In Germany, throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, U.S. military intelligence spied on Dr. Traub at his new home on Paul-Ehrlich-Strasse, in Tübingen. Agents stopped by the home of Traub’s colleague and friend Dr. Theodor Benzinger, in Maryland, to ask whether Benzinger knew “of any associations retained by Dr. Traub outside the United States.” Benzinger said he did not. Whenever Traub traveled outside Germany, military intelligence kept a watchful eye on him.
Dr. Traub was a man experienced in the illegal trafficking of deadly pathogens. During World War II, he was the trustworthy scientist chosen by Heinrich Himmler to travel to Turkey to obtain samples of rinderpest to weaponize on Riems. And after the war, when Traub fled the Russian zone at great risk of personal harm, he managed to smuggle deadly cultures with him out of the Eastern bloc, which he then stashed at an intermediary laboratory in West Germany until he was able to locate an appropriate buyer. In the mid-1960s, according to Traub’s FBI file, Traub moved from Germany to Iran, with a new permanent address at the Razi Institute for Serums and Vaccines, in Hesarak, a suburb of the city of Karaj. When Traub traveled from Iran to the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., for a meeting with unknown persons, FBI agents watched him. What they learned about the mysterious Dr. Traub remains classified as of 2013.
Through the lens of history, it is remarkable to think that U.S. biological warfare and chemical warfare programs grew so quickly to the size they did. But the Pentagon was able to keep the scope and cost of these weapons programs secret from Congress in much the same way that it was able to keep the damaging details of Operation Paperclip secret from the public. Everything was classified.
It took President Richard Nixon to realize that playing chicken with the Russians, using a huge arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, was pure madness. On November 25, 1969, Nixon announced the end of all U.S. offensive biological warfare research and ordered that America’s arsenal was to be destroyed. “I have decided that the United States of America will renounce the use of any form of deadly biological weapons that either kill or incapacitate,” Nixon said. His reasons were simple and self-evident. The use of biological weapons could have “uncontrollable consequences” for the world. “Mankind already carries in its hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction,” said Nixon. After twenty-six years of research and development, America’s biological weapons programs came to an end. For the first time during the Cold War, a president decided that an entire group of weapons was going to be unilaterally destroyed.
The end of America’s chemical weapons program was not far behind. Nixon reinstated the “retaliation-only” policy, which meant no new chemical weapons would be developed and produced. Over the next few years, Congress worked with the military to determine the best way to destroy this entire group of weapons. The original plan was to dispose of some twenty-seven thousand tons of chemical-filled weapons in the deep sea. But upon investigation, it turned out that many of the sarin-and VX-filled bombs stored at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal were already leaking nerve agent. These munitions needed to be encased in steel-and-concrete “coffins” before they could be dumped in the ocean. The Pentagon also had thirteen thousand tons of nerve agent and mustard gas stored in secret on its military base in Okinawa, Japan, which now needed to be disposed of. In 1971, these munitions were brought to an American-owned atoll in the South Pacific called Johnston Island in an operation called Red Hat. The plan was to store the sarin-and VX-filled bombs in bunkers on the atoll until scientists figured out how best to destroy them. But as it turned out, the sarin and VX bombs were not made to ever be dismantled. So the army had a massive new scientific endeavor on its hands, for which it created the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System, the world’s first “full-scale chemical weapons disposal facility.”
It took another thirty-four years for America’s arsenal of chemical weapons to be destroyed. “The numbers speak volumes,” says the army. “More than 412,000 obsolete chemical weapons—bombs, land mines, rockets and projectiles—all destroyed.” The elaborate destruction process involves the robotic separation of the chemical agent from the munitions, followed by incineration of the separated parts in three separate special types of furnaces. The army says it is “proud [of its] accomplishment,” which cost an estimated $25.8 billion as of 2006, or approximately $30 billion in 2013.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Limelight