BIOJIHADBy A. J. Weberman

This article will give you an idea of the United State’s germ warfare capability ending in the 1970’s when Nixon put an end to this vile science. That was 40 years ago – if the jihadists, who will now have access to university laboratories in countries like Egypt – even get one tenth of this antiquated germ warfare technology countless human lives will end in death and tragedy. William Capers Patrick was one of the last surviving remnants of the period

when the CIA and scientists working at Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division were into conducting biological warfare vulnerability tests on different segments of the American infrastructure such as airports, subways, bus stations etc. He was also an important part of the CIA’s PROJECT MKULTRA that tested various substances on unwitting subjects. Most importantly of all he had worked on projects that involved

assassination and like his associate Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, may have himself carried out assassination plots involving the covert transmission of biological substances.

William Capers Patrick III was born July 24, 1926, the only child of a southern couple from Furman, South Carolina whose families were of Scotch-Irish descent. His middle name was taken from a relation who was a Methodist bishop despite the fact he pulled off numerous “capers” in his time. Patrick described the inception of American biowarfare, “In 1942, the United States initiated its biological warfare program with a commission headed up by a Dr. George W. Merck. Intelligence indicated that both the Japanese and the Germans were investigating biological warfare. Dr. Merck reported back to President Roosevelt that biological warfare seemed feasible, but the only way to demonstrate that feasibility was to actually get in the production of agents. Then, the research and development center, Camp Detrick, came on stream in 1943.”1 Dr. Merck would eventually label Patrick and his associates at Fort Detrick as “un-American” because what they created could wipe humanity off the face of the earth. Patrick considered germ warfare humane:

I can make a very good case for biological warfare as a more humane way of fighting war than with the atom bomb and chemical warfare. We can incapacitate a population with less than one percent of the people becoming ill and dying. And then we take over facilities that are intact. When you bomb a country, you not only kill people but you destroy the very facilities that are needed to treat them -- the electricity, water, all the infrastructure is gone when you bomb.

What if Patrick miscalculated and 99% became ill and died? What would he say then? “Well back to the drawing board?” In April 1951 after a background check that took more than half a year, Patrick won a top-secret clearance and permission to work at Camp Detrick. Workers there had already erected Building 470, a windowless prototype factory for making anthrax. It was eight stories high. Patrick, who had been attracted to medicine not due to his interest in making anthrax but due to his interest in penicillin, became part of a group of people who would be in charge of vast quantities of the world’s deadliest bacteria and virus’s.

Before Patrick arrived, in 1950, the CIA and the Army had already turned all the residents of San Francisco in human guinea pigs. That year, government officials believed that the bacteria agent Serratia Marcescens did not cause disease. Now we know it is a human pathogen that is intrinsically resistant to many antimicrobials and occurs predominantly in hospitalized patients. The Army used serratia to test whether enemy agents could launch a biological warfare attack on a port city such as San Francisco from a location several miles offshore. For six days in late September 1950, a small military vessel near San Francisco sprayed a huge cloud of serratia particles into the air while the weather favored dispersal. Then the Army went looking to find out where it landed. Serratia is known for forming bright red colonies when a soil or water sample is streaked on a culture medium -- a property that made it ideal for the bio-warfare experiment.

Army tests showed that the bacterial cloud had exposed hundreds of thousands of people in a broad swath of Bay Area communities including Sausalito, Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, and San Francisco. Soon after the spraying, 11 people came down with hard-to-treat infections at the old Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco. By November, one man had died. Edward Nevin, 75, a retired Pacific Gas and Electric Co. worker recovering from a prostate operation, had succumbed to an

infection with Serratia marcescens that attacked his heart valves. The outbreak was so unusual that the Stanford doctors wrote it up for a medical journal. The government later denied any responsibility for the death or the other infections, producing evidence in court that its germs were not to blame. As the news of this surfaced in 1976, doctors started wondering whether the Army experiment that seeded the Bay Area with serratia two decades earlier might be responsible for heart valve infections then cropping up as well as serious infections seen among intravenous drug users in the '60s and '70s. Before the 1950 experiment, serratia was not a common environmental bacterium in the Bay Area nor

did it frequently cause hospital infections.

At Camp Detrick Patrick evaluated viral agents that the scientists were developing and did experiments to see if the microbes could be produced easily in bulk and still maintain their virulence. He was a production engineer, though at this time, in the early 1950s, he was also working toward a doctorate in microbiology at the University of Maryland after which he went into research and development. Among the viruses that Patrick and his colleagues developed as weapons were those that give rise to encephalitis, a brain disease of fevers, seizures, comas, and in some cases death. Another was the yellow fever virus, which causes chills, stomach bleeding, and yellow skin due to liver failure and bile accumulation. The scientists also investigated rickettsiae, which range in size between viruses and bacteria. Like viruses, most burrow into cells to reproduce. Unlike viruses, antibiotics slow some. One rickettsia that Patrick studied was the Q-fever microbe, an extremely hardy germ that causes fevers, chills, and a throbbing headache, usually behind the eyes. Patrick had the slurries of Q-fever germs carefully transported to his test sites. The first was Detrick's own eight-story high anthrax machine. There, starting in early 1955, the Seventh Day Adventists gathered around the ball's periphery to don face masks and breathe deeply, inhaling mists of germs through rubber hoses connected to the ball's interior. Army experimenters administered a range of doses and droplet sizes to the men. Patrick himself came down with Q fever. In 1956, at the age of thirty, Patrick won a promotion and soon became responsible for designing a distant plant where the production methods perfected at Detrick would be reproduced on a large scale so that viruses could be made not by the ounce but also by the gallon and the drum. The site was the Pine Bluff Arsenal, an army base that had been carved out of the woods of central Arkansas.

In May 1949 Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division opened for dirty business – scientists that studied biowarfare assassination and incapacitation customizing germs for use in the Cold War. SOD figured ways to kill an individual, disable a roomful of people or even touch off an epidemic. Special Operations Division personnel -- about 75 at the unit's peak -- didn't get the usual parking stickers. They had metal tags that could be removed from their cars when they traveled undercover. Fanning out across the country, Special Operations Division officers also played the role of bio-terrorists in an era before the word had even been coined. Doctor John Schwab headed SOD. His work included developing bacteria that were resistant to antibiotics and the aeration of liquid cultures of microorganisms. For assassination the CIA/SOD partnership preferred

botulinum. With an incubation period of eight to twelve hours it allowed the assassin to disappear. When the SOD conducted what it termed defensive tests their usual mock weapons were two forms of bacteria, Bacillus globigii (BG - Bacillus globigii is a safe, non-pathogenic microorganism which is used in a harmless way by the researchers to simulate the movement of clouds of sporulated bacteria) and Serratia Marcescens (SM). The existence of the Special Operations Division was revealed six years after it shut down, in a 1975 Senate Church Committee investigation into CIA abuses. Senators wanted to know why the CIA had retained a lethal stock of shellfish toxin and cobra venom after President Richard M. Nixon's 1969 order to destroy all biological weapons stocks. They found that the poisons had come from the Special Operations Division under a CIA-Army project code-named MKNAOMI. The Special Operations Division did some pretty bizarre research for CIA on “Materials that will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so they can be used for malingering etc.”

SIDNEY GOTTLIEB

In 1952, the CIA and the SOD embarked on Project MKNAOMI, the purpose of which was to stockpile lethal materials for the Technical Services Division of the CIA and to provide for testing, upgrading, and evaluation of these materials to insure complete predictability of results under operational conditions. The Technical Services Division developed darts coated with biological agents that were so tiny the victim could feel nothing as one penetrated clothing and skin. Furthermore, no trace of the

dart or the poison would be found in later medical examination of the cadaver. The Technical Services Division also developed pills that contained several different biological agents, which could remain potent for weeks or months, as well as other biological and chemical toxic agents, which were undetectable during normal autopsy procedures.

CIA/DCI Richard Helms told the Church Committee that he was aware of an 18 year long CIA program in conjunction with the Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratory at Fort Detrick.2 The 1975 Senate Church Committee investigation revealed that the Special Operations Division supplied biological materials for several planned CIA attacks.

In 1960, the CIA's main contact with the Special Operations Division was Sidney Gottlieb. Sidney Gottlieb was half hippy and half mad scientist. He was born in New York City on August 3, 1918, the son of immigrants from Hungary. He had a clubfoot and he stuttered. He would have made Dr. Frankenstein a good assistant. His real name was Joseph Schneider but he changed it to Sidney Gottlieb. That makes sense. His parents were orthodox Jews, but he did not embrace the faith. Sidney was everything from an agnostic socialist to a Zen Buddhist. He left the City College of New York, first for the Arkansas Polytechnic Institute, then for the University of Wisconsin, where he graduated, magna cum laude, with a chemistry degree in 1940. He earned a doctorate in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, where in 1942 he married Margaret Moore, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries who served in India, where she was born. His clubfoot kept him from military service in World War II. Gottlieb joined the CIA in 1951, and he was appointed head of the Chemical Division of the CIA's Technical Support Staff (TSS) by Richard Helms in 1953. On April 3, 1953 Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms proposed to Director Allen Dulles that the CIA set up under Gottlieb a project for the covert use of biological agents. Two years later, the agency established MKULTRA and Gottlieb ran it. As chief of the agency's Technical Services Division, he served two decades as the senior scientist presiding over some of the CIA's chemical, biological and radiological operations. Some of these ops were aimed at the Soviets; others targeted unwitting civilians, both here and abroad. The first of these were the LSD experiments. The drug fascinated Mr. Gottlieb, and he dropped acid hundreds of times. Gottlieb stated, “Based on a lot of our own self-administration we thought it was a fairly benign substance in terms of potential harm.” Sidney was looking for the ultimate high and proposed the CIA develop “substances that will produce pure euphoria with no subsequent let down.” Gottlieb drank goat's milk from the herd of goats he raised in suburban Virginia. Behind his desk was a large painting of a nude woman. After he left CIA Gottlieb and his wife went to India, where he ran a leper colony for 18 months. When Gottlieb returned to the United States he set up the equivalent of a hippy commune. Gottlieb spent his last years in Washington, Virginia, a pretty village in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, working in a hospice, tending to the dying.

William Patrick and Sydney Gottlieb shared one of the darkest secrets of the Cold War: that the US maintained the capability, which it would use at times, to kill or incapacitate, selected people with biological

weapons. Only very few CIA officials knew that TSD was paying SOD about $200,000 a year in return for operational systems to infect foes with disease. Gottlieb was not just a scientist – he was also a CIA operative who carried a tube of toxin-laced toothpaste to Africa in a plot to kill Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Sidney was the CIA's expert on exotic poisons and developed poisons to be used against Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdul Nasser. Gottlieb also developed cigarette lighters that gave off a lethal gas, lipstick that would kill on contact, and a pocket spray for asthma sufferers that induced pneumonia. The Special Operations Division supplied germs for CIA schemes to kill or sicken Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and that it came up with the poisoned handkerchief that the agency's drolly-named Health Alteration Committee sent to Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim in 1963. (He survived.) Qasim had withdrawn Iraq from the pro-Western Baghdad Pact and established friendly relations with the Soviet Union. Iraq also abolished its Treaty of mutual security and bilateral relations with Britain. Also, Iraq withdrew from the agreement with the United States that was signed by the monarchy from 1954 to 1955 regarding military, arms, and equipment. He legalized the Communist Party. In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam’s Bath Party came to power for the first time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq’s secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA’s close friends in Iraq. Patrick and his fellow scientists at SOD had a cowboy mentality even when they were not in the field.

FRANK OLSON WORKED WITH PATRICK

Gottlieb dosed Dr. Frank R. Olson a distinguished Fort Detrick Special Operations Division scientist with acid, without Olsen’s knowledge or consent as part of MKULTRA. Olson was involved in assessing the vulnerability of American installations to biological attack, developing the offensive use of biological weapons and biological research for the CIA.3 On November 18, 1953 a group of ten scientists from the CIA and Fort Detrick attended a semi annual review and analysis conference at a cabin on Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland. Three of the participants were from the CIA’s Technical Service Staff. The Detrick representatives were all

from the Special Operations Division. All but two of the Special Operations Division participants received LSD. One did not drink; the other had a heart condition. Olson had an ulcer that had caused him to resign as head of SOD but this did not seem to matter. CIA Agents Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook arranged this meeting. These men had an on-going liaison relationship with Dr. Olson’s research group of which William Patrick was a leading member, the purpose of which was (at least

the way Dr. Olson’s group understood it) to enable the SOD to make available some of its research findings to the CIA. No one in Dr. Olson’s group suspected that during that November 1953 meeting they would be used as guinea pigs in an experiment on LSD that the two CIA agents had secretly planned to conduct on them. The CIA agents slipped LSD into the after-dinner drinks, as a magician who was a consultant for the CIA had taught them. The thing that keeps you sane during an acid trip is that you can attribute the strange goings on to having taken a drug. Olson did not have this and had the first “bum trip” in the history of LSD. After the meeting, Dr. Olson returned to his home where he continued to flip out. The next day he told his boss he wanted to “drop out.” His boss, Colonel Vincent Ruwet, told him that he would take him to New York for treatment. He ended up in the hands of CIA LSD consultant Harold Abramson. After his “treatment” at midnight Olson woke up, got dressed, and left the hotel room he shared with Ruwet (Ruwet continued sleeping). Ruwet and Lashbrook found Dr. Olson the next morning sitting in the hotel lobby with his coat on. Dr. Olson told them that he had walked around the city most of the night, had torn up his money, and had thrown his wallet, containing his personal identification, into a chute somewhere in the city. Ruwet and Lashbrook were determined to fly Olson back home for Thanksgiving and did so however he asked them to return him to New York as he felt he might kill his family. On November 28, 1953, Dr. Olson was bludgeoned then pushed through the plate glass window from the tenth story of the Statler Hotel. He had become an embarrassment and security risk to American intelligence. In the summer of 1994 the body of Frank Olson was exhumed and the multiple fractures to Frank Olson's skull were found to be inconsistent was a 10-story fall.4

The Fort Detrick website reported, “Dr. Olson's death was the tragic result of clandestine research taking place within the secret confines of the

Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick in the 1950s. Researchers had been investigating the disorienting effects of LSD and similar incapacitating drugs as potential Chemical Warfare threats. Dr. Olson had been a member of the BW labs' team since World War II, but was said to have been unaware that he had ingested the chemical given him by a co-worker in the New York hotel room. Knowledgeable observers have noted this was a situation that got out of hand in a usually well-controlled research atmosphere. The Army was unaware that the LSD program was taking place and had not sanctioned the project.” Sydney Gottlieb devised this project. Although it had to be someone on a higher level who ordered this murder, Gottlieb’s subordinates carried it out.

PATRICK’S & GOTTLIEB’S ASSASSINATION WEAPONS

Gottlieb was one of those mysterious characters from the CIA that came and went at the SO Division, leaving wish-lists and checking progress. For cover, CIA visitors often wore military uniforms and said they worked for "Staff Support Group." No one mentioned aloud the name of the agency financing so much of the division's work. CIA interest included assassination," a CIA retiree told an agency investigator in 1975, according to a declassified report. The former CIA man referred to the arsenal that came to be called the Big Five. "The Big Five program was devoted to assassination," said William Patrick, who worked closely with the SO Division as Chief of Product Development at Fort Detrick. He called it "the most sensitive program we ever created at Detrick," and said its details should still be kept secret because they might be useful to terrorists and "embarrassing to the United States." Among the other Big Five weapons: a 7.62 mm rifle cartridge packed with anthrax or botulinum toxin that would disperse in the air on impact; a time-delay bomblet that would release a cloud of bacteria when a train or truck convoy passed; and a pressurized can that sprayed an aerosol of germs. The fifth is described in unclassified documents only as an "E-41 disseminator." Patrick was an expert at “gas propelled sprays an aerosols” a subproject of MKULTRA.

Patrick missed the good old days of cold war murder and mayhem and said the current United States Government has made little effort to learn from the work of the Special Operations Division and the larger biowarfare program. In the early 1960's, the CIA tasked Patrick with researching the possibility of large-scale covert use of biological weapons. Scientists prepared memoranda, studied by the CIA, that detailed which

diseases were common in different areas of the world so that covert use of biological weapons containing these diseases could easily go undetected.5 When Gottlieb participated in an assassination plot against Patrice Lumumba he transported a bacteria that was indigenous to the Belgian Congo. In 1964 Sidney Gottlieb approved a $150,000-a-year payment to “a Baltimore laboratory” (Fort Detrick) to conduct research into lethal microorganisms.

William C. Patrick III was chief of the Product Development Division of the Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick from 1965 to 1972 although his last four years were devoted to dismantling the germ weapons program. Just before the germ warfare program was shut down, from 1964 to 1968, a long series of open-air biological tests was conducted over the Pacific Ocean downwind of Johnston Atoll, a thousand miles southwest of Hawaii. Richard Preston reported,

There, in the reaches of open sea, American strategic tests of bioweapons had been conducted secretly for four years. Until very recently, these tests remained unknown to people without security clearances. "We tested certain real agents, and some of them were lethal,’" Patrick said. The American strategic tests of bioweapons involved enough ships to have made the world's fifth-largest independent navy. The ships were positioned around Johnston Atoll, upwind from a number of barges loaded with hundreds of rhesus monkeys. Late one afternoon, Bill Patrick went out to Johnston Atoll and stood on the beach to watch a test. At sunset, just as the sun touched the horizon, a Marine Phantom jet flew in low, heading on a straight line parallel to the beach, and then continued over the horizon. Meanwhile, a single pod under its wings released a weaponized powder. The powder trailed into the air like a whiff of smoke and disappeared completely. This was visual evidence that the particles were flying away from one another. Patrick's patents worked.

The scientists call this a line-source laydown. The jet was disseminating a small amount of biopowder for every mile of flight (the exact amount is still classified). One can imagine a jet doing a line-source laydown over Los Angeles, flying from the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach, releasing dust from a

single pod under the wing. It would take a few minutes. The jet would appear on radar, but the trail of bioweapon would be invisible. In Iraq, United Nations inspectors found a videotape of an Iraqi Phantom jet doing a line-source laydown over the desert. The technique looked precisely like the American laydowns, even to the Iraqis' use of a Phantom jet. The one difference was that the Iraqi Phantom had no pilot: it was a remote-controlled drone. At Johnston Atoll, the line of particles moved with the wind over the sea, somewhat like a windshield wiper sweeping over glass. Stationed in the path of the particles, at intervals extending many miles away, were the barges full of monkeys, manned by nervous Navy crews wearing biohazard spacesuits. The line of bioparticles passed over the barges one by one. Then the monkeys were taken back to Johnston Atoll, and over the next few days half of them died. Half of the monkeys survived, and were fine. Patrick could see, clearly enough that a jet that did a laydown of a modest amount of military bioweapon over Los Angeles could kill half the city. It would probably be more efficient at causing human deaths than a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb. "What was the agent you used?" I asked Patrick. "I don't want to tell you. It may still be classified. The real reason is that a lot of countries would like to know what we used, and not just the Iraqis. When we saw those test results, we knew beyond a doubt that biological weapons are strategic weapons. We were surprised. Even we didn't think they would work that well." "But the agent you used was curable with antibiotics, right?" I said. "Sure." "So people could be cured -- " "Well, think about it. Let's say you hit the city of Frederick, right here. That's a small city, with a population of about fifty thousand. You could cause thirty thousand infections. To treat the infections, you'd need -- let me see." He calculated quickly: "Eighty-four grams of antibiotic per person…that's…oh, my heavens, you'd need more than two tons of antibiotic, delivered overnight! There isn't that much antibiotic stored anywhere in the United States. Now think about New York City. It doesn't take a mathematician to see that if you hit New York with a biological weapon you are gonna tie things up for a while.

1. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bioterror/biow_patrick.html2.http://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F20710F63D5B157493CAA81782D85F418785F93. 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRA4. Wash. Post 7.12.945. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities For. Mil. Int. V1 p362