourteen visiting Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army, and Pentagon officials. According to the document, the purpose of the visit was “to meet with Plum Island staff regarding biological warfare.” The visitors were part of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency reviewing the dual-use capabilities of the facility.
The Soviet Union didn’t buy the USDA line. Former Soviet biowarrior Dr. Ken Alibek wrote in his 1999 book Biohazard that Plum Island “had figured in our intelligence reports for years. It was used during the war to test biological agents.” I ask Alibek to explain those reports about Plum Island. “We had these ‘Special Information Reports’ that came from KGB and GRU [Soviet military intelligence] that described Plum Island, Fort Detrick, and Dugway Proving Ground as biological warfare sites.
“There’s no question that Plum Island was a threat—you know, at that time—I cannot even translate for you in Russian how ‘Plum Island’ would sound. Today I know what a ‘plum’ is and what ‘island’ is, but then,” he says, laughing, thinking of the fear the strange-sounding name instilled. “Someone had told me they worked in exotic livestock diseases, foot-and mouth virus and such.” As part of a 1994 arms agreement brokered between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the United States, each side was permitted to choose three suspected germ warfare sites for full inspection. When the Russian team arrived in February 1994, they visited their first two choices while aboard Air Force Two: Vigo and a Pfizer pharmaceutical plant in Groton, Connecticut.3 Then the team announced their third and final snap inspection: Plum Island. Dr. Breeze ventures a guess on why they chose Plum Island out of all places in the United States. “It used to be a military base with all these old underground bunkers, right across [the Long Island Sound] from a nuclear submarine base. We were doing a lot of reconstruction, and I think they looked at their satellite photographs and saw all this construction going on.”
3 Vigo was a long-abandoned World War II–era Army germ weapons plant in Terre Haute, Indiana, that had since been sold to Pfizer.
Upon arriving, the Russians first demanded a tour through the Army bunkers, searching in vain for a trapdoor leading to an underground complex. Then they walked around Lab 101, blueprints in hand, pointing and insisting to be shown the basement, except that the portion of 101 they were interested in didn’t have one. The plans showed the area as an “unexcavated” crawl space, yet the Russians refused to believe it. It was plainly apparent to the Plum Island staff that not all the Russians sniffing around were scientists. Though Dr. Alibek defected two years earlier, he confirms that inspection team members Grigoriy Shcherbakov and Aleksey Stepanov were two of his subordinates working on weaponizing genetically engineered anthrax. Dr. Carol House recalls, “A couple of them were green-beret types, who would take anybody out without thinking twice, and there were some intelligence agents, too. It wasn’t well hidden.”
Then there was a question-and-answer session on the viruses being studied there. Team leader Oleg Ignatiev, a short man with a low, booming voice, told Newsday reporter John McDonald afterward, “We find this is a very large center. It does very important work—but we have to work on it and think it over before reaching a conclusion.” Days after the Russians returned home, the newspaper Izvestiya reported that the United States was in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.
According to Alibek, the violation was mutual. The Soviet Union had a biological warfare program against livestock, code-named “Ecology,” that boasted thousands of scientists in multiple facilities. One Ecology-designed weapon he heard being discussed was called R-40. “Whether it was some new fever or new foot-and-mouth disease virus, I don’t know. What was interesting is that this weapon agent was cultivated in cattle; then, when the virus concentration was high, they bled them and made weapons from cattle blood.” Primitive science, but deadly.
The Soviet threat remains strong. Many of the program’s scientists, faced with starvation or working for rogue nations, chose the latter. And to this day, Russia still has three “former” biological warfare facilities that continue to be off-limits to the West. “Closed,” says Dr. Alibek in his gruff Russian accent. “Top secret—and nobody knows what they do behind those closed doors.” The former biowarrior now works for a Virginia biotech company with Pentagon contracts, developing defenses against the recombinant DNA germs he helped create, such as an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax. He’s even visited Dr. Huxsoll on Plum Island to interest the USDA in some business. Dr. Alibek says of Plum Island, “It’s a struggling facility trying to find adequate funding. This is what I know.”
The catastrophes at Plum Island did not occur in a vacuum. The single minded zeal of the USDA’s science mantra ends in wreckage far and wide. What happens when the blind pursuit of science is taken too far? When scientific glory is pursued for glory’s sake? In Plum Island’s case, the not-so-invisible hand of government prioritizes an abundance of food(really the livestock from which food is derived) ahead of its human workforce and the public health. Plum Island runs at the sufferance of deep pocketed agribusiness. One political scientist put the USDA’s thinking in no uncertain terms. “Critics inside the establishment are not appreciated, and outside criticism that cannot be dismissed as malicious, romantic, or uninformed is viewed as trivial in the context of agriculture’s record of increased food production.” There are no signs that DHS will change this modus operandi.
Then there is the question of the animals themselves. Plum Island has sacrificed hundreds of thousands of them, in all shapes and sizes, in an ambitious effort to tame foreign animal germs. Yet fifty years later, there is still no cure or silver-bullet vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease virus— Plum Island’s cause célèbre—or any of the other germs studied there. Is all this animal carnage necessary? If the modest success of the past is a barometer of future successes, productivity at Plum Island needs to be addressed.
The best solution may be not to rebuild on Plum Island, but to pack up instead and leave the mess behind. In this case, the USDA and DHS should consult those communities in Maine, Montana, Washington, and the Virgin Islands that actually wanted the lab during the first go-around in the 1950s. Generations from now, after the germs have long subsided, Suffolk County can establish that magnificent park preserve it wanted to build on Plum Island before the Army canceled its sale of the island.[Yet somehow the replacement finds it's way to the very heartland of the country in Manhattan Kansas DC]
In its final battle, Pat Acampora’s task force faced down mad cow disease. At an early morning meeting in Acampora’s office, with Dr. Breeze present, USDA officials were asked if Plum Island had ever studied bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. This animal infection’s human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, gnaws away at brain tissue and has a 100 percent mortality rate.4 The Plum Island officials told the group they had not worked on mad cow and weren’t equipped to study it. But a few months later, when 255 sheep in Vermont were suspected of contracting mad cow, the USDA made plans to ship the carcasses to Plum Island for necropsy, tissue and blood samples, and incineration. Tipped off of the plan, Acampora went livid. When she confronted Plum Island about it, the USDA told her, “Well, the situation has changed.” “They don’t even have a state permit for their incinerator!” she roared, and threatened a showdown: if they carted the sheep carcasses through Manhattan or Connecticut onto Long Island soil, she would get the police in Nassau and Suffolk counties to barricade the roads.
4 Mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are caused not by live germs, but inanimate “prions,” free floating snippets of infectious DNA material that lack the structure that characterize viruses and bacteria. More resilient than any known germ, they resist the decontaminating processes of steam autoclaving and even incineration. Little is known about prions, but they are known to be extremely dangerous to animal and human life.
Fearing a public relations debacle with national implications, the USDA backed off, and trucked its infected sheep refuse to the Ames, Iowa, laboratory. “It became such a hassle, they decided not to do it,” Acampora recalls with modesty; the truth is, she was the hassle. So many others— politicians, media, community groups—had failed over the years in trying to fight Plum Island. Finally, the task force had won a battle. It was a start.5
5 Later, the USDA disclosed that tissue samples from the infected sheep had been sent previously to Plum Island and, unknown to the task force and the local community, were used in tests there.
“Look at our space shuttle,” Acampora says. “We spent billions of dollars on the space mission, hundreds of engineers, technicians, scientists, and safety experts to make sure the flight was fail-safe. We watched in awe. We clapped. And then it exploded in horror. That’s what I’m worried about.” Even to this day, while other local officials have accepted tour invitations, the feisty assemblywoman won’t go to Plum Island. Why is that? “It’s really a simple reason,” she laughs. “They say that when you go there, you have to scrub down, and get all washed up. And no one’s going to see my hair wet.” One gets the impression her fears go far beyond a bad hair day. “There have been a lot of mishaps out there,” she says, “and let’s face it— Long Island has a lot of wind, and should something happen there, and the wind’s blowing in the wrong direction, that could be pretty problematic.
“When you are a mile off the coast of a heavily populated area, an area for which we have no real evacuation, I have a concern.” Indeed, there is only one arterial road off the North Fork and one out of the Hamptons, spilling into the heart of Long Island. From there, Long Island’s 7.2 million people bottleneck into ten narrow bridges and tunnels that themselves empty into the cluttered congestion of New York City, where 11 million more people reside.6 Indeed, Plum Island lies on the periphery of the largest population center in the United States.
6 As of 2000, the island of Long Island holds 2.6 million people in Nassau and Suffolk counties, 2.2 million in Queens, and 2.4 million in Brooklyn.
Whether the nation’s exotic animal disease laboratory should remain on Plum Island remains the central question. “When the Manhattan Project was developed during World War II,” Karl Grossman points out, “they selected places that would be safe. The Manhattan Project laboratories were inland, at places like Oak Ridge in Tennessee, and Los Alamos. If it was a small island in the Pacific doing very sensitive research, through radar you could make sure no vessels came within a certain distance. But Plum Island... man.” Grossman lets out a long sigh. “Plum Gut on a summer day is a main street for boaters and fishermen. If they aren’t moving in, they are moving out. You can’t screen [marine traffic] until they are onshore. There is a war consciousness today—is it appropriate to have [the laboratory] on an island that is jutting out there in the Atlantic, with lots of traffic?”
Can Plum Island’s facilities be moved to the mainland, like the National Academy of Sciences urged back in 1983? Asked this question in his Plum Island office, Dr. Huxsoll says, “With the biocontainment technology today, you can probably put this anywhere. But the stakeholders are more comfortable with it being there because of the geographic location.” Yes, the “stakeholders”—a fancy euphemism for the $100 billion agribusiness empire that claims this research is essential, but won’t spend a dollar of its own money to do it itself. “The reason Plum Island survives today is money,” says ex–union chief Ed Hollreiser. “The cattlemen and pig and poultry farmers want it continued.”
“You could put it in the middle of New York City and obtain the right biosecurity,” Huxsoll asserts. Sounds crazy, but he’s right. While it sounds ironic, the work is safest not on an island but right next door, like the CDC in Atlanta, where tens of thousands of people mill past it each day. Why? Because that kind of closeness demands (and in the case of the CDC, enjoys) the most stringent protocols of safety possible. If past history has taught us any lessons, it’s that Plum Island desperately needs a babysitter.
If Plum Island should go, there will be yet another accompanying consequence, though perhaps not as weighty as national and regional safety and security—the demise of a local economy. Dr. Breeze’s ploy to split the workforce between New York and Connecticut crippled a good part of the east end tax base, and far fewer federal dollars were spent locally. With the departure of those skilled and professional positions remaining on Plum Island, the “brain drain” of educated folks will continue, leaving behind empty nesters and dwindling farm families.
The government closed Lab 257 for good in the spring of 1995. They cited the building’s outdated biocontainment facilities and crumbling old age—eighty-four strenuous years of service under its belt, forty-one of them as a exotic germ laboratory—as reasons for the shutdown. All of Lab 257’s laboratory operations were consolidated within the other research facility, Lab 101 on the island’s northwest shore.
Although scheduled to be fully decontaminated and demolished in 1996, Lab 257 still stands today, rotting from weathered decay, harboring who knows what deep within. On one of my voyages to Plum Island, I had an opportunity to investigate it up close. It was an eerie, post apocalyptic scene. Corrugated metal plates clamored loudly against the lab’s wall. Scores of rusty pipes sprouted out of the flat tar roof. A lonely two-story skeletal extension was partially connected to the near side of the building, exposing rusted beams. Pipes snaked around the insides, some twisting into air vents, others ending in midair with no connection. Two short, thick pipes rose along the side of the building, like turbines in a ship’s boiler room.
The door to the gatehouse hung open, creaking away in the whistling wind. I carefully inched inside. On the right was a padlocked wooden box marked suggestions. The guard’s desk, straight ahead, was covered with a thick coat of soot. There was a flip calendar on the desk, one page half turned over—paused on January 13, 1995. The clock overhead, stopped dead at 9:12 and some seconds. Leather bound logbooks were piled haphazardly in the middle of the desk, just below the calendar. Sand blown in from the beach was piled in five-inch drifts at the floor’s corners. It was a ghost lab.
Nailed to the door leading into the lab compound were rusted warning signs, stamped biohazard. They were signs reminiscent of Lab 257’s shadowy past.
And a mile away, Lab 101 marched—and continues to march on.
15
A Plum Island Prescription
For all of its warts, we still need Plum Island. Or a place like what
Plum Island ought to be, where America can fight the emerging
threat of biological terrorism against the nation’s food supply—
called agroterrorism in the new parlance. Back in the 1970s, a biological warfare expert told the Newsday investigative duo
Cummings and Fetherston, “If you want to use biological warfare,
you would be much better at striking livestock. If you use nerve gas
on an army, you just kill the soldiers. If you destroy or damage a
country’s food supply, you strike at everyone.” Those in power
didn’t listen then, but after the 2001 anthrax attacks that infected
eleven and murdered five, bioterrorism became a new vocabulary
word. Floyd Horn, shifted from USDA research czar to agroterror
chief at the Department of Homeland Security, said this of the threat
in May 2002: It is dead serious, and we really are at war. They want to get us, they want to get our economy, they want to kill us, they want to make us sick, get us out of the global marketplace and they want us to get out of their part of the world. And they have very few constraints about how they want to go about it.... When people lose their faith in government to protect the food supply, there’s big trouble. This is ice cream for the average terrorist, and it’s something we have to worry about every day here.
When Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood was caught red-handed in Kabul, Afghanistan, with a dossier on Plum Island, Horn’s startling warning became a grim reality.
Tom Ridge, secretary of the DHS, said in June 2003, “I understand completely that Plum Island is the first line of defense in agroterrorism. I mean, that’s where we’re going to see the contaminants. That’s where we’re going to identify the pathogens. . . .” And, said another DHS official, the aim of Plum Island “is not just science, it’s protecting U.S. agriculture from agroterrorism.” If this is what DHS chiefs expect from Plum Island, they may end up shortchanged.
Karl Grossman used to think it was a joke. Always the thorn in Plum Island’s side, he playfully wrote in a 1995 column, “As to what nation has been interested in poisoning America’s pigs and assassinating our chickens, that has been very unclear.” But after September 11, 2001, and revelations of an Iraqi anti-agricultural and antipersonnel germ warfare program, Karl has had a change of heart. “After September 11th, it seems to me—finally— that with these people doing crazy things, that al Qaeda and the Islamic extremist movement attacking food and livestock is a real possibility. We are dealing with a challenging, inventive, and nutty enemy. So the defensive biological warfare mission on Plum Island suddenly has—and I don’t know if it should be on Plum Island, that’s another issue—but the mission itself suddenly has validity.”
While calls to improve homeland defense are focused on airports and biological attacks on people, a ready-made terrorist opportunity lurks elsewhere. A terrorist could use germs targeted at animals, but like Rift Valley fever, the animal viruses could be zoonotic agents that infect animals and people simultaneously. Infecting domestic (and wild) animal populations that act as vectors would spread and amplify the disease in the very same manner that Lyme disease, West Nile virus, and Dutch duck plague spread from the New York area to the rest of the nation in a matter of years. Economically speaking, a non-zoonotic virus—one affecting only animals—directed against domestic livestock would be nearly as damaging.
Though we require it to live, food is a luxury taken for granted in America. For millions of urban, suburban, and exurban dwellers, food comes from the sparkling clean thirty-five-aisle supermarket, or the Friday’s chain bistro in the shopping mall, or the McDonald’s just off the highway exit. Rarely do we ever think about where our food comes from. It’s that ignorance that terrorists will look to exploit. Recent events serve as a harbinger for things that may come.
It would be very easy to destroy the American food supply. In fact, if you wanted to, you could do it all by yourself. I sat down with a veterinarian microbiologist named “Todd Barker” and discussed this possibility. “It’s amazing what lab equipment you can buy on-line,” says Todd. Websites like www.labjunk.com sell old equipment at bargain-basement prices, and from there you can start assembling your very own kitchen laboratory. Over the Internet, you can purchase anaerobic fermenters, a good centrifuge, a pressure cooker, bacterial media, and a milling device. A crude kitchen lab environment will be messy and things tend to spill, so you would want to go to a feed store out west to pick up antibiotics and vaccines meant for cattle. “You’ll get a sore arm and a reaction,” says Todd of the crude animal prophylactics. But it will still protect you while you’re playing mad scientist.
Then you will need a starter germ, and all that takes is some fake letterhead. “You could write someone and say you are a scientist from a phony lab, and you need it to test and make a diagnosis—and you’ll get it. It’s a common courtesy.” If that doesn’t come through, you can always go abroad and obtain viruses like foot-and-mouth disease virus and rinderpest in European and African countries where they are endemic, like Dr. Erich Traub did in Turkey during World War II for SS Reichsführer Himmler. If those two options fail, you can try to follow the Long Island researchers who recently created the first synthetic live virus (polio virus, to be exact): by using genetic recipes available over the Internet and mail-ordering the component gene snippets.
Then you set your target. Modern agribusiness presents the nation’s most vulnerable bioterrorism target. In the last fifteen years, virtually all livestock farms have been vertically integrated. Take swine, for example. There is no national tag system. Pigs go into a sale barn where they mix with thousands of other pigs and then ship out. Every pig that is reared and fattened for slaughter has some one thousand miles of travel on it. They go from Arkansas to North Carolina to Indiana, then to market in Chicago. Over twelve thousand pigs move out of North Carolina a day, and they head out for contract barns in ten different states; if it has to, a pig producer will move pigs two thousand miles to a contract barn with an open slot. Two weeks later, it’s off to twenty-odd swine-producing states. Using sophisticated computer inventory systems, it is no more difficult than Home Depot moving hardware inventory between store locations.
Cattle ranches orchestrate similar movements of “product” through sale barns to large stockyards. A million head will go through sale barns to market in a span of three months. Dairy “farms,” as they are still called, are no different. Comparing today’s dairy industry to his roots growing up on a small dairy farm, Dr. Huxsoll says, “You wouldn’t recognize a single similarity—except maybe the presence of a cow.” Several thousand cows are milked mechanically twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, on a mere forty acres of land. It’s not really a farm anymore. Their milk goes directly to a six-thousand-gallon tanker truck; when the tanker’s full, it pulls away and goes to the dairy processing plant to cool for a while. This is where the vulnerabilities arise. Sixty vehicles drive in and out of those dairy operations every day, bringing in feed, hauling off milk, driving workers to work, you name it. And germs travel extremely well when suspended in milk. Many of the sale barns are wide open places, and only a few have even token security, says Todd. “These operations claim to have real biosecurity, but it’s superficial.” Infiltrating these facilities, then, is not all that difficult.
But Todd has a far easier target for you: a cattle truck. There’s not much biosecurity to a cattle truck sitting at a rest stop, on its way to a contract farm or a sale barn. Your compact rental car can pull right alongside the truck loaded full of animals after the driver steps into the Waffle House for a plate of eggs and cup of coffee. You can walk up to the side of the long open-corral trailer with your test tube of—insert virus of your choice here, say foot-and-mouth disease virus, held in liquid slurry form—uncork it, and swat its contents inside, like a priest anointing his congregation with holy water. On roughly the seventh day, results should materialize.
Your macabre blessing, unleashed on a truckload of cattle, just created a wide-scale food shortage and in so doing, proceeds to tank over one-tenth of America’s total economic output.1 You’ve sent America a brutal reminder of where its abundant food comes from, and created national mass hysteria in the process. Says Dr. Huxsoll, “If you had a major agricultural catastrophe, you’d see the disappearance of a lot of family farms and the disappearance of a lot of small rural communities.”
1 The American livestock industry makes up 13.3 percent of the entire U.S. gross domestic product, accounting for $100 billion in sales every year
Attacking the American food supply is the simplest form of biological warfare available to a terrorist. United States agriculture is vertically integrated, accessible, and concentrated. The fact that American livestock has been fortunate enough to be disease-free has a downside. Not being needed, vaccines aren’t widely used, making herds extremely susceptible to infectious foreign germs. And because of the high level of animal intermingling and herd combination, recombination, and consolidation, there’s no way an infection can be limited to an isolated occurrence, and there’s no way it can be traced. “We’re such a wide-open target, it’s just unbelievable,” Todd laments. “Because we’re so damn incredibly efficient. Agribusinesses move pigs like Wal-Mart moves toilet paper and motor oil.” There’s significantly less bioprotection in place for animals than there is for humans; and there’s no expensive research and development, mass production, or bomb delivery device prerequisites either. A kitchen laboratory and chemistry textbook would suffice. If left unguarded, we won’t know what hit us until that animal truck strewn with disease begets millions of hungry and panicked Americans scouring empty supermarket shelves coast to coast.
The worst part of this scenario is that it pales in comparison to what the al Qaeda terrorist network or a well-trained scientist-cum-terrorist already has in mind, waiting for the right moment to unleash upon an unsuspecting—and strikingly vulnerable—America.
In August 2002, CNN broadcast excerpts from al Qaeda videotapes showing three tests of a white oozing liquid being unleashed on Labradors, romping around in a closed test room. On film, the trapped dogs quickly turn dour. They begin to yelp and writhe in pain and go on to suffer agonizing deaths from these mysterious chemical or biological agents. Made available to a CNN reporter outside of Kabul, Afghanistan (home of Bashiruddin Mahmood’s “charity”), the disturbing tapes show “meticulous planning and attention to the tradecraft of terror,” in the words of terrorist expert Magnus Ranstorp. Recently, an Algerian terrorist cooperating with U.S. authorities testified he was taught by al Qaeda how to smear biological toxins on doorknobs. The techniques are similar to those used by German terrorists who smeared glanders bacteria on the gums of horses in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York during World War I.
If you don’t think agro- or bioterrorism could be coming soon to an American town near you, you need to think again.
A former military intelligence commando, Gary Stubblefield runs a consulting firm that specializes in ultra-high security. Four years ago he was writing a report on the national security threats of radiological emission devices (REDs) and national food security, warning of possible terrorist threats. “All the national labs just looked at us and laughed,” he recalls, when they read his report. “Said it was ridiculous.” Today, no one is laughing, and the hulky Stubblefield is spending seventy-five hours a week flying all over the world for the Pentagon to stymie the threat of REDs, or “dirty bombs.” Yet with all his time spent confronting the dirty bomb threat, he hasn’t forgotten about the food security issues he also once raised. “They laughed us out of the room back then on that one, too,” he recalls. But people are starting to realize that our food supply may be the next target.
“Here’s one of the scary things,” Stubblefield says. “Those guys watch CNN just like we do, they see what happened economically to us, and how we reacted to that small anthrax situation—and I only say small because it didn’t spread widely. They recognize this, and it has been written in their intercepted literature that ‘We can bring down the giant economically, and that too will kill him.’ If they can find a way to stop our food supply, they believe they will bring America to a halt.” Stubblefield says that since its inception, al Qaeda’s modus operandi involves simultaneously attacking multiple targets, which can include planned attacks on our food.
The state of Montana decided to get serious. After September 11, 2001, officials asked Stubblefield to come up with a plan to protect the agriculturally rich state from agroterrorism. Among other defense options, Stubblefield proposed fiber-optic detection cables, run along fence lines. “If anything gets inside,” he says, “an alarm will go off and tell you exactly where it was set off.” Though Stubblefield’s fiber-optic security solution is effective and easy to install, the cable is fairly expensive, and no one is stepping forward to pick up the tab. “The rancher doesn’t feel he has to pay because he says it isn’t his problem. His mission in life is to raise stock and sell it—they don’t understand this. I don’t think they have a clue.” What about the USDA? “The feds are saying they can’t do it because it’s not their responsibility either. Everybody is sidestepping the issue.” Montana hasn’t implemented a full agroterrorism program, and no other state has either. Is the food supply close to being protected? “We are quite far away,” he says. “I think we are still at the discussion level, and that is shortsighted. We should be more proactive.”
One of the most insightful analyses of ways to defend against agroterrorism comes from Anne Kohnen, who designed specific recommendations in her October 2000 Harvard master’s degree thesis. Kohnen proposed a four-level counterattack, from the organism level to the farm, sector, and national levels. The report requires Plum Island be upgraded to BSL-4 to combat all exotic animal diseases. When asked about the impact of her thesis—which is perhaps the most comprehensive report publicly available on the subject—Kohnen, who now works on nuclear proliferation, laments the inattention agroterrorism still receives. “Until now, it has been overlooked. Not of much interest to the policymakers—it’s not a sexy topic like arms control or international trade. It hasn’t received much press. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing—I’d just as soon have fewer articles out there about how easy it is.” Gary Stubblefield takes the opposite approach. “I don’t like putting these things out in the news. But sometimes it doesn’t hurt to advertise that we are working on things.” Speaking of our homeland security, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry said on Meet the Press that there are “enormous gaps and deficits in the preparedness level. . . .” Given the lack of preparedness, federal and state officials need to work much harder.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks on America, homeland security has become paramount to the nation’s survival. Plum Island can play an important role in securing the home front. But not the Plum Island that exists today.
There are two worthy options for the island’s future: closure or total rebirth. In 1983, the National Academy of Sciences implored the USDA to close Plum Island down, eight years before it was foolishly privatized. “Limitations of time and budgets, shortage or lack of primary containment equipment, and lack of a sufficient number of engineering and safety staff trained in biomedical containment facilities have made it difficult. . . .” Had the public known of this report, the shop would have long been closed. But they hadn’t, and Plum Island still limps along, plagued by those same limitations and shortages. Plum Island management is asleep at the wheel, waiting to be jolted awake by an employee dying from contact with deadly exotic animal virus, or by a scientist burning in a laboratory fire the volunteer bucket brigade couldn’t put out because the emergency exit door was locked, or by large numbers of swimmers in the Hamptons coming down with strange untraceable illnesses, or a boater in the Long Island Sound hooking a box full of test tubes.
The second possibility, a born-again Plum Island, must take strict measures in biological safety and biological security, truly separate matters that are too often confused. Science, security, and safety must go hand in hand and rate equally; never should one be sacrificed for another. Should there be an imbalance, it must tip in favor of security and safety, and rather than the pursuit of science.
In this end, a “Plum Island Prescription” follows:
Biological Safety—It begins with the transportation of virus and bacteria samples to Plum Island. When the USDA convinced Congress to let it transfer viruses over the mainland in the late 1950s, it duped the lawmakers by saying there would be only a few trips a year. That wasn’t true then and it’s not true today, as samples make their way anonymously along highways and local roads multiple times each day. Dr. Callis used a USDA courier to transport samples, saying, “We do not trust the mails.” Today, Plum Island is far more trusting, entrusting germ samples to the U.S. Postal Service, airport limousines, and private shipping companies like Federal Express. Drivers don’t know their packages’ contents, nor are they trained on handling an accidental spill.
The USDA’s private courier is marginally better. The precious cargo is placed in the trunk of a compact car or in the backseat of a Dodge Caravan minivan, and an unarmed driver takes it for a two-hour spin from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Plum Island. Nothing will break in the sturdy containers if dropped from heights of up to twenty-seven feet. Physics dictate, however, that a dropped box from that height will be traveling at 29 miles per hour upon ground impact. A 60 mph car crash will subject the same box to twice the force. That’s far from unbreakable.
Virus shipments should arrive either by the original method of Navy ship transport or by armed escort over New York City and Long Island roads. In this case, notification of each trip must be given to emergency responders like fire and police departments, along with the nature of the samples and what to do in case of an accident (including a fatal one, like the deadly accident in 1970 involving the Plum Island germ courier).
It should go without saying that biological samples should be brought immediately to Plum Island and locked away in storage and never be left on the side of Route 25 or in the Plum Island mailbox. At 7:05 p.m. on May 19, 2002, Southold town police received a worried call from the Orient Point private security guard. Someone had placed a suspicious-looking package inside the oversized black Plum Island mailbox along Route 25. The road was cordoned off, and 350 passengers on two Connecticut ferries were detained on the boats for more than three hours. The police called in the Suffolk County emergency services unit, who donned protective gear to rip open the mailbox and expose its contents. “After this examination,” said the police report, “the items found in the mailbox were determined not to be of suspicious nature.” The package was an envelope containing junk mail. Had it not been a false alarm, a three-hour response such as this would have posed tragic consequences.
The Plum Island safety office needs to be taken seriously and augmented with seasoned professionals, returning to the policy that the director of safety is a trained scientist. The Plum Island frying pan affair clearly demonstrates this. As part of a 1993 renovation of sixty thousand square feet in Lab 101, the windows needed to be replaced. The entire wing was opened to the atmosphere for the first time since 1956. The safety department hatched a jerry-rigged decontamination operation using two hundred electric frying pans, three hundred power extension cords, eighty rolls of duct tape, and a bunch of household fans. With frying pans placed on the floor every few feet, the safety office heated eighteen-gram blocks of solid formaldehyde to 450 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour, turning the solids into a poisonous decontaminating gas. When the cloud dissipated days later, they would collect 600 test strips of the Bacillus subtilis spore, a germ known for its hardiness (the same germ used in Fort Detrick’s germ warfare tests in the New York City subway), to see if the formaldehyde had fully decontaminated the area. Climbing into the air lock and collecting the test strips, workers in space suits found that more than 120 of the strips turned murky with bacteria spores. The decontamination failed. On the second try, poisonous gaseous formaldehyde, in concentrations far greater than those that sickened Fran Demorest, leaked into the adjacent lab and forced a full evacuation to the Army chapel. Again, Plum Island escaped the reaper—no one was seriously injured.
What caused this potentially deadly leak? It was something that plagued Labs 257 and 101 often in the past, particularly during Hurricane Bob. On the day of the second try, a power outage just after 7:30 a.m. shorted out the negative airflow system and stopped the forward airflow. Soon after, thirty unsuspecting people working in the laboratory smelled a pungent odor, and their eyes began to tear. No viruses escaped, the USDA said. Just formaldehyde gas.2 The USDA blamed it on the Long Island Power Company, which in turn blamed it on an osprey that crashed into a power line, disrupting the power running through the undersea cable to Plum Island. Neither mentioned why the emergency generators at the power plant failed to kick in. The same people that cooked up the frying pan fiasco still run the skeletal Plum Island safety office. This critical department, arguably the most important on the island, must be staffed with a multitude of professional experts, rather than a handful of MacGyver like handymen solving biological problems with pots and pans.
2 In an amusing aside, this only-on-Plum Island disaster occurred the same day the battered Dr. Jerry Crawford announced his departure. One can picture Crawford, packing up his desk, breathing a long sigh of relief.
Fire safety remains an important issue. With a single dedicated fireman and a bucket brigade of employees (performing other responsibilities) who are supposed to sprint to the firehouse at the sound of an alarm, the ability of Plum Island to control laboratory fires seems dubious at best. According to workers now on strike, the contractor was essentially forcing workers to be part of the fire brigade. “The sad part about it,” says one worker, “is that we don’t want to—and we never went to school to—fight a fire! And fire training today is a fifteen-minute confined space rescue drill.” On top of that, it appears that crucial mutual aid from nearby Long Island in the event of an out-of-control blaze is a nonstarter. Many firefighters, all community volunteers, privately admit they will not go to Plum Island to fight a fire, fearing biological infection, regardless of any mutual aid agreement. Trained to chop holes in roofs to put out fires, the Long Island fireman would have a far different task inside a biological containment laboratory that must remain sealed to the outside world. There was to be comprehensive fire training on Plum Island—possibly the first of its kind—for the Long Island fire departments. But the training was canceled after the strike. “Even if they went to the fire,” says a former Plum Island fire brigade member of the local fire departments, “how long would it take to get to the island? At full steam that’s still about forty minutes in response time.” At the very least, then, the bucket brigade should be disbanded and the professional fire department reinstated.
My interview with Dr. Huxsoll in his Plum Island office—before he departed, leaving no one on site in charge of the Plum Island helm for months—adds further weight to the vision of chaos that surrounds the island. Our meeting was conducted in stifling heat because, as luck would have it, there was a power outage that morning, forcing the evacuation of all nonessential personnel. I entered Lab 101 to a commotion: workers arguing about how to safely store the arriving boxes, loaded with live biological samples, that had traveled across Plum Gut on the same ferry as me. Because of my meeting with Huxsoll, I was spared from the evacuation and rushed up to his office. We sat there speaking while sweating profusely, both pretending nothing was wrong. We did our best to ignore the loud piercing beeps that periodically blasted from the hallway, reminding us that something was going very wrong, again, on Plum Island.
The safety office should also check employees regularly for exposure to pathogens and provide assistance with medical diagnosis if exposures occur. Plum Island must adhere to the 1982 outside safety review committee report issued in the wake of the virus outbreak: “In the event of active suspected laboratory-associated infections, however, it is recommended that diagnostic examinations be conducted at a facility other than Plum Island.... Examinations of active cases should be conducted with the knowledge and concurrence of the USDA Medical Officer and the employee’s private physician.” Two decades later, the edict remains ignored. Instead, the Plum Island safety office turned its back on Phillip Piegari, Pete Swenson, Shine Mickaliger, and others.
Biological Security—Plum Island needs to be guarded around the clock by a platoon of trained, armed guards, like the thirty-four-man department it used to have in the 1950s. The current force of retired NYPD cops guarding Orient Point and Plum Island isn’t even a start. Since his first visit in 1971, reporter Karl Grossman has seen more of Plum Island than anyone not connected the government. “In my earlier visits,” recalls Grossman, “it looked like what you would expect out of a James Bond movie, with armed federal agents who patrolled the beach constantly. Later they had privatized the security, and you were walking past the kind of people you would see in front of a convenience store in a bad neighborhood.” Regular helicopter and marine patrols, proposed by Senator Schumer and Assemblywoman Acampora, are also imperative.
Plum Island is more vulnerable to enemy and terrorist attack than it Lab 257 249 was prior to September 11, 2001, though the USDA strongly disagrees. “It’s really no more a terrorist target than the local federal courthouse,” says spokeswoman Sandy Miller Hays. “It’s just not that attractive a target.” I suggest that Hays relay the USDA’s viewpoint to Bashiruddin Mahmood, c/o Islamabad, Pakistan, and to his unsavory cohorts. Security needs to be on par with Steve Nostrum’s armed paramilitary unit that protected Shoreham, the nuclear power plant. Thanks to the discovery of Mahmood’s cache, there is proof that Plum Island is as vulnerable a target as a nuclear power plant, and in many ways a far greater one.
After the terrorist attacks, the American public called for increased security at airports, focusing particularly on private companies that hire minimum-wage workers to X-ray baggage and run the passenger metal detectors. By federalizing airport security—placing guards under federal control—better trained and equipped people will vastly improve lax safety measures, say supporters. Plum Island is an installation as vulnerable as any airport and arguably far more exposed. The federal A-76 privatization program stated that the private enterprise system, “characterized by individual freedom and initiative, is the primary source of economic strength.” But wherein lies the primary source of national security strength? Or the strength required to protect the public from biological and environmental harm? That lies with the people’s government, not in the private sector, where the “governing” is motivated by profit. Still, Plum Island’s support functions and its paucity of island security remain in private hands. If there is strength in numbers, then Plum Island is exceptionally weak. From a support staff high of 156 employees before privatization, the workforce was trimmed from 156 to 100, and then pared to 80—half of its original size. In some instances, workers are assigned job tasks once performed by three separate individuals. This is a recipe for disaster, evidenced by this one sewage plant worker who kept a private log:
We proved the problem can be kept under control by concentrating more operator time running the plant. Due to the lack of manpower, we could only do this for a short time by ignoring other island operations, which contributed to the old plant being out of compliance this month.... Requested covers be installed to avoid freezing problems during winter. Request denied due to “Who will pay?” syndrome. Systems around the island that we have been ignoring are beginning to fail. Still no extra manpower as promised. High temperatures shutting down pumps. But EQ tank full. Must let go through plant HOT (100 degrees Fahrenheit]).... Bad storm blew poly pumps and plumbing apart.... Some days with no operator at all! During this time, a major plant spill occurred due to this lack of manpower. Plant is under size for current and future needs of island.... Plant requires much more operator manpower to overcome design problems.... Budget cutbacks have wiped out availability of normal maintenance.
During my personal visits to Plum Island, I noticed that the gates leading into the Lab 101 compound were left open all day, and utility vehicles and box trucks (presumably carrying biological samples and animals) freely moved in and out. The laboratory building itself needs to be better guarded. “Take the new lobby,” says Dr. Carol House of Lab 101, who’s been there a few times since her retirement. “They built that nice brand-new lobby, but the staircase blocks the doors into the lab, and there was no pass card to get into the lab for years. There is now, maybe installed a month ago. Anybody in that building can walk into those laboratories at will. Just look at the physical setup—the security guy sitting at reception is flush with the wall, and if he’s sitting down, he can’t see the entrance to the lab because the staircase is in the way. All you have to do is slip in—I mean, c’mon!”
Maintaining proper biological security also means screening scientists and workers. In the early days, Dr. Callis defended the security checks and taking oaths before researchers were hired, telling a panel, “We wouldn’t want anybody working here who would maliciously sabotage our work.” But over the years Plum Island has welcomed many foreign scientists in residence with little or no background checks, from nations like China, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Uganda, and—of all places—Iraq. While doctors from staunch American allies like Japan and Taiwan should be, and are, welcomed to Plum Island, those hailing from nations with suspect political affiliations ought to be barred. “A highly skilled individual could take advantage of the opportunity afforded by a position of trust in a laboratory . . . in human or veterinary medicine. Such persons would use to full advantage the appearance of loyalty and transparent honesty,” Canadian officials wrote this in December 1941 at a time of world turmoil. It rings just as meaningfully today.
Background checks should be run, like they were in the 1950s, on all nonprofessional personnel as well—yet another discarded procedure. Recently, a worker in charge of preparing Plum Island identification badges was caught making fake badges and was quietly dismissed. Dr. Carol House speaks of a USDA employee who was accused of taking large bribes at the Port of Miami quarantine facility, and was previously convicted for assault and battery. The employee was transferred to work at Plum Island. House noticed the man, an inventory keeper, on Plum Island on a Saturday morning, for no apparent reason. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘This is weird— what’s he doing here on a Saturday?’ He knows where all the keys are, and knows all the combinations to the locks.” On Monday morning, House privately reported her observation to security, who never properly investigated the claim. What had he been doing there that day? “I don’t know,” says House. “I wasn’t going to trail him. I went home earlier in the day and he stayed on after that.” The man mysteriously left Plum Island about two months later. “This was the mentality of security,” House recalls. Bungle it, or honor it in the breach.
A final concern involves Plum Island’s airspace. At some point during the gradual decline of the island’s security, the restricted “no-fly zone” designation over Plum Island’s airspace was suspended. Its airspace should be redesignated restricted on navigational flight charts and enforced by the U.S. Air Force or the National Guard.
Privatization—A democratic government should perform essential functions that are economically and practically infeasible for private citizens and industry to perform themselves. For example, maintaining a private armed security force to guard one’s home is economically beyond most people’s reach, so everyone pays taxes to support a municipal police force that guards one’s person and property. Applied to Plum Island, research on exotic animal disease has been deemed inefficient and impractical for the private sector to finance, so it has been delegated to government. Because of the ultrasensitive nature of operations, its support workers should be of the highest caliber. Skill—not a willingness to work for low wages and benefits—should drive recruitment. Safety and security—not year-end profits realized on a balance sheet—should be the primary motivator. This is not an indictment of the private sector; it is a realization that government takes on inefficient roles to provide a necessary benefit and protect its citizens. Plum Island, like airport security, must be federalized.
A stark reminder of this occurred at midnight on August 13, 2002, when seventy-six workers, with a combined 758 years of professional experience running Plum Island, went on strike for the first time in the island’s history. Citing living wages and medical benefits that lag behind similar operations elsewhere, Local 30, the Plum Island union, took action after going without a contract for eleven months.3 The union asked for a forty cents per hour per worker increase, or $850 per worker. The private contractor rejected their modest demands, and instead airlifted some forty replacement workers (“scabs” in union parlance) from as far away as Colorado to Connecticut, and secretly ferried them to Plum Island under cover of night. The replacements circumvented the twenty-four-hour picket line at the Orient Point dock—christened with a camping tent, a twenty-foot high inflatable balloon rat, and an American flag. The scabs were taking turns working the island’s critical systems and sleeping on cots huddled together in the big warehouse at Plum Island harbor. Food and toiletries were ferried in for them
3 The earlier 1998 contract that expired was only agreed to after a federal mediator was brought in to resolve a threatened strike. The contractor agreed to 3-percent-per-year wage increases, slightly lower than U.S. inflation increases over the same period.
Responding to concerns over whether Plum Island could be safely run during a walkout by the workers trained to sustain it, a USDA spokeswoman said simply, “We do not feel it is necessary to shut down the island.” But the replacement workers’ mishaps contributed to Plum Island’s circus-gone wrong atmosphere. Scabs caused three separate ferryboat incidents: one in which the ferry ran over a buoy in Plum Gut, causing $10,000 in damage; another where the boat crashed into the Old Saybrook, Connecticut, dock; and yet another in which a six-hundred-gallon tank of liquid nitrogen fell off the back of the boat into Plum Island Harbor. Thankfully the tank did not rupture, but the parade of horribles marched on. One worker, placed in charge of the laboratory’s critical negative air containment system, had been previously charged with malicious assault on three occasions. The man went missing for three days, taking with him a laptop computer which remotely controlled the laboratory’s biological containment system by dial-up access. Seven hundred gallons of oil spilled near the power plant (on the same site of a 1,500-gallon spill in 2000), 200 of which seeped into the ground. Two replacement workers drove off with a 2002 Dodge Caravan assigned for local errands and never returned. Later found in New York City, the minivan’s cargo was unknown. OSHA returned, again, to Plum Island and cited the contractor for at least six workplace safety violations, including repeat infractions all too familiar now: poor handling of hazardous materials, inadequate training in blood-borne pathogens, and no radiation hazard training. At this writing, a second laptop computer is missing from inside the biological containment area, one that according to sources contains laboratory experiment data. The DHS is investigating yet another sensitive computer believed to be stolen. And in yet another instance of history repeating itself on Plum Island, there were two power outages, each multiple hours long, in December 2002. The emergency power generators failed, and the ever-vigilant Plum Island safety office attempted to seal containment doors with ordinary duct tape to keep germs from escaping. Although three employees were marooned inside biological containment areas until power could be restored, one scientist referred to the tape-up job as “standard operating procedure.”
On Plum Island, speaking out was forbidden after the strike. Worker Jim McKoy came forward and told USDA and DHS officials about lax safety and security procedures. He told them that he saw employees working with asbestos without proper protections; that he saw visitors walking around and about Plum Island unescorted; and that he exchanged ID badges with another worker as a test of the security system. The ID switch, he said, went unnoticed for a whole day. “I really felt I had to do something,” McKoy told a local newspaper. “I could go anywhere in the lab.... That place is a powder keg.” USDA and DHS told McKoy there would be no retaliation by his employer. Then they changed their tune and said government officials couldn’t get involved in the affairs of a private contractor. The Plum Island contractor fired McKoy. The contractor said that the whistleblower had left his post without permission.
Chaos reined on both sides of the coin. Mark DePonte, in charge of Plum Island’s water treatment plant on the eve of the strike, left a parting gift when he walked off the job: he shut down the complex water supply system, crucial to both fire suppression and biological decontamination. Then he sent DHS Secretary Tom Ridge an e-mail warning of “catastrophe” if the union workers did not return to their posts. Asked by a local reporter about the water crisis, DePonte said everything was fine when he left his post. “I can’t help it if the new workers don’t know which switches to turn on.” After management spent hours figuring out the intricate maneuvers required to restore water, they called in the FBI, which began to investigate. Soon after, DePonte pleaded guilty to tampering with federal government property.4
4 A union source says DePonte shut down the system because the line pump wasn’t working properly, and that following procedure, he entered the shutdown into the logbook and recorded it on a dry-erase system status board in the power plant. Another worker familiar with the situation says it was shut down because from time to time the antiquated system—used in lieu of a recently installed replacement system—did not properly maintain the correct pH level. “This was standard procedure. The new system never worked, and management had it redesigned twice and it still didn’t work right, so the old system is used.” Failing to shut off the system, says the worker, would have caused the pH level to move in the opposite direction. “If [DePonte] left the water system running, they would have said he was trying to poison people.” Why, then, did he plead guilty? “Dollars and cents, plain and simple,” says the union source of DePonte’s mounting legal fees, and calling the affair a “red herring,” points to the fact that despite the extensive FBI investigation, DePonte retains his regulatory operator’s license and is working at a municipal plant in Connecticut. “They could not troubleshoot it [after the strike] because they had no one capable of doing it, so they blamed someone. And they were looking for something they thought would turn the media against us—and it didn’t work.”
Though the whole mess could have been averted with a forty-cent-per hour wage increase for a total of $62,000 a year, the strike cost an additional $12.82 per worker per hour, or $45,000 per week—outrageous expenses passed along to, and essentially a strike shouldered by, the U.S. government and the taxpayers. “I am bewildered at why it had to get to this point,” exclaimed Senator Hillary Clinton to the New York Times when asked about the strike. At the end of the year, Clinton demanded that the USDA cease operations at Plum Island until labor and biological safety lapses were rectified. And along with Republican congressman Rob Simmons from Connecticut, she formally requested that the Plum Island workforce be completely un-privatized and re-federalized. Unfortunately, their urgings fell upon deaf ears.
This is the state of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.
Placing all employees at this germ-ridden utopia—if it is to continue its mission there—on the rolls of a well-trained Department of Homeland Security might prevent it from reaching this point again. It might ensure the safety and biological security of this troubled island laboratory. But this hasn’t been done.
It goes without saying that Plum Island’s transfer to DHS should be far more than a “paper transfer,” as assistant director Santoyo put it. Above all, Plum Island needs something that’s completely new in its long history: transparency. The past has proven, time and again, that the island’s stewards cannot pilot the ship safely without close supervision. This secretive island has been exploited, both as a monarchical fiefdom and as a resumé-building career stepping-stone. It should be neither. If Jerry Callis can be compared to a fallen angel, Roger Breeze can be likened to a vainglorious “doomsday machine,” and privatization to an absentee slumlord.
Former Plum islander Phillip Piegari remembers a saying among the workers: “Plum Island is always taking calculated risks, and somehow they get away with it.” The public must not allow the government to continue its research without being fully supervised, because it’s running Plum Island like it’s a game of Russian roulette—where its luck can only last so long.
The true story of Plum Island reaches a most disturbing conclusion. The laboratory once glorified as the “World’s Safest Lab” is today the world’s most dangerous.
In light of everything presented in these pages, consider these queries:
• Is such a facility necessary and important to the United States and its national security interests?
• Do the past catastrophes, the present level of safeguards, and its future plans justify the laboratory’s existence on Plum Island?
Plum Island is a ticking biological time bomb. The U.S. Department of Agriculture set the timer, and the clock has been ticking away for years. Today the island is more vulnerable than ever before to a germ outbreak, and it remains wide open to sabotage and terrorist attack. Now is the time to reconsider its existence or take meaningful corrective measures. In other words, there’s still some time to dismantle the bomb.
Or will the people of America have to wait until Plum Island reaches the point of no return?
The choice is ours.
Fallout:
Current Affairs at Plum Island
Afterword to the Paperback Edition
It was an auspicious response. For the first time in more than two
years, and the first time since September 11, 2001, a late-breaking
media advisory went out from the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.
A press tour would be held by the USDA and the Department of Homeland Security, on President’s Day, of all dates. The New York Times
showed up. So did Reuters and the Associated Press, NBC’s Today
show, Newsday, and New York City television and radio stations. I did
too—after all, my book was the reason why everyone was there. Reporters asked the Plum Island scientists, seated behind a makeshift dais, if their sudden openness had anything to do with the book Lab 257, scheduled for national release the following day. “No,” they said. “Absolutely not. Now why would you think such a thing?”
Undeterred, those in the media treated to the quadrennial Plum Island dog and pony show asked the brass what they thought of the new book detailing the past half-century of their island laboratory. Two responses came forth: “What can I say?” a distinguished scientist rhetorically asked the Today show. “This goes to show you, you can’t judge a book by its cover.” And the other, “Sounds more like science fiction that fact.” Off the record, they admitted a not-so-unimportant fact. When a reporter asked if any of them had read the book, all of them responded no, although one “skimmed” it. To this day, not one fact has been successfully challenged. So much then for scientific fact trumping “science fiction.” Since then, Plum Island and its chorus of pseudo-scientific sycophants have called me a lot of things—except “wrong.”
Standing on the side of the road in Orient Point that cold winter morning (now deemed a “security threat,” I was refused access to the island), I held my own press conference. I appeared on national television and radio, and in print. The book made an appearance on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Asked to comment, New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton responded that she hadn’t read the book yet, but it “appeared” to raise the “important issues of safety and security I’ve been raising for over a year.” Hundreds of emails poured into my website from around the country, all concerned about this little known place that clearly had dangerous biological potential, a place targeted by a reputed terrorist. I attended many book signings and book fairs, participated in panel discussions, and appeared on radio talk shows. I spoke to college students in their microbiology classes. Virtually everyone I encountered expressed outrage at a government laboratory in such patent disrepair that it posed a threat to us all.
Ordinary citizens responded by writing letters, like this one that appeared in the New York Times two weeks after the book’s release, where the writer clearly felt I had not gone far enough:
“My agenda is not to close Plum Island, it’s to make it safe,” said Michael Christopher Carroll, author of “Lab 257,” diluting his strong warnings. Why not move it?
What benefit is there from having deadly animal research two miles from such a heavily populated area, when birds and mosquitoes can easily travel that distance and beyond?
Why has nothing been learned from 9/11, anthrax, ricin, West Nile virus, SARS, and bird flu? Why ignore the fact that most new human viruses come from animals and become more deadly when they jump species?
Why do we have to wait until after terrorism, accidents, or naturally occurring dangers create widespread epidemics from Plum Island? Why is there not an outrage from the public, the media, and politicians? And most of all, why are government officials doing nothing but stubbornly defending their unconvincing assurances of safety?
Or this letter, that appeared in a local paper close to Plum Island in late August 2004, which also went further than I did and suggested a solution:
It never ceases to amaze me that for as long as Plum Island has been in existence, we are still talking about breaches of security and safety. What will it take before it is realized that this facility should be close down permanently? . . . Just ask your local police and fire departments how much training they have received in the event of an accident at Plum Island.
One cannot live too far from this facility. I have little confidence that we are told all there is to know about what kind of activity truly goes on there and certainly have no confidence in the security. We should be fearful of what we don’t know about what goes on there: how often security is breached, and how much of that ends up on our trees, fruits, vegetables, and drinking water . . . . Plum Island has outlived its usefulness.
In my defense to these justifiably enraged citizens’ viewpoints, I can only say my goal was to present the evidence best I could, and let the reader decide whether the rewards justify the risks.
Some of the island’s scientists quietly acknowledged their agreement with the concerns raised in the book. Other Plum Island veterans were openly hostile to me. Merlon Wiggin stood up at a public forum, waived his copy of Lab 257 riddled with Post-it notes in the air, and boldly accused me of fabricating direct quotes attributed to him over multiple pages. When I politely reminded him before the assembled crowd that I had talked to him on the phone multiple times, received faxes from him, and spent hours at his East Marion home interviewing him with a tape recorder, he didn’t want to hear anything of it. Also at that forum, Dr. Carol House sharply criticized my book, but later admitted she hadn’t read it because she heard it was “no good.” Finally, I read in a newspaper that Ben Robins, who took me on the “jungle tour” though Plum Island, recently unsheathed his fountain pen and wrote “Blab 257,” which I look forward to reading with great anticipation, should he send me a copy of his tome.
All foolishness aside, two groups remain painfully silent: the current scientists of Plum Island and our elected leaders. It is my opinion that the former group remains mired in bureaucratic inertia and the latter find Plum Island to be an issue far too difficult to tackle because it cannot be dispensed in the twenty-four-hour news cycle to score political points. Instead, they continue to ignore the imminent threat of this book’s subject. Instead, we continue to get more of the same—pretty glossy photo ops, beat-the-drum press releases, and letters crammed with prattle—and nothing changes at one of the most inviting biological soft targets in the nation. I did get an inquiry from the office of Congressman Dan Burton, who sits on the House Government Reform Committee and is known to take on tough issues, but that went nowhere. Of all municipalities adjacent to Plum Island, not one of them asked me to brief them. But members of the Boston City Council invited me to talk about the mistakes made on Plum Island, as Boston University is considering establishing a similar laboratory. Finally, New York Senator Michael Balboni, the chair of his state’s homeland security committee, asked me to brief him before he made an inspection of Plum Island.
Sadly then, the book has largely fallen upon deaf governmental ears. As I write this, Plum Island has suffered yet another germ outbreak, a cross contamination episode inside the laboratory on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary gala that the USDA planned for itself. Instead of spoiling the party, the scientists of Plum Island thought it better to conceal the laboratory accident; only after four weeks did they inform Senator Clinton, the local congressman, and members of a “community forum,” who themselves practiced non-disclosure until an anonymous tip reached the ears of Newsday investigative reporter Bill Bleyer. Apparently this is modus operandi at Plum Island. All this writer can do is detail the recent gaffes and phony window dressing designed to quash public inquiry in this laboratory’s conduct, and hope that perhaps this book will one day fall into the laps of someone who can make a real difference. I had expected real change would have been the norm out there by now. But my expectations have gone unanswered— and we remain at risk.
One of the things that can be fairly said about Lab 257 is that it is historical. It only speaks as of late 2003 when I delivered the final manuscript. A reader might be thinking that a good amount of time has passed for the material to be digested and addressed. Rather than simply state that is not the case, I’ll show through Plum Island’s own words and deeds.
We’re equally proud of our safety record. . . . Not once in our nearly 50 years of operation has an animal pathogen escaped from the island.
—HOME PAGE OF
PLUM ISLAND WEBSITE
If you haven’t skipped to the end of the book, then you are likely shocked at the sheer hubris of this statement. Let’s look at the first sentence. Proud? How on Earth can Plum Island scientists be “proud” of a safety record that boasts germ outbreaks, injured lab workers, and literally hundreds of federal environmental and occupational safety hazard law violations? The second statement is reminiscent of another brassy statement: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,” i.e., a statement of legal technicality. Until we have a comprehensive scientific investigation, we cannot ever know if Lyme disease, West Nile virus, or the Dutch duck plague virus is connected to Plum Island. But, we do know, from their own rare admission that on at least one occasion, germs did escape the “World’s Safest Lab” and infected healthy animals outdoors on Plum Island. We know this only because it was impossible to conceal, because every person had to be evacuated from Plum Island in a spacesuit, and because every animal—healthy or infected—was ordered to be killed. The fact that the outbreak didn’t “escape the island” obscures the fact that they had a massive germ outbreak, yet they don’t get into such little detail on their website. It’s up to the public, now armed with the truth, to call Plum Island on it. Finally, they are again stressing they work only with “animal pathogens,” and have repeatedly taken pains to note they work on diseases affecting animals. Another half-truth. Anthrax, West Nile virus, and the deadly Rift Valley fever virus described in this book may be strictly classified as “animal diseases” in the eyes of Plum Island scientists, but they ought not use this as a PR smoke screen when explaining their work to the public. Those diseases are deadly to humans, and it is incumbent upon them to disclose that to the public.
In July 2004 the Department of Homeland Security finally decided it was time to deploy federal armed guards on Plum Island. As if on cue, the public was treated to another press release, this time from Congressman Timothy Bishop, who succeeds a line of one- and two-term congressmen in the district that includes Plum Island. “We all recognized that unarmed guards alone are not an adequate defense in the face of an attack,” said Bishop. “I applaud the Department of Homeland Security.” But, the guards are a mere window dressing. The guards are only to be stationed on Plum Island during business hours—as if terrorists only attack nine to five. This book detailed the reputed terrorist, a disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist who met with Osama bin Laden multiple times, who was caught in Afghanistan with a dossier on Plum Island—and a part-time placement of guards on Plum Island is “applauded” by the local congressman? Caught in the milieu then: absentee elected officials and USDA scientists, a faulty laboratory researching dangerous germs (and a terrorist target), and us.
Newsday investigative reporter Bill Bleyer just couldn’t believe it. We were talking one morning about the new germ outbreaks on Plum Island that occurred over the summer of 2004, a story Bleyer broke after he received a tip from one of his sources close to the island. In an all too familiar sequence of events, Plum Island engaged in a cover-up of the outbreak. The two laboratory accidents occurred just days before a fiftieth anniversary celebration the scientists were planning. I can tell you from years of research that if Doc Shahan, Plum Island’s first director, were at the helm, a biological event of this magnitude would have prompted him to cancel the festivities and close the lab. Everything I learned about Doc Shahan is summed up in one simple rule he repeated to a reporter in the 1950s: “We take no risks,” Doc Shahan said. “We may be extreme, but I don’t think so. It’s better to be overcautious all the time, than not cautious enough just once.” But that was then. Too much at stake to heed Doc Shahan’s prescient advice, went the current thinking. Probing newspaper and television reporters, and that meddling author would have a field day with this one if we told them about it. Plum Island had organized a full gala, replete with speeches, alumni gatherings, tours, and gauzy media press kits. Nothing would stop it from proceeding. Not even a germ outbreak.
After the excitement faded a month later, the scientists called up Senator Clinton and confessed: “Oops.” A week or so after that, Clinton and Bishop wrote yet another letter, thanking the scientists for “notifying our offices about the two inadvertent foot-and-mouth disease cross contaminations that occurred in the biocontainment areas of Plum Island Animal Disease Center. We urge you to immediately investigate these alarming breaches at the highest levels, and to keep us apprised of all developments.” The immediacy of their letter, tied to a six-week-old germ outbreak was disheartening. Plum Island called it an “incident,” just as they had years ago when germs escaped the laboratory, instead of calling it what it was—a biological outbreak. Same as then, they refused to use the “O word” that prompted scientist Dr. Don Morgan to dub the earlier outbreak the “disastrous” incident.
What actually happened is very easy to understand. On at least two separate occasions, healthy animals on one side of the laboratory—supposedly sealed from the rest of the laboratory compartments and sealed to the outside world—became infected with the same germs being studied in a different laboratory module on the other side of the building. If this germ outbreak doesn’t once and for all condemn this half-century-old laboratory, I’m not certain anything will. Some questions come to mind: Who knew about the outbreak? Why didn’t the scientists disclose the outbreak to the public? How did it happen? Were proper safety measures followed? What are the effects of the germs leaking outside of containment? Who was responsible for the outbreak? What action has been taken against him, her, or them? What kind of repairs and training and education is under way to prevent an outbreak from occurring again? Why elected officials like Clinton and Bishop aren’t taking to the streets after this cover-up is a question whose answer is beyond the scope of this epilogue.
As I’ve written in this book, it is high time to stop the letters, press releases, photo-ops, and empty condemnations, and start doing something meaningful out there.
Perplexed, Bleyer could not reckon why Plum Island officials didn’t call him up and tell him what had happened. He was infuriated—he had reported on the anniversary party days before and given them positive coverage. And months before that, Plum Island had given him an exclusive “Day in the Life” tour of Plum Island that he turned into a comprehensive feature story in his newspaper. They had promised Bleyer they would be forthright about things the public ought to know about, and to him, this certainly topped this list. He was also angry at Clinton and Bishop, who also didn’t tell him what had happened so he could report it (the letter they wrote to Plum Island wasn’t released to the public until he cajoled them into releasing it). Unfortunately, Bleyer didn’t get it. Plum Island used him as free PR tool to promote a positive image of the island, then reneged on their openness pledge the moment it didn’t suit them to keep it.
Perhaps worst of all is what I learned last summer, when giving a talk on tiny Fishers Island, which sits about five miles northeast of Plum Island along the shoreline of Connecticut. Two fine groups, the nature conservancy and the local library, invited me there to address the residents. More than one hundred people showed up to hear what I, and the director of a Long Island group called The North Fork Environmental Council, had to say. It’s not what was said that night, but rather what I later learned wasn’t said which was most troubling.
The talk was after the germ outbreak, but before Bleyer’s Newsday story, so at that time no one except the Plum Island scientists, and the senator and congressman knew. Or so I thought. The evening progressed and the understandably concerned citizens of Fishers Island became increasingly outraged at the antics of their neighboring island, but the invited guest seated to my right knew about the outbreak and didn’t tell the assembled citizenry. She had been part of a select group of “community leaders” briefed by Plum Island scientists. Why she would keep this critical information from the now smoldering neighbors of Plum Island is an enigma. Perhaps this community leader figured she and her group could solve Plum Island’s problems all by herself? One thing is for sure: had not Bleyer stumbled upon the germ outbreak, the public would have known nothing about it.
The Plum Island PR machine keeps on churning. In October 2004, Dr. Dan Bradway, a scientist from Washington State, who put in brief stint researching on Plum Island, weighed in with an opinion piece in Newsday, oddly entitled “‘Mystery Island’ is no threat to us,” (italics mine) when Bradway himself could not live farther away from Plum Island and still be in the continental United States. He playfully discusses Nelson DeMille’s novel Plum Island, and then brushes off my book as another work of fiction:
This history of secrecy has led to all kinds of wild conspiracy and accident theories about diseases escaping from Plum Island. In a recently published book, “Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory,” author Michael Carroll tries to connect Plum Island to Lyme disease and the 1999 outbreak of West Nile virus. Other non-scientist authors have blamed the island for Saint Louis encephalitis virus and even AIDS.
He then goes on to describe how well protected Plum Island is, and meticulously details its biological safety practices. “Conspiracy and accident theories?” Bradway has shown great impudence here, failing to mention the covered-up germ outbreak that occurred two months before he penned his opinion, the two stolen laptop computers, and the workers hired with felony criminal arrest records, among other mishaps. For a place hatched by Nazi Germany’s top germ warfare scientist, host to germ outbreaks (like the two painstakingly detailed in this book), and a myriad of accidents and safety violations sprinkled upon Plum Island like rainbow jimmies on an ice cream cone, this is a fatally flawed opinion. Classic Plum Island spin, Dr. Bradway throws in AIDS and St. Louis encephalitis for good measure to obscure the true facts.
As I’ve said to people looking for links among Plum Island, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus, during my seven years of research I did not happen upon an octogenarian scientist hobbling out from behind a white curtain, exclaiming, “It was me! I did it! I spawned Lyme disease at Plum Island!”
And yet, there’s still an unexplained initial outbreak of Lyme disease occurring nine miles away from an exotic germ laboratory with quarter inch holes in its roof—a lab busy breeding hundreds of thousands of ticks including a tick known to spread Lyme disease with African Swine fever virus cross-contaminated with who knows what—that is worthy of a real, scientific investigation. And a little-known outbreak of West Nile virus, that killed horses on the doorstep of Plum Island weeks before humans first contracted the illness many miles away in New York City in August of 1999, also deserves a real, scientific investigation.
Bradway then concludes, “There is no scientific merit to any of these theories.” He is right in a sense—there is no scientific merit to them— because they have never been investigated by his esteemed brethren, which is the same reason he has no basis to call them conspiracies. Is it logical to conclude that something didn’t cause an event because it hasn’t been investigated? If that is Bradway’s brand of science, then I’m honored to wear his badge of “non-scientist author.” It’s strange that someone who spent such a brief time on Plum Island can post such an elaborate defense of an ill maintained laboratory that doesn’t have one.
Speaking of Lyme disease, a letter that a reader wrote struck a deep chord in me. Those who brush aside any possible connection without giving so much as lip service to conducting an appropriate scientific investigation should take his impassioned opinion to heart:
Fellow Lymies:
I usually don’t post messages, but have replied to many of you privately. In this case, It’s too important to stay quiet. Yes, Tim, Lyme disease has been around longer than Plum Island. But not in this form—not doing the things it does to our bodies, our central nervous system, our minds. We are the last people who should dismiss this book for this simple reason: I don’t want an apology, I don’t care about holding people accountable and the outrage of it all, if it’s true . . . . But if it is true, someone might know something that could help us.
Aren’t you all tired of this disease that is killing us? Are you just a little sick of being on 12 meds which almost cover 40 percent of the symptoms? Have you ever said to yourself, “God, this disease is so unnatural?”
I don’t mean to be strident, but look, just the fact that the American Lyme Disease Foundation came out publicly dismissing this book was a big clue for me. In seven plus years of reading about Lyme disease, almost every statement I’ve ever read from the ALDF is, in my opinion, against patient interest. I would encourage every one of you to get this book and read it. Here is someone who doesn’t even have the disease and who, if nothing else, points out the sheer horror of the experience. Bravo for Michael Carroll, and trust me, if you read the book there is no way you can say, “Aw, I don’t buy it.” On the Today show, they discussed how while they were hosting a tick colony, right across the water from old Lyme, Connecticut, there were holes in the ceiling. Maybe one or two of those 400,000 ticks got out.
Let me make this really clear: I was a healthy guy, a 35-year-old television executive making big money and knowing big people and just starting to get the payoff of 20 years of hard, hard work when this stuff came in and BOOM! It took away my life; it took away my ability to make money, my health, my sex drive, my energy (which used to fuel me through 15-hour shoot days on rigorous television production schedules). I can’t make plans, can’t get to church. . . .
I was invited to go see a member of Congress a few months ago, and I was too sick to go. Too sick to go talk about being too sick. . . . Michael Carroll has taken all of us one step closer to getting the attention, the care, and the respect that we deserve. Okay, that’s all I can say,
I’ve got to go and lie down.
I wonder if the message of Lab 257 gets drowned in its “parade of horribles.” Perhaps people believe that because there is such a lengthy trail of misdeeds, it is impossible to start fixing Plum Island. Or that speaking out about this island is a futile exercise, and that its problems are insurmountable. Allow me to outline four straightforward issues to be addressed, and how to get our leaders to take them seriously and tackle them.
FIRST: Re-establish the thirty-four-man armed guard patrol that protected Plum Island in the 1950s, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Stop cold comforting the public with a nine-to-five security patrol, because it’s not going to stop a terrorist who attacks outside of business hours. Re-establish the Plum Island Fire Department and disband the volunteer bucket bridge of untrained scientists and support workers.
SECOND: Transport the exotic germs that arrive from international airports to Plum Island, that regularly travel along local roads of New York and Connecticut, only by armed courier. Emergency first responders must be notified of each trip to respond to a biological accident or ambush.
THIRD: Lockdown Plum Island airspace from all air traffic and enforce a no-fly zone with the national guard aircraft that are stationed nearby.
FOURTH: Un-privatize the Plum Island support staff, and reestablish full federal control of the island. Plum Island’s sister laboratory in Ames, Iowa holds far less dangerous germs and it has never been privatized, like Plum Island has with a shoestring private contractor that received special preferences—not because it did good work, but because it was owned by an Alaskan Eskimo tribe (yes this is true).
By no means is this list exhaustive, but it is bite-sized and ready for spoon-feeding to anyone who will listen.
I’m often asked by readers, “What can I do to help fix Plum Island?” I suggest first that people tell their friends, family, and neighbors about this precarious island. All the information needed is between these covers and on my website, www.lab257.com. Then, grab a phone book and call your local, state, and federal elected officials, and demand action, for starters, on the four points above. Ask them why they aren’t informing the public about the dangers of Plum Island and more importantly, doing something about it. Failing that, contact the news media and urge them to report on Plum Island to raise public awareness. Finally, it is said that the pen is mightier than the sword—draft a letter to the editor to be included in your town’s local newspaper or church bulletin. No publication is too small to get the word out. The more people who know about Plum Island, the better. The more voices that are raised, the greater likelihood of success there will be in eliminating America’s softest terrorism target. The demands of ordinary citizens like you appears to be the only recourse left to get Plum Island appropriately cleaned up or permanently shut down.
If you have other ideas on how to redress the situation, I want to hear about them. Write me at lab257@att.net, and let’s work together to reveal to the citizenry a Plum Island that, for all the empty political talk and pretty window dressing, remains a biological ticking time bomb.
—MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
FEBRUARY 2005
source and footnotes
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