THE DISTURBING STORY OF THE GOVERNMENT‘S SECRET GERM LABORATORY LAB257 MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL For a quiet outing where the air is a real tonic to a run-down man or woman; where you could have your bluefish and blackfish, sea bass, and lobsters fresh out of the water, cooked to a turn; milk, eggs, and chicken in abundance, Plum Island was the ideal place. What more could one ask? —PLUM I SLAND ADVENTURER (1909) Plum Island is a biological Three Mile Island. —PLUM I SLAND EMPLOYEE (2003) Contents Epigraph iii Map v PREFACE viii PART 1: OUTBREAKS 1. 1975: The Lyme Connection 3 2. 1999: East End Meets West Nile 28 3. 1967: The Demise of the Ducks 35 PART 2: THE SAFEST LAB IN THE WORLD 4. Genesis 41 5. The Age of Science 52 6. Symptoms 71 7. “The Disastrous Incident” 87 8. Rift Valley Fever 115 9. Crossing the Rubicon 137 PART 3: THE DECLINE 10. The Kingdom and the Glory 153 11. Boomerang 176 12. Meltdown 191 13. The Aftermath 207 PART 4: THE FUTURE 14. The Homeland 219 15. A Plum Island Prescription 239 FALLOUT: CURRENT AFFAIRS AT PLUM ISLAND 25 SOURCE NOTES 269 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 299 About the Author Praise Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher MAP Preface n May 1998, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a Western-educated Inuclear physicist, was cheered by throngs gathered in the narrow cobblestone streets of Islamabad. They set off fireworks and wielded large placards emblazoned with his likeness. As the powerful chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Mahmood developed nuclear power plants with the help of Canada and other Western nations. At the direction of the Pakistani government, Mahmood and others co-opted this technology and developed nuclear weapons; and that May their first atom bomb was successfully tested to counter a nuclear test by their archenemy, neighboring India. A joyous national celebration in Mahmood’s and the other nuclear scientists’ names ensued, a celebration rivaling Pakistan’s independence day holiday. Mahmood was a national hero. In 2002, he was under twenty-four-hour house arrest and his assets were frozen. The clean-shaven, moderately religious nuclear engineer, educated in Britain in the early 1970s, had drifted toward hard-line Islamic views by the mid-1990s. The snow-white-haired Mahmood became a bona fide religious extremist. He began fortune telling by reading people’s palms and grew a long, unkempt beard. Urging Pakistan to adopt neighboring Afghanistan’s Taliban way of life, his writings stressed the sacredness of keeping beards, the correlation between natural catastro- phes and places of immoral behavior, and hidden scientific knowledge from Allah contained in the Koran. After he obstreperously opposed ix Preface the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in favor of a vigorous bomb-testing program, an apprehensive Pakistani leadership forced Mahmood out of the atomic energy program. He then relocated to Kabul, Afghanistan, where he set up a relief organization called Tameer-e-Ummah, or “Islamic Reconstruction.” One month after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, U.S. Army intelligence and the CIA intercepted telephone communications between Mahmood and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, whose oppressive, terrorist-sponsoring regime was on the verge of being crushed by American forces.1 The United States government declared Tameer-e- Ummah, his Islamic “charity,” a terrorist front organization. Its assets were seized by Pakistan’s central bank, and Pakistani troops arrested their nuclear hero and turned him over to American authorities. CIA Director George J. Tenet rushed to Islamabad to take personal control of the Mah- mood affair. During his interrogation about the phone calls, Mahmood claimed to have discussed only Omar’s personal safety and a flour mill that the charity wanted to build in Kandahar. But he failed six separate lie detector tests and disputed the results, calling the technology flawed. Then he admitted meet- ing on multiple occasions not only with Omar but also with a rogue Saudi millionaire named Osama bin Laden (and his top deputy, Al Zawahiri) as recently as August 2001. He described meeting with bin Laden and Omar, perched atop fluffy pillows, drinking green tea and praising Allah, in a scene reminiscent of the video footage aired worldwide featuring Osama bin Laden plotting destruction with his cohorts. Mahmood told interroga- tors that bin Laden had more in mind than schools and flour mills—bin Laden said he had radioactive material and wanted to know how to build a “dirty bomb” nuclear device (and “other things,” according to Mahmood’s son Azim, who later confirmed the meeting). Fearing further embarrassment to its already tarnished nuclear energy program, Pakistan decided in early 2002 not to put Mahmood—whose “noble cause” was featured on the cover of the December 2001 issue of the radical glossy Kashmir Jihad—on public trial. The Pakistani government instead charged him with violating national secrecy oaths. Today, he remains under house arrest (and a media gag order) in a gated, two-story home. After Pakistan arrested Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and U.S. forces secured the Kabul perimeter as part of the Afghanistan phase of America’s war on terrorism, CIA and U.S. Army commandos stormed Mahmood’s Kabul residence and the offices of Tameer-e-Ummah. Inside, they found copies of books he authored, with disturbing titles such as Mechanics of the 1The contents of the Mahmood–Mullah Omar conversations have not been made public. Preface x Doomsday and Life After Death, and Cosmology and Human Destiny, which contained the following prediction: “During the autumn of 2000–2001, due to the high energy solar cycle and its impact on people, cer- tain crazy actions are likely to happen.” Then they uncovered some very incriminating raw material. One item was a diagram of a helium balloon designed to release large quantities of anthrax spores into the atmosphere. Another was a large document titled “Bacteria: What You Need to Know.” And a hefty file folder contained a bundle of papers from an Internet search on anthrax vaccines. Then there was a dossier. It contained information on a place in New York called the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. There was even a New York Times article in the dossier about this island. Why would an associate of Osama bin Laden be so interested in some obscure New York island? If Plum Island isn’t exactly a household name in America, it apparently holds a prominent place in the minds of people like Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. And it’s not the sandy beaches and swaying plum trees they’re after. ess than 2 miles off the east end of Long Island and 85 miles from New LYork City lies an unimposing 840-acre island, unidentified on most maps. On the few where it can be found, Plum Island is marked red or yel- low, stamped u.s. government—restricted dangerous animal dis- eases. Six huge ferries, each carrying 1,000 people and 120 cars, pass within one quarter mile of it every day, making the journey from Orient Point— the tip of Long Island’s North Fork—to New London, Connecticut. More than one million people live and spend their summers in the Hamptons, within a scant mile or two from its shores, yet few know the name of this pork chop–shaped island that lies on the periphery of the largest population center in the United States. Even fewer can say whether it is inhabited or why it doesn’t exist on the map. ’ve often been asked why I decided to write about Plum Island. In the Isummer of 1992, as part of a ritual before picking up a friend from the Connecticut-to-New York ferry, I drove out to Orient Point, the end of the narrow strip of rural land that lies on either side of Route 25. Abandon- ing my car at the end of the road, I hiked through a mile’s worth of tall beach grass, making my way to the very tip of Long Island. I climbed a high rocky bluff that sloped off to a sandbar that stretched far into the water, xi Preface until it stopped abruptly at an ancient lighthouse that looked more like a cast-iron coffeepot than a warning beacon. Crouching on the bluff, I gazed at the waves from the Long Island Sound as they met the current of Gar- diner’s Bay—the precipice of the great Atlantic Ocean—crashing together, spitting spindrift high into the air, and falling against the shore. Through the light haze, ten miles off to the north, was the long coastline of Con- necticut; between us, the ferry slowly chugged its way toward me. Out past the lighthouse was a wide green landmass. It looked deserted except for a powder blue water tower that sprouted above a green canopy. The island triggered a series of thoughts—rumors of biological warfare tests, news sto- ries about deadly virus experiments, talk about Lyme disease being hatched there, stories about a man who worked on Plum Island and contracted some strange, undiagnosed ailment during a storm. But it doesn’t make sense—it looks so pristine! What is happening out there? And why? The long white ferry charged into the foreground, sailing through Plum Gut, the deep, narrow strait between where I sat and Plum Island. As I returned to the car, I resolved to uncover one day exactly what Plum Island is. Those were my thoughts over a decade ago. Years later, fresh out of law school, I began to revisit that haunted place, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.