Monthly Archives: September 2020

This article is part of a series called How to Human, interviews with memoirists that explore how we tackle lifes alarms, marvels and bombshells.

A few years ago, Nicholson Baker was doing research for his book about the destruction of newspapers by libraries in a library when he came upon a book about Americas use of biological weapons. The authors of the book spent years trying to prove that the United States had conducted biological warfare during the Korean War, including the dropping of insects tainted by disease. It was all horrifying stuff not taught in history class, and Baker was shocked.

How could it be that the United States was doing such terrible things? Its the question that drove him to research and write Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, which comes out Tuesday.

Researching the book sent him into a warren of government tunnels in search of documents that proved America was guilty of developing and using biological weapons. He used the Freedom of Information Act to acquire such documents, but the government wasnt always compliant in getting them back to him. Indeed he received many pieces of paper with redacted words, sentences and paragraphs, sometimes in black rectangles, other times in white, depending on the government agencys preference. This led him to file more FOIA requests in which hed ask for the redacted words to be revealed.

He still has FOIAs out there waiting to be returned to him, and he could be waiting decades more. Since life moves a lot faster than the government, Baker found a way to tell the story now. He decided to keep a diary in which he could spend several weeks writing what he learned. Isnt that what historians do? They sit down to write what they know based off of the evidence they have on hand.

In the end, he is now on a quixotic mission, hoping the government will declassify everything older than 50 years old. He believes, If we could learn from our mistakes and our successes, then I think we can maybe move forward about things that are happening right now.

HuiffPost spoke with Baker via a Google Hangout and FaceTime earlier in July. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

Would you describe what FOIA is and how it came to be?

FOIA [pronounced FOY-a] stands for the Freedom of Information Act, and its a glorious law that took a long time to come into being. It was something dreamed up by congressman John Moss. He had this idea in the middle of the 1950s that there was too much that was happening in the federal government that was not knowable. You cant have consent of the governed unless the governed know whats actually happening.

He started this long process, and he had hearings, and he had resistance. The Justice Department didnt like the idea and the newspapers did like the idea. It took him 10 years, and finally in 1965 this act came in. It said that anybody can ask to see anything; they have to put it in writing, and then in 20 days, that particular agency has to give some kind of response.

It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and he did not want to sign it, but it had to be signed. It had some ups and downs; there was a moment where it was very powerful, where suddenly it dislodged a lot of things that had happened in the 50s. Suddenly people thought, Oh my God, you did that? Then the Reagan administration changed the rules radically, and said that the CIAs operational files this was specifically about the CIA were going to be off limits. That meant basically all the stuff that is actually interesting that the CIA does, you werent going to be able to learn anything about it. Operations just means secret, sneaky, clandestine things that people do in other countries, that kind of thing.

Theres been ups and downs over the years, and gradually its gotten harder and harder to get things from federal agencies. Basically whats happened is that government agencies want to shield themselves from scrutiny.

I fully understand that, they want some privacy to do whatever they want to do. What is driving this book is that they want to keep private, keep secret stuff that happened 60 or 70 years ago, so long ago that its of historical interest and importance, but cannot possibly affect national security.

Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, by Nicholson Baker

What was your goal for this book?

It took a lot of work to write this book; I put my heart and soul and liver and onions into it, and Im just hoping that it could lead to a kind of decision, a blanket decision to declassify everything thats over 50 years everything, just everything.

Just let people see what the government was doing, at least that. Thats the beginning, because if we could learn from our mistakes and our successes, then I think we can maybe move forward about things that are happening right now.

Toward the end of your book you describe a deep frustration in one of your diary entries, and you say you want to sue the American government, that if you could be armed with $20 million, youd be able to open everything up.

Yeah, I have these fantasies. I successfully, oddly enough, sued the San Francisco Public Library, because they didnt want to release the list of the books that theyd gotten rid of. They got rid of about a quarter of a million books when they moved to a new library, and the librarians came to me and said that this was a really strange, secret thing that happened. I put in a Freedom of Information request, and they said no, so I then found a lawyer, a Freedom of Information lawyer who did it pro bono, and they released the list.

I just think that it would be so great to sue the federal government and then use $20 million to scan everything that was released to the National Archives. Everything older than 50 years, just start scanning it and do it. It actually would be a nice employment project because youd have people coming in. It would be a WPA kind of effort to say, Were going to be able to look at our own countrys history.

Could you describe the main theme of the book, and what you were trying to uncover?

There are two things that interested me. One was I wanted to know what happened in a fraught time in the past, so theres that, but then I also wanted to know how people actually truthfully think about history. Thats why I wrote it as a diary. When you get up in the morning and youre trying to write the history of anything, maybe its of the Bronx in 1910 or something, you also have to eat a bowl of cereal and talk to your wife or husband, or students if youre a teacher, I mean, you have a whole life.

What was the spark that made you want to go looking for biological warfare?

It came out of the book I wrote about libraries. I was at the University of New Hampshire library; I was in the middle of writing this book about the fact that there had been a complete clean-out of beautiful newspapers and a replacement of them with microfilm, and there was this book on the shelf that was by these two guys, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, and it had a pink fly on the cover it was really kind of a lurid cover: it said, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea.

Now, I dont know anything about that at this point. Im standing there, I pull the thing down, thinking, Well, Ive been reading about all this weird Cold War stuff in connection with this library, so let me just get a little bit up to speed on the Cold War. I started looking at it, and there were lists of the diseases that the United States government thought were important to study and to intensify and to find ways to put into bombs and figure out how to make them more virulent.

I was really troubled, but also then I saw on this list, it was this list of diseases, and one of them was coccidioidomycosis, which is a very long word that I still dont really know how to spell. My grandfather was a pathologist and he studied coccidioidomycosis because its a fungal disease, and he was a fungal disease pathologist and thought, By God, I know that disease. I cannot believe that the American military wants to make people sick with this horrible disease that gets in peoples lungs and gives them lesions, its a very slow-acting disease.

I just thought I want to know more about this. I read this book, and I liked these guys on paper. They had managed to declassify huge amounts of stuff, because it was in a sort of golden age of declassification in the 80s, and I just thought, They have done a real service to American history to open it all up. I started reading reviews of their books, and the reviews were savage. It was amazing, they said it was shoddy scholarship, that these people have besmirched the historical profession, and their claim was that there was a gigantic germ warfare development program that was paid for by the Army and the Air Force, and that possibly the Americans had done what the Chinese and North Koreans said, and actually had dropped disease weapons on them.

That was the controversial thing. Most of the book is about the machinery of weapons research, and they do a beautiful job of that, and its fascinating. What people didnt like was the idea that these two men from Canada were charging that the United States had actually done this.

Anyway, I wrote a bunch of different books, and somewhere along the way I thought, I really want to just really get to the bottom of this story, because the two of them seemed a little bit like wounded men. They had worked on a book for close to 10 years, and it came out and every single person trashed it. I thought, Thats not fair. This book is a piece of institutional history of something. I just thought I would try to find out what actually happened, and I did.

When you write about some of your FOIA heroes in the book, its almost like youre a sports fan the way you revere them. Could you talk about who are your heroes in that department and what kind of impact theyve had on society?

The FOIA victory a tremendous, huge, ticker-tape parade kind of victory that nobody really knows about was one that just happened fairly recently. It has a long set of people involved, but it basically comes down to MuckRock, a very small, hardy band of really nice people for one thing, but who have set up this mechanism for asking for government documents using their website.

They made a request through a lawyer named Kel McClanahan, who is a very articulate, almost professorial kind of lawyer. But they requested from the CIA to have every bit of this digital database called the CREST databasethat just stands for CIA Records Search Tool.

The CREST database used to reside only in the National Archives in this one room; they had these four chairs, and it was a completely air gap, super secure cluster of terminals. And there was surveillance and your every keystroke was recorded. This CREST database, mind you, was completely what they call sanitized, meaning that the documents had all already been redacted. But in order to use the database, you had to physically go to College Park, Maryland, and sit in this room.

It was really a way of keeping historians from learning about the past. So [MuckRock] said, Give us the whole thing in electronic form. We dont want paper. Just give us the whole thing. Its all been declassified. So were not asking for you to declassify anything further, just give it to us.

And [the CIA] said, No, that would be burdensome and refused because its classified material. So this giant collection of declassified materials suddenly becomes classified material. That didnt make any sense, so the lawyer brought suit and there was this tremendous back and forth where the CIA said it was going to take I think they first said it was going to take 28 years to go through this collection and then they thought about it and said, No, no, itll only take six years, or something like that.

Finally this ex-CIA employee, whom I interviewed, got into it. Hed had a rough time with the CIA, because hed asked while he was [still] employed by the CIA for something controlled by the CIA not a good idea. So he testified that the whole thing could be put on an external $60 Staples drive and the whole process would take a day.

When he did that, the CIA just folded. And suddenly, I dont know if its millions of pages, its an enormous horde of stuff, became publicly available to anyone in the world. This happened in 2017. So just as I was sort of embroiled in one version of this book, a version that failed, suddenly Im typing. Im looking up keywords on the CIAs own website, thinking I should check it, and the words like BW, which stands for biological warfare, or specific diseases, brucellosis and stuff. And suddenly, instead of there being no hits, it suddenly would be lots of hits for crop diseases in the Soviet Union and all kinds of stuff. The thing that was mind-blowing was one of the set of hits was Korean War records, the agency that was the precursor to the National Security Agency.

So all of these people I admire tremendously because they just kept asking and kept asking and kept insisting until they got something. What they got was enormously valuable.

I wonder with everything being shut down, whats going to happen with the backlog of FOIA requests and what the government could be doing to make more documents available digitally.

I think one of the things that really should happen is that the National Archives budget should go up and there should be a more concerted effort to scan a lot of documents. Not throwing away the original documents, of course, but the dream would be that all of World War II records would be scanned and digitally searchable immediately in all kinds of ways we cant even predict.

Our understanding of World War II would be enriched because we would know things about people that are just unfindable, and we would make connections between things. Or World War I, which is really a fascinating era, or the 20s, my God, or the prohibition, all of that. All of that is just waiting to be opened up.

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How America Covered Up Its Germ Warfare Program | HuffPost

Biological weapons. The phrase alone could send chills down the spine. But what are they? How do they work? And are we really at risk? In this Spotlight, we survey their history and potential future.

Sometimes known as germ warfare, biological weapons involve the use of toxins or infectious agents that are biological in origin. This can include bacteria, viruses, or fungi.

These agents are used to incapacitate or kill humans, animals, or plants as part of a war effort.

In effect, biological warfare is using non-human life to disrupt or end human life. Because living organisms can be unpredictable and incredibly resilient, biological weapons are difficult to control, potentially devastating on a global scale, and prohibited globally under numerous treaties.

Of course, treaties and international laws are one thing and humanitys ability to find innovative ways of killing each other is another.

The history of biological warfare is a long one, which makes sense; its deployment can be a lo-fi affair, so there is no need for electrical components, nuclear fusion, or rocket grade titanium, for instance.

An early example takes us back more than 2 and a half millennia: Assyrians infected their enemys wells with a rye ergot fungus, which contains chemicals related to LSD. Consuming the tainted water produced a confused mental state, hallucinations, and, in some cases, death.

In the 1300s, Tartar (Mongol) warriors besieged the Crimean city of Kaffa. During the siege, many Tartars died at the hands of plague, and their lifeless, infected bodies were hurled over the city walls.

Some researchers believe that this tactic may have been responsible for the spread of Black Death plague into Europe. If so, this early use of biological warfare caused the eventual deaths of around 25 million Europeans.

This is a prime example of biological warfares potential scope, unpredictability, and terrifying simplicity.

Moving forward to 1763, the British Army attmped to use smallpox as a weapon against Native Americans at the Siege of Fort Pitt. In an attempt to spread the disease to the locals, the Brits presented blankets from a smallpox hospital as gifts.

Although we now know that this would be a relatively ineffective way to transmit smallpox, the intent was there.

During World War II, many of the parties involved looked into biological warfare with great interest. The Allies built facilities capable of mass producing anthrax spores, brucellosis, and botulism toxins. Thankfully, the war ended before they were used.

It was the Japanese who made the most use of biological weapons during World War II, as among other terrifyingly indiscriminate attacks, the Japanese Army Air Force dropped ceramic bombs full of fleas carrying the bubonic plague on Ningbo, China.

The following quote comes from a paper on the history of biological warfare.

[T]he Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks. [] Some of the epidemics they caused persisted for years and continued to kill more than 30,000 people in 1947, long after the Japanese had surrendered.

Dr. Friedrich Frischknecht, professor of integrative parasitology, Heidelberg University, Germany

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) define bioterrorism as the intentional release of viruses, bacteria, or other germs that can sicken or kill people, livestock, or crops.

This can be achieved in a number of ways, such as: via aerosol sprays; in explosive devices; via food or water; or absorbed or injected into skin.

Because some pathogens are less robust than others, the type of pathogen used will define how it can be deployed.

Utilizing such weapons holds a certain appeal to terrorists; they have the potential to cause great harm, of course, but they are also fairly cheap to produce when compared with missiles or other more hi-tech equipment.

Also, they can be detonated, and, due to the long time that it takes for them to spread and take effect, there is plenty of time for the perpetrator to escape undetected.

Biological weapons can be difficult to control or predict in a battlefield situation, since there is a substantial risk that troops on both sides will be affected. However, if a terrorist is interested in attacking a distant target as a lone operant, bioterrorism carries much less risk to the person.

Experts believe that today, the most likely organism to be used in a bioterrorism attack would be Bacillus anthracis, the bacteria that causes anthrax.

It is widely found in nature, easily produced in the laboratory, and survives for a long time in the environment. Also, it is versatile and can be released in powders, sprays, water, or food.

Anthrax has been used before. In 2001, anthrax spores were sent through the United States postal system. In all, 22 people contracted anthrax five of whom died. And, the guilty party was never caught.

Another potential agent of bioterrorism is smallpox, which, unlike anthrax, can spread from person to person. Smallpox is no longer a disease of concern in the natural world because concerted vaccination efforts stamped it out and the last naturally spread case occurred in 1977.

However, if someone were to gain access to the smallpox virus (it is still kept in two laboratories one in the U.S. and one in Russia), it could be an effective weapon, spreading quickly and easily between people.

We have already mentioned the Tartars use of the plague, Yersinia pestis, hundreds of years ago, but some believe that it could be used in the modern world, too. Y. pestis is passed to humans through the bite of a flea that has fed on infected rodents.

Once a human is infected, the resulting disease can either develop into bubonic plague, which is difficult to transmit among humans and fairly easy to treat with antibiotics, or if the infection spreads to the lungs it becomes pneumonic plague, which develops rapidly and does not respond well to antibiotics.

A paper written on the plague and its potential for use in biological terrorism says:

Given the presence and availability of plague around the world, the capacity for mass production and aerosol dissemination, the high fatality rate of pneumonic plague, and the potential for rapid secondary spread, the potential use of plague as a biological weapon is of great concern.

Dr. Stefan Riedel, Department of Pathology, Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, TX

As a potentially severe and sometimes deadly gastrointestinal disease, cholera has the potential to be used in bioterrorism. It does not spread easily from person to person, so for it to be effective, it would need to be liberally added to a major water source.

In the past, the bacteria responsible for cholera, Vibrio cholerae, has been weaponized by the U.S., Japan, South Africa, and Iraq, among others.

Some consider tularemia, an infection caused by the Francisella tularensis bacterium, as a potential bioweapon. It causes fever, ulcerations, swelling of lymph glands, and, sometimes, pneumonia.

The bacterium can cause infection by entering through breaks in the skin or by being breathed into the lungs. It is particularly infectious, and only a very small number of organisms (as few as 10) need to enter the body to set off a serious bout of tularemia.

Studied by the Japanese during World War II and stockpiled by the U.S. in the 1960s, F. tularensis is hardy, capable of withstanding low temperatures in water, hay, decaying carcasses, and moist soil for many weeks.

According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness, Aerosol dissemination of F. tularensis in a populated area would be expected to result in the abrupt onset of large numbers of cases of acute, non-specific, febrile illness beginning 3 to 5 days later [], with pleuropneumonitis developing in a significant proportion of cases.

Without antibiotic treatment, the clinical course could progress to respiratory failure, shock, and death.

Those pathogens are an abbreviated selection, of course. Others considered to have potential as biological weapons include brucellosis, Q fever, monkeypox, arboviral encephalitides, viral hemorrhagic fevers, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B.

Although biological weapons are as old as the hills (if not older), modern technology brings new worries. Some experts are concerned about recent advances in gene editing technology.

When utilized for good, the latest tools can work wonders. However as with most cutting-edge technology there is always the potential for misuse.

A gene editing technology called CRISPR has set off alarm bells in the defense community; the technology allows researchers to edit genomes, thereby easily modifying DNA sequences to alter gene function.

In the right hands, this tool has the potential to correct genetic defects and treat disease. In the wrong hands, however, it has the potential for evil.

CRISPR technology is becoming cheaper to run and therefore more accessible to individuals bent on bioterrorism.

A report titled Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, written by James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, was published in February 2016. In it, gene editing features in a list of weapons of mass destruction and proliferation.

Given the broad distribution, low cost, and accelerated pace of development of this dual-use technology, he explains, its deliberate or unintentional misuse might lead to far-reaching economic and national security implications.

Advances in genome editing in 2015, he continues, have compelled groups of high-profile U.S. and European biologists to question unregulated editing of the human germline (cells that are relevant for reproduction), which might create inheritable genetic changes.

With future generations of CRISPR-like technology and an advanced knowledge of genetics, there would be no theoretical end to the misery that could be caused. Theres potential to create drug-resistant strains of diseases, for instance, or pesticide-protected bugs, capable of wiping out a countrys staple crop.

For now, however, other methods of bioterrorism are much easier and closer to hand, so this is likely to be of little concern for the foreseeable future.

In fact, to lighten the mood at the end of a somewhat heavy article, just remember that anyone who lives in the U.S. today is much more likely to be killed in an animal attack than a terrorist attack biological or otherwise.

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Biological weapons and bioterrorism: Past, present, and future