In fact, the Army had awarded a secret construction bid to build a germ warfare lab on June 18, a full month before the selection hearings began. Worried locals' fears were justified: the hearings were rigged.
Edward L. Bernays, the father of public relations, once defined his art as the "engineering of public consent." On Plum Island, the USDA pulled off a PR masterpiece. "[I]t will become a research center known throughout the world…asource of income, employment, and a point of pride in the community," the USDA heralded in its hearings pamphlet. Over time, Plum Island would indeed become known, though perhaps not for the reasons they had hoped for.
The U.S. military had a special plan for Plum Island. In 1951, the Joint Chiefs of Staff determined that "the destruction of the enemy's food supply by the use of anti-animal Biological Warfare agents would be strategic in its effect." In a long war of attrition and "a front in Europe stabilized far to the East" — so as not to destroy the food of Allied Western Europe—"it might then be to our definite advantage to initiate a vigorous anti-crop and anti-animal campaign and weaken the Soviet will to resist and encourage defection."
The Soviets were "doing a considerable amount of work" in this area because they understood that "famine…provides a real threat." The time to act was now. "Immediate action should be taken," the Joint Chiefs said, "to procure an island test-site where all types of hot agents could be tested
with greater freedom and an animal laboratory could be established….
This would also obviate the restriction imposed by law prohibiting work on certain animal diseases within the continental limits of the U.S." The military ordered Army veterinarian Colonel Donald L. Mace, Doc Sha-han's partner in a 1948 virus eradication campaign in Mexico, to begin a "cooperative project" with the USDA and the Army on Plum Island, one that would be "feasible and of potential mutual benefit." The USDA would be employed as a cover to sell the idea to the New York community. Five top secret projects were approved for the germ warfare island:
4-11-02-051 Miscellaneous exotic diseases
4-11-02-052 Rift Valley fever
4-11-02-053 African swine fever
4-11-02-054 Foot-and-mouth disease
4-11-02-055 Rinderpest
Army surveyors landed on a deserted Plum Island in late 1951. They set up windsocks and fans and tested wind speed. They found prevailing winds from the southwest. That was good news, because if germs from their tests escaped off island they would tend to blow east, into the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, or south into Gardiner's Bay, and dissipate, at least in theory. The surveyors also charted a regional population map, drawing radius circles around Plum Island at ten-, twenty-five-, and fifty-mile increments. Inside those circles were the Hamptons villages to the south, the Long Island Expressway (then under construction) to the west, and coastal Connecticut to the north. These would be the fallout zones if a biological accident occurred while the wind was blowing the wrong way.
At Dr. Hagan's urging, the Army rehabilitated the old mine storage building but retained its fungible-sounding name: Building No. 257. By August 1954, over one hundred large animals — horses, cattle, sheep, and swine — milled about in outdoor pens set up in the World War I-era artillery bunkers, and scientists used one thousand mice and guinea pigs each month. The bunkers were fitted with corrals, metal railings, gratings, "dip vats," walk-through sprayers, water bins, and feeding troughs. The sight of animals idling in cavernous concrete complexes that looked like ancient Mayan Indian ruins was a glimpse into a futuristic stone age. On small creatures and in culture dishes, work with hot viruses in Building No. 257, now simply called Lab 257, was performed in "gloveboxes," designed at Fort Detrick. Each steel enclosed chamber had riveted glass windows and was fitted with thick black rubber gloves that reached deep inside for experiments.
Activating Plum Island as a full-time germ warfare island presented a number of "pressing problems," according to Army records. Foremost was the sheer difficulty of constructing the unique facility on an ocean-exposed island not connected to the mainland by bridge or tunnel. Further complicating the situation, the longshoremen ferrying the construction materials to the island went on strike, and the building laborers refused to cross their picket line. This significantly delayed the project. Recruitment of scientists from mainland Fort Detrick wasn't easy. "I went up there for a job interview," remembers microbiologist William Patrick, "and the weather was terrible — cold, foggy, and just horrible. I went over on that damn boat, got seasick, and said to myself, 'This is not for me.' " Patrick declined Colonel Mace's offer and stayed at Fort Detrick. "The weather did me in — no question about it."[14] Dr. Al Webb, who occasionally came up from Fort Detrick to visit Doc Shahan, remembers the ferry. "I remember thinking, 'This is a hell of a way to go to work!' " He saw firsthand why Patrick and others rejected invitations to Plum Island. "If the wind was blowing up the Sound, or it was drizzling or snowing, you might think it was pretty grim, too."
With all the delays, not much germ warfare research was accomplished. And the importance of that research was suddenly called into question. The Joint Chiefs found that a war with the U.S.S.R. would best be fought with conventional and nuclear means, and biological warfare against humans— not against food animals. Destroying the food supply meant having to feed millions of starving Russians after winning a war. The Army was moving in too many biological warfare directions at once, and it was time to move anti-animal and anticrop biological warfare to "other appropriate agencies of the government." The Army asked the secretary of defense to order them off Plum Island.
As Lab 257 neared completion in the spring of 1954, President Eisenhower approved an agreement between the Departments of Defense and Agriculture at a National Security Council meeting. Mace was ordered to "pursue a minimal, yet forceful, research program at Fort Terry during the
Fiscal Year 1954":
The mission of Fort Terry [Plum Island] has been changed…from one which encompassed studies on various exotic animal diseases to determine both their offensive and defensive potentialities as biological warfare agents to one which pertains only to the defensive aspects of foot-and-mouth and rinderpest diseases.
A declassified top-secret report stated, just before the turnover, that "even though Department of the Army plans contemplated deactivation of Fort Terry, the assistant chief chemical officer for biological warfare at Camp Detrick will retain responsibilities in the anti-animal biological warfare field." Hardly did the Army "up and leave," as the USDA presently maintains. As time wore on, it became easier for the USDA to repeat the mantra that it had nothing to do with the Army when both were on Plum Island; that there were two labs; that each agency "did its own thing;" that the USDA never so much as looked at the Army soldiers.
14
Patrick continued working at Fort Detrick for twenty-five years. Today he's one of the nation's top experts on germ warfare.