Buried secrets of biowarfare

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They designed deadly, silent biological dart guns and hid them in fountain pens and walking sticks. They crunched lethal bacteria into suit buttons that could be worn unnoticed across borders. They rigged light fixtures and car tailpipes to loose an invisible spray of anthrax.

They practiced germ attacks in airports and on the New York subway, tracking air currents and calculating the potential death toll.

But they weren't a band of al-Qaida fanatics -- or enemies of any kind. They were biowarriors in the U.S. Army's Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick.

From 1949 to 1969, at the jittery height of the Cold War, the division tested the nation's vulnerability to covert germ warfare -- and devised weapons for secret biological attacks if the United States chose to mount them.

A few years ago, its story -- never before told in detail -- would have seemed a macabre footnote to U.S. history.

Now, after the Sept. 11 attacks, the anthrax mailings and a steady stream of government warnings on terrorism, the fears of the 1950s have returned -- and the experiments of Fort Detrick's covert bioweapons makers suddenly resonate in a new era. In the biological realm, there is little that any terrorist group could concoct that Fort Detrick's "dirty tricks department," as veterans call it, didn't think up decades ago.

But because of the division's scant recordkeeping and the fast-disappearing ranks of its aged scientist-warriors, the knowledge it acquired is being lost to history.

One of the few survivors is Wallace Pannier, 76, who remembers standing in a Frederick County field watching sheep shot with what the Army called a "nondiscernible bioinoculator" -- a dart gun. The bosses demanded a dart so fine that it could penetrate clothing and skin unnoticed, then dissolve, leaving no trace in an autopsy.

"If the sheep jumped, that meant people were going to jump, too," said Pannier, now living a quiet life tending his flowers and shrubs in Frederick.

Once perfected, the dart gun astonished those who saw it in action. Charles Baronian, a retired Army weapons official, recalls a demonstration at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

"Twenty-five seconds after it was shot, the sheep just fell to the ground," said Baronian, 73. "It didn't bleat. It didn't move. It just fell dead. You couldn't help but be impressed."

The rest of the Army's offensive biological weapons program thought big: 500-pound anthrax bombs that could contaminate entire cities. But the Special Operations Division -- known at Fort Detrick by its initials, SO -- studied biowarfare on a more intimate scale, figuring ways to kill an individual, disable a roomful of people or touch off an epidemic. more

[floydian slip]

I wonder what kind of sheep he's talking about?

ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a

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Bleating and babbling I fell on his neck with a scream.
Wave upon wave of demented avengers
March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.