Karl Grossman's 1971 twin stories had set the tone of dialogue and defined the standard by which the public would judge the island. The self-described "Plum Island Enemy Number One" recalls running into Callis years later on the mainland. "He screamed at me." Asked about the reporter, Callis says, "Karl Grossman? I don't know if I have a word to describe him." The reporter would continue his role as the ever-prodding thorn in Plum Island's side, and his scathing pen wasn't going away anytime soon.
CONGRESS FIRES A WARNING SHOT
The media's new interest in Plum Island piqued the interests of local officials, including freshman Congressman Thomas J. Downey. For a politician, 1974 was the year to be a Democrat. With the resignation of President Nixon and the word "Watergate" on the lips of every American, Republicans had little hope of winning elections to public office. The Democrats even won an upset in overwhelmingly Republican Suffolk County, where they had fielded Tom Downey just to have a name on the ballot. One of the youngest ever to serve in Congress, he was barely twenty-five (the minimum age set forth in the Constitution) when he took his oath on the Capitol steps. Pictured on the front page of the New York Times playing basketball with his younger brother in his parents' driveway, Downey became the poster child of the Congressional Class of 1974, the "Watergate Class."
Fresh out of college, and now a member of the House Armed Services Committee, he dove into an investigation into allegations of LSD drug testing and deaths at the Army's Edgewood Arsenal. "I did it simply because I wanted to get some press," he recalls. "The next day, a Capitol Hill cop comes into my office with a complete dossier including pictures and recruiting brochures and films from the arsenal, where they had him [the police officer was then an Army private] without any antidotes present, taking large doses of LSD. The materials enticed young soldiers to come to the arsenal — 'Come see Washington,' they said. 'See the monument, have fun, all while helping your government.' By taking drugs!" Downey discovered a Long Island man had committed suicide after participating in the program. Before long, the young congressman had Army generals twice his age running for cover, forced the program to close down, and gained national attention.
Downey's next fight was led by a person even less likely than the twenty-five-year-old newly minted congressman — his twenty-seven-year-old intern.
Ron Fitzsimmons attended high school with Downey and worked on the triumphant 1974 campaign. Downey took on his old buddy, "Ronnie" — who had been horsing around on an extended-year, Vietnam-era college track at State University of New York at Stony Brook, and was unemployed during the summer of 1976 — as an unpaid intern in Washington. Ronnie was assigned to typing envelopes up in "The Cage," catacombs with wire-cage doors lining the attic crawl space on the top floor of the Cannon House Office Building that had storage spaces for each member. Bored, and thinking Downey was punishing him for something he did, Ronnie walked down to the office and begged chief of staff Fred Kass for something interesting to do.
Rifling through the papers on his desk, Kass uncovered a thin manila file folder and tossed it across his desk at Fitzsimmons. "Here, Ronnie. Check this out."
Inside were two pieces of paper about Plum Island with rumors about biological warfare. Though he grew up nearby, Ronnie had never heard about the island.
"See what you can find out," said Kass. "Oh, and here's the name of a Newsday reporter you can call."
As Fitzsimmons climbed the flights of marble steps, returning to The Cage, his thoughts raced. An odd inspiration came to him. Only a few months before he had seen All the President's Men, the blockbuster Watergate film with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodward and Bernstein, the two Washington Post cub reporters who brought down the president. He remembered how they took one morsel of information and expanded on it. It was a list — a list of political contributors, he recalled. And there was that scene where they went through the phone book and made all those phone calls that led to more clues. Now it all fits — things are connecting here, he thought. A sense of purpose came over him with every step he climbed. Soon he was racing down the hallway to his cage. Ronnie harbored an envy of his childhood peer, Tom Downey, and his improbable success. Now, with Woodward and Bernstein as his self-appointed mentors, he would play investigative journalist and congressman. Hunched over his typewriter, he banged out a letter from Downey, asking the secretary of agriculture for a Plum Island phone book and organizational chart. He could hardly contain his excitement. The Plum Island Inquiry had begun.
Days later, the list of employees and a crude chart showed up. Grabbing the local white pages, Fitzsimmons painstakingly cross-referenced the three hundred plus names and penciled in phone numbers on the long list. He studied the chart, tracing the lines from box to box. Now who works for who? Then, starting with the As, he picked up the receiver and began making calls.
"Hi, I'm Ron Fitzsimmons with Congressman Tom Downey. I'm calling from Washington — we're looking into the operations of Plum Island…."
"I heard lots of stuff," recalls Fitzsimmons. "But I picked up right away that — much like in the movie — people were afraid to talk. It's a small community out there — there's only that one road at the end of the North Fork. I sensed people were concerned about talking." Many hung up on him. Some agreed to talk, but not over the telephone. "In person," they said to him. "The phones might be tapped." The intern decided he must return to Long Island, convinced it was the only way to get the full story. Willing employees insisted they not meet at their homes, worried that neighbors would spy a strange car pulling up to the house. Instead, Ronnie met with them at the park, behind the school, and at their friends' homes in neighboring towns.
At the suggestion of Kass, Fitzsimmons had hooked up with News-day's Cummings and Fetherston. The team had recently uncovered a possible biological attack on Cuba, and unearthed a series of secret outdoor biological warfare tests in U.S. cities orchestrated by Fort Detrick in the 1950s. Although Fitzsimmons recalls being interested only in the "personal lives and health" of Plum Island workers, he thought the two reporters seemed more intrigued by the island's alleged connections to biological warfare. They all agreed to share sources and research, and spoke once a week thereafter.
The worker interviews, pooled together by the trio, were quite troubling. They heard that women were barred from working in Laboratory 257 for fear that they "would carry infections to their children." And men could only work on a volunteer basis on subacute sclerosing panencephali-tis (SSP), a disease arising as a complication of the measles that affects children and adult males with personality changes, intellectual deterioration, periodic involuntary movements, and severe dementia. Few patients diagnosed with SSP lived past three years. Paul Rose, the Plum Island union president, told them one section of Lab 257 (he would not identify which) was closed off, and no one was permitted to enter or know what was going on inside. This didn't seem too far-fetched — a scientist had told a reporter off the record a few years before, "I knew what I and the other three people working with me were up to, but I didn't know really what the whole place was about. We kept in our own laboratory all day long…there was some talk on the ferry…."