One source, taking the pseudonym "Charlie," told them there was heavy traffic between Fort Detrick and Plum Island in both directions, as well as from Egypt and Kenya. A document revealed an October 1969 shipment by military escort of "Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis (VEE) virus and antisera," to "Dr. J. J. Callis, from the Viral and Rickettsial Division, Army Biological Laboratory, Fort Detrick." VEE had been one of Fort Detrick's main germ warfare agents for decades, along with anthrax, botulism, and Rift Valley fever; human guinea pigs had been injected with VEE to develop a vaccine called TC-83, under a top-secret program called Operation whitecoat. "for research purposes," the permit announced. When the Newsday reporters inquired about it, Plum Island assistant director Dr. John Graves said it had been sent to prepare for the disease, which threatened to spread into the United States from Mexico.
Another document described a one-year project called "Pathogenicity and Prophylaxis of Influenza-A Viruses." Aimed at live and inactivated flu viruses and engineering man-made recombinant DNA flu virus strains, the research tested their effects on pigs and birds. Working on viruses that jumped between pigs and humans, they used pigs as virus production factories. Scientist Dr. Charles Campbell was able to combine human Hong Kong flu strain with a strain of swine flu (that in 1976 killed an Army soldier at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and touched off a national flu panic) and isolated a new, hybrid virus strain that had the characteristics of both. In this regard, Plum Island did not seem to fit its relatively innocuous title of "Animal Disease Center" — this work placed its actual research in a human realm. That year, President Ford authorized an emergency national flu vaccination campaign to combat this same "New Jersey" flu strain now on Plum Island.
Fort Detrick's animal disease chief, Dr. William Hinshaw, headed up germ warfare against enemy food. Though retired since 1966, he regularly visited Plum Island in the 1970s and served as a "consultant." Charlie also divulged that a lab chief working on a "very hot" monkey virus — possibly the forerunner of Ebola virus, the new Marburg hemorrhagic fever virus that killed German lab workers with ghastly hemorrhagic fevers at a vaccine plant in Marburg, West Germany. In All the President's Men, "Deep Throat" implored Woodward in a dimly lit parking garage to "follow the money." Now, the scene was re-created in the desolate field behind a school, as Plum Island sources told Fitzsimmons to "follow the viruses."
In 1958, the USDA had quietly pushed through the House of Representatives a measure to allow the transfer of viruses over the mainland to Plum Island. A decade before, when it authorized the construction of an offshore exotic virus lab, Congress specifically banned foreign viruses from the mainland, and from any island connected by bridge or tunnel. Viruses had to be unloaded from giant Navy freighters onto tugs in Gardiner's Bay that steamed their biological cargo to Plum Island harbor. Requesting the law change, USDA officials told House members, "Only four or five vials of the virus would be delivered over land twice a year" and promised to package those few shipments with the utmost care. The law change would cut costs and do away with a "an inordinately expensive and inconvenient procedure," they said. Congress agreed and granted them their wish.
The USDA was either ignorant of the level of germ traffic that would ensue or it intentionally lied to the lawmakers. By 1976, huge crates of live viruses were traveling over congested Long Island roads multiple times each day. Germs were shipped off Plum Island, logged only as "biologi-cals," with no other description. Virus and bacteria samples coming into the United States were stowed behind the pilot's seat in a commercial airliner, picked up at Building No. 80 at JFK International Airport, and shifted from one car to another in the parking lot of a department store in the Suffolk town of Sayville. Over the years, thousands of these trips were made through New York City, and over Nassau and Suffolk county roads; local health officials were unaware of potentially deadly biological voyages occurring every day right under their noses. Sometimes the shipments of live exotic virus samples were taken home with the couriers in the evening, placed in household freezers, and brought to Plum Island the next day. A USDA official later admitted to doing just that, but only "once or twice" a month. Couriers weren't instructed on what the samples contained, which could be as large as a thirty-gallon drum, or how to go about using theemergency decontamination kit in case something spilled. Often the Plum Island scientists themselves had little idea what the blood serum samples contained. Sometimes crates were locked in a freezer in the Orient Point warehouse — but the key to the freezer hung conspicuously on a wooden peg just inside the front door. There were no security guards at the Orient Point facility. They had been dispensed with long ago. And if the package arrived after the last scheduled boat left for Plum Island, it was just left outside the door to the Orient Point office, or on the side of the road, either inside or leaning against the big Plum Island mailbox. The following morning the marine crew took it to the island on the first boat out.
In June 1970, a virus courier named Alfred Von Hassel was killed in a car accident on Northville Turnpike in Riverhead, thirty miles west of Plum Island, while transporting unidentified biologicals. The container— described as an aluminum case one foot wide and one foot deep, and eighteen inches tall with latches — catapulted from Von Hassel's car on impact. It was retrieved from a field abutting the road where the vehicle had flipped over. Fortunately, Leo Golisz, an off-duty Plum Island security guard, passed by the commotion and recognized the upside-down car with its u.s. gov't marking. He identified himself to police and left the scene toting the shiny silver box of biologicals, which he brought to Plum Island. Other foreign shipments were less sturdy and wouldn't survive such a horrendous accident — one source recalled transporting picnic coolers and leaky cardboard containers with fluid oozing out of the bottom.
The abuses read like a checklist on how to disregard regulations and abandon all common sense. Employees told the investigators that DDT insecticide was still being sprayed liberally on Plum Island, four years after use of the toxic compound was banned by the federal government. Tons of sewage effluent flowed daily into Long Island Sound and Gardiner's Bay from the two laboratories, untested to ensure that germs had been destroyed by decontamination. Radioactive materials that were incinerated required testing with Geiger counters to monitor fallout, per the Atomic Energy Commission. Nervously wringing their hands as they sat uncomfortably in their friend's house in East Marion, two employees admitted the incinerator charging room hadn't been tested for radiation exposure in years. Not only was security at Orient Point nil, but the guardhouses at each of the two lab compounds on the island were unmanned. The once thirty-four-man-strong security patrol had been decimated. A paltry eleven guards covered three 8-hour shifts, seven days a week, 365 days a year. "I could take you to the island on a motorboat," said a source, "get you ashore and put you in a lab — and no one would ever see us."
Then there were the illnesses.
"James Robinson," a worker in the lab glassware department, became sick in 1975 and had to retire early. The USDA offered him a 40 percent disability payment, until the union protested the settlement, stressing he had been exposed to dangerous microbes. The USDA doubled the ante to an 80 percent payment and the employee's grievance conveniently faded away. A union leader had been filing workplace grievances for years, noting that Plum Island workers occasionally contracted severe rashes. No steps were taken by management toward amelioration.