SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Plum Island Weaponized Ticks Fact Or Fiction?

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

“Pentagon May Have Released Weaponized Ticks That Helped Spread of Lyme Disease: Investigation Ordered” was the Newsweek headline last month. The article below it was about the U.S. House of Representatives having “quietly passed a bill requiring the Inspector General of the Department of Defense to conduct a review into whether the Pentagon experimented with ticks and other blood-sucking insects for use as biological weapons between 1950 and 1975.”

The article continued: “If the Inspector General finds that such experiments occurred, then, according to the bill, they must provide the House and Senate Armed Services committees with a report on the scope of the research and ‘whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experimental design’…potentially leading to the spread of diseases such as Lyme.”

The measure was introduced by Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, “who was ‘inspired’ by several books and articles claiming that the U.S. government had conducted research at facilities such as Fort Detrick, Maryland, and Plum Island, New York, for this purpose.” 

One of the books, published earlier this year, was “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons” by Stanford University science writer Kris Newby. It includes interviews with Willy Burgdorfer who is credited with having discovered the pathogen that causes Lyme disease and earlier developed bioweapons for the Department of Defense. Said Mr. Smith on the House floor: “Those interviews combined with access to Dr. Burdorfer’s lab files suggest that he and other bioweapons specialists stuffed ticks with pathogens to cause severe disability, disease—even death—to potential enemies. With Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases exploding in the United States…Americans have a right to know whether any of this is true.”

Whether Lyme disease resulted from activities on Plum Island—a mile-and-a-half off Orient Point —is an issue I’ve pursued since tick-borne Lyme disease became widespread in Suffolk County. 

A 1982 book linking Plum Island and Lyme disease was “The Belarus Secret: The Nazi Connection in America” written by John Loftus, an attorney specializing in pursuing Nazis for the Office of Special Investigations of the U.S. Department of Justice. He tells of former “Nazi germ warfare scientists” brought to the U.S. after World War II who “experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I have received some information suggesting that the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range during the early 1950s…Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret U.S. document confirming that ‘clandestine attacks on crops and animals’ took place at this time.”

Mr. Loftus points to “the hypothesis that the poison ticks are the source of the Lyme disease spirochete.” And adds: “Sooner or later the whole truth will come out, but probably not in my lifetime.”

In 1995, with Lyme disease epidemic in Suffolk, indeed in many areas of the U.S., a just-elected congressman from Suffolk, Michael Forbes, conducted what he told me would be a “raid” on Plum Island. He would go to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and demand information about tick weaponization there and a link to Lyme disease as related by Mr. Loftus. He took John McDonald, a Newsday investigative reporter, and me.

Representative Forbes confronted the center’s director, Dr. Harley Moon, who in intensive questioning took the position that “we don’t have any paperwork on that.”

Then in 2004 came another book, “Lab 257,” also by an attorney, Michael Carroll, formerly a law firm associate of the late New York Governor Mario Cuomo. Using documents he found in the National Archives, he exposes a full story about Plum Island. He details how Erich Traub during World War II was the “lab chief of Insel Riems—a secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory” in the Baltic with a mission in World War II of poisoning cattle in the  Soviet Union. Traub and hundreds of other Nazi scientists were brought to the U.S. in the U.S. government’s “Project Paperclip” after the war. Traub was the “father” of the establishment of a biowarfare center on Plum Island, says “Lab 257,” with the same mission Insel Riems had—going after Soviet livestock now with the Cold War having begun.

“Lab 257” relates how “animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. They called him the Nazi scientist…they were inoculating these ticks.” Mr. Carroll, too, points to the possibility of Lyme disease emerging from activities on Plum Island with ticks. 

Will we know in our lifetimes a confirmed link between biowarfare and Lyme?

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.