That brief pinch the nuclear power plant trooper felt on his ankle that afternoon was the bite of an enemy no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. The chance of finding something that size, even had it attached to his exposed forearm, was pretty slim. The foe was either a eight-legged nymph deer tick or a Lone Star tick, swelling up to one hundred times its size with his blood. And while it sipped away, the tick regurgitated hundreds of spiral-shaped Bb bacteria into the victim's blood.
The tick is the perfect germ vector, which is why it has long been fan cied as a germ weapon by early biowarriors from Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan to the Soviet Union and the United States. Fixing its target by sensing exhaled carbon dioxide, the creature grabs onto a mammal's skin with its legs and digs in with its mouth hooks. The tick secretes saliva that helps glue it to its host, making it difficult to separate. A special hormone in the tick counteracts antibodies sent by the host to fight it off, and the crafty tick secretes an anti-inflammatory to prevent itching — so the host hardly knows it's there.
If the tick is the perfect germ messenger, then Bb is an incredibly clever germ. Because its outside wall is hard to destroy, the bacterium can fight off immune responses and antibiotic drugs. Bb finds a home in the mouth and salivary glands of larvae and nymph ticks, and infects females' ovaries and the thousands of eggs they will lay after breeding while attached to deer (upon which Bb has little effect). Common in mice and birds as well, today there are five subspecies of Bb and over one hundred mutated substrains in the United States.
The question that experts haven't been able to answer is why this disease suddenly surfaced in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in the summer of 1975.
PROJECT PAPERCLIP MEETS PLUM ISLAND
"I do not believe that we should offer any guarantees to protection in the post-hostilities period to Germans…. Among them may be some who should properly be tried for war crimes or at least arrested for active participation in Nazi activities…."
"To the victors belong the spoils of the enemy."
Dr. C. A. Mitchell began his remarks at the 1956 Plum Island dedication day by reminiscing on the late world war:
I often think and almost tremble at what could have taken place had our Teutonic enemies been more alive to this. It is said that some of their scientists pointed out the advantages to be obtained from the artificial sowing of disease agents that attack domestic animals. Fortunately blunders existed in the Teutonic camp as in our own. Consequently, this means of attack was looked upon as a scientific poppy dream…If [as much] time and money were invested in biologic agent dispersion as in one bomber plane, the Free World would have almost certainly gone down to defeat.
The audience murmured in acknowledgment, but one dedication day vIP stirred uncomfortably — the director of the new virus laboratory in Tubingen, West Germany, personally invited by Plum Island Director Maurice S. "Doc" Shahan. The mind of the brown-haired man with the scar on his face and upper lip held a dark secret. He sat there perspiring, staring at Dr. Mitchell through his gray-brown eyes, wondering how many people knew his past.
For he — Dr. Erich Traub — was that "Teutonic enemy." Strangely enough, he had every right to be there. He was one of Plum Island's founding fathers.
Nearing the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union raced to recruit German scientists for postwar purposes. Under a top-secret program code-named Project paperclip, the U.S. military pursued Nazi scientistific talent "like forbidden fruit," bringing them to America under employment contracts and offering them full U.S. citizenship. The recruits were supposed to be nominal participants in Nazi activities. But the zealous military recruited more than two thousand scientists, many of whom had dark Nazi party pasts.[2]
American scientists viewed these Germans as peers, and quickly forgot they were on opposite sides of a ghastly global war in which millions perished. Fearing brutal retaliation from the Soviets for the Nazis' vicious treatment of them, some scientists cooperated with the Americans to earn amnesty. Others played the two nations off each other to get the best financial deal in exchange for their services. Dr. Erich Traub was trapped on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain after the war, and ordered to research germ warfare viruses for the Russians. He pulled off a daring escape with his family to West Berlin in 1949. Applying for Project paperclip employment, Traub affirmed he wanted to "do scientific work in the U.S.A., become an American citizen, and be protected from Russian reprisals."
As lab chief of Insel Riems — a secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory on a crescent-shaped island nestled in the Baltic Sea — Traub worked directly for Adolf Hitler's second-in-charge, SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, on live germ trials. He packaged weaponized foot-and-mouth disease virus, which was dispersed from a Luftwaffe bomber onto cattle and reindeer in occupied Russia. At Himmler's request, Traub personally journeyed to the Black Sea coast of Turkey. There, amid the lush Anatolian terrain, he searched for a lethal strain of rinderpest virus for use against the Allies. Earlier in the war he had been a captain in the German Army, working as an expert on infectious animal diseases, particularly in horses. His veterinary corps led the germ warfare attacks on horses in the United States and Romania in World War I with a bacteria called glanders. He was also a member of NSKK, the Nazi Motorists Corps, a powerful Nazi organization that ranked directly behind the SA (Storm Troopers) and the SS (Elite Corps). In fact, NSKK's first member, joining in April 1930, was Adolf Hitler himself. Traub also listed his 1930s membership in Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund, a German-American "club" also known as Camp Sigfried. Just thirty miles west of Plum Island in Yaphank, Long Island, Camp Sigfried was the national headquarters of the American Nazi movement. Over forty thousand people throughout the New York region arrived by train, bus, and car to participate in Nuremberg-like rallies. Each weekend they marched in lockstep divisions, carrying swastika flags, burning Jewish U.S. congressmen in effigy, and singing anti-Semitic songs. Above all, they solemnly pledged their allegiance to Hitler and the Third Reich.
Ironically, Traub spent the prewar period of his scientific career on a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, perfecting his skills in viruses and bacteria under the tutelage of American experts before returning to Nazi Germany on the eve of war. Despite Traub's troubling war record, the U.S. Navy recruited him for its scientific designs, and stationed him at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.[3]
Just months into his paperclip contract, the germ warriors of Fort Detrick, the Army's biological warfare headquarters in Frederick, Maryland, and CIA operatives invited Traub in for a talk, later reported in a declassified top-secret summary:
2
The best known PAPERCLIP recruit was Wernher von Braun, the brains behind the Saturn V rocket that brought the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon, the visionary architect of Disneyland's fabled Tomorrow-land exhibit, one of the founders of NASA, and the fatherly host of network television specials on outer space. The American public knew him as a warm, affable man with a thick German accent. They didn't know that the U.S. missile program was based upon von Braun's revolutionary V-2 rocket he designed for Hitler, a 50-foot-long, 13-ton intercontinental ballistic missile. And they didn't know that during World War II, von Braun was a major in Heinrich Himmler's SS, and that his V-1 and V-2 rockets — built by some 20,000 slave laborers in his Mittlewerk SS munitions factory — rained destruction upon Europe in Hitler's futile attempt to turn the tide near the end of the war.
3
Another PAPERCLIP recruit who worked alongside Traub at the Naval Medical Research Institute was Theodur Benzinger, an "aviation doctor." Benzinger was invited by Heinrich Himmler to view a film on high-altitude simulations at Dachau using prisoners as human guinea pigs (a "37-year-old Jew in good condition who lasted 30 minutes — he began to perspire, wriggle his head, developed cramps, became breathless, and [with] foam collecting around his mouth became unconscious and died"). Arrested for war crimes by Nuremberg prosecutors, he denied experimenting with any prisoners. He evaded prosecution at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial and rushed into the waiting arms of Project PAPERCLIP.