According to the jacket cover, Jacques Bergier, a chemical engineer trained at the Faculty of Sciences and the National Academy of Chemistry in Paris, devoted the early part of his career to the study of technical and industrial processes and their use and adaption for military purposes. He fought in the Resistance during World War II and was a POW. After the war, he joined the Bureau de la Documentation des Exterieurs et de Contre-Espionnage. Other books by former French Secret Service agent Dr. Bergier include THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS and EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL VISITATIONS from PREHISTORIC TIMES TO THE PRESENT
The cause would seem to be obvious. For five years defoliants from Dugway had been used in the region, the same defoliants that were being used in Vietnam. The population, once assured the chemicals were totally harmless, now no longer believed that, especially since they saw two dogs drop dead from direct contact with a few drops of the stuff.
The people protested, formed a committee, and wrote their congressman. The Senate commission heard then Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Robert Finch and Dr. Lee Dubridge, former President Nixon's scientific advisor. Their statements were not made public. Nor were those of investigating senators or independent experts from the University of Arizona.
Two possible explanations were put forth. First, it was theorized that the defoliants had been mixed with water rather than with the usual Diesel fuel; the hot Arizona sun had caused the water to evaporate, leaving the chemical in its full harmful strength. Second (and more likely), it was said that, as a result of some mistake, the good people of Arizona had been favored, if we may use the term, with military defoliants a lot stronger than the normal civilian product.
A secret report on the matter (existence of which was authoritatively ,confirmed in The Observer, April 5, 1970) speculated that the defoliants used could produce mutations and cause the birth of monsters. Needless to say, this caused quite a stir in the U.S., one result of which was an official ban of all use of biological weapons.
But that was not the end of the trail. While foreign spies probably knew all about Dugway, the public did not, and wanted to. It also wanted be informed about the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, the 17,300 acres which were (and still are) being used for developing not only chemical d biological weapons but also antiriot devices. Why not give protesting citizens a taste of what we have in store for uniformed enemies?
Not too long ago, a train loaded with hundreds of tons of poison gas was scheduled to be sent across the U.S., but public outcry forced cancellation of the operation.
Americans now know that a lot of what goes on at Dugway and other such places is kept from them; they are afraid that perhaps even more serious things are being kept secret.
Obviously, professional spies are better informed on this than I can be. But there are still a number of things that can be told, and some conclusions that can be drawn from them. Let us merely note that places like Dugway are choice targets for spies, for a scientist who tells what goes on there may sincerely believe he is working for peace.
From all that has come out, Dugway concentrates on poisons as well as gases, drugs as well as microbes. And there seems to be no difficulty in recruiting scientists for such work. The appeals to the scientific conscience issued by such writer-scientists as Robin Clarke have fallen on deaf ears. We may safely assume that those who work at Dugway honestly believe they would be leaving their country disarmed if they rejected work that scientists of other countries are doing.
So, at Dugway, there are vegetable and animal poisons. A fish recently discovered in Japan was so toxic that one gram of the poison extracted from it could kill two thousand people. There are plant poisons even more virulent, plus new biological drugs, only one of which has been given some notoriety by the press: BZ gas.
This gas, already tested in Vietnam, according to U.S. Army manual TM 3-215 produces hallucinations, vertigo, and sometimes even madness. The exact formula for BZ is of course one of the main objectives of scientific-espionage services. No one knows whether they have found it. Nor is it out of the question to think that some of those involved with BZ might tell enemy agents what it consists of in the hope of maintaining world peace.
Dugway must also be at work on the various openly toxic gases (not just "incapacitators"), derived from the German gases perfected during World War II but unused for fear of reprisals: tabun, sarin, and soman.
These gases must have been further refined, and research on them one of Dugway's principal concerns. The gases may indeed already have been used in Vietnam to destroy Vietnamese in inaccessible underground bunkers. The Egyptians are also said to have used them in Yemen. Americans and Egyptians both deny these allegations; all that can be said is that there is no solid proof.
I have never been to Dugway, but have been inside enough comparable installations to try a description which will not be entirely imaginary.
The first thing you would notice on entering would be a distinctive smell and an undertone of animal cries. Such installations use a huge number of animals-not as sadistic vivisectionists or inhumane Dr. Moreaus; they inflict the least suffering they can. But that does not keep research animals from being noisy; their sound as well as their stench is characteristic of a bacteriological-warfare research center.
The next thing you would notice is the badges, allowing entry to one building or another. Only security agents or distinguished visitors with full Clearance Q can go everywhere. Others may be let into one, two, or three buildings, and the colors of badges are real signs of social status. Green badges may go into red and yellow areas, and yellow may go into red, but red badges cannot go beyond their own work zones. Refectories and residences are equally stratified.
It is best not to talk too much in the refectory, which is probably bugged all over. Everyone has signed a pledge of silence, but some talk anyway: things break in the press, secret services pick up tips. Obviously, the key giveaways are those deaths on the outside.
On the inside, there is little to see: research laboratories are not picturesque. No enormous machines, no computers, none of the Rube Goldbergisms of sci-fi movies. This in itself is an awful truth: extremely simple methods, very modest expenditures, suffice to make the awful weapons of chemical-bacteriological warfare. And once a weapon is perfected, it can easily be mass-produced, often in entirely automated factories.
What measures the degree of perfection? The LD, or lethal dose coefficient. This, of course, is determined on guinea pigs, but human figures are then easily extrapolated. Here, for example, is the calculation of a lethal dose as computed in a recent publication by Marcel Fetizon and Michel Magat:
The lethal dose of the gas sarin is about thirty times lower than that of phosgene, considered the most effective of all fatal gases before the 1939-45 war. Which means the lethal dose is .01 milligram per human kilogram of weight, or about .7 mg. for an adult and .1 to .3 mg. for a child. The adult dose can be absorbed in a few minutes if the concentration of sarin reaches. I to .3 mg. per liter of air (at 2 to 4 mg. per air liter, one whiff is fatal). On this basis, it is easy to determine that to reach a fatal concentration in the air over a city the size of Paris at a height of fifteen meters would require some 250 tons of sarin. This is not huge, if one considers that German reserves of sarin in 1945 were 7,200 tons, and that 250 tons today could be carried by twenty to twenty-five bombers. In the eighties, an equal number of missiles will probably be enough.
At the Pentagon or Dugway there are terrifying LD files, with potentials probably much greater than these. Spies must more or less successfully be going after these files so as to be able to furnish a general description of a given chemical-bacteriological weapon and its LD, specifying the nature of the microbe used, the formula of the gas, and the manner in which use is anticipated. This is almost always the same: aerosols with the active ingredient dissolved in an easily atomized liquid.
Not all research, of course, is lethal. One such project, for instance, was the much talked about Project Bloodsucker. It was looking for a chemical to ward off the leeches that attached themselves to American soldiers in the Vietnam jungles. But the beneficial character of the project and the publicity given it were not enough to redeem Dugway's bad name.
Another publicized Dugway project was MAO (not to be confused with the Chinese chairman). MAO stands for monoamine oxidase , catalyst for human brain reactions. An increase or reduction of MAO action, affecting it positively or negatively, can control the human mind. Various psycho drugs act on MAO, and the hallucinogen war, which has, become a real psychological warfare factor, consists in reducing MAO action to the point where the brain takes for reality the hallucination, produced by tiny parasitic oscillators. Theoretically, it might be possible in warfare to saturate the entire atmosphere of the target with drugs that neutralize the MAOS. The victims then would no longer know what the, were about-a useful ploy if the aim were to incapacitate a general staff, but much more ominous, it seems to me, if it were used against a silo of missile with thermonuclear warheads. The personnel of the silo might hallucinate the outbreak of a new world war and act accordingly. Since the silos know 1 to the great powers already house the equivalent of a hundred tons of TNT per inhabitant of the globe, the least that can be said about this is that it is dangerous game. We can only hope no one will ever be mad enough to try.
For a drug like this, it is not the LD that is important, but the dosage that causes victims to lose all rationality: the dose that does this for an adult I male may well prove fatal to a child or a pregnant woman. So it is better not to refer to this kind of thing as "humane warfare" or "pacification weapons." Those terms are a real mockery, unless the only targets were warships or fortifications.
Professor Carl-Goren Heden says on this subject:
What we must remember is that such weapons, like all mass-destruction weapons, will never be selective enough to spare individuals who are not responsible for the situations that called them forth. Meantime, the champions of war-game playing who weigh the costs of antiballistic missiles against the "acceptable( number of casualties involved had better think twice before trying to calculate their sportsmanship of their adversaries where bacteriological arms are concerned.
First, money: both salary and research grants. Salaries appear to about three times what scientists would get for comparable work teaching. In the U.S. alone, something like a billion dollars in (non accountable) "black funds" is available for this kind of research-far beyond what funds there are for any other research work.
Then, there is also the academic consideration: in 1970, in the U.S., a Vietnam-war-connected project could qualify for a Ph.D. in record tin and with the greatest of ease. And the doctorate was likely to lead to a huge further work grant on the Dugway circuit. small manual on grants by one Harold Wooster showed how easy it get up to half a million dollars for any project that seemed to have military potential. And the project would generally throw off enough publishable by-products to guarantee a secure and brilliant university career a few years after Dugway.
Drawbacks? Not many. The danger of accident is slight, and people in general are unaware of the real activity taking place. Scientists, of course, about it-but they also know that attacking Professor X and his work at Dugway may lead at the least to accusations of disloyalty, and sometimes to becoming persona non grata in academic circles. So it is naive to think Professor X might stop studying the dropping of mortal microbes on civilian populations because of professional disapproval.
The average German knew that concentration camps existed, but that never kept him from sleeping. The average scientist is aware of Dugway, but he too loses no sleep. Of course, the Dugway people feel some moral scruples, and foreign spies take advantage of these scruples to get information they say will be passed along to pacifist scientists. But that does not keep the main body of Dugway employees from working with colored badges on, burning the contents of their wastebaskets, and locking their file drawers. They do not seem to hear the warnings that come from Pugwash. They no doubt rationalize with the belief that in West Germany, or the USSR, the same kind of research is going on.
The fact that children in Vietnam die because Dugway's output destroys rice paddies (one kilogram destroys two hundred square meters of rice) seems to have shocked no one. Rather than close our eyes to it, better to admit that Dugway exists. Naturally, former President Nixon is to be congratulated for his decision: limited though it be, no other country has done as much. True, Dugway did not close as a result: it even extended its tentacles and developed some satellites. The following educational organizations are all working with or for it: Duke University Medical Center, Stanford University, Brooklyn College, New York Botanical Gardens, Midwest Research Institute, Southern Research Institute, University of Maryland, Illinois Institute of Technology, Hahnemann Medical College, University of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, George Washington University, and University of Utah. That makes these schools and centers, and their connections with Dugway and with each other, prime age targets.
Nigel Balchin, in his fine novel Who Is My Neighbor? (1950), showed the kind of blackmail used to force scientists to work on immunological weapons. His story, based on facts, has never been denied. But novels are not the sole sources of such information. In Le Monde, October 25, 1968, Louis de Villefosse, who was assistant chief of staff of the Free French Forces (1941-42), French representative to the Allied Commission on Italy (1946-47), and a member of the Scientific Action Committee of French National Defense (1949), said: And why not prepare an even more absolute, more atrocious weapon, by cultivating the infection agents of plague and other diseases, as American and Russian laboratories have been doing for a score of years? I have seen these hideous aspects of future scientific war: this was one of the reasons for my giving up a military career before joining the campaign for the Stockholm Peace Appeal. There are innumerable people in the world who are revolted by the idea of such genocide.... Let us not exaggerate the "innumerability" of such people-but there are some. If Dugway is the pilot, there are huge factories about the world, which the secret services try to spy out, making huge quantities of such chemical and psychochemical weapons. In 1959 a Russian scientist, Professor M. M. Dubinin, told a Pugwash conference that six hundred thousand tons of offensive chemical weapons were at the time being produced worldwide annually. That is quite enough to wipe out the whole population of the globe several times. The toxics, liquids rather than gases, are now mass-produced everywhere. The New York Times on February 15, 1967, reported that the previous day: A petition calling for an over-all review of United States policy on chemical and biological warfare was turned over to the White House today by four scientists who estimated they had signatures from 5,000 of their peers. Included among the names were those of 17 Nobel Prize winners and 127 members of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most prestigious group of scientists. . . . The petition asked the President to take the following steps: Institute a White House study of over-all Government policy on chemical and biological weapons. Order a halt to the use of antipersonnel and anticrop chemical weapons in Vietnam. "Re-establish and categorically declare the intention of the United States to refrain from initiating the use of chemical and biological weapons."
The petition was delivered by Drs. Paul Doty, John Edsall and Matthew Meselson of Harvard and Dr. Erwin C. Gunsalus of the University of Illinois. . . .
We know little about the virtually unlimited potential of biology. Professor Salvador Luria, the famous M.I.T. biologist and Nobel Prize. winner, recently cited experiments done on flies with a virus that made them vulnerable to carbonic acid gas. Normally this carbon dioxide produced by breathing or combustion is not toxic for such flies, but when the virus is present, it is. So Professor Luria speculated: "What might happen if someone spread such a substance that made the whole populations of the world, except a small group of plotters, vulnerable to some common substance, and refused to reveal the antidote unless he were made master of the world?"
Other scientists have said that such a war would not be declared and would not be immediately apparent. Crops might decrease in size and quality, epidemics spread, people become irritable for no reason, all the results of an undeclared biological attack.
It is understandable that espionage wants to know what the scientists, have in their papers and their test tubes. Dugway is a fine target for such spying, especially since its existence and location are no secret. Other targets are less accessible, but let us consider how some imaginary, espionage service, whether that of an enemy of the U.S. or of a friend (if there be friends in matters of espionage), might go about investigating Dugway and U.S. preparations for chemical-bacteriological warfare.
The first step would be open intelligence, the gathering of all' meaningful published material on the subject (this is the method used for documenting this book).
Amazing how many such details are available and how good they are: tens of volumes, hundreds of periodicals. The Americans have even released films from Dugway, showing, among others, the BZ hallucinogenic gas.
The next step for our imaginary agent would be to analyze the American chemical and petrochemical industries, to see what industrial products or by-products are cheap enough and in wide enough supply to serve as raw materials for poison gases, tranquilizers, or incapacitators, produced in the kind of quantities Dugway would make. Obviously, if the aim is to make thousands of tons of something per year, it has to obtained from a molecule that is widely available in everyday commercial, use. Otherwise, you would have to set up a highly costly-and unmistakable bly visible-new industry. All the poison gases of World War 11 were products widely used in the chemical industry, or derivatives thereof.
We would also be looking for the funding of such manufacture. These funds were drastically increased by President Kennedy: a matter of twenty percent, or some fifty-six million dollars. That is small in terms of the overall defense budget, but an awful lot of a simple gas can be turned out for that price. In 1962 Secretary of Defense McNamara (now director of the International Bank) further raised the ante, while stressing that these were for nonlethal gases. Those who were close to President Kennedy say he was most interested in the possibility of using gas rather than A-bombs.
Turning to the literature, our imaginary service would note in the summer of 1964 a number of references to a factory at Newport, Indiana. It was supposed to have made a gas that provoked instant death by choking, through dilatation of the muscles. Much was printed about it, including pictures. We would then have a satellite today take pictures of Newport, to see whether that factory was still operating, or whether we could spot others. After the Newport brouhaha, there was a blackout on chemical-warfare information in the U.S., until President Nixon's 1969 statement banning it. By that time, allocations for it had reached two hundred million dollars a year. No way of telling whether this figure covered mass production of gases and masks (in which case it might be rather slight), or only research (in which case it would be rather huge).
The only published material I have found since that blackout is a study that shows the horned toad to be naturally completely immune to the worst nerve gases. It might be worthwhile to find out why, and develop a homed-toad serum that might protect humans.
The next object would be the scientists at Dugway. It would not be too hard to make up a list of them, and then it would be child's play to get their publications and have a general idea of their work, So if a horned-toad specialist is working at Dugway or one of its contract-affiliates, we might be pretty sure he was studying the toads' gas-immunity. When the Germans went heavily into nerve-gas research in 1934, they scoured Europe for specialists in hearts of snails, this organ reacting very specially to traces of the gas. If the survey of the Dugway scientific publications were done by computer, it would surely detect the general lines of the research going on there.
Beyond the research qualities of the people at Dugway, we would also be interested in them as human beings. What are their foibles, their weak points, the triggers that might bring some of these men or women to give information on their work? As noted earlier, an appeal to "idealism" would be used, and many of them might think they were giving the information to Pugwash or a comparable group when in reality they were informing the military intelligence of a foreign government.
Finally, as a last resort, we might try for a defection, in the hope of eventually producing on TV a "refugee from Dugway" to describe its horrors. The East Germans did get one such scientist from a West German gas laboratory: he defected and gave terrifying details to the East German press and TV. The place he worked would seem to have been a quite illegal outpost of Dugway itself, but so far no Dugway scientist has surfaced. If one should, it would be one of the great coups of scientific espionage.