The Plutonium Files (67 page)

The third group to weigh in with its analysis of the experiment was the blue-ribbon committee appointed by the dean of the medical school and chaired by Raymond Suskind, director of the university’s environmental health center. The “Suskind Report” was generally supportive of the TBI studies but contained some pointed criticisms as well. Among the most stunning was the finding that nineteen of the patients could have died from the radiation alone.
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The committee also found that the University of Cincinnati appeared to be the only institution in the country that was using TBI to treat radioresistant tumors. The panel pointed out that Saenger and his colleagues had not incorporated into the experiment appropriate measures to evaluate palliation—the very thing that Saenger said he was studying. Despite the findings, the committee urged that the study be continued provided certain changes were made in the design and a new funding source found.

The Suskind committee was fraught with conflicts of interest, a campus newspaper later revealed.
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One committee member was part of Saenger’s research team, and four others were members of or advisors to the faculty panel that had just reviewed—and approved—the experiment. “Could one be led to believe,” an editorial asked, “they would have voted, say, to discontinue a project they just recently approved of this past summer as faculty research committee members?”

Kennedy sent staffers to Cincinnati in early December 1971 to learn more about the experiment and to interview patients.
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But the university fought hard to keep the investigators away from the patients. The medical school argued that the interviews would be harmful to the patients’ well-being and got two outside doctors to support its position. But an
attorney identified as “Roscoe,” who was representing the university, questioned whether the strategy would work: “Can this (psychological harm) be said of all the patients?
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Query whether patients who can stand total body radiation would be harmed by ‘talking about their operation.” ’ Saenger was worried the congressional investigators would take the patients’ comments out of context. “This is a personal impression of mine,” he wrote, “but there is no question in my mind that these men would dearly love to get directly at the patients and exploit them in any way possible to make a public issue out of the fact that one or more of these sick and infirm and poorly educated people could be maneuvered into a statement that they did not really remember as to just why they were being treated and that they might be experimented on without their knowledge.”
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A member of Saenger’s team, Edward B. Silberstein, contacted the surviving patients and the parents of several children who underwent the TBI treatment. Transcripts of these interviews show Silberstein took the opportunity to prep the patients (described in one Pentagon document as “humble, mild and conforming”) about a possible interview with Kennedy’s investigators. In an interview with a patient identified as J.D., Silberstein pointed out:

“I might remind you about the way that the Defense Department, which did pay for the research, never paid for any of your treatment or made us make any decisions about how to do our tests or how to treat you in any way.
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Do you understand that?”

“Yes sir,” J.D. responded.

Kennedy’s inquiry into the experiment also drew the ire of Ohio’s powerful senator, Robert Taft. “Senator Taft just went bonkers on the thing,” Ellis Mottur, one of the Kennedy aides who had gone to Cincinnati, told reporters many years later.
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“It was clear he [Taft] was going to cause us a lot of trouble if we went any further with this Cincinnati thing.” Kennedy eventually backed off the Cincinnati experiment and went on to hold the sensational hearings in 1973 on the infamous Tuskegee study, in which 400 impoverished African Americans who had syphilis were tracked for forty years but not given any treatment.

Martha Stephens tried to interest several legal groups in filing a lawsuit against the university after she learned Kennedy wasn’t going to hold a hearing. But none of the patients had come forward or been identified, and Stephens couldn’t find any attorney interested in pursuing the case. She bundled up the reports and carted them down to her basement.
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There they would sit for another twenty-two years.

Saenger’s career, meanwhile, flourished. He went on to write more than 100 scientific articles and serve on numerous committees, many of which were involved in setting radiation standards for workers and the general public. He testified on behalf of the government in radiation injury cases and served as a consultant to the Justice Department, the Energy Department, the Food and Drug Administration, Brooke Army Hospital, Lackland Air Force Base, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and the Air Force Surgeon General. He was also among the international experts called in to evaluate the effects of the Chernobyl disaster. “There are two possible attitudes toward the holocaust which can be produced by nuclear warfare,” he once wrote.
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“One is total despair and confusion. The alternative is the adoption of an attitude of making the best of an admittedly bad situation.…”

The Atomic Energy Commission’s worst nightmare came true in October 1975 when
The National Enquirer
broke a story on the testicular irradiation experiment at the Oregon penitentiary. The tabloid reported that the sixty-seven men who participated in Carl Heller’s experiment “could be walking around with cancer” but couldn’t be notified because nobody knew where they were.
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In fact, many of the test subjects were still locked up in the penitentiary, and they were frightened and angered by the story.

A month later Heller’s top assistant, Mavis Rowley, and Glenn Warner, another scientist, went to the prison to answer their questions. When the inmates asked Rowley what the purpose of Heller’s program was, she is quoted as saying “It helped in genetic counseling.”
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The meeting only “heightened the emotionalism and confusion of mind,” one convict later wrote.
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Eventually a dozen subjects who participated in the Heller experiment filed a lawsuit against the AEC, prison and state officials, and the doctors. It was during the depositions taken from prisoners that some of the brutal details of the experiment were revealed.

Carl Heller, still suffering the effects of the debilitating stroke that had occurred four years earlier, had his deposition taken in 1976 at his home on the Olympic Peninsula. The morning of the deposition, a friend helped Meta Heller move her husband into the living room where he was placed on a plastic mattress. Heller’s long-term memory was still excellent, but he had a hard time with short-term recall. His assistant, Mavis Rowley, was questioned under oath simultaneously in an apparent effort
to conserve Heller’s strength. Rowley answered most of the attorneys’ queries. Only the most critical questions were directed at Heller.

“What was the primary purpose of the radiation program?” asked David Hilgemann, an attorney representing the prisoners.
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“The primary purpose was to discover the effects of radiation on the human body, objectively,” Heller responded.

Later in the deposition Hilgemann asked, “What were the potential dangers, as you saw them, of the radiation aspect of the program?”

“The possibility of tumors of the testes,” responded Heller.
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“Are you talking about cancer?”

“I didn’t want to frighten them so I said tumor; I may on occasion have said cancer.”

Finally Hilgemann asked Heller whether he thought the convicts could honestly be considered volunteers: “Considering the inmates’ attitude toward the money, do you really think that they voluntarily entered into this program and continued on with it?”

Heller responded, “Well, that’s a very difficult question to answer.
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I could answer it in two ways: One, the inmates would tell me that they had been bad guys all their lives. Now they were going to do something good for humanity. Then perhaps weeks or months later they would say, ‘You know, Dr. Heller, that was a lot of bull that I told you. I really joined the program only for the money.’ This reminds me of a discussion with some of the NIH people who brought up the same question. One of the NIH people who were interested in our program and had been following it indicated the following answer: He said, ‘Well, isn’t money the reason that most people do things in our society?’ ”

Heller then looked up from his sickbed at the prisoners’ attorney and asked, “Isn’t that why you are here?”

Although Dr. Heller was a very sick man, the comment showed that he had lost none of his shrewdness—or combativeness. After the disposition was completed and the court reporter and the lawyers had packed up and left, Heller swallowed a Benadryl tablet, drank a glass of orange juice, and ate two egg sandwiches.
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Then he asked to be propped up in bed so he could enjoy the view.

Heller’s health continued to decline, and he died in 1982. The small group of prisoners who filed the lawsuit eventually settled out of court for payments totaling about $9,000. But the settlement didn’t resolve the issue of medical follow-ups, a question that officials for the state of Oregon and the penitentiary continued to grapple with for the next decade or so.

——

Officials at the Center for Human Radiobiology were analyzing the remains of plutonium injectees Arthur Hubbard, Fred Sours, and Albert Stevens in the spring of 1976 when Arthur Kranish, the editor and publisher of
Science Trends,
a Washington, D.C., newsletter covering technology and federal agencies, spotted something about the experiment in an official report.
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Kranish was astonished by the information and published a lengthy article about the experiment in February 1976. Officials of the Energy Research and Development Administration, the AEC’s successor, refused to divulge the names of the patients or the experimenters, telling Kranish it wasn’t even clear who ordered the experiment. Always eager to put the best spin on an admittedly bad situation, they also declared that the experiment suggested that plutonium might actually be “less carcinogenic” than expected.
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Kranish’s story was immediately picked up by the
Washington Post
and other newspapers. In the
Post
story, an unnamed official said the commission “has no plans to launch an investigation to try to learn more about the injection program.”
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The official neglected to mention the extensive inquiry that had just been concluded or the exhumation program that was still ongoing. In a somewhat more frank interview with a Rochester
Democrat and Chronicle
reporter, William Bale, the scientist who “activated” the metabolic unit at the University of Rochester’s Strong Memorial Hospital where the injections were carried out, said the test subjects “did not come voluntarily to the project.”
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He added, “It is my impression they did not know they were being treated with plutonium.”

As he lay dying of leukemia in a Veterans Administration hospital in Salt Lake City, Paul Cooper, a highly decorated Army officer, decided in the spring of 1977 to go public with his story about the atomic tests he participated in two decades earlier. In numerous interviews with print and broadcast reporters, Cooper said he was certain his disease was caused by radiation he received during Shot Smoky, the fifth of twenty-four nuclear detonations and six safety experiments conducted during the 1957 Operation Plumbbob series. “It was like getting too close to a campfire with tight Levis on,” he said of the heat released by the bomb.
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Although he was lying flat on his back, Cooper still looked like a sandy-haired soldier who was merely resting. But soon after the wave of publicity the disease worsened and he banished his wife and children from the hospital because he didn’t want them to see his wasted body.

Several soldiers who had also participated in Operation Plumbbob happened to see Cooper’s interview on television. One was Charles Broudy, a retired Marine Corps major from California who was dying of lymphoma. Broudy was a highly decorated pilot with a deep loyalty to the Marine Corps. Nevertheless, he recognized immediately that Cooper was on to something. That evening he called Cooper in Salt Lake City. Cooper advised him to file a claim as soon as possible with the Veterans Administration.

Broudy followed Paul Cooper’s advice, but his claim was denied by the VA. He appealed the denial, but before a decision was rendered, he died. “He was a very loyal Marine but I was not a happy Marine’s wife,” said his widow, Pat Broudy.
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The dying Marine had urged his wife to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the federal government. Eventually she filed two lawsuits. Both were dismissed, but her legal effort attracted the attention of thousands of veterans who had participated in the atomic maneuvers.

Broudy began making numerous television appearances with Orville Kelly, an Army sergeant who had witnessed some two dozen detonations and was suffering from lymphoma. When he was too weak to make any more television appearances, he returned home and formed the National Association of Atomic Veterans. Pat Broudy became a member of that group and also helped form the National Association of Radiation Survivors. For two decades she has been lobbying Congress for compensation for the atomic veterans and has helped many individual veterans with their claims.

Paul Cooper’s story caught the attention of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Investigators there did an epidemiological study and discovered there was indeed an excess of leukemias among the participants of Operation Plumbbob. Cooper’s story also prompted a remarkable hearing on Capitol Hill in 1978. For perhaps the first time in history, the civilian and military officials responsible for the nuclear weapons program were put on the defensive as congressmen Paul Rogers, a Democrat from Florida, and Tim Lee Carter, a Democrat from Kentucky and medical doctor whose son had died of leukemia, peppered them with questions about the atomic maneuvers.
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The congressmen also delved into the efforts by the weaponmakers to quash reports on excess cancer rates among nuclear workers and the dangerous effects of low-level radiation. The testimony from representatives of the Defense Nuclear Agency and its related organizations revealed how reckless and haphazard the testing program was. The officers didn’t know what groups
participated in the tests or where records were stored. After the committee had heard hours of testimony, U.S. Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, observed, “It seems the Army sent men out to be exposed to radiation dangers and did not advise them—if that was the case—that they were subjecting themselves to possible health hazards.
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Then afterward the Army denied any liability for it because it did not seem to fit into their plans.”