The Secret Side of Government

[Tim May]

At 9:23 AM -0800 2/20/98, Bill Stewart wrote:

>They'd also be focusing on the great job they've done eliminating the
>entire US stock of CBW and nukes.  Oh, we haven't?  Well their weapons
>of mass destruction are Evil, and ours are Freedom Fighting Tools.
>Actually the US and Former Soviet Union have substantially reduced the
>nuclear forces, especially older missiles that are hard to maintain,
>but the US refused for a long time to sign the CBW treaties,
>and I'm not sure they ever did follow through and destroy their supplies.

Nixon made a very big deal of signing some papers which would supposedly
get rid of CBW supplies and research. This was back in 1972.

(I remember this clearly, because I was in college and my roomates and I,
all libertarians, hooted when the supposedly eliminated CBW weapons got
loose at Dugway Proving Grounds and killed a bunch of sheeple (er, "sheep")
in Utah...and an excellent and rage-inspiring movie with George C. Scott,
"Rage," had a similar theme. Highly recommended, if you can find it.)

What really happened is that a bunch of military bacteriological warfare
facilities were turned over to the private sector. Oh, and renamed "cancer
research," which looked good to the sheeple, as Nixon had just declared a
War on Cancer.

So, Litton Bionetics took a big piece, the National Cancer Institute
formally took over some of the military's labs (but the staff remained
unchanged, and some of the military brass "retired" to these
now-civilianized facilities), and things went on as usual. Well, not "as
usual," as it appears the secret side of governtment drastically stepped-up
work on biological and chemical weapons.

And the stockpiles still exist, of course. Some are corroding inside VX
warheads near Hanford, Washington (a good place to be far away from). Some
are stockpiled in Germany, apparently too dangerous to even move. And some
are no doubt stockpiled in lots of other places.

Here's a little personal story:

I worked for two summers in one of the labs probably related to this whole
thing. I worked in an immunology lab in the summers of 1969 and 1970,
working on immunoassay methods. My job was mundane, to run experiments
directed by others, to bleed mice for their serum, to run centrifuges, and
so on. Others in the lab worked with monkeys, on cancer, and hepatitus.
Yep, we had one of the first clean rooms in the nation, with double
airlocks, devoted to Hepatitus B (I think it was). All of this in a
nondescript warehouse building in Springfield, Virginia, just down Highway
95 from Washington. The company was initially Melpar, then the lab was spun
off into Melloy Labs. Some of the labs, Melpar at least, were sold to
E-Systems, the spook/SIGINT private contractor.

(For those who live, or lived, in the D.C. area, here are a few more
details. The lab was originally at the Arlington Boulevard facility of
Melpar, near the intersection with the Beltway. The biological labs were
spun-off and moved to West Springfield in 1970.)

I hadn't thought about this work for many years, until in the past couple
of years I've been reading up on the history of AIDS and the military's
work on monkey viruses. (Books, "Hot Zone," "AIDS, Ebola, and Emerging
Viruses," "Mary, Ferry, and the Monkey Virus," etc.)

It turns out that the period 1969-73 was a period of "privatizing" much
research that the military had formerly done. Several labs affiliated with
defense contractors were actively working with monkey cultures, and
maintaining contacts with Fort Detrick, the NIH, and the NCI. One figure
that stands out in this time period is Dr. Robert Gallo, who later achieved
fame for his HIV discovery (prior credit is often given to the French head
of the Pasteur Institute, Dr. Luc M.). I honestly have no way of recalling
if Gallo was circulating through our lab, or if the doctors I worked for
(Dr. Anne Jackson and Dr. Frederick Hyams) had contact with him.

As I learn more about this period, and the links between Hepatitus-B, AIDS,
and the timing of the big AIDS/HIV outbreak in the late 70s and early 80s,
I can't help wondering if the lab I worked in was involved in this whole
affair. A lot of things match up closely, and the absorbtion of Melpar into
E-Systems is part of the coincidences.

But all of this was a long time ago, before many of you were born.

The larger issue is that the spook side of government is only the tip of
the iceberg. For every $600 million "unindentified" building out past
Dulles Airport, eventually identified as the new headquarters of the
supersecret National Reconnaissance Organization (NRO), there are many
times as many "contractors" and "subcontractors" doing work too sensitive
even for the government to do. In fact, the unknown huge building in the
Virginia countryside was officially labelled as a Rockwell building, if I
recall correctly.)

(Readers may be familiar with Wackenhut, Science Applications, MITRE, etc.
Besides the large aerospace companies, all with large spook divisions, and
all with outlying offices doing work that few in the parent companies are
even cleared to know about.)

This is precisely the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us
about in his Farewell Speech, and that Washington in effect warned us about
in _his_ speech, when he warned about foreign entanglements and foreign
wars.

Footnote: Did the U.S. government and its subcontractors develop HIV as a
biological weapon? To be tested in Africa, as some suggest? Or was it an
accident, an accident let out of the labs of the Naval Health Sciences labs
(later Litton Bionetics) the East Bay of the Bay Area (site of many early
AIDS cases)? Or is it true that HIV viruses have been found in biological
specimens preserved for 40 years? And even if some HIV-like viruses existed
in nature, could the U.S. have isolated it and concentrated it in those
labs doing the work I described in the early 70s?

I don't know the answer to these questions. As my favorite researcher into
these matters puts it, "Food for thought and grounds for further research."
(Dave Emory, whose tapes can be bought. Use web search engines to find URLs
if interested.)

One thing I know for sure, the "secret" side of government is far larger
than most people think.

--Tim May

Just Say No to "Big Brother Inside"
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^3,021,377   | black markets, collapse of governments.