Now let’s focus our attention upon the United States’s equivalent of Porton Down: Fort Detrick.
Fort Detrick
In 1941, President Roosevelt secretly ordered the establishment of a program that came to be officially known as the U.S. Biological Warfare Program. As a result of Roosevelt’s historic move, in 1943, the newly designated Camp Detrick, in Maryland, was assigned to the Army Chemical Warfare Service for the specific development of a center dedicated to biological warfare issues. Twelve months later, Camp Detrick was established as an installation focused on the research and development of both offensive and defensive biological warfare techniques and agents.
In 1956, the name of the installation was changed from Camp Detrick to Fort Detrick, but its workload remained very much the same. Then, on April 1, 1972, following the official closure of offensive biological warfare studies in the United States, the control of Fort Detrick was transferred from the U.S. Army Material Command to the Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army. One year later, Fort Detrick was assigned to the newly created U.S. Army Health Services Command. And in 1995, the HSC was itself reorganized, into the U.S. Army Medical Command. Perhaps not surprisingly, Fort Detrick, just like Porton Down, is a hotbed of controversial deaths.
Few people who lived through it will ever likely forget the incredible wave of terror that swept the United States when, only one week after the shocking events of September 11, 2001 unfolded, anonymously mailed envelopes containing anthrax spores arrived at the offices of a variety of major media outlets, including the New York Post, CBS News, and ABC News. Two Democratic senators, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, were also targeted with the potentially deadly substance. The results were catastrophic. At least 22 people were infected, of whom five tragically lost their lives. The situation led the FBI to launch one of the biggest manhunts in its long and winding history.
Documentation that has surfaced via the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act shows that, by the early months of 2005, the FBI had a suspect in the anthrax mailings case firmly in mind. It was not some minion of Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, however, as many had assumed (and as many within the administration of George W. Bush earnestly hoped would be the case). Rather, it was a Dr. Bruce Edwards Ivins, a microbiologist who had worked for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick for no less than 18 years.
By 2007, Ivins became the subject of periodic secret surveillance by the FBI personnel assigned to the operation. And it did not take the FBI long to build up what was perceived by the Bureau as a very strong case against the man: In June 2008, Ivins was informed that prosecution for the anthrax attacks, as well as for the subsequent injuries and deaths, was almost certainly forthcoming. Ivins did not wait around to learn what the FBI had in store for him. On July 27, 2008, he died as a result of a significant overdose of acetaminophen, a pain reliever. As was the case with the various microbiologists attached to Porton Down, England, whose lives ended so abruptly and suspiciously in this very same time frame, probing questions were asked as to whether Ivins had really taken his own life, or if he was merely a convenient scapegoat for a far bigger, wide-ranging conspiracy.
One theory suggested that Ivins was nothing more than a Lee Harvey Oswald — style patsy, and that the anthrax attacks were actually the work of rogue elements within the Bush Administration that were intent on terrorizing the nation to such a degree that no one would even dare to question Dubya’s plans to invade the Middle East and establish footholds in both Iraq and Afghanistan before then moving on to Iran, and who knew where else after that.
FBI sources stated that in the direct aftermath of the anthrax attacks, the White House practically ordered Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, to find a link— any link, no matter how tenuous — between the anthrax attacker and Osama bin Laden. Despite the unrelenting pressure put on Mueller, FBI agents wryly noted that there was no way whatsoever that the particular strain of anthrax in question could have been fashioned by “some guy in a cave.”[49]
Whether or not the FBI was right to focus on Ivins, Dr. Meryl Nass, an authority on anthrax, said that regardless of how accurate microbial forensics might be, that discipline would only have the ability to connect the anthrax to a specific strain and place of origin, and not to any particular individual. Regardless, as a result of the fact that Ivins was now dead and the FBI had no other target in sight, it elected to close its investigation on February 19, 2010. Not everyone was satisfied with the outcome, however.
Echoing the sentiments of many, Senator Leahy — who had been one of the key targets of the anthrax attacks — said of the theory that Ivins had been the sole culprit, “If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape, or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people. I do not believe that at all.”[50]
There is a curious afterword to this story: Militarized Anthrax, as it is known, was developed by William C. Patrick III, who, throughout the course of an extensive, multifaceted career, was employed at Fort Detrick and the equally secret Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, and periodically undertook contract work for the CIA. Patrick, who died in 2010 at the age of 84, developed a process by which anthrax spores could be concentrated at a level of one trillion spores per gram, which happens to be the precise concentration of the anthrax utilized in the 2001 attacks — yet another clear indicator that, regardless of the role played (or not played) by Ivins, the anthrax attacks were domestic in origin. Aside from the United States, no nation on the planet has ever successfully managed to achieve concentrations above 500 billion per gram.
In later years Patrick worked closely with a certain Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov, who rose through the ranks of the Soviet Army to become the first Deputy Director of the Russian equivalent of Fort Detrick and Porton Down: Biopreparat. Alibekov, who defected to the United States in 1992, now goes by the far more Western moniker of Ken Alibek. Interestingly (some might say highly curiously), before his defection, Alibekov’s boss was none other than Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, who, as we have seen, was an expert in the field of anthrax research, and died under questionable circumstances in Wiltshire, England, in November 2001, only a month after the anthrax attacks in the United States were at their height.
Whether as a result of its reported ties to anthrax attacks, the Age of Terror, and groundbreaking research into the realm of biological warfare, Fort Detrick, just like its British cousin, Porton Down, remains an enigmatic installation.
C-13
The Secret Island
The commonwealth of Puerto Rico is what is known as an unincorporated territory of the United States, and is located in the Caribbean Sea. According to some, it may very well be the most secrecy-shrouded place on the planet, home to not just one secret base, but a plethora of classified locations, certainly of a governmental nature, and maybe even of an alien nature too. Throughout the course of the last 20 years or so, the people of Puerto Rico have been swamped by UFO encounters, sightings of strange and unearthly craft surfacing from mountainous lairs and undersea installations, and run-ins with strange, vampiric creatures that one might accurately describe as the distinctly evil twins of Steven Spielberg’s benign E.T.