-
- The impure salts that turned Dr. Henry Jekyll into Mr.
Edward Hyde did not prescribe themselves. In Robert Louis Stevenson's famous
story, it is the scientist and not science that is the villain. ''Man is
not truly one,'' the doomed Jekyll lamented, ''but truly two.'' Real-life
Dr. Jekylls lurk in the background of Ed Regis' ''Biology of Doom: The
History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project.'' The science behind
biological warfare is the evil flip side of the search for vaccines and
cures. Military use of pathogens is as old as human conflict. But it is
in the 20th century that biological warfare became an industry.
-
- For once the Nazis are not primarily to blame. It was
imperial Japan that inspired the modern biological arms race. In 1938,
Japanese scientists began moving into Ping Fan, a walled city 20 miles
south of Harbin in occupied China. Within two years, the Anti-Epidemic
Water Supply and Purification Bureau, or Unit 731, employed 3,000 people
at scores of laboratories. At Ping Fan, Japanese scientists pioneered the
mass production of pathogens and worked on delivery mechanisms. By October
1940, Japanese planes dropped a mixture of grains and fleas over Chinese
towns, causing two major outbreaks of bubonic plague south of Shanghai.
-
- The British, concerned that whatever Tokyo could do Berlin
could do better, were the first to try to set up a biological warfare program
of their own. In December 1941 they acquired Gruinard Island in the Scottish
highlands and over the next few years dropped bombs filled with anthrax
spores over the heads of oblivious sheep, who then died as expected. As
in many other areas of modern national defense -- intelligence gathering,
commando operations -- the Americans started behind the British, learned
from them and because of huge national resources ultimately surpassed them.
But it was the cold war, and fears of Soviet biological weapons, not World
War II, that gave rise to an American biological arsenal. And once again
the Japanese played a significant role. There were rumors that the scientists
at Ping Fan had experimented on human beings, and in 1947 the Soviets exerted
pressure on the United States to put them on trial. Maj. Gen. Shiro Ishii,
whom American intelligence had found living under an assumed name in Japan,
finally admitted his crimes.
-
- In all, Unit 731 killed about 850 ''patients.'' ''The
human subjects,'' one American study later concluded ''were used in exactly
the same manner as other experimental animals.'' The Japanese discovered,
for instance, that if you put 10 people in a room infested with 20 plague-bearing
fleas per square meter, 4 would die of plague. Anthrax had a better mortality
rate (80 percent to 90 percent, Ishii said) but the plague diffused better.
The most frightening agent the Japanese tested was Songo fever, like Ebola,
the star of ''The Hot Zone,'' a hemorrhagic fever.
-
- ''The Biology of Doom'' is thought-provoking in spite
of itself. Regis' goal seems to be to disprove Soviet and Chinese claims
that the United States used biological weapons in the Korean War. In this
he succeeds. As this institutional history shows, the United States acquired
an operational biological weapons capacity only after the end of the Korean
War. The United States Air Force included a biological warfare annex to
its plans for general war as early as 1950; but until 1954, it did not
have the refrigeration capability, let alone enough of any kind of bug,
to perform this feat anywhere. The Army, meanwhile, completed its first
biological production plant only in December 1953. Nor has any researcher
yet found tactical plans for biological warfare in the Far East in the
1950's. In fact, Regis says, there is no evidence of any American military
use of biological weapons in the cold war; work to perfect them continued
until late 1969, when President Richard Nixon ordered a halt.
-
- Regis, the author of four previous books, including ''Who
Got Einstein's Office?,'' understands the critical difference between plans
and operations. But in focusing on what the United States did not do in
battle, he misses the larger implications of his story. Shiro Ishii and
his associates received immunity from prosecution in return for giving
the United States Army 15,000 slides of specimens from more than 500 human
cases of diseases caused by biological agents, and in the 1950's and 60's,
the government sponsored covert tests, using the apparently harmless microbes
Serratia marcescens (SM) and Bacillus globigii (BG), to simulate the spread
of deadly anthrax over large populations. In April 1950, two Navy ships
-- without, it seems, the knowledge of Congress -- sprayed the residents
of the Virginia coastal communities of Norfolk, Hampton and Newport News
with BG. Later that year, 800,000 people around San Francisco Bay were
exposed to clouds of these microbes. Regis found evidence of 200 similar
tests all over the country. In the most bizarre, in June 1966, soldiers
in plain clothes dropped light bulbs filled with BG on New York City subway
tracks, and the trains pulled the cloud of biological agents throughout
the subway system. Then men with suitcase samplers strolled among unsuspecting
New York subway riders to test the amount of spread.
-
- Arguably, these were defensive operations to determine
the vulnerability of American cities to attack. Regis also describes how
human beings were also used to test offensive agents. Between 1955 and
1969, 2,200 Seventh-day Adventists in the American military volunteered
to be infected with scores of diseases from equine encephalitis to Rocky
Mountain spotted fever. ''The type of voluntary service which is being
offered to our boys,'' the Army sponsors wrote, ''offers an excellent opportunity
for these young men to render a service which will be of value not only
to military medicine but to public health generally.''
-
- It is customary to blame governments for these industries
of death. But one also has to wonder about the individual scientists. A
compelling book, for which Regis did the research, would have examined
the morality and motivations of the men behind biological weapons. Henry
Jekyll blamed self-indulgence for the shipwreck of his life. What prompted
these American scientists to feed the Hydes of their souls?
-
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---- Timothy Naftali is director of the Presidential Recordings Project
at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. He is
working on a history of American counterespionage during World War II and
the cold war
-
-
- Comment
-
-
- How To 'Cover' The US BioWarfare Program
-
- From Brasscheck <ken@brasscheck.com 1-27-00
-
-
- When I saw that Ed Regis had dedicated his book "The
Biology of Doom" to right wing ideologue in technophile's clothing
Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired Magazine, I realized I was probably
going to be in for a treat of sorts.
-
- My first impression of Regis' book is that it followed
the formula used by his colleague Stewart Brand in his whitewash of Ithiel
de Sola Pool, the head of the CIA funded Center for International Studies
at MIT: 1) share lots of "inside" secrets, 2) lionize the scientists
and the challenges of their cutting edge work, and 3) make sure readers
don't get within ten miles of the real facts of the story. (See Brand's
"The Media Lab")
-
- It's an ideal con. First, most importantly, the writer
gets paid. Second, one's reputation as a science writer is reinforced.
Third, if one ever gets called on the fact that they left out essential
facts, they can, and do, fall back on the excuse that "well, that
wasn't part of my focus."
-
- The technical term for this is disinformation. Or Stewart
Brand and Ed Regis and their pals at Wired are just lucky idiots. Idiots
who happen to stumble into producing works that gloss over facts that are
inconvenient to those who have the means and motives to make them disappear.
Take your pick. Idiots or hacks. I will grant them this. They are good
at what they do and extremely consistent.
-
- Fortunately in the case of Regis' book, the review of
a reputable historian published in the New York Times deals with the core
"flaw" in his account of the US biowarfare program so I don't
have to be the instigator of a "conspiracy theory."
-
- Here's the pertinent quote from Timothy Naftali's New
York Times review:
-
- "The Biology of Doom'' is thought-provoking in spite
of itself. Regis' goal seems to be to disprove Soviet and Chinese claims
that the United States used biological weapons in the Korean War..."
-
- As I've pointed out elsewhere, Regis' book is remarkable
in that it offers itself as a cold war history of US biowarfare efforts,
yet it somehow manages to miss the 1980s program that sent substantial
biowar technology to then US ally Iraq. The cold war was still hot when
we were sending West Nile Fever and Anthrax to our good buddy Saddam Hussein.
How could Regis have left this out? Does this intelligent man believe that
the fact that these weapons technologies were sent to Iraq via Department
of Agriculture and Commerce Department programs mean that the military
was not involved?
-
- But Regis' packaging of the US biowar story has a far
more serious flaw. His account grossly understates the extent of a key
source for the US program: Japanese biowarfare research and tactics during
the years leading up yo and including World War II.
-
- About 850 people were killed by the Japanese research
program, he says. To adapt a phrase from Steve Jobs: "This is INSANELY
inaccurate."
-
- To appreciate what a huge distortion this is, let's read
some excerpts from a widely circulated book issued by a well established
publisher which specializes in Japanese subject for English speaking readers,
Tuttle:
-
- Here's a description of the Pingfang biowarfare complex
from Hal Gold's book "Unit 731 Testimony" (emphasis mine):
-
- "The air space over the area was off limits...
-
- The Pingfang complex would grow into a sprawling walled
CITY of more than SEVENTY BUILDINGS on a SIX SQUARE KILOMETER tract of
land...
-
- Pingfang was equipped for disposing of its consumed human
lab materials with three large incinerators...
-
- (There was) an airfield built off to one side of the
building complex within the unit grounds...Doctors who knew the situation
at the time have commented that the Tokyo-Pingfang air corridor was run
on a very regular basis...
-
- In addition to the Pingfang central unit, there were
units set up in Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, and Singapore. In addition,
some of these units had their own branch units. The total number of personnel
reached TWENTY THOUSAND people."
-
- This operation ran from 1939 until the end of the war
yet Regis tells his readers they killed about 850 people.
-
- One officer alone admitted that his unit, which was one
of many that was charged with rounding up Chinese victims, was personally
involved in the murder of at least 3,000 people. Pingfang had its own train
line that brought victims to the labs night and day. No hard data exists,
but the victims surely numbered in the tens of thousands. I leave it to
you to read the eye witness accounts in Gold's book to learn the various
ways in which they were murdered. I'll tell you this. You better have a
strong stomach. It makes accounts of Nazi concentration camps look like
Red Cross work.
-
- It's interesting to note that the US military was profoundly
active in the cover up of the Pingfang story and stood by while the atrocity's
engineers were elevated to high positions in Occupied Japan. The reason:
it wanted access to the mountains of research data and know how generated
by this horror. Think of that. Not a word of this huge and evil enterprise
was reported to the world, or to to Japanese citizens for that matter,
yet the US military had all the evidence. (Some info finally did come out
50 years later.)
-
- As for Regis' claim that the US military lacked the means
to wage biowarfare in Korea, anyone knowing the facts of the Japanese program
knows that this is ludicrous in the extreme. The US received the entire
Japanese biowarfare machine (men, materials, and infrastructure) from Japan
after the war. That's why it was essential that the extent of the Japanese
operations in China be hidden from the world. And, by the way, the attacks
the Chinese and Koreans say were launched on them by the US were entirely
consistent with biowafare tactics used by the Japanese.
-
- The timing of Regis' interest in "covering"
the US biowarfare story is noteworthy.
-
- Starting in 1993, there was an explosion of material
released on this topic in Japan. A traveling exhibit on the subject visited
sixty one Japanese cities provoking dozens of participants to come forward
and confess the details of their involvement. How could a "thoroughly
researched" book on the history of the US biowarfare program miss
this or fail to address these accounts? It's hard work, I guess, but somebody's
got to do it.
-
- One last point Naftali raises in his review that is worth
considering:
-
- "A compelling book, for which Regis did the research,
would have examined the morality and motivations of the men behind biological
weapons."
-
- I can almost hear the patented dismissive snickering
of Regis, Kelly, Brand, Peter Schwartz and the rest of the Wired crew at
this demonstration of naivete. The whole point of the output of these individuals
has been to strip considerations of morality from the technological wet
dreams of the military and big business. One has only to thumb through
a few issues of Wired to see that. "Morality? What's that? We're all
about progress and science. We we check our moral concerns at the door."
-
- Along with the facts too.
-
-
- Post script: A little known fact is that Wired was bankrolled
virtually from its first issue by the Newhouse family which eventually
swallowed it after they bungled their IPO.
-
- Newhouse gave us Ronald Reagan's second term. After the
disastrous first debate with Mondale in which the public got its first
uncensored look at the extent of Reagan's mental impairments, Roy Cohn
called the campaign on behalf of the family offering its services.
-
- Within a week there was a photoshoot at the Santa Barbara
ranch showing Reagan cutting wood and riding horses. It was the cover story
of the very next issue of Parade Magazine, the insert that appears in tens
of millions of Sunday newspaper across the country.
-
- Ed Rollins, now a flack for the Chinese, then a Reagan
campaign strategist, recounts the story proudly in his autobiography.
-
-
- ============================================== Brass
Check - http://www.brasscheck.com
-
- "...if only the press were to do its duty, or but
a tenth of its duty, this hellish system could not go on." - William
Cobbett, Rural Rides, 1830
-
- "He who knows best knows how little he knows."
- Thomas Jefferson ===========================================
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