Poisoner in Chief Read online

  He sought it actively. In 1948 he found a new job at the National Research Council, part of the non-profit National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. There he studied plant diseases and fungicides and was also, as he later recalled, “exposed to some interesting work concerning ergot alkaloids as vasoconstrictors and hallucinogens.” Soon afterward he changed jobs again, becoming a research associate at the University of Maryland devoted to studying the metabolism of fungi.

  “By this time we had found a very old and primitive cabin near Vienna, Virginia,” Margaret wrote years later. “It had no electricity or water or any of that fancy stuff but it sat under three very magnificent oak trees, and when I saw it, I said, ‘This will be my home.’ Sid, having grown up in New York City, thought I was nuts, but I persuaded him that I knew how to live this way and it was possible, so we borrowed money from all our friends to make a down payment and we moved in our two babies and our few possessions.”

  A relative who spent four days with the young family during this period wrote a glowing account of their life in a letter to her parents. “Margaret’s whole situation is most unusual and interesting—15 acres of pine forest in Virginia with a little log cabin in the midst thereof, about 20 miles from Washington DC,” he reported. “Sid is a grand man, full of energy and initiative and brains, and a perfect gentleman and host, with never a dull moment. He has just taken a job with the University of Maryland as a research chemist—his own boss and his own lab with a special assignment to work out a problem with wood for the navy. Penny (4) and Rachel (1) are beautiful and angelic children. They have an interesting group of friends, and the future looks rosy for them. Margaret seemed very natural, and is obviously very happy. She is just as keen on country life as Sid is, so no one needs to feel sorry for her one bit, but only glad.”

  The Gottliebs had two more children, both boys. “There are so many nice names that we can’t use because Sid’s folks are Jewish and they would be hurt if we chose something like John or Mary,” Margaret wrote to her mother. The boys were named Peter and Stephen. Gottlieb settled comfortably into family life.

  “Sid is pitching in more than he ever has before and he’s wonderful,” Margaret wrote while she was nursing one of her infants. “I feel guilty sleeping when he has to milk the goats.”

  Despite his satisfying family life, Gottlieb was frustrated. He had no clear path out of his mid-level research on pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals. His mentor from the University of Wisconsin, Ira Baldwin, had guided other former students into exciting work during the war, but Gottlieb had been too young. Everything suggested that he was headed for a career as a government scientist. So he was—but he could not have imagined what a phantasmagorical kind of science he would be called to practice.

  2

  Dirty Business

  White flags hung from many windows as shell-shocked Germans measured the depth of their defeat. Hitler was dead. Unconditional surrender had sealed the collapse of the Third Reich. Munich, like many German cities, lay in ruins. With the guns finally silent, people began venturing out. On a wall near Odeonsplatz someone painted CONCENTRATION CAMPS DACHAU—BUCHENWALD—I AM ASHAMED TO BE GERMAN.

  Four United States Army divisions had moved into Munich, but infantrymen were not the only soldiers in town. With them came the Counterintelligence Corps, a semi-clandestine unit whose men wore plain uniforms and identified themselves only as “agent” or “special agent.” Their two main tasks were to suppress the black market and find Nazis. Munich had been the birthplace of the Nazi Party, so hunting was good. Agents compiled lists, followed leads, and arrested suspects. A notorious one fell into their hands on May 14, 1945.

  It was a splendid day. Among those who stepped out to enjoy the sun, walking silently past bombed-out buildings and piles of rubble, was Dr. Kurt Blome, who had been the Nazis’ director of research into biological warfare. Blome was, according to one report, “a well-dressed man, 134 pounds, five foot nine, with dark black hair, hazel eyes, and a pronounced dueling scar on the left side of his face between his nose and his upper lip.” He cannot have been surprised when an agent of the Counterintelligence Corps stopped him and flashed a gold-colored badge that said WAR DEPARTMENT MILITARY INTELLIGENCE. The agent asked Blome for identification. Blome produced his passport. The agent checked his list and found Blome’s name. Next to it was the code for “Arrest Immediately—First Priority.”

  Blome was detained and questioned. Interrogators soon concluded that he had much to tell. They sent him to Kransberg Castle, a medieval fortress near Frankfurt that had been turned into a detention center for the highest-ranking suspected war criminals. Other inmates included Albert Speer, Wernher von Braun, Ferdinand Porsche, and directors of the I. G. Farben chemical cartel. In this extraordinary company, Blome’s story began to emerge.

  As a young student he had joined ultra-nationalist groups and become virulently anti-Semitic. In 1922, after receiving a degree in bacteriology, he spent time in prison for sheltering the assassins of Germany’s foreign minister Walter Rathenau, a Jewish socialist. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931. After Hitler seized power two years later, he rose steadily in the Third Reich hierarchy. By the 1940s he was a member of the Reichstag, deputy minister of health, and director of a medical complex at the University of Posen, in what is now Poland. There he tested the effects of germs and viruses on prisoners.

  Blome’s complex was surrounded by ten-foot walls and guarded by a detachment from the Nazi SS. Inside were a “climate room,” a “cold room,” incubators, deep freezers, and steam chambers; laboratories devoted to virology, pharmacology, radiology, and bacteriology; a “tumor farm” where malignant viruses were cultivated; and an isolation hospital for scientists who might be accidentally infected with the poisons they handled. Blome developed aerosol delivery systems for nerve gas, to be tested on inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp; bred infected mosquitoes and lice, to be tested on inmates at the Dachau and Buchenwald camps; and produced gas for use in killing thirty-five thousand prisoners at camps in Poland where patients with tuberculosis were being held. His complex was officially known as the Central Cancer Institute.

  Blome fled from Posen as the Red Army approached in January 1945. He was able to destroy some incriminating evidence but did not have time to raze the complex. In a letter to General Walter Schreiber, the Nazi army’s chief physician, he said he was “very concerned that the installations for human experiments that were in the institute, and recognizable as such, would be very easily identifiable.” For the next several months he worked at another bio-warfare center, also disguised as a cancer research institute, in a pine forest near the German town of Geraberg. It was largely intact, with records and equipment, when Allied troops seized it in April 1945. By that time Blome had moved on to Munich. His capture was only a matter of time.

  Interrogators from the Counterintelligence Corps confronted Blome with a letter from Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and a principal architect of the Holocaust. In it, Himmler directed Blome to produce toxins that could be used to kill concentration camp inmates who were suffering from tuberculosis. Blome confirmed the letter’s authenticity but insisted that Himmler, not he, had directed the Nazi biological warfare program and overseen experiments on prisoners. The interrogators reported this to American intelligence officers who specialized in questioning Nazi scientists.

  “In 1943 Blome was studying bacteriological warfare,” they wrote. “Officially he was involved in cancer research, which was however only a camouflage. Blome additionally served as deputy health minister of the Reich. Would you like to send investigators?”

  From this question grew a far deeper one. Nazi doctors had accumulated a unique store of knowledge. They had learned how long it takes for human beings to die after exposure to various germs and chemicals, and which toxins kill most efficiently. Just as intriguing, they had fed mescaline and other psychoactive drugs to concentration camp inmates in experiments aimed at fi
nding ways to control minds or shatter the human psyche. Much of their data was unique because it could come only from experiments in which human beings were made to suffer or die. That made Blome a valuable target—but a target for what? Justice cried out for his punishment. From a U.S. Army base in Maryland, however, came an audaciously contrary idea: instead of hanging Blome, let’s hire him.

  * * *

  TERRIFYING INTELLIGENCE REPORTS from Asia filtered into Washington during 1941. Japanese forces rampaging through China were using germs as weapons—killing thousands of soldiers and civilians by dropping anthrax bomblets, releasing infected insects, and poisoning water supplies with cholera virus. Secretary of War Henry Stimson recognized this tactic as a potential threat to the United States. He summoned nine of the country’s leading biologists and asked them to make an urgent study of global research into biological warfare. By the time they completed it, the United States was at war with Japan.

  The study’s conclusion was alarming. Not only had Japanese scientists begun producing bio-weapons, but their counterparts in Nazi Germany were testing them as well. The effect of these weapons could be devastating.

  “The best defense is offense and the threat of offense,” the biologists wrote. “Unless the United States is going to ignore this potential weapon, steps should be taken immediately to begin work on the problems of biological warfare.”

  This moved Stimson to action. “Biological warfare is of course a ‘dirty business,’ but in light of the committee’s report, I think we must be prepared,” he wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt. Soon afterward, Roosevelt authorized creation of the first U.S. agency dedicated to studying biological warfare. From its anodyne name—War Research Service—no one could deduce its mission. Anyone curious, though, could have made an educated guess by noting that its director was the renowned chemist George Merck, president of the pharmaceutical company that bears his family name.

  Chemical warfare, which caused at least one million casualties during World War I, was already well known, but biological warfare, banned by the Geneva Protocol of 1925, was something new in the modern age. Merck concluded that the United States must join the race. “The value of biological warfare will be a debatable question until it is proven or disproven,” he argued in a long memo. “There is but one logical course to pursue, namely, to study the possibilities of such warfare from every angle.”

  Merck’s memo reached American military commanders as they were considering a top-secret request from British prime minister Winston Churchill. Intelligence reports—later proven false—had led British leaders to fear that Hitler was planning a bio-attack on their island. They decided they needed a store of concentrated pathogens to launch in retaliation if such an attack occurred. Britain did not have the facilities, expertise, or budget to develop these toxins. Churchill asked the Americans for help. Roosevelt agreed to look into the possibility of producing bio-weapons for the British, and assigned the job to the army’s Chemical Warfare Service. On December 9, 1942, its commanders convened a group of bacteriologists and other specialists at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. They posed a question that pushed beyond the edge of known scientific engineering: Would it be possible to build a hermetically sealed container in which deadly germs could be produced on an industrial scale?

  Patiently, the assembled scientists explained to their military hosts why fabricating toxins on this scale would be prohibitively difficult or impossible. One dissented. Ira Baldwin, the bacteriologist who had been Sidney Gottlieb’s mentor at the University of Wisconsin, said he saw no theoretical or technical barrier to the construction of such a chamber.

  “Practically all of the people there had been working in pathogenic bacteriology—so-called medical bacteriology—and by and large they were very skeptical,” Baldwin later recalled. “Either you couldn’t culture in large amounts, or if you did culture it, you couldn’t do it with safety. And finally they got around to me … And I said, ‘The problem is simple. If you can do it with a test tube you can do it with a ten-thousand-gallon tank, with equal safety and perhaps more. And you could preserve the virulence in the ten-thousand-gallon tank. All you have to do is make the same conditions in a ten-thousand-gallon tank that you make in a test tube’ … So I went home, feeling I had done my bit for the country by venturing an opinion on this subject, and thought no more about it.”

  Soon after that meeting, General W. C. Kabrich of the Chemical Warfare Service called Baldwin and asked him to return to Washington. He replied that his campus obligations made it difficult for him to travel on short notice.

  “We’re in hopes that you can arrange to be relieved of your university duties,” General Kabrich told him. “We need you here, to do what you said could be done.”

  Baldwin reported this to the president of the University of Wisconsin. They agreed that he should take a leave of absence to serve the war effort. When he arrived in Washington at the end of 1942, he was told that the army had decided to launch a secret program to develop biological weapons and wanted him to direct it. It was, he realized, “a terrifically big assignment … They wanted me to develop a research program, recruit a staff, find a location to build a camp and a laboratory, and then design the pilot plants and the laboratories.”

  By accepting this job, Baldwin became America’s first bio-warrior. He had all the intellectual and academic qualifications to take on such a pioneering role. By personal background, though, he was an unlikely candidate. His grandfather had been a Methodist preacher. He was a part-time pastor himself, held Quaker beliefs, grew up abhorring all forms of violence, and lived austerely. After the United States entered World War II, though, he proved as ready to join its cause as any American.

  “To understand the biological warfare program, you do need to understand the climate in which we existed,” he told an interviewer years later. “It never occurred to me to say, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ Everybody was doing whatever he was asked to do … There is no question that the idea of using biological agents to kill people represented a complete shift of thinking. But it only took me about twenty-four hours to think my way through it. After all, the immorality of war is war itself. You start out with the idea in war of killing people, and that to me is the immoral part of it … But I grew up first in medical bacteriology, and you spent your time trying to kill microorganisms to prevent them from causing disease. Now to turn around and think of it as I had to was horrifying to some extent. Yes. No question about it.”

  Baldwin remained a civilian during the two and a half years he spent establishing and running America’s bio-warfare program. His title was created for him: scientific director of the newly formed army Biological Warfare Laboratories, part of the Chemical Warfare Service. The army gave him one of the most sweeping promises it made to any American during World War II: whatever you ask for, we’ll provide.

  “If I said ‘I want that man,’” Baldwin later recalled, “unless the Manhattan Project said they needed him, I got him.”

  Baldwin’s first task was to find a site for his new complex. The obvious choice was Edgewood Arsenal, a thirteen-thousand-acre army base facing Chesapeake Bay in Maryland that had served as headquarters for the Chemical Warfare Service since its founding in 1918. After touring Edgewood, however, Baldwin decided it was too crowded for the bio-weapons complex he had been assigned to build. He wanted an entirely new campus.

  Baldwin and a couple of Chemical Warfare Service officers set out on a tour of regions outside Washington. They sought a protected area that was reasonably close to the city, remote enough so that experiments could be conducted without attracting notice, and big enough to house dozens of buildings, including large tanks in which deadly germs would be cultivated. First they turned down an offer from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Their next idea was to commandeer an island in Chesapeake Bay, but they could not find one that was the right size and also uninhabited. They surveyed and rejected a former shoe f
actory near Edgewood Arsenal, a weather station in Virginia, and Sugarloaf Mountain in Maryland. Finally, outside the Maryland town of Frederick, they found a former National Guard air base called Detrick (pronounced DEE-trick) Field, named after an army surgeon who had lived nearby and served in World War I.

  Airplanes based at Detrick Field had been moved to Europe. What remained were empty barracks, a cavernous hangar, runways, and a control tower. Outside the gate, pastures stretched toward Catoctin Mountain, a majestic Appalachian ridge in which the presidential retreat Shangri-La—now called Camp David—was nestled. Washington is fifty miles away. This thousand-acre base would become the literal nerve center of the U.S. government’s search for ways to turn germs into weapons of war and covert action.

  The Office of Strategic Services, America’s wartime intelligence agency, was using part of Detrick Field as a training base and did not want to give it up but was forced to do so because Ira Baldwin’s project had such high priority. On March 9, 1943, the army announced that it had renamed the field Camp Detrick, designated it as headquarters of the army Biological Warfare Laboratories, and reached agreements to purchase several adjacent farms in order to provide extra room and privacy. The first commandant immediately ordered $1.25 million in new construction. Within three months he had spent $4 million. Everything Baldwin requisitioned was immediately supplied, from custom-made bacteriological equipment to bulk quantities of chemicals to herds of laboratory animals—ultimately more than half a million white mice and tens of thousands of rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, sheep, monkeys, cats, ferrets, and canaries.

  Everything about Camp Detrick was shrouded in the deepest secrecy. Military commanders feared that if news of research into germ warfare leaked out, Americans might panic at the prospect of a bio-attack. “I remember one time we had a party and someone said, ‘Hey, lots of bacteriologists here, right?’” one veteran of the Chemical Warfare Service recalled years later. “That was quickly shushed up. We were taught at Detrick, ‘Don’t talk about Detrick.’”