BIOJIHAD

By 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.html
2.http://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F20710F63D5B157493CAA81782D8
5F418785F9
3. 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRA
4. Wash. Post 7.12.94
5. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities For. Mil. Int. V1 p362