"I could no longer speak. As the joint pain became unbearable, this one finger hurt so much I wanted it amputated — and I asked the doctor to amputate it. I prayed to God, 'How do you expect me to preach when I can't speak?' and He said, 'You have a typewriter — type.' And I had one crummy finger left that I could move, it was the little finger on my left hand and I'm right-handed." He began to pinkie-type, letter by letter, click-clack-click, whatever came to mind. In the very first sentence he punched the I key too hard and it broke off and fell on the floor. "Forty years old, and I began to cry like a baby — and no sound came out." He finished the letter, carefully penciling in the I's. "It was the most humble letter I have ever written in my life." He did not think anyone would even read the pathetic-looking half-typed, half-scrawled epistle. But plucking Steven J. Nostrum's letter out of the thousands she received each day, the nationally syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers not only read it — she printed it.
What happened next was completely unexpected. Nostrum received hundreds of phone calls and thousands of letters from Lyme disease sufferers and their family members who shared his pain. "People were actually calling up telephone operators to get the exchange for Mattituck, randomly dialing numbers beginning with 298 and asking, 'Is there a man in your town with the initials S.J.N. who's involved with Lyme disease?' " Buoyed by the overwhelming response, he began to heal himself by helping others. He set up a makeshift command center in the basement of his home. Nostrum started one of the nation's first Lyme disease support groups; guests from around the country came to his monthly gatherings at the local library. Through his organization, the Lyme Borrelia Out-Reach Foundation (Lyme Borrelia is the technical name of Lyme disease), he published a newsletter, sent out audio-tapes, distributed literature, and hosted a monthly cable television program seen across the country. He spoke at civic associations, churches, and schools, and testified before a special U.S. Senate committee on Lyme disease.
"I've been involved in Christian ministry for thirty-seven years — and I'm not going to tell you I saw a burning bush," says Nostrum. "But I can look you square in the eye and tell you I felt a real calling to get the information out, no political agendas, strictly from a point of education and prevention." Nostrum's education would lead him into some surprising territory.
Attorney John Loftus was hired in 1979 by the Office of Special Investigations, a unit set up by the Justice Department to expose Nazi war crimes and unearth Nazis hiding in the United States. Given top-secret clearance to review files that had been sealed for thirty-five years, Loftus found a treasure trove of information on America's postwar Nazi recruiting. In 1982, publicly challenging the government's complacency with the wrongdoing, he told 60 Minutes that top Nazi officers had been protected and harbored in America by the CIA and the State Department.
"They got the Emmy Award," Loftus wrote. "My family got the death threats."
Old spies reached out to him after the publication of his book, The Belarus Secret, encouraged that he — unlike other authors — submitted his manuscript to the government, agreeing to censor portions to protect national security. The spooks gave him copies of secret documents and told him stories of clandestine operations. From these leads, Loftus ferreted out the dubious Nazi past of Austrian president and U.N. secretary general Kurt Waldheim. Loftus revealed that during World War II, Waldheim had been an officer in a German Army unit that committed atrocities in Yugoslavia.[6] A disgraced Kurt Waldheim faded from the international scene soon thereafter.
In the preface of The Belarus Secret, Loftus laid out a striking piece of information gleaned from his spy network:
Even more disturbing are the records of the Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to America. They experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I have received some information suggesting that the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950s…Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret U.S. document confirming that "clandestine attacks on crops and animals" took place at this time.
Erich Traub had been working for the American biological warfare program from his 1949 Soviet escape until 1953. We know he consulted with Fort Detrick scientists and CIA operatives; that he worked for the USDA for a brief stint; and that he spoke regularly with Plum Island director Doc Shahan in 1952. Traub can be physically placed on Plum Island at least three times — on dedication day in 1956 and two visits, once in 1957 and again in the spring of 1958. Shahan, who enforced an ultrastrict policy against outside visitors, each time received special clearance from the State Department to allow Traub on Plum Island soil.
Research unearthed three USDA files from the vault of the National Archives — two were labeled tick research and a third e. traub. All three folders were empty. The caked-on dust confirms the file boxes hadn't been open since the moment before they were taped shut in the 1950s.
Preposterous as it sounds, clandestine outdoor germ warfare trials were almost routine during this period. In 1952, the Joint Chiefs of Staff called for a "vigorous, well-planned, large-scale [biological warfare] test program…with all interested agencies participating." A top-secret letter to the secretary of defense later that year stated, "Steps should be taken to make certain adequate facilities are available, including those at Fort De-trick, Dugway Proving Ground, Fort Terry (Plum Island) and an island field testing area." Was Plum Island the island field testing area? Indeed, when the Army first scouted Plum Island for its Cold War designs, they charted wind speeds and direction and found that, much to their liking, the prevailing winds blew out to sea.
One of the participating "interested agencies" was the USDA, which admittedly set up large plots of land throughout the Midwest for airborne anticrop germ spray tests. Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division ran "vulnerability tests" in which operatives walked around Washington, D.C., and San Francisco with suitcases holding Serratia marcescens—a bacteria recommended to Fort Detrick by Traub's nominal supervisor, Nazi germ czar and Nuremberg defendant Dr. Kurt Blome. Tiny perforations allowed the germs' release so they could trace the flow of the germs through airports and bus terminals. Shortly thereafter, eleven elderly men and women checked into hospitals with never-before-seen Serratia marcescens infections. One patient died. Decades later when the germ tests were disclosed, the Army denied responsibility. A Department of Defense report later admitted the germ was "an opportunistic pathogen… causing infections of the endocardium, blood, wounds, and urinary and respiratory tracts." In the summer of 1966, Special Operations men walked into three New York City subway stations and tossed lightbulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis, a benign bacteria, onto the tracks. The subway trains pushed the germs through the entire system and theoretically killed over a million passengers. Tests were also run with live, virulent, anti-animal germ agents. Two hog-cholera bombs were exploded at an altitude of 1,500 feet over pigpens set up at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. And turkey feathers laced with Newcastle disease virus were dropped on animals grazing on a University of Wisconsin farm.[7]
6
The Office of Special Investigations found that Waldheim participated in the transfer of civilians to SS slave labor camps, the deportation of civilians to death camps, the use of anti-Semitic propaganda, and the mistreatment and execution of Allied POWs.
7
Traub likely developed the standardized Newcastle disease virus placed on the biological cluster bomb by concentrating the germ in chicken blood while he was working at the Naval Medical Research Institute for Project PAPERCLIP.