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Freedom’s ground-breaking investigations into joint CIA-military testing of chemical and biological warfare agents on unwitting sections of the population included Operation Big City, in which hundreds of New York City subway passengers were exposed to bacteria. | |
In another series of tests, a fungus that could cause lung disease was used in certain East Coast cities. The germ had been selected for the astounding reason that it was believed to be more harmful to blacks than whites. As stated in an Army report, the purpose of the test was to check logistics lines because “[w]ithin this [supply] system, there are employed large numbers of laborers, including many Negroes, whose incapacitation would seriously affect the operation of the supply system.”
Freedom also revealed that personnel from the Special Operations Division utilized specially modified suitcases in 1964 and 1965 to spray bacteria on unsuspecting passengers in Washington, D.C.’s National Airport and Greyhound bus terminal. Those tests, intended to study the consequences of the use of smallpox or other biological agents in public places, employed Bacillus subtilis, a germ since found to cause symptoms of respiratory infections, blood poisoning and food poisoning. Based on tickets sold at the time of the tests, Special Operations Division staff calculated that “infected passengers” transported the bacillus to more than 200 cities.
Freedom’s coverage of the government-sponsored chemical and biological warfare tests included, in 1979, exposing “Operation Big City,” covert biological warfare experiments conducted in the New York subway system in 1956 by the CIA with the cooperation of U.S. Army personnel.
As Jimmy Breslin wrote in New York Newsday in 1998 regarding the New York experiment originally exposed in Freedom, “If there had been scrutiny from the day of the test on, common sense tells you that over time, the mortuary reports would indicate a stack or so of dead.” Breslin noted that the Church of Scientology had been alone at the time in publicly expressing outrage over such experiments.
In 1980, Freedom published an analysis of CIA records which showed that the agency had sponsored biological warfare tests in Florida in 1955. These tests were linked to an outbreak of whooping cough in that state which claimed the lives of 12 people, half of them children under the age of one.
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