Tests were supposed to be held in airtight laboratory rooms. Instead, internal government documents prove there were gaping holes in the lab roofs where air currents and insects freely came and went, depending upon the direction of the wind. What's more, the animals were held in outdoor pens, where they were injected with virus vaccines and fed out of open-air feeding troughs. Plum Island workers witnessed birds flying in and out of the pens, picking morsels from the troughs. Wild animals were shooed away, but not before birds swooped down and mingled with the test animals. One eyewitness reported seeing deer entering the animal pens to feed.
If Dr. Traub continued his outdoor germ experiments with the Army and experimented with ticks outdoors, the ticks would have made contact with mice, deer, and more than 140 species of wild birds known to frequent and nest on Plum Island. The birds spread their toxic cargo to resting and nesting perches atop the great elms and oaks of Old Lyme and elsewhere, just like they spread the West Nile virus throughout the United States.
Researchers trying to prove that Lyme disease existed before 1975 claim to have isolated Bb in ticks collected on nearby Shelter Island and Long Island in the late 1940s. That timing coincides with both Erich Traub's arrival in the United States on Project paperclip and the Army's selection of Plum Island as its offshore biological warfare laboratory.
The USDA's spokesperson, Sandy Miller Hays, is unconvinced about the possibility of a link between Lyme disease and Plum Island:
Lyme disease — well, the positive agent for Lyme disease was identified in 1948, which was about six years before Plum Island came into being. So then some people blame the Army. There is a part of me that says, "Let me get this straight, the U.S. Army, that had saved the world, came along after the war and said, 'Let's poison a bunch of ticks and turn them loose on people in Connecticut?' "
We kind of giggle around here about the stories, but some of them are just outlandish. I always laugh about Nazi scientists….
Do you want to hear about how [scientists] are keeping a cow from drooling or do you want to hear about poisoned ticks and the Nazi scientists? It's always more fun to tell those scary stories.
A PR expert, Hays had Scientific American eating out of her hand in June 2000, when they reported her as saying, " 'We still get asked about the Nazi scientists,'… [with] the slightest trace of weariness creeping into her voice." In their feature story on Plum Island, the prestigious magazine dubbed the intrigue surrounding the island as a "fanciful fictional tapestry."
But as much as Ms. Hays and Scientific American might like to laugh or shrug it off, hard facts are indeed facts: the Army and the USDA conducted numerous outdoor biological warfare experiments within United States borders; the Army and the USDA were cooperating in a germ warfare laboratory built on Plum Island; the U.S. recruited the key architect of Nazi Germany's germ warfare program who worked directly for Heinrich Himmler; after Fort Detrick and the CIA interrogated him, the Nazi scientist developed the idea to build Plum Island, modeled after his own germ warfare lab on Insel Riems; the USDA borrowed this Nazi scientist to work in its Washington, D.C.-area laboratories; and this very Nazi scientist is now confirmed to have been on Plum Island on at least three occasions.
These aren't "fictional tapestries" or "scary stories" — they are scary facts from which conclusions can and should be drawn.
While the Army and the USDA are quick to deny the Plum Island tick experiments ever occurred, every few years the public learns of a top-secret germ warfare test whose existence the U.S. government had long denied. Consider this 2002 Pentagon disclosure in the New York Times about a 1964 test:
The Defense Department sprayed live nerve and biological agents on ships and sailors in cold-war era experiments to test the Navy's vulnerability to toxic warfare, the Pentagon said today. [S]ix tests were carried out…[h]undreds of sailors were exposed to poisons…in some of the experiments, known as Project shipboard hazard, or shad. Of the six tests, three used sarin, a nerve agent, or VX, a nerve gas [agents used by Iraq's Saddam Hussein against his own people]; one used staphylococcal enterotoxin B, known as SEB, a biological toxin; one used a simulant [Serratia marcescens] believed to be harmless but subsequently found to be dangerous… 4,300 military personnel [were] identified as participants in Project shad.
PLAYING WITH FIRE
Former Plum Island Director Dr. Jerry Callis says the association between Lyme disease and Plum Island is absurd. "Not now or ever had we anything to do with Lyme disease," he says in measured impatience. "It's existed in Europe for years — I've had it three times." Asked if Plum Island ever worked with ticks on Plum Island, Dr. Callis gave a surprising answer.
"Plum Island experimented with ticks," he says, adding, "but never outside of containment. We had a tick colony, where you take them and feed them on the virus, and breed the ticks to see how many generations it would last, on and on, until it's diluted. Recently, they reinstated the tick colony."
Tick colony?
Journalist Karl Grossman pressed a Plum Island lab chief some years ago about John Loftus's claims in The Belarus Secret. "My impression is that there is no truth to this," said Dr. Charles Mebus. But like director Harley Moon, Mebus had not been there in the 1950s to form an "impression." He did tell the roving reporter what he knew firsthand: Plum Island previously worked on — and continued to work on — tick experiments on "soft ticks" that transmitted heartwater, bluetongue, and African swine fever viruses, but aren't normally known for spreading the Bb bacteria. But that wasn't the complete picture.
The lab chief failed to mention that Plum Island also worked on "hard ticks," a crucial distinction. A long overlooked document, obtained from the files of an investigation by the office of former Long Island Congressman Thomas Downey, sheds new light on the second, more damning connection to Lyme disease. A USDA 1978 internal research document titled "African Swine Fever" notes that in 1975 and 1976, contemporaneous with the strange outbreak in Old Lyme, Connecticut, "the adult and nymphal stages of Abylomma americanum and Abylomma cajunense were found to be incapable of harboring and transmitting African swine fever virus." In laymen's terms, Plum Island was experimenting with the Lone Star tick and the Cayenne tick — feeding them on viruses and testing them on pigs — dur-ing the ground zero year of Lyme disease. They did not transmit African swine fever to pigs, said the document, but they might have transmitted Bb to researchers or to the island's vectors. The Lone Star tick, named after the white star on the back of the female, is a hard tick; along with its cousin, the deer tick, it is a culprit in the spread of Lyme disease. Interestingly, at that time, the Lone Star tick's habitat was confined to Texas. Today, however, it is endemic throughout New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. And no one can really explain how it migrated all the way from Texas.
Entomologist Dr. Richard Endris joined Plum Island in 1981 to spearhead increased tick research. Endris and the African swine fever team leader, Dr. William Hess, went to Cameroon and other parts of Africa on tick-hunting safaris. They stuck their arms deep inside burrows and were occasionally bitten by snakes and rats. They searched out wild warthog burrows in the brush using a "tick sucker" — a reversed leaf-blower with attached sieves and filters — to strain hundreds of tick specimens out of the moist sand. They set out little blocks of dry ice thirty feet apart and watched the ticks march to the smoking lumps (the carbon dioxide attracted them, fooling the ticks into thinking it was the exhale of mammalian hosts). Endris constructed two high-hazard "insectories," insect labs, one in the back corner of Laboratory 101 and another in the basement. Each insectory was equipped with sand-filled climate chamber incubators with lighting that simulated photoperiods, protective rims around the airlock doors covered in sticky glue, and seals across all windows and drains. The ticks were fed on the blood of hairless suckling baby mice, where they would attach and molt and breed. All told, he reared over 200,000 hard and soft ticks of multiple species.[8] Endris handled the tiny parasites with extreme care, using fine art brushes to move the minute nymphs into a transfer container — a urine specimen cup and a screen, glued together with globs of plaster of Paris. To test the ticks, the scientists first anesthetized diseased pigs, goats, mice, and calves, then placed the ticks on the sleeping animals. The ticks immediately attached and dug their mouth parts in. After a few hours of feeding, technicians detached the ticks with soft-tip forceps.
8
Dr. Endris also conducted experiments with sand flies on Plum Island in 1987 to test transmission of leish-maniasis, a bacterial ailment that if left untreated, has a human mortality rate of almost 100 percent. It is characterized by irregular bouts of fever, substantial weight loss, and swelling of the spleen and liver. The work was performed under contract for Fort Detrick, and serves as another example of a deadly germ warfare agent worked on at Plum Island for the Army, with no public knowledge or public safety precautions taken.