Germs

Biological Weapons and America's Secret War

Judith Miller, William J Broad, Stephen Engelberg

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781439128152
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In this "engrossing, well-documented, and highly readable" ( San Francisco Chronicle ) New York Times bestseller, three veteran reporters draw on top sources inside and outside the U.S. government to reveal Washington's secret strategies for combating germ warfare and the deadly threat of biological and chemical weapons. Today Americans have begun to grapple with two difficult truths: that there is no terrorist threat more horrifying—and less understood—than germ warfare, and that it would take very little to mount a devastating attack on American soil.Featuring an inside look at how germ warfare has been waged throughout history and what form its future might take (and in whose hands), Germs reads like a gripping detective story told by fascinating key figures: American and Soviet medical specialists who once made germ weapons but now fight their spread, FBI agents who track Islamic radicals, the Iraqis who built Saddam Hussein's secret arsenal, spies who travel the world collecting lethal microbes, and scientists who see ominous developments on the horizon.With clear scientific explanations and harrowing insights, Germs is a vivid, masterfully written—and timely—work of investigative journalism.

1

The Attack

IT was noon on Sunday, September 9, 1984. Parishioners from Saint Peter’s Church were drifting into Shakey’s Pizza in The Dalles, Oregon. Dave Lutgens and his wife, Sandy, who had bought the simple eatery with its wooden tables and linoleum floors in 1977, were sharing a pizza with Dan Ericksen, a friend who served on Wasco County’s land-use planning commission, and his wife, Kay, and their families. They were discussing the topic that had come to obsess nearly everyone in this stable community of ten thousand in the spectacular Columbia River Gorge, not far from snow-capped Mount Hood: the growing tensions between the county and its controversial newcomers, a religious cult known as the Rajneeshees.

In 1981, followers of the Bhagwan Shree (meaning “Sir God” in Sanskrit) Rajneesh had paid $5.75 million for a remote sixty-four-thousand-acre ranch in Wasco County, a two-hour drive from The Dalles, the county seat. Their plan was to build a “Buddhafield,” an agricultural commune in which they could celebrate their “enlightened master’s” credo of beauty, love, and guiltless sex. Detractors said it was the sex, not the meditation, that had attracted thousands of followers, many of them wealthy Westerners, first to Poona, India, the commune’s original home, and then to Oregon. The group had left Poona under growing political pressure stemming from reports that its leaders made money not only from followers but also from drugs and other illicit activities, charges the cult denied. But the guru, a balding, bearded Indian with a religious charlatan’s permanent smile, preached that it was blessed to be rich. He owned a collection of diamond-studded watches and ninety Rolls-Royces.

His devoted followers, the “sannyasins,” dressed only in shades of red, sang while working ten to twelve hours a day, every day, at the ranch. In only three years, they had built a small city on this once barren land, which now supported dozens of modular buildings and mobile homes; a 2.2-acre meeting hall; a 160-room hotel; a two-block-long shopping mall; a casino and disco; a dam and a lake; networks of new roads; sophisticated water, sewage, and transportation systems; an airstrip on the valley floor for the sect’s five jet planes and helicopter; and a seemingly thriving community of four thousand. When the group sold tickets to its annual summer festivals, the numbers swelled to fourteen thousand. Some locals had tried to stop what they called the cult’s “idolatrous orgies,” but the state’s tradition of tolerance prevailed.

Like most county officials, Dan Ericksen didn’t like the group. There were plenty of reasons to be suspicious of them. The Rajneeshees had built their community on land zoned primarily for agriculture. They had harassed local residents who opposed their expansion plans and had threatened neighbors who had initially welcomed them but had become alarmed by the group’s aggressiveness.

In 1982 the sannyasins had moved into the neighboring town of Antelope, whose population had stood at seventy-five before the influx. After winning electoral control of the town council, they had ruled that all of its meetings must begin and end with a joke, and they had infuriated residents by insisting on taking over the local school. They had renamed the town Rajneesh and turned Antelope’s sole business, a combination store, restaurant, and gas station, into a vegetarian health-food café called Zorba the Buddha. Locals had responded with bumper stickers that proclaimed BETTER DEAD THAN RED and MONEY CAN’T BUY ANTELOPE’S HERITAGE.

The Bhagwan’s followers also created a separate city within the ranch’s borders, which they called Rajneeshpuram, and controlled zoning there too. They created their own city police department—the 60-member “Peace Force,” which they equipped with many weapons and military gadgetry. Oregonians who drove down county public roads on Rajneesh property complained of being stopped and mistreated by the Bhagwan’s police.

Incorporation gave the Rajneeshee police access to state-run law-enforcement training programs and Oregon’s crime-data networks. But the FBI, which was investigating civil-rights complaints against the group from several county residents, denied the sect access to the sensitive information available on its National Crime Information Center database.

Now the commune was trying to expand further, again in violation of zoning and legal restrictions, by inviting onto the ranch some three thousand homeless people from New York and other cities throughout the country under its Share-a-Home program. Exploiting Oregon’s liberal voter-registration laws, the Rajneeshees wanted to win electoral control of the county commission and other posts by registering the homeless to vote in the November 1984 elections. Once the Rajneeshees controlled Wasco County, Ericksen and other locals feared, nothing would stop them.

The Rajneeshees had deluged Ericksen’s planning commission and the county commission with requests, petitions, and lawsuits. When the county commission challenged their demands, they responded with harsh attacks and dire, unspecified threats.

Though he traced his own family’s roots back to Oregon’s fur-trapping founders, Lutgens felt that the area needed new blood. The Rajneeshees worked hard and attracted educated, talented followers—lawyers, doctors, engineers. And they spent money. They had invested more than $35 million in the ranch since their arrival. This was a blessing in The Dalles, whose main industry, an aluminum smelter, had shut down two years earlier. Lutgens also knew that a lot of beer had been delivered out to the ranch. Local farmers, who grew sweet cherries and produce, and other businessmen had also sold the commune equipment and supplies.

They may have been weird, he thought, but the Rajneeshees seemed determined to make their patch of desert bloom. Set in a steep-sided valley forged by two streams and surrounded by rocky cliffs and high rolling hills, the property was parched by blistering heat in summer and sometimes flooded by winter downpours that turned its volcanic soil instantly into gooey clay—which was why locals called the ranch the Muddy. Yet the sect had filled the overgrazed land with vegetable gardens and fruit orchards.

Sannyasins occasionally ate at Dave Lutgens’s restaurant. They were vegetarians and liked his salad bar, which was always well stocked with fresh vegetables, mixed salads, several varieties of lettuce, garnishes, and dressings. Lutgens liked it too, and went to the bar to get a large helping of macaroni for himself and his wife and some salad for Dan.

THE stomach cramps began later that day. They were mild at first. Lutgens felt them along with nausea as he sat at his cash register, counting the afternoon’s take. By early evening, the symptoms were too severe to ignore. Dizzy and disoriented, he could barely make it across his bedroom to the toilet. Chills, fever, and intense diarrhea and vomiting left him weak and dehydrated.

His wife was also ill, and Dan Ericksen was even sicker than they were. He had been taken to Mid-Columbia Medical Center, the town’s only hospital. By week’s end, thirteen of Lutgens’s twenty-eight employees were sick. And dozens of his customers had also called to complain that they had gotten violently ill after eating at his restaurant. Some were threatening to sue him.

ON September 17, the Wasco-Sherman Public Health Department received a call from someone who complained of gastroenteritis after eating at another restaurant in The Dalles. In the next few days, the department received at least twenty more complaints, involving two more restaurants. Less than forty-eight hours after the outbreak began, a pathologist at Mid-Columbia Medical Center had determined from a patient’s stool that the bacteria making people sick was salmonella, one of nature’s hardiest germs, though infection usually is not fatal. On September 21, within four days of the first report, scientists at the Oregon State Public Health Laboratory in Portland analyzed the stool samples further and identified the bacteria as Salmonella typhimurium, a common agent in food poisoning. In this case, they found they were looking at a very unusual strain that was treatable with most antibiotics. Since there were roughly twenty-five hundred known strains of salmonella, this was speedy scientific sleuthing. But by late September, reports of new cases were diminishing.

Carla Chamberlain, a no-nonsense nurse who headed the county public health office, knew that between 1980 and 1983, the department had reported only sixteen isolates of salmonella, eight of which were Salmonella typhimurium. None resembled this strain. When the wave began to crest, Chamberlain thought the outbreak was over.

In fact, the citizens of The Dalles were under biological siege. Once the rod-shaped bacteria entered a victim’s body, the invaders multiplied wildly over hours and days, damaging tissues and overwhelming rival bacteria. Their main weapons were toxins and sticky hairs on their cell walls that let them seize hold of the mucous membranes of the colon and small intestine and then force their way inside. The toxins caused the intestines to exude waves of watery fluid. Typically, abdominal pain began anywhere from twelve to forty-eight hours after infection, followed by diarrhea, chills, fever, and sometimes vomiting. Lasting up to four days, salmonellosis could be severe in the young, the elderly, and patients with weakened resistance. The diarrhea could be life-threatening if dehydration was not treated aggressively with fluids.

On September 21, the day after the Oregon state lab identified the salmonella strain that had caused the initial outbreak, Chamberlain’s office began receiving a second wave of reports involving people who had fallen ill at ten different restaurants in The Dalles. Because of its location on Interstate 84, a major east-west highway, the town had a disproportionately large number of restaurants—some thirty-five in all.

Arthur Van Eaton, the pathologist at Mid-Columbia, and his small staff were overwhelmed with patients and work. Their new laboratory, only a year old, was stacked high with specimens destined for the state’s lab in Portland, ninety miles away. Normally, the lab used up one shipment of media, the broth in which specimens are cultured to see what kind of bacteria will grow, every two or three weeks. But during the outbreak’s second wave, the lab went through three shipments a week. The twenty petri dishes of tests in a normal week mushroomed to two hundred every other day. At the peak of reports, the lab ran out of media altogether.

For the first time ever, all of Mid-Columbia’s 125 beds were filled; some patients had to be kept in corridors. Many were angry and hostile, and very frightened; doctors had difficulty treating them. Violent patients and their families demanded their test results; some even threw stool and urine samples at the hospital’s doctors and technicians.

By the end of the outbreak, almost a thousand people had reported symptoms to their doctors or the hospital; 751 were confirmed to have salmonella, making it the largest outbreak in Oregon’s history. No one had died, miraculously. But a pregnant woman had given birth prematurely, and her baby was suffering from the poison’s effects.

Meanwhile, Chamberlain and her small staff were struggling. A colleague was inspecting restaurants and talking to their owners and employees, while Chamberlain interviewed patients to identify their common denominators.

On September 25, in the midst of the second wave, the state sought help from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, and its Epidemic Intelligence Service, seventy mostly young doctors who learned epidemiology firsthand by investigating suspicious disease outbreaks throughout the country. Founded during the early days of the Cold War, the EIS’s original mission was to help detect a germ attack against the United States.

By the time Thomas Török, a new EIS officer who had done his medical internship in Eugene, reached Oregon, sixty cases of Salmonella typhimurium had already been confirmed. Chamberlain’s office had found a connection among the patients: most of those who had gotten sick had recently eaten at a salad bar. That very day, the local health sanitarian recommended that restaurants voluntarily discontinue salad-bar service. All did so.

Assisted by Chamberlain’s office, more than twenty local public-health workers, including local sanitarians, state health officials, Török, and three other EIS officers, began an exhaustive epidemiological investigation of the outbreak. There was no mainframe computer in the county health office. Until an EIS doctor rigged up a primitive portable computer, interview material and collected data were all recorded and collated by hand.

The investigators interviewed hundreds of patients, as well as their families and friends. They tracked down out-of-state visitors who had paid for meals with credit cards to see how they felt and ask what they had eaten. They talked to all of the 325 food handlers who worked at the ten restaurants; about 100 of them had been infected, many of them falling ill before their patrons. They measured salad-bar temperatures and inspected food-handling practices. They visited an uncertified dairy in neighboring Washington State and tested the cows, cow feces, raw milk, and even the farm’s pond water for salmonella. They didn’t find it.

They checked the two local water systems that supplied The Dalles for contamination, as well as water at the restaurants. They visited a farm that had sold cucumbers and tomatoes to one restaurant and discovered that a nearby trailer court had suffered from septic-tank malfunctions in early September. Tests, showed however, that the adjacent vegetable patch had not been contaminated.

Another farm had provided cantaloupes to a restaurant whose patrons had gotten sick. But inspectors found that all the melons had been harvested and sold. There were none left to test.

Several suspect food items that had been served at affected restaurants were sampled and tested. Again, the tests were negative. Interviews with 120 people who had ordered home delivery showed that none of them had fallen ill. Nor had people who had eaten food served at banquets. It was the people who had eaten from salad bars—or who had ordered side dishes of mixed salads like macaroni or potato salad—who had become sick.

There was no common source for the food. The lettuce had come from different suppliers; so had the other vegetables. The salad dressings were from different wholesalers. Each item was traced back to its source. The investigators even checked for contamination in the kale that one restaurant had used as decoration on the bar. They found nothing. They did find salmonella in the milk in the coffee creamers in one of the restaurants and in the blue-cheese dressing of another, though not in the dry mix that had been used to prepare the dressing. This suggested that the dressing had been contaminated during or after its preparation. But how, why, and by whom?

ONE man in The Dalles was sure that the outbreak was not natural. Judge William Hulse, the head of the three-member county commission that ruled on contested land-use issues, among other things, feared that the Rajneeshees had poisoned his fellow citizens with salmonella, because he and another commissioner had come down with it a day after they had visited the commune the previous year.

Hospital records showed that Hulse had nearly died, though doctors did not know from what. They had not tested him for salmonella. The trip to the ranch had been unpleasant—but he had expected that. The commissioners were doing a mandatory inspection of the ranch before its annual summer festival. Ma Anand Sheela, the Bhagwan’s personal secretary and the commune’s de facto leader, had instructed him and another commissioner to get into the back of the van that had taken them around the ashram.

When the men had returned to their car, one of the tires was flat. While the Rajneeshees changed it, they offered the commissioners paper cups of water. Eight hours later, they became violently ill with symptoms that were virtually identical to Dave Lutgens’s. Hulse and the other commissioner suspected that the Rajneeshees must have put something in their water, but they had no proof. So neither filed a complaint, requested an investigation, nor took further action until a year later, when their neighbors and friends started getting sick.

Hulse shared his suspicions with his colleague Carla Chamberlain. She had visited the ranch to discuss the county’s health-reporting requirements and knew that the Rajneesh medical lab was better equipped than the county’s. Many people in town were suspicious because they, too, had experienced run-ins wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Back Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Attack
• Chapter 2: Warrior
• Chapter 3: Revelations
• Chapter 4: Saddam
• Chapter 5: Secrets and Lies
• Chapter 6: The Cult
• Chapter 7: Evil Empire
• Chapter 8: Breakthrough
• Chapter 9: Taking Charge
• Chapter 10: The President
• Chapter 11: Defenders
• Chapter 12: The Future
• Afterword
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index