Virologist Dr. Robert Shope (son of the late Rockefeller Institute scientist and Erich Traub's American mentor, Dr. Richard Shope), who served on Plum Island's advisory committee, is a nonbeliever. "The Newsday article was absurd," says Shope. "There's no grounds for it. It would have been stupid to do such a thing because of the boomerang effect [the virus back-lashing on the United States]." Dr. Callis, director at the time of the outbreak, likewise denies any link between Plum Island and the Cuban outbreak. "There are a lot of rumors that the CIA planted it there — well, I'm not a CIA specialist, and I know they've done some stupid things, but I don't think they'd do it that close to the United States. Cuba likely got it from garbage they imported or from returning military staff from their African political programs in Angola."
Norman Covert, Fort Detrick's historian, shows how the CIA could easily have been involved — and unwittingly co-opted Plum Island. "There were CIA people who infiltrated the [Fort Detrick] laboratories. They did their own work, and we know now what they did with LSD and other psycho-illnesses. They had their own little cell there — they worked on their own, and I suspect that a very small circle of people knew that." This type of information isolation — informing people of project details strictly on a need-to-know basis — is the brand of secrecy that might have been used to poison Cuba's food supply with germs. Compartmentalization of each step made Plum Island an unknowing accomplice when it trafficked in viruses between Fort Detrick and elsewhere.
Efforts to explain away the outbreak as a natural occurrence do not hold up to close examination. The theory that food wastes from Spanish aircraft were fed to domestic pigs fails to address that Cuba, like the United States, had always kept their nation disease-free through strict importation quarantines. Cuban investigators claim ASFV broke out simultaneously in two distant locations; germ warfare experts say that contemporaneous sites of infection are unnatural and point to a deliberately caused outbreak. Because it is impossible to disprove, the logic of a methodical scientist dictates that a germ warfare attack cannot be ruled out. CIA assassination plots (some of which involved germs) and the Bay of Pigs invasion stand as acknowledged covert acts by the United States government to force regime change upon Cuba.
THE A-WIRE
The USDA devised a strategy to quiet the mounting concerns over Plum Island being raised by the press: it would host a national media day. Fifteen years after dedication day, Plum Island again opened its gates to reporters. Meddling local reporters with on-island deep background sources weren't telling the story the government wanted to tell; national reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune would. The USDA figured it could trump local reportage by spoon-feeding Plum Island positively to a captive, less informed national press.
Karl Grossman, short, rotund, and dark-bearded, was then an east end cub reporter for the daily Long Island Press, and managed to claw his way into the media day event. With a circulation of about 600,000, the Press was the seventh largest afternoon daily in the nation, serving Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk counties. The night before media day, he phoned James Reynolds, the USDA's public relations rep, for details on when to meet in the morning, and they got to chatting. The spokesman, relieved his well orchestrated press tour was all set, casually told the reporter, "The research also involves building defenses to… a foreign nation utilizing biological warfare." After being egged on by Grossman ("I got him on a run," says Grossman, "and he just kept going and going"), Reynolds protested. "We're not a front for the Department of Defense," but "America must be prepared to protect its food sources… " This was a far cry — wrote Grossman in a story he handed his editor before boarding the ferry to Plum Island the next morning — from the mantra that only civilian research took place on Plum. That had been the company line since dedication day, since Doc Shahan left mention of Colonel Mace and the Army on the cutting room floor.
When the press arrived, Dr. Howard Bachrach held up a tiny glass vial before the crowd of twenty-four newsmen and said its contents could infect not only all the cattle on the Earth, but all the cattle that had ever roamed the Earth. Billions and billions of potential infections were held between the little man's thumb and forefinger. And they had plenty more of this and other germs on hand.
Another scientist, tired of the journalists' pestering about biological warfare operations, barked at them in the hallway, "Absolutely ridiculous! Do you see any evidence of such things?" Reporters looked around the lab, eyes darting, unsure if they were missing the big white elephant.
At lunchtime in the cafeteria, Grossman placed his lunch tray down at an empty table. James Reynolds walked into the big room with his PR aides and a few of the national reporters in tow. They picked up their preordered lunches and sat down; Reynolds and his aide pointed and sneered at Karl across the room, now sinking his teeth into a soggy tuna fish sandwich.
While Reynolds had been shepherding his flock through the staged laboratory tour, extolling the virtues of Plum Island to the newsmen scribbling on little notepads, Karl Grossman's story of the night before had made the front page of the morning edition of the Press, and was being read by hundreds of thousands on the mainland. The PR man had been duped the night before.
That was only the beginning.
The story made the Associated Press's A-Wire, which meant that every news media outlet in the entire country had read an official-looking all-caps news brief off their teletype machines that said Plum Island was a biological warfare center. "These PR guys just knew—" remembers Grossman fondly. "They just knew that if something came across the AP wire, it was like it had come down from Mount Sinai." Editors around the nation were ordering their desk reporters to write stories based on the wire. With the stroke of his pen, Grossman had dashed the efforts of the USDA, singularly usurping Plum Island's canned media day. No matter what positive impressions the national reporters returned to their news desks with, they would still be colored by the contents of the authoritative AP story. Grossman wrote a second follow-up story the next day under the banner out of 'Andromeda strain' … right here on plum island, where he drew a frightening connection to Michael Crichton's 1969 novel about a deadly outbreak of viruses caused by the malfunction of a military satellite launched by the U.S. biological warfare program.
When Director Jerry Callis glanced at the cover of the Long Island Press on his desk, he was in utter shock. After disembarking from the 4:30 p.m. ferry off the island, he sped over to Claudio's in Greenport, hoping to find some of the national reporters to whom he could plead his case. There he came upon a young Boyce Rinsberger, then a junior New York Times reporter (and later an award-winning editor at the Washington Post, and editor of science magazine). Callis shoved the cover of the Press in his face and gestured wildly.
"You upset?" Rinsberger said, sipping a cocktail at the bar.
"Hell, I'm very upset," Callis said.
"Well, there's not a lot you can do. You can write a letter to the editor, put it in your desk drawer, and wait two weeks. See how the other stories come out — put them in an envelope with your letter, and send it all to the Long Island Press. Let the editor there decide whether he has the best writer in the nation on his staff, or the worst." Callis followed Rinsberger's detailed instructions. But his letter never ran and he never received a reply from the editor.