The Army never fully withdrew its germ warfare efforts against food animals. Two years after the Army gave Plum Island to the USDA — and three years after it told President Eisenhower it had ended all biological warfare against food animals — the Joint Chiefs advised that "research on anti-animal agent-munition combinations should" continue, as well as "field testing of anti-food agent munition combinations… " In November 1957, military intelligence examined the elimination of the food supply of the Sino-Soviet Bloc, right down to the calories required for victory:
In order to have a crippling effect on the economy of the USSR, the food and animal crop resources of the USSR would have to be damaged within a single growing season to the extent necessary to reduce the present average daily caloric intake from 2,800 calories to 1,400 calories; i.e., the starvation level. Reduction of food resources to this level, if maintained for twelve months, would produce 20 percent fatalities, and would decrease manual labor performance by 95 percent and clerical and light labor performance by 80 percent.
At least six outdoor stockyard tests occurred in 1964-65. Simulants were sprayed into stockyards in Fort Worth, Kansas City, St. Paul, Sioux Falls, and Omaha in tests determining how much foot-and-mouth disease virus would be required to destroy the food supply.
Had the Army commandeered Plum Island for an outdoor trial? Maybe the USDA lent a hand with the trial, as it had done out west by furnishing the large test fields. After all, the Plum Island agreement between the Army and the USDA allowed the Army to borrow the island from the USDA when necessary and in the national interest.
Traub might have monitored the tests. A source who worked on Plum Island in the 1950s recalls that animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. "They called him the Nazi scientist, when they came in, in 1951—they were inoculating these ticks," and a picture he once saw "shows the animal handler pointing to the area on Plum where they released the ticks." Dr. Traub's World War II handiwork consisted of aerial virus sprays developed on Insel Riems and tested over occupied Russia, and of field work for Heinrich Himmler in Turkey. Indeed, his colleagues conducted bug trials by dropping live beetles from planes. An outdoor tick trial would have been de rigueur for Erich Traub.
Somebody gave Steve Nostrum a copy of John Loftus's The Belarus Secret at one of his support group meetings. Steve had long suspected that Plum Island played a role in the evolution of Lyme disease, given the nature of its business and its proximity to Old Lyme, Connecticut. But he never publicly voiced the hunch, fearing a loss of credibility; hard facts and statistics earned him a reputation as a leader in the Lyme disease field. Now, in his hands, he had a book written by a Justice Department attorney who not only had appeared on 60 Minutes but also had brought down the secretary general of the United Nations. Nostrum disclosed the possible Plum-Lyme connection on his own television show. He invited local news reporter and Plum Island ombudsman Karl Grossman to help him explore the possibilities in light of the island's biological mishaps. Asked why he wrote about Loftus's book in his weekly newspaper column, Grossman says, "To let the theory rise or fall. To let the public consider it. And it seemed to me that the author was a Nazi hunter and a reputable attorney— this was not trivial information provided by some unreliable person."
In October 1995, Nostrum, fresh off nursing duty (having earned an RN degree to help Lyme disease patients), rushed to a rare public meeting held by the USDA. In a white nurse's coat, stethoscope still around his neck, Nostrum rose. Trembling, his blond beard now streaked with gray, he clutched his copy of The Belarus Secret as he read the damning passage out loud for the USDA and the public to hear. "I don't know whether this is true," he said, looking at the dais. "If it is true, there must be an investigation — if it's not true, then John Loftus needs to be prosecuted." People in the audience clapped, and some were astonished. A few gawked, thinking he was nuts. How did the USDA officials react? "If stares could kill, I would have been dead," remembers Nostrum.
Hiding behind the same aloof veil of secrecy they had employed for decades, the USDA brazenly cut him off. "There are those who think that little green men are hiding out there," the officials responded to Nostrum. "But trust us when we say there are no space aliens and no five-legged cows." A few laughs erupted in the crowd. "It did nothing but detract from what I was saying," says Nostrum. "But I said it, and I had the documentation to support it."
One person the USDA couldn't laugh off as easily was Congressman Michael Forbes. A concerned Forbes called newsman Karl Grossman after reading his column. "He gets hold of me late one night," says Grossman, "and tells me he's going to make a surprise visit — a raid on Plum Island—the very next morning." He wanted Grossman (and the power of his pen) to come along for the ride.
At 6:45 a.m. on a crisp, clear spring morning, just days after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Forbes walked up to the ferry captain at Orient Point flanked by Grossman and John McDonald, an investigative reporter from Newsday. "Hi, I'm Congressman Mike Forbes."
The captain's response was one of "pure fear." He radioed over all kinds of distress calls to Plum Island. Waiting impatiently on the gangplank, Forbes was in no mood to fool around. He repeated, "Look, I'm Congressman Forbes and I'm going on this ferry." Minutes later, he was riding on the ferry with the two journalists. The self-invited guests were hurried onto the bus and whisked into the office of new Plum Island Director Dr. Harley Moon. Dr. Moon had been recruited from the USDA's Ames, Iowa laboratory, which studies less dangerous germs domestic to the United States. Though he had no interest in relocating to New York, he agreed to temporarily help move Plum Island past the troubles of past administrations before returning to his native Iowa. Forbes, who had never been on Plum Island before, immediately began peppering Moon with questions that revealed extensive homework. Nostrum had briefed Forbes beforehand and given him a list of questions, first of which was the Plum-Lyme connection unearthed in John Loftus's The Belarus Secret.
"Forbes wanted to get to the bottom of a bunch of issues," remembers Grossman. "Like the hurricane — the electricity going out in that hurricane years before. And all the stuff about Plum Island and biological warfare. A real laundry list of things.
"They were very nervous. Very nervous. There were no PR guys around. It was just these scientists — and no spin. Moon had six or seven scientists come in and explain what they were doing. Forbes was in no mood to be snowed or soft-balled. To bullshit him would have been difficult. Meanwhile, McDonald and I were shooting questions at them, too. It was their worst nightmare."
Forbes then asked Dr. Moon about the allegations in The Belarus Secret.
"There is a great concern about the prevalence of Lyme disease on eastern Long Island," Mike Forbes said, winding up. "And here we have the highest incidence of it in the world."
Dr. Moon replied to the inquiries with half-apologies. "I'm sorry, Congressman, I wasn't here then" — "I don't know, Congressman" — "We don't have any paperwork on that" — "I can't say what the Department of Defense might have been doing before Agriculture came here." Factually, the answers were all true. After all, how would Harley Moon know about outdoor tick trials in the 1950s? Dr. Moon had been on Plum Island two months (he'd only be there for ten more, before assuming an endowed research chair at Iowa State University). And if there were documents on Plum Island that addressed it, they were long gone, thanks to the recently ordered destruction of Central Files. Moon enjoyed complete plausible deniability.