All twenty-one of these memos, numbered and cross-referenced, still exist, stored at the National Archives’ big building in College Park, Maryland—but they are inaccessible to researchers like me.

The National Archives has pending at least one FOIA request that is twenty-five years old.

The way to understand covert action, as practiced by the Central Intelligence Agency, is to realize that the same tricks and schemes are used over and over again. There is the same gradual escalation, the same planting of false news, the same bribery of politicians, the same huffy denials, the same urge to create social chaos that requires an imposition of martial law.

In August 1960, Ray Treichler, one of the CIA’s scientists, tainted a box of fifty of Castro’s favorite brand of cigars with botulinum toxin.

One CIA document (declassified in 1997, and then declassified all over again in 2012, but with more, not fewer, redactions than in the 1997 version) gives an accounting of American-sponsored acts of violence in Cuba between October 1960 and April 1961. “Approximately 300,000 tons of sugar cane destroyed in 800 separate fires” was one achievement.

I filed my first Freedom of Information Act request about twenty years ago, on April 2, 1999, while I was working on the book about libraries, called Double Fold.

Project Artichoke seems to have been—not to be too fancily psychological—an outward projection of Wisner’s inner torment.

The only reason we can read these words now is because of Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie, JFK, about the Kennedy assassination. … Stone’s movie got Washington’s attention, and made possible the passage of the JFK Records Act, which gave rise to a group called the Assassination Records Review Board.

The payment—in cash or cashier’s check—was authorized by LSD scientist Sidney Gottlieb: it was part of the CIA’s now famous MKULTRA program of biochemical and psychological experimentation.

“We have deep suspicions that the plagues—especially the hemorrhagic dengue—could have been introduced into Cuba by the CIA,” Castro said in his speech.

In 1974, when Congress voted to strengthen freedom of information law, President Ford’s advisers Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Antonin Scalia—who was then head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel—argued in favor of a presidential veto.

From the beginning, he says, the DOJ, which oversees FOIA compliance—and defends government agencies in FOIA lawsuits—has resisted the basic idea that the right to know is implied by the First Amendment.

Six weeks later, an outbreak of the disease forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic.

In 1978, before the blue mold crisis, Cuba produced 46,000 metric tons of tobacco. The 1980 crop was down to 5,000 metric tons.

“Optimum temperature range for infection is between 60.8 and 69.8 F,” Wuest wrote.

In 1963, Paul J. Wuest, a plant pathologist from Penn State, was hired by Fort Detrick’s biological-warfare laboratories to study tobacco diseases.

In 2017, MuckRock won a gigantic victory over the CIA.

With the help of a Washington, D.C., lawyer named Kel McClanahan, they compelled the CIA to put its CREST database of millions of declassified documents onto the internet.

At his speech, hecklers set off firecrackers in the aisles to disrupt the meeting.

Years of work shrugged off, dismissed with the flick of a finger. Sheldon Harris, the reigning expert on Unit 731 and the American appropriation of Japan’s germ-warfare research, denounced the book in the Journal of American History. “It is easy to dismiss this book as a black mark on the historical profession, and several scholars have done so,” he said. “Sadly, this study is a prime example of shoddy scholarship masquerading as an objective examination of a controversial topic.”

ONE OF THE MANY DOCUMENTS that Ned and Steve managed to get declassified, the “1951 Program Guidance Report,” dated December 5, 1950, was a thirteen-page set of recommendations by the Committee on Biological Warfare of the Department of Defense’s Research and Development Board (RDB), chaired by MIT-trained weaponeer William Webster.

The committee recommended intensified work on Q fever, rabbit fever, and plague, in addition to a number of animal and plant diseases, including hog cholera, wart hog disease, anthrax, and “virulent races of wheat, oat, barley and rye rusts.”

The present international situation requires a re-evaluation of the BW program,” the committee’s report began. The United States was inadequately prepared. “The current situation demands an acceleration of BW research and development activities.” The committee recommended intensified work on Q fever, rabbit fever, and plague, in addition to a number of animal and plant diseases, including hog cholera, wart hog disease, anthrax, and “virulent races of wheat, oat, barley and rye rusts.”

Beginning on July 1 that year, a group of people gathered on a road in Frederick, Maryland, near the entrance gate to Fort Detrick. They came every day.

Somebody drew a line next to a particular paragraph in the CIA’s copy, in which Hersh gives a slightly garbled account, retold to him by Kennedy insiders, of the CIA proposal to destroy Cuba’s sugarcane crop. … The summary remarks by top Agency officers about Hersh’s article are whited out from an accompanying document, a memo for the record summarizing a morning meeting on November 18, 1969, partly declassified in 2005.

But what struck Ned Hagerman as strange, and struck Steve Endicott as strange—and what strikes me as strange—is that this document, written during a horrendous war that had killed tens of thousands of American soldiers (and millions of Korean civilians and hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Korean soldiers) makes almost no mention of Korea. … One has to suspect that the paragraphs here and there that mention Korea—and China and Russia and wartime Japan—have been whited out.

If you look at a map of Lyme disease you’ll notice that it didn’t spread naturally. … It has two separate foci of infection: one in Lyme, Connecticut, spreading out from there over the coastal Northeast, and one in Wisconsin.

What’s troubling, or at least puzzling, about the Lyme-tick story is that Willy Burgdorfer, the Swiss-born scientist who in 1982 discovered the causative agent of the disease and gave it its scientific name, Borrelia burgdorferi, was himself a germ warrior. … Burgdorfer worked at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, which had a research contract with Camp Detrick.

So that’s Q fever, one of a number of fractious fevers that the Committee on Biological Warfare of the Research and Development Board thought deserved intensified research and weaponization. … Q fever tests at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah began in 1951.

At some point there is a lot of noise, as four-pound bombs burst open and fall around them. And then a cold sort of moist mist. They breathe the mist. They have no choice. Then they go back to their cages in the lab and live for another two or three weeks. Some of them get brucellosis, or undulant fever, which is a very unpleasant disease, but usually not fatal. All of the guinea pigs die, though, because scientists kill them so that they can look at their lungs and internal organs.

At the University of California, Berkeley, a teacher and bacteriologist, Albert Krueger, oversaw the Naval Biological Laboratory, which had an outpost on the island of Alameda, near Oakland. (Fulfilling the requirement that certain infectious research be carried out offshore.) Beginning in 1943, Krueger’s team worked on experimental aerosol weapons using pestis as their active agent: plague.

During the war and just after, in 1944, 1945, and 1946, Meyer, hired by the Office of Scientific Research and Development to develop a dependable plague vaccine, injected bacteria into hundreds of inmates at San Quentin prison, after the prison’s warden, Clinton Duffy, put out a call for “human guinea pigs.”

A study on the vulnerability of subway systems to covert attack and development of a method to carry out such attack was conducted,” wrote the chief of the Biological Branch of the Technical Services Division in October 1967.

The year 1975 was the beginning of FOIA’s golden age. “Applications under the Freedom of Information Act are slowly beginning to dislodge documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, and tidbits from the agency’s secret files are floating all over Washington,” wrote Nicholas Horrock in The New York Times in May 1975. “An amendment to the Freedom of Information Act that went into effect in February has vastly increased the number of documents that are being declassified.”

Lyle Goodhue, at the Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland, had an idea of making an extremely fine bug-killing mist using pressurized freon mixed with pesticide.

Secrecy attracts people who like to get away with things. … Secrecy enables war’s infinite series of atrocities, some small, some huge.

At its peak in 1945, 3,900 people worked at Detrick, and yet not a whisper about what they were doing appeared in the press during the war.

Ishii Shiro and his covivisectionists had dusted birds with anthrax spores and used feathers as a transmission medium; in 1949 Oram Woolpert’s Special Operations Division followed suit, using not anthrax, but the spores of two fungal crop diseases, wheat stem rust and rye stem rust.

What was happening just then, in secret, was that scientists of covert warfare from Camp Detrick, along with Berkeley’s Albert Krueger and Captain Cecil Coggins of Naval Intelligence, had converged on San Francisco in order to investigate the “offensive possibilities of attacking a seaport city with a BW aerosol.”

Serratia marcescens, an organism chosen because it formed distinctive red colonies in petri dishes, wasn’t entirely innocuous—some San Franciscans contracted a rare kind of infection from it, and at least one, Edward Nevin, died.

The government said that the sudden, unprecedented appearance of a cluster of Serratia marcescens infections, never seen before or after, occurring just after the Army-Navy-CIA nozzle-fogging, was entirely coincidental.

In 1952, the Ralph M. Parsons Company (an oil-refinery engineering firm that had done a good deal of work for Detrick), working with “Stanford scientists”—probably chemists William Perkins and/or Philip Leighton—sent plumes of zinc cadmium particles into the city’s air from aerosol generators mounted on trucks and installed on rooftops. … Camp Detrick had come up with a cover story, a fairly good one, printed in newspapers: General Creasy said that the Army had hired the Ralph M. Parsons Company to perform a series of twenty to thirty “smoke screen” tests, in order to learn more about how clouds of simulated smoke behave in different kinds of weather.

Actually, the Minneapolis foggings were part of an ambitious series of experiments meant to find out how clouds of anthrax and other airborne diseases would behave over Russian cities. … Zinc cadmium sulfide dust was the simulant for anthrax, useful because it was fluorescent under ultraviolet light, and Minneapolis was the simulant for Kiev, in Soviet Russia.

The Air Force had targeted seventy Russian cities for destruction, Brugioni explained; Air Research’s job was to gain information about each area in order to, as he put it, “create a target chart for the Strategic Air Command to bomb the place.”

The Korean War was the beginning of the end for the library’s huge and irreplaceable wood-pulp newspaper collections: in trying to figure out how best to bomb our enemies, we bombed ourselves.

Finally, in October 2014, the Air Force released to Burr a nuclear targeting study from 1956 that included a computer printout of several hundred pages from Curtis Lemay’s Strategic Air Command. … The printout, although heavily redacted, listed more than twelve hundred Soviet bloc cities slated for “systematic destruction,” including Bucharest, Budapest, Dresden, East Berlin, Hanoi, Harbin, Nanking, Prague, Pyongyang, Riga, and Shanghai.

Except that Moynihan was wrong about relocating the paramilitary side. Just get rid of it. Covert lying and targeted killing and bribery and drones and all of it—and the hiring and training of indigenous thugs—whether it is done by the CIA or by Army Rangers or by Blackwater contractors, always, without exception, leads to disaster.

SENATOR DANIEL MOYNIHAN, thirty years ago, had a related idea. Break the CIA in two, he said. The intelligence function—the writing of learned research reports about the political situation in various countries—should go to the State Department, which had been doing it all along anyway, and the operational, paramilitary, counterinsurgency side should go to the Department of Defense.

The CIA is failing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, and hoarding its secrets forever, because the hoarding of secrets allows it to survive. The Agency narrowly missed being shut down in the 1970s, when the Church Committee pulled the drapes back and showed some of the squirming horror, but it was able to escape dissolution.

These human radiation boxes were maybe three times the size.

Each of my boxes was heavy. The normal archival box, called a Hollinger box, can hold roughly a thousand pages, although in practice they are more loosely packed and the folders take up room.

In less than half an hour I found the precious Frank Wisner document. It was still hard to read the date, but I think it was June 20, 1950.

“As you know,” Haskins writes, “I visualized that we might form an advisory committee for this work consisting of approximately six people, and the six who were considered were and myself.”

VKA was a plant hormone, 2,4-D (full name, 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid), one of the components of a mixture that some years later came to be called Agent Orange. … Norman treated test plots with VKA mixed with diesel fuel, tributyl phosphate, and other substances, and worked out how best to deliver it to rice, wheat, and other staple crops from B-25 bombers fitted with 550-gallon tanks.

Once the E-73 feather bomb was a reality, shown to have performed well on fields of oats in New York, the Air Force and the CIA began figuring out how best to use it to ruin Soviet agriculture. … The plan came to be called Project Steelyard—perhaps this was an allusion to the counterweighted steelyard scales that farmers traditionally used to measure how much heavy things (like bags of grain) weighed.

What is so clear to me, going through my hundreds of pages of notes from various declassified documents, is how wars introduce a red shift in human cruelty. It happens in battle, but also among civilians.

Albania was an experimental animal. (“Our ‘allies’ wanted to make use of Albania as a guinea pig, without caring about human losses,” said one survivor, Abas Ermenji.)

In 1984, Philip Roettinger, a former CIA case officer and Marine Corps colonel who was involved in the 1954 coup, wrote a penitent op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times. “I now consider my involvement in the overthrow of Arbenz a terrible mistake,” Roettinger wrote. “When I authorized Castillo Armas, then in a Tegucigalpa safehouse, to return to Guatemala and assume the presidency that we had prepared for him, I had no idea of the consequences of the CIA’s meddling. Our ‘success’ led to 31 years of repressive military rule and the deaths of more than 100,000 Guatemalans. Furthermore, the overthrow of the Arbenz government destroyed vital social and economic reforms, including land distribution, social security and trade-union rights.

And then came the list of all the covert things that were allowable under this new dispensation—the sabotage, the economic warfare, the “assistance to underground resistance movements,” and all the rest of it—all born secret and meant to stay secret: “so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” “Plausibly disclaim” is the almost comical circumlocution in place of the simpler word: “lie.” Later “disclaim” was sharpened to “deny,” and the doctrine of plausible deniability became a sacred phrase.

The National Security Council, taking cognizance of the vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups to discredit and defeat the aims and activities of the United States and other Western powers, has determined that, in the interests of world peace and US national security, the overt foreign activities of the US Government must be supplemented by covert operations.

The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface,” says the manual.

It has to be said: in the 1950s, the Library of Congress secretly became a military intelligence agency. … Because the library harbored so much secret activity, the administrators who got ahead tended to be Cold War hard-liners with security clearances.

When Knudson moved on from Des Moines, he left his research files at the Iowa State University Library for future inquirers, and a kind librarian there sent me scans of the material on hog cholera, which included Knudson’s notes and transcriptions.

All told, Schwarte killed more than 1,200 pigs in his search for a better way to kill pigs, according to Tom Knudson’s notes (along with 750 guinea pigs, 2,000 mice, and 700 rabbits).

Step five, which happened on July 14, 1951, was to fly a B-26 airplane over thirty-one hog pens and drop the experimental bombs, which opened fifteen hundred feet above the ground, releasing a cloud of turkey feathers and blood dust—the release looked like white smoke.

In 1950, the East Germans and the Czechs charged that American planes were dropping large numbers of potato beetles on their potato fields—and they were laughed at when they protested.

The death rate from Songo fever, initially, was about 30 percent.

General Waitt called Willoughby in Tokyo to say that the inquiry into Japanese biological research was already yielding important data. “I consider it vital that we get the information and that secrecy (which would be impossible if war crimes trials were held) be maintained,” he said.

In addition to informational interviews, the Detrick scientists had gathered a substantial collection of pathological specimens, including slides and bits and pieces of material from 246 plague victims, 135 cholera victims, 101 Songo fever victims, 36 anthrax victims, 16 mustard gas victims, and 30 suicides.

Botulinum toxin, being highly concentrated, was the most expensive weapon: it cost four hundred and twenty dollars per pound to make.

The confusion and disruption following an incendiary, HE, or atomic attack would be an incubator for disease agents.

On October 20, 1950, Twining issued a top-secret order to all of his deputies in the Air Force. “The Joint Chiefs of Staff have agreed,” he wrote, “that action should be initiated at once to make the United States capable of employing toxic chemical and biological agents and of defending against enemy use of these agents.”

What is not so well known about Doolittle is that he was a big fan of germ weapons. On August 10, 1951, an Air Force memo says, “General Doolittle has expressed his desire to have a briefing on recent developments in the Biological Warfare field.

Burden, who was in photographs a pouchy, owlish man, and was by his own account a discriminating wine connoisseur as well as a collector of great paintings, had an office next to Finletter and several capable assistants, and he began doing what he could to accelerate production of the hydrogen bomb.

When Burden became ambassador to Belgium in 1959, he discussed assassination plans with Belgian government officials. “The Belgians were sort of toying with the idea of seeing to it that Lumumba was assassinated,” Burden recalled in his oral history, held at Columbia University.

The firebombing of Korea wasn’t enough for Pat Partridge. He also wanted to destroy North Korea’s rice supplies. In his microfilmed diary, which I got (unredacted) from the Air Force Historical Research Agency, Partridge observes, on March 3, 1951, that a certain Dr. Cohen, a bomb-damage statistician, is visiting. (I think Partridge is talking about A. Clifford Cohen, a mathematician from the University of Georgia, who spent some months with the Fifth Air Force in 1951.) “I took advantage of his presence to pitch him a problem regarding the destruction of rice supplies,” Partridge writes. The North Korean rice supply was stacked in straw bags, visible from the air. “It seems to me that there should be some way of insuring that this can be made inedible:

GENERAL PARTRIDGE WAS WORKING by this time very closely with an eccentric, mentally unstable spy and fixer, Donald Nichols, who had the ear of President Syngman Rhee and help from Rhee’s brutish police force to get things done. Nichols claimed the Air Force gave him a license to murder, and he supervised, or at least observed, tortures and atrocities in South Korea in which hundreds of suspected Communist sympathizers were executed and buried in mass graves.

Obviously somebody is hiding something. Perhaps some of the reports have to do with Syngman Rhee’s prewar police-state atrocities, as described by Nichols. “I’ve witnessed many executions,” he writes in his autobiography, “and to the last second they’re fighting for their Communist way of life.” Or, really, who knows what the documents are about? That a known piece of paper is actively being suppressed is a valuable piece of information—often the only thing it is able to tell the world while its suppression is in effect.

PARTRIDGE WAS AN AIR FORCE GENERAL; most of what he did was overt. Donald Nichols was also in the Air Force, but most of what he did was covert. Project Baseless, the overt Air Force program of biowar research, development, and training—the effort on the part of Jimmy Doolittle and William Burden and Nathan Twining and James Totten (and do not forget Robert Lovett, secretary of defense) to achieve a large-scale, Air Force–wide “practical capability” in biological weapons at the earliest possible date, to be used against Russia and China in a total war—is, in a way, a blind, a smoke screen, a foil, for the looser and smaller-scale experiments in unconventional weaponry, including feathers and insects and modified leaflet bombs, that the Communists were (I believe legitimately) complaining about—and sometimes exaggerating.

So Jimmy Doolittle, in-house consultant for the Air Force on biological weapons, says there are no practical capabilities, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which included heads of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Army, and the Air Force, say there were good available capabilities.

Actually, both statements could be true. There could be no overt capabilities—an ability to employ a given weapon on an industrial scale—and plenty of quick-and-dirty covert capabilities, which could happen here and there.

Since Conant wasn’t briefed about the tunnel, he could claim that the charge was a baseless provocation.

Nishi also knew about the frostbite experiments. Prisoners, warmly dressed but bare-armed, were taken outside when it was twenty below zero. A fan blew air over their arms. “This was done until their frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives out when it is struck.” Then they were brought inside. “These researches were being conducted with a view to future war with the U.S.S.R.”

Defendant Mitomo, who had volunteered for duty at Detachment 100 to be with his friends, contaminated rivers and reservoirs with glanders and anthrax, and fed prisoners porridge mixed with lethal doses of heroin. Mitomo injected one drug-weakened Russian with cyanide, dissected him, and then buried him near the cattle pit. There was a murmur of indignation in the courtroom. Not in the cattle pit, Mitomo clarified; in a different pit.

THAT SAME DAY, December 27, 1949, a spokesman at MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo told reporters that there were no known cases in which Japanese germ-warfare scientists experimented on American prisoners of war, or indeed on prisoners of any nationality.

THE DETRICK SCIENTISTS read this book about the Khabarovsk trial carefully, I suspect. They studied the reports by Fell and Hill and Victor. And then they tried to improve on what the Japanese had planned to do to the Russians. Kill the wheat, kill the pigs, kill the chickens, kill the cattle, sicken the population.

Some years later Wise filed a FOIA request for records relating to the publication of The Invisible Government, and he got back a document in which someone at CIA recommended a media campaign, employing Agency assets to plant unfavorable reviews and thereby “lessen the book’s impact.”

The majority of the cases occurred north of the 38th parallel in the Yonchon-Chorwon-Kumhwa section of the front and the remainder in a belt along the 38th parallel,” wrote Carleton Gajdusek, an epidemiologist. “All evidence points toward infection from a common localized source over a brief period.

Kennedy, who won a Purple Heart after removing wounded men under mortar fire in 1953, came down with a bad fever soon after the fighting stopped in Korea, and couldn’t move from his sleeping bag.

It is a subject for interesting speculation as to how an ‘infection belt’ of hemorrhagic fever suddenly stretched from one coast of Korea to the other along the 38th Parallel, while not appearing either in Manchuria or along the transport routes in North Korea leading to the parallel.

Jenkins’s lab was able to produce half a million disease-infected mosquitoes a month. Which wasn’t enough, apparently: in a summary report from January 1960, the Chemical Corps said it had proposed the construction of a full-scale plant that would have a monthly output of 130 million mosquitoes.

And yet in 1963, in a paper in Military Medicine, Jenkins claimed, remarkably, that there had been no research at all into insect-borne weapons during the Korean War.

IN 2010, Julian Ryall wrote a piece in The Telegraph, “Did the United States Wage Germ Warfare in Korea?”

Operation CARCASS, according to memos from 1951 in the CREST database, aimed to train members of CABOCHE-1 to function as “penetration agents,” so that they could go on missions in the USSR and create “covert resistance nets.”

The CIA’s cryptonym for Italy was KMULCER.

The goal was total rollback: “Its maximum objective was the overthrow of the Albanian regime.”

Project BGFIEND, the Office of Policy Coordination’s effort in KMWAAHOOLAND—that is, Albania—was approved in June 1949.

“From a purely cold-blooded point of view,” Wisner wrote, “it might be better for us to concentrate all efforts to further disorganize and hamstring the tottering Albanian economy, thus leaving the Russians with the unhappy alternative of pouring in resources of their own or allowing the fate of a rotting and desperate Albania to appear before all the world as further evidence of what happens to countries and peoples within the Soviet orbit.”

CIA has introduced inefficient and cumbersome processes to make every FOIA request a laborious process and large requests virtually impossible.

As of 26 January 2017, this CREST kiosk will be decommissioned.

It didn’t just fail, it failed disastrously. It was the worst rice harvest since 1909.

The only reason Japan didn’t starve was that General MacArthur, supreme commander for the Allied powers, was prevailed upon to import a great deal of food in the ensuing months.

If you blank many proper names and sections of many paragraphs, the import of an entire document becomes blurred. … Redaction is a way of muffling the impact of something powerful.

Someone at the National Archives had written the CIA to ask whatever had happened to nine documents involved in a FOIA request relating to George Polk’s murder. Edmund Cohen, chief of information management, replied: “The Agency generally disposes of documents released to FOIA requesters and the associated source documents five years after the Agency’s response to the requester.”

Helms didn’t want the public to know about the mind-melting work of MKULTRA, ever. Someone whose name is whited out wrote, in a CREST database document from January 17, 1975, “Over my stated objections the MKULTRA files were destroyed by order of the DCI (Mr. Helms) shortly before his departure from office.”

Burning was initiated at 10:45; by 11:45 all 120 pounds were deposited in the burning chamber. At 12:15 the fire was completely out and complete destruction (100%) had been attained.

After years of litigation, the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals said that Wolf was permitted to see thirteen responsive documents from 1948. “It was at this point that the CIA admitted that its ‘Post WWII Era Records’ are on microfilm, and that their microfilms are indexed by an old IBM-type punch card computer which is no longer operational,” Wolf wrote in Counterpunch in 2008. “The CIA is demanding $147,000 to find the missing reports.”

Many years later, an American covert agent and soldier of fortune, Captain John M. Spirito, who’d served in Castro’s army in 1959, gave a taped interview in Cuba. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Spirito said, had been killed under orders of the American embassy.

More than 400 million barberry bushes were rooted out by Stakman’s diggers in a swath covering eighteen states.

From 1952 to 1957 an Army worker named Tom West cultivated quantities of wheat disease on plots the size of football fields at an unused military airfield in Boca Raton, Florida—now the site of the Boca Raton Airport.

Was the epidemic natural? What is natural?

In 1948, five staffers at Detrick got sick with rabbit fever, and fifteen came down with brucellosis. In 1949, five more got rabbit fever. Ten got brucellosis. A sewage-plant decontaminationist got cutaneous anthrax. Nobody died, but some were very sick.

The year 1951 was a bad year for safety. Forty-four people got sick, and thirty-six ended up in the hospital.

This plan is still applicable,” wrote the Joint Strategic Plans Committee. “It requires only minor changes in wording and form.” Plan Classroom was approved by Forrestal, but then Forrestal killed himself. Eventually it was resubmitted to the new secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, a temperamental lawyer who had raised a lot of money for Harry Truman’s campaign.

But the Russians were frightened, actually; they subsequently vastly ramped up their own biological-weapons research program.

History is about individual people doing things—and having things done to them. These people have names. That’s what’s so terrible about name redaction. You have the minutes of a meeting, and a paraphrase of what was said, but the heads are all lopped off. Name redaction is the decapitation of history.

The CIA used a clever argument to win that debate. If you allow us to keep secret our “operational” files, the Agency said—our covert-action, chaos-creating files, the ones that chronicle how we disrupted and disimproved entire countries and indeed whole regions of the planet—we will be freed up to respond with more speed and efficiency to our current multiyear backlog of FOIA requests.

Lieutenant O’Neal, a reservist with a master’s degree in chemistry from Tulane, describes attending two training lectures on biological weapons, one in the States and one in Korea.

O’Neal has this closing thought: “When I think of my future, when I think of someday—though I’m not married, I intend to be—when my son asks me what I did in Korea, how can I tell him that I came over here and dropped germ bombs on people, destroying them, bringing death and destruction? How can I go back and face my family in a civilized world? How can I tell them these things, that I—I am a criminal in the eyes of humanity? They’re my flesh and blood. It’s the most difficult thing, to really give a man’s feelings a vocal expression. I can’t try, I can only tell you somewhat of how I feel.”

In October 1949, the president showed James Webb, acting secretary of state, a map of Russia, color-coded to indicate where Muslims and Buddhists were to be found: they formed a wide belt across southern Russia. Both groups were antagonistic to the Soviet regime, Truman pointed out to Webb; perhaps they could be induced to make trouble at the border?

A Chinese Nationalist Army has struck 65 miles into Red China from its refugee base in Burma and seized a 100-mile-long frontier strip in Yunnan Province,” the Associated Press reported on July 28, 1951, without disclosing that the CIA had ordered and financed the attack.

KMPRUDE grew and was absorbed into something bigger called LCPROWL, which engaged in psychological warfare and spun off a network, or “Technical Service,” of paramilitary and sabotage teams whose job was to hoard weapons, train with CIA trainers, make liquidation lists of prominent Communists and Socialists, and wait for World War III.

LCPROWL’s cover was blown in October 1952, when the guerrilla-training network became front-page news all over Germany. The Frankfurter Allgemeine ran a long article with the headline “A Secret Organization Unearthed.”

In January 1958, however, the entire anticrop program came under attack: a report by the Operations Research Office said that plant killing was inefficient and costly.

All through the 1950s, Dale Jenkins and other Fort Detrick scientists worked on ways to use mosquitoes and other insects to make people sick.

Paul Linebarger, aka science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith, was hired to study anticrop warfare in 1962. Linebarger and his colleagues wrote: “The advent of modern biological and chemical agents which can effectively attack and destroy a variety of crops now makes it possible to consider the delivery of such agents on a strategic scale to wipe out entire crops of a region or country, thus leaving the target nation in a state of famine and subsequent starvation.”

In July 1963, Charles Minarik hosted a two-day defoliation conference at Fort Detrick. He invited contractors and scientists from all over the country to meet and give presentations and tour the test fields and greenhouses.

The second-biggest plan—that I can think of right now at least—was Operation Sphinx, a plan to kill or injure more than ten million people by air-dropping a hundred thousand tons of poison gas on Japanese cities.

In all, said the planners, the gas attacks “might easily kill 5,000,000 people and injure that many more.”

After Tokyo, twenty-five cities were specified as “especially suitable for gas attacks.”

By controlling their own records, and purging them, and cutting all the interesting parts out of them, they are forcing a state of amnesia on a whole country—on us—so that we don’t know what we as a purportedly self-governing nation did.

Really secrecy is about mind control. It’s about deliberately imposed historical amnesia. If you can suppress all knowledge of something like Operation Sphinx for decades, you allow the myth of American decency and goodness to endure.

MKULTRA had as one of its major goals the refinement of drugs and techniques that create a state of amnesia.

Jackson believed that the Soviets’ sinister purpose was to “plant the idea that maybe the Americans are morally capable of initiating germ warfare.”

Irwin told me that he came to understand later that Lodge’s effort to invalidate the Communist allegations was based on untruths and “machinations.”

“This was, I think, about the only experience I ever had,” Irwin said, “in which I was engaged in an operation which turned out to be based to a great extent on falsehoods.”

“A lot of people want to protect their backside—and protect the institutional setting that they are still working for.”

STARTING IN MAY 1971, the Department of Defense began destroying its biological weapons stockpile: 220 pounds of anthrax, 804 pounds of tularemia, 334 pounds of Venezuelan equine encephalitis, 4,991 gallons of Venezuelan equine encephalitis in liquid suspension, 5,098 gallons of Q fever, and tens of thousands of bombs.

“Where we have previously had scientists—some of the best people that we could possibly find in the United States—working on weapons of war, we now have scientists devoting their efforts toward saving life,” President Nixon said.

I REALLY THINK GUATEMALA is the key to Korea and germ warfare. The Guatemala records are complete enough that you understand how the men at the Office of Policy Coordination planned something and then shifted around when it was exposed, and how they then indignantly denied what they knew to be true: 1954 is the key to 1952.

Blome was acquitted of war crimes charges at Nuremberg. … In 1947, he began to pass on his biowar lore to scientists from the Special Operations Division of Camp Detrick. … By 1950, he was working for the Americans.

Keeping the original pages, too, of course, at the National Archives: you always, always want to keep the paper.

Twenty million dollars is about the cost of buying, arming, and flying one Reaper drone for a year. … It’s less than 1 percent of the cost of one ridiculous Zumwalt “stealth” destroyer.

Korean hemorrhagic fever, carried by the field vole, now classified as one of the hantaviruses, is still a problem in Korea today.

But once the operation was blown, I think, the CIA quickly mounted a bigger campaign that was biological only in the sense that living creatures were involved. … The 1952 effort quickly became a psychological-warfare campaign, or a nerve-war campaign—a campaign to cause fear and confusion and revulsion.

In this case a flight of aircraft spraying an area extending for a considerable distance along or near the Korean bank of the Yalu River is indicated.

Frank Wisner had the first of several breakdowns in 1956, after the Soviets suppressed the Hungarian uprising. “That’s when he first went nuts,” according to his friend and CIA colleague Tom Braden.

“FRANK GARDINER WISNER, a former New York lawyer and for many years a top official of the Central Intelligence Agency, died at his farm in nearby Galena, Maryland, today,” said The New York Times, in an article datelined October 29, 1965. “According to the police in Kent County, Md., Mr. Wisner shot himself in the right temple with a 20-gauge shotgun.” He was only fifty-six.

Plan Classroom, kept secret for seventy years, aimed to trick and frighten the Russians into entering into a hazardous, large-scale bioweapons arms race with the United States.

The plan worked all too well: the Russians were deceived, the biological arms race intensified; germy stews were cooked up in unsafe laboratories around the world.

Bit by bit, as with this one tiny release of a single Defense Department plan from 1949, we begin to understand how we got to where we are. But the process of disclosure has been too slow. Every U.S. government document that’s more than fifty years old should be released in full, right now. No redactions. As a first step.