Operation Bacterium: Testing Germs on the A Train
Cole, Leonard A.
Operation It would have been hard to pick them out of a crowd: average-looking men walking through Washington’s National Airport, carrying suitcases. But the men were agents of the...
...Former Representative Andrew Maguire, who served on the House Subcommit’ tee for Health and the Environment, confirmed that ignorance on the subject is rampant and that Congress, in effect, has permitted the military to fashion “loopholes in current law which could be exploited by those who wish to test .” Maguire’s fears are most ominous when viewed against the backdrop of an earlier era when the military cavalierly risked human life to test weapons no one fully understood...
...Many of these soldiers were never informed about the risks to their health...
...The Pentagon, as well as the CIA, have shameful histories of exploiting human guinea pigs...
...Clearly, the Army has a responsibility to develop such defenses within the terms of the Biological Weapons Convention...
...Not so, says the Pentagon...
...The government doctors were charged with caring for a group of syphilitic black men, but in fact were dispensing placebos so they could study the course of the disease in live subjects...
...Congress enacted the National Research Act of 1974 in response to revelations that for 40 years beginning in 1932, U.S...
...Laws now exist to prevent such activity...
...This remarkable interpretation of the 1974 law stems in large measure from Congress’s failure to oversee adequately the military’s activities in this area...
...They were among a group chosen in a test class-action case involving 1,192 alleged victims...
...And given the lack of attention paid to the matter by politicians, it’s unlikely that biological weapons experiments will spark much public discussion in the near future...
...As is customary with such reallocations, the request received only a cursory review by senior committee members of both houses before being approved...
...The undercover operation, which took place in 1964-65, was part of a nationwide program of so-called ‘vulnerability’ testing designed to gauge the impact of an enemy-launched epidemic of smallpox...
...let’s not do it again...
...One Pentagon witness, Lt...
...The judge ruled that radioactive fallout had caused nine people to die of cancer...
...But the need for adequate protection does not justify spraying germs on unknowing people...
...Sasser is still nominally pressing his complaint with the Pentagon, but one of his staff members conceded that the senator “couldn’t get very much interest from anyone” on the Hill to join his afterthefact protest...
...The money was to be taken from existing programs and used for several apparently minor projects: new military housing in Europe, a parking garage in upstate New York, a physical fitness center in Pennsylvannia...
...The Pentagon, for its part, seems to be aware of Congress’s lack of sophistication in the area of biological weaponry...
...It’s an old trick with weapons systems,” said a staff member of the House Subcommittee on Arms Control...
...The use of involuntary, unwitting subjects for potentially dangerous military experiments is not, of course, limited to the experience with vulnerability testing...
...Despite the evidence of outbreaks of infectious disease, only a handful of people have sued the government for harm allegedly done by open-air vulnerability testing...
...It provided that every federal agency that engages in research involving human subjects have a review board, which must approve each project...
...Throughout the 50s and 60s, the U. S . Army tested our vulnerability to a Soviet biological attack by spraying germs on unknowing Americans...
...Yet at the 1977 Senate hearing on biological vulnerability testing, military spokesmen insisted their experiments had been safe and refused to rule out renewed openair germ spraying...
...There’s a definite sense,” said one House staff member, “that, ‘well, this stuff went on all in the past...
...The hearing, said Wilkie, “must not have had a big impact .” Neither she nor a series of other congressional foreign policy staff members interviewed had more than a superficial familiarity with the 1977 revelations before the Kennedy subcommittee...
...The 1974 legislation reflected concern not only about the misdeeds in Tuskegee, but also about the rights and welfare of human experimental subjects in general...
...But the former DIA employee added, “I’m not at all sure it would be such a bad thing to do tests with harmless simulants-not to see how they affect people, just to see how the things spread .” Leonard A. Cole is a political scientist and writer from New Jersey...
...Colonel George A. Carruth, declared that although such operations were not then underway, the Army might well find “a specific area might require additional germ spraying, and there was never any follow-up investigation to determine whether vulnerability testing had indeed caused health problems...
...Thousands of veterans and civilians have brought claims against the government relating to the atomic testing of 20 and 30 years ago...
...If indeed the military did pull a hidden ball routine to gain approval for a controversial funding request, it wouldn’t have been an unusual maneuver...
...But to others, when you deal with widely dispersed testing, there may be some question as to who are the subjects .” The Pentagon official who specializes in reading the research rules concurred that as far as the Army is concerned, openair testing does not affect an identifiable subject group, and therefore the people exposed “would not, in fact, be experimental subjects...
...Last month, construction for the Utah project was delayed by a federal judge’s ruling that the Army must file additional environmental reports on the proposed new laboratories...
...To me,” said Alexander Capron, “it would be pretty clear” that the exposed population is the subject of the experiment...
...Until last year, none of these plaintiffs had won a court decision...
...Unfortunately, Congress seems to have written off open-air germ testing as a relic from the hysteria of the Cold War...
...It would be inconceivable today for the Army to propose a new round of live nuclear tests on unknowing human subjects...
...In other words, the germs would have to be deemed ‘harmless‘the way, for example, Bacillus subtilis was given the okay for the 1964-65 National Airport operation...
...People do sit around [in the Pentagon] and talk and say, ‘You know we got burned on that last time...
...But even if the Army were to concede that vulnerability testing is indeed “research” covered by the 1974 legislation, people exposed to the germs would not be considered experimental “subjects” for purposes of the Act...
...the tests would therefore be viewed as comparable to a battlefield exercise or an experiment with a new weapons system, according to a Pentagon official who requested anonymity...
...For instance, in one study which was the focus of a recent case before the Supreme Court, the CIA explored means of controlling human behavior by administering mindaltering drugs without the subjects’ knowledge...
...Alexander Capron, a University of Southern California law professor who through 1983 headed a now-defunct White House commission on bioethics, confirmed the prevelance of this curious outlook within the military: “If they develop a new battle plan or a new weapon, the Army does not regard that as coming under regulations” on research involving human subjects...
...Last May, for the first time, a federal judge found the government negligent in the way it had conducted above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada in the 1950s...
...But as the Pentagon reads those restrictions, at least one form of unannounced weapons testing involving human populations is still permissible: that of biological weapons...
...After he had signed off on the funding, Senator James Sasser, ranking minority member on the Senate Subcommittee on Military Construction, changed his mind and protested that the Pentagon had not explained precisely what new testing would take place and whether the activity would fall within the guidelines of the 1972 treaty...
...What’s on second...
...Once a weapon is so classified, according to this view, it no longer falls under the terms of the 1974 research restrictions: no review board, no consent...
...No one would try it again I” It would make it more difficult for the Pentagon to return to vulnerability testing if we had a clear-cut agreement with the Soviets barring all biological warfare research and development...
...But we shouldn’t need a treaty to eliminate the possibility of undertaking experiments on our own innocent civilians...
...At first glance, the Research Act would seem to protect people from Army germs insofar as targeted citizens would have to be informed of and give consent to the spraying before the Pentagon review board would approve vulnerability testing...
...That’s the job of our elected leaders...
...Relying on semantic gymnastics that would do Abbott & Costello proud, the military argues that spraying ple affected by such spraying aren’t “subjects I’ Open-air vulnerability tests would be conducted to estimate the impact of an actual enemy attack...
...Now Army scientists recommend renewing the tests, the Pentagon refuses to rule them out, and no one in Congress seems the slightest bit interested...
...neither were the civilians who lived downwind from the explosion sites in Utah and Nevada, among other places...
...Just before Congress adjourned in August 1984, for example, an acting assistant secretary of the Army sent a note to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees requesting a routine reallocation of $66 million...
...But the familiarity of such gamesmanship doesn’t diminish the fact that the Pentagon apparently went out of its way to avoid formal votes, hearings, or debates on the matter...
...The government has appealed the decision, but many similar claims are pending...
...It wasn’t until 1977, during a hearing before the Senate, that civilian experts suggested that vulnerability testing may have caused outbreaks of disease which occured in some of the test areas...
...The issue here is not whether the United States should have defenses available if the Soviets violate their treaty obligations and threaten us with biological attack...
...Here is how Thomas Dashiell, the environmental expert in the Office of the Secretary of Defense explained it: Before the military uses any weapon in a test situation, “we do a whole series of tests to ensure that they meet military requirements, and that they’re not harmful from the occupational, safety, and health aspects I’ The Army would also obey any applicable environmental regulations, said Dashiell...
...Although vulnerability testing took place only two decades ago, it seems like a bad memory from a distant era-when, for example, we were rehearsing troops for atomic combat by marching them through radioactive fields following nuclear detonations...
...That’s history...
...Colonel Robert Orton of the Pentagon’s biological defense division insisted in an interview that “it is wrong to say that someone was trying to slip one by”a term that was not suggested to himL‘without the approval of Congress...
...But the men were agents of the United States Army, and the suitcases were something out of a James Bond movie-disguised atomizers which imperceptibly sprayed unsuspecting travelers with a bacteria-laden mist...
...Public Health Service doctors in Tuskegee, Alabama had consciously endangered the lives of patients they were supposed to be treating...
...Asked about the future of vulnerability testing, a former employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency within the Pentagon who now works for the Senate stressed that “there’s been a certain learning curve” on biological weapons testing within the military...
...And battlefield maneuvers and weapons tests do not qualify as research on humans, said the official...
...Tucked among these items was a new “aerosol test lab” in Utah intended for biological weapons research with a price tag of $8.4 million...
...Who’s on first...
...Informed consent is supposed to be a central consideration in such reviews...
...For 20 years ending in 1969, the Army staged hundreds of these secret germ ‘attacks’ in a number of cities, using microorganisms the Pentagon claimed were harmless to humans...
...none of the plaintiffs have won...
...Result: the restrictions would not apply...
Vol. 17 • July 1985 • No. 6
