Seymour Hersh

9. Finding America’s Hidden Arsenal

88 CHAPTER 9 Finding America’s Hidden Arsenal “Just a Drop Can Kill” The- top-of-the-page banner headline was ominous: “U.S. Could Deliver Deadly Gases, Germs.” Although pushed back to page four of the April 14, 1967, edition of Stars and Stripes, the independent newspaper that covers the military, the headline seemed to warn of ghastly American weapons with a searing exposé to follow. The byline was Seymour H. Hersh. Inexplicably, M for Myron was replaced with an H. Hersh might have been happy, however, if his name had been left off the article completely . The article was bland and muted. A subheadline took the bite out of Hersh’s warning: “Research Is Defensive: To Deter Enemy,” which was the government’s contention, although Hersh’s research showed otherwise. Editors at the Associated Press had taken Hersh’s ten thousand words and compressed—he said “massacred”—them into a flat and conventional thousand words that only hinted at the dark and secretive nature of the weapons of mass destruction that America had been stockpiling ever since World War II.1 And Hersh was furious—not only with the editing but also because he knew a compelling story when he saw one. He knew it, in part, because as he scrambled around the country in pursuit of evidence, no one in the government would talk to him. “The military has consistently refused to make public many of the facts about chemical biological weapons,” he wrote. And while secrecy was a way of life in the military, this one was extraordinary. “The secrecy over biological efforts has been almost an obsession with the military,” he concluded. America’s arsenal of gases, biological agents, and chemical bombs were as hidden as could be. “A secrecy curtain,” Hersh called it, “cutting off the public’s view.” The facts, FINDING AMERICA’S HIDDEN ARSENAL 89 he wrote, “are cloaked in secrecy.” Didn’t the public deserve to know that nearly 10,000 civilians and 3,750 military officers in conjunction with seventy American universities were working nonstop at six military bases? Shouldn’t they know that $300 million—a 30 percent increase in six years—was being spent to support these weapons? Most important of all, shouldn’t they know that scientists had perfected “a massive array of deadly agents?” He posed the question that even many researchers and policy analysts were asking behind closed doors, “Can disease, once spread, be controlled?” And his inability to get an answer on the record from the Pentagon irked him most of all. “I hate secrets,” he said. “I don’t think there should be secrets. I’m awfully tired of people in Washington telling me something is secret in the name of national security.”2 “The whole subject,” Hersh wrote in words that were uncharacteristically dramatic for him, “has overtones of horror and revulsion that far outstrip the world’s fear of a nuclear holocaust.” It is “almost too horrible for rational debate,” he added. And if these weapons are not controlled or eliminated, Hersh concluded, it might “set in motion a doomsday machine on the planet—striking down attacker and defender alike.” These strong words, of course, did not make it into his AP dispatch. His article was produced for the AP’s bold new investigative unit, but little or no reporter voice was allowed. “As for hard-edged investigative stuff,” observed Pulitzer Prize–winner Jean Heller, “they wanted to tread very lightly in those early days.” Hersh decided to move ahead on his own to tell the story. On May 6 he wrote an article about “secret work on gas and germ warfare” that the New Republic headlined “Just a Drop Can Kill.” The article broke the AP’s ban on outside work, and it did not sit well with his bosses.3 It was the first of six national magazine articles for Hersh—two in the New Republic, a well-known progressive magazine, two in Ramparts, a 1960s muckraking upstart, and two in the staid New York Times Magazine. Hersh could not know that his articles were making Pentagon insiders nervous and, moreover, were reinforcing the arguments of reformers—in both America and Britain—as they desperately sought to force the United States to re-evaluate its policies. In particular, as he noted in the opening salvo of his crusade, the United States had secretly made a major policy [3.145.36.10] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 11:59 GMT...