Only later did FIAT interrogators learn about this meeting. Major Tilley’s suspicions were now confirmed. A group inside the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, including his former partner, Lieutenant Colonel Tarr, did indeed have an ulterior motive that ran counter to the motives of CIOS, FIAT, and the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Tilley’s superior at Dustbin, Major Wilson, confirmed this dark and disturbing truth in a classified military intelligence report on the Ambros affair. “It is believed that the conflict between FIAT… and Lt-Col Tarr was due to the latter’s wish to use Ambros for industrial chemical purposes” back in the United States.
All documents regarding the Ambros affair would remain classified for the next forty years, until August of 1985. That an officer of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, Lieutenant Colonel Tarr, had sheltered a wanted war criminal from capture in the aftermath of the German surrender was damning. That this officer was also participating in meetings with the fugitive and a representative from the Dow Chemical Company was scandalous.
In 1945, the Chemical Warfare Service was also in charge of the U.S. biological weapons program, the existence of which remained secret from the American public. The program was robust; if the atomic bomb failed to end the war in Japan, there were plans in motion to wage biological warfare against Japanese crops. After the fall of the Reich, the staff of the Chemical Warfare Service began interrogating Hitler’s biological weapons makers, many of whom were interned at Dustbin. The Chemical Warfare Service saw enormous potential in making the Nazis’ biological weapons program its own and sought any scientific intelligence it could get. The man most wanted in this effort was Hitler’s top biological weapons expert, Dr. Kurt Blome.
On June 29, 1945, Blome was sent to Dustbin. The officers assigned to interrogate him were Bill Cromartie and J. M. Barnes of Operation Alsos. Each man was uniquely familiar with Blome’s background. Cromartie had been in Dr. Eugen Haagen’s apartment in Strasbourg in November 1944 when he and Alsos scientific director Samuel Goudsmit made the awful discovery that the Reich had been experimenting on people during the war (Blome was named in the Haagen files). And it was Cromartie and Barnes who led the investigation of the Geraberg facility, the abandoned, curious-looking research outpost hidden in the Thuringian Forest. Both Cromartie and Barnes had concluded that Geraberg had been a laboratory for Reich biological weapons research and that Dr. Blome was in charge.
During his initial interview at Dustbin, Blome refused to cooperate. “When he was first interrogated, he was very evasive,” Cromartie and Barnes wrote. But a few days later, when interrogated in more detail, Blome’s “attitude changed completely and he seemed anxious to give a full account not only [of] what he actually did but what he had in mind for future work.” Cromartie and Barnes were unsure if they should be enthused by Blome’s seeming change of heart or suspicious of it. Blome had been observed in the Dustbin eating hall conversing at length with Dr. Heinrich Kliewe, the Reich’s counterintelligence agent for bacterial warfare concerns. Perhaps the two men were concocting a misinformation scheme.
During the war, Dr. Kliewe’s job had been to monitor bioweapons progress being made by Germany’s enemies, most notably Russia. “Kliewe claims that he himself did all the evaluating of the reports received and determined what course of action his department should thenceforth follow,” investigators wrote in Kliewe’s Dustbin dossier. Kliewe told Blome that he would likely be taken to Heidelberg for a lengthy interrogation with Alsos agents, as Kliewe had been.
If Cromartie and Barnes were surprised by Blome’s sudden willingness to talk, they were also aware that most of what he told them could not be independently verified. “It is quite impossible to check many of his statements and what follows is an account of what he related,” read a note in Blome’s Dustbin dossier. What Blome recounted was a dark tale of plans for biological warfare spearheaded by Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler had a layman’s fascination with biological warfare. A former chicken farmer, the Reichsführer-SS had studied agriculture in school. According to Blome, it was Himmler who was the primary motivator behind the Reich’s bioweapons program. Hitler, Blome said, did not approve of biological warfare and was kept in the dark as to specific plans. Himmler’s area of greatest fascination, said Blome, was bubonic plague.
On April 30, 1943, G?ring had created the cancer research post that was to be held by Blome. Over the next nineteen months, Blome explained, he met with Himmler five times.