safety issues….There comes a point in time when you see — and you
know — the only logical response is to make that uncomfortable decision with the best interests of lots and lots of people in mind." The decision was the right one. Huxsoll's well-trained medical soldiers — led by virus hunter C. J. Peters, who stalked Rift Valley fever through Egypt a decade before— successfully beat back the Ebola virus.
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Huxsoll served on three U.N. biological warfare inspection teams in Iraq, leading two of them. In Iraq he interrogated directors and middle managers of medical and academic facilities like the University of Baghdad and the College of Agriculture. As with the United States, following the veterinarians revealed clues about germ warfare. Says Huxsoll, "Probably the greatest capability in addressing the biological villains, and those having a true understanding of it, was at the veterinary vaccine places." Special military satellite image maps enhanced by computer line drawings afforded the inspection team an uncanny recreation — down to exact shapes and sizes — of each suspected germ weapon manufacturing plant. Among the long sheet maps Huxsoll unfurled in front of his impressed Iraqi hosts ("I think it got to the point they probably thought we had more capability than we really did") was a single-cell protein facility at Al-Hakam. Ostensibly, that operation grew colonies of bacteria in big fermenter vats to be dried and milled into high-protein animal feed. But the team discovered a fair amount of evidence that it was used for biological agents, and ultimately the Iraqis admitted it. It wasn't easy to determine, however. "The plant that would produce biological agents for weapons purposes," Huxsoll notes, "may not look too much different from the plant that produces biological agents for vaccine purposes or for making beer." Chemical agents are another story. Chemical plants have what is called a large "signature," while biological facilities have a far smaller footprint. "If you're going to dump chemical agents on a significant portion of Long Island," Dr. Huxsoll postulates, "you have to have tons of the stuff. Now, in the case of biological [agents], you can measure what you need for the same area on Long Island in kilograms, not tons. That's because you can disseminate them in an aerosol, and if you are good at this, you can spread it over a huge distance." Following those tiny footprints all throughout Iraq, Huxsoll's teams uncovered volumes of anthrax, botulinum toxin, ricin, gas gangrene, and other anticrop and antilivestock germs being prepared and weaponized on the tips of bombs.
Before the first Gulf War, says Huxsoll, little effort was put into biological warfare intelligence. But after he helped uncover the Iraqi program, America turned its eyes to the rapidly disappearing Soviet Union, and Hux-soll inspected weapons plants there, too. "Their programs were far beyond the imaginations of anybody," he says. "We're talking about big facilities. Huge. Huge beyond the imagination. Incomprehensible. Very plain, very stark. Desolate and unattractive. Nothing decorative about it." In the vanquished Iraq, Huxsoll's horde of UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission on Iraq) scientists, interpreters, communications officers, and photographers could go anywhere and be as intrusive as it pleased. When it came to Russia, however, for every suspected facility the American inspectors asked to see, the Russians could see an American one in return. "And that really begins to create some problems. Not that you are trying to hide anything, but to have them go into Eli Lilly and Merck and take samples?"
One of the doors the Russians would pry open was the door to Plum Island.
The first thing Dr. Huxsoll did after accepting the Plum Island directorship (he refers to it as just "one more interesting type of experience") was to call a truce with the community. He raised the white flag by proposing to open the island to public tours, perhaps once a week, so the public could learn more about the mysterious animal virus kingdom. "There's nothing to hide," says Huxsoll. "No need to hide anything at all. I can be extremely proud of what we do here, and extremely proud of why we're doing it." But the half-hearted olive branch never materialized, and the September 11, 2001, attacks foreclosed the idea of an open-door policy for the foreseeable future.
With Huxsoll in control, Plum Island finally appeared to be in capable hands, under the leadership of this tested, experienced ex-military commander. That is, until one hears the island's previous directors talk about him. "Dave Huxsoll is a really good guy," says Dr. Breeze. "But he doesn't have the power that I did. The bean counters are running that in a way that actually isn't the right way to do it… " And Dr. Callis, in a rare statement about Plum Island leadership, admitted, "Huxsoll is there just because the USDA thinks it can upgrade [to biosafety level four]."
What about Plum Island itself and anthrax? The USDA made it a priority after the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001 to state repeatedly that it did not have and never had anthrax on Plum Island. If that really is true, it is quite curious that the FBI's lie detector tests for scientists suspected of the anthrax attacks included these three questions:
• Have you ever been to Plum Island?
• Do you know anybody who works at Plum Island?
• What do they do there?
As noted earlier, the Army's housewarming gift to the USDA upon bequeathing Plum Island in 1954 was 131 strains of germs, including 12 vials of "N," the now-declassified code name for the original weapons-grade anthrax designed by Plum Island founding father Dr. Hagan. If Plum Island never worked on anthrax or kept it in its freezers, then the USDA must explain when the code name "N" changed from anthrax to another germ. And if there is no anthrax on Plum Island, the USDA has both the FBI and its own founding fathers fooled.
The New York Times revealed in late 1999 that the USDA was quietly upgrading Plum Island from a biosafety level three to a biosafety level four laboratory. The story provoked a howl of protest from Long Island's east end communities. The structural difference between BSL-3 and -4 is minimal — face respirators are worn while working with "hot" agents in a level three facility, while level four requires full-body spacesuits. Here's the important difference: the level four germs. Once upgraded, Plum Island joins charter members CDC and Fort Detrick in an exclusive club whose membership benefits include working with agents, lethal ones that have no vaccine and no cure. These include mad cow disease, the Nipah pig virus (that killed a million pigs and 265 people in Malaysia in 1999), and the Ebola, Marburg, and Machupo hemorrhagic fever viruses (all related to Rift Valley fever virus). Biosafety level distinctions, however, never deterred Plum Island research in the past. For example, Rift Valley fever virus and glanders bacteria are classified borderline germs, lying between biosafety levels three and four. Both are biological warfare agents and have been studied intensively at Plum Island. Some literature classifies glanders, the bacteria used by Germany in World War I, as level three, yet a federal government document relating to 1989 Plum Island research is titled "Biosafety for Animal Rooms with Glanders — Biosafety Level 4."
Despite the USDA's secret efforts, Congressman Mike Forbes, Hochbrueckner's successor, who had eyed Plum Island skeptically since his surprise visit with Karl Grossman, intervened and killed the BSL upgrade line item in the 2001 federal budget. For the first time, the local community triumphed over the USDA's designs for Plum Island. The USDA again pushed to upgrade Plum Island after September 11, 2001, but it has been fought off thus far by Forbes's two successors.