Army Chemical Corps

The Army Chemical Corps is the branch of the U.S. Army responsible for chemical, biological and radiological warfare and defense. During World War I the German use of chemical weapons led General John J. Pershing to press for a specialized gas unit for the American Expeditionary Force; the War Department created a Gas Service and, according to the Corps' regimental association, renamed it the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) on June 2, 1918. The First Gas Regiment fought in the Meuse-Argonne and St. Mihiel campaigns.¹ The National Defense Act of 1920 made the CWS a permanent branch of the Army.¹² The regimental association dates its redesignation as the Chemical Corps to 1946.¹

Biological warfare

In the Second World War the CWS developed the 4.2-inch mortar's high explosive round, smoke generator battalions and flame weapons for the Pacific. "Although not used in WWII, the CWS was given the lead for the development of biological weapons, and as a result, then-Camp Detrick was created exclusively for biological warfare experimentation."¹ Fort Detrick remained the center of the American offensive germ warfare program until 1969.³

The Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick was a secret unit of the Chemical Corps that developed biological weapons and delivery systems for the CIA. John D. Marks dates its founding to 1950 under John Schwab; Ed Regis and Stephen Kinzer place it in 1949. Under the MKNAOMI program the CIA's Technical Services Staff (TSS) paid SOD about 200,000 dollars a year. Entry to the SOD building required a clearance, a "need to know" authorization and a shot card of ten to twenty immunizations, and at one point the general who headed the Chemical Corps decided against inspecting SOD. An SOD veteran told Marks: "That's the way we kept them out. Those [military] types didn't need to know."⁴⁵ Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Ruwet of the Chemical Corps was chief of SOD and the immediate superior of Frank Olson, who died in November 1953 days after the CIA covertly gave him LSD.⁶

Psychochemicals

Major General William M. Creasy, a 1926 graduate of the United States Military Academy, served as Chief Chemical Officer of the U.S. Army. The Ordnance Corps Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 1978, credits him with "innovations in the field of psychochemical agents and radiological defense" and with establishing "the managerial and organizational elements to develop a deterrent biological warfare capability for the U.S. Army." He retired in 1958 and died on March 22, 1987.⁷ Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain wrote that Creasy considered psychochemical weapons preferable to fire bombs or nuclear weapons because they could incapacitate without permanent injury, and that the Army tested LSD, designated EA-1729, in war games at Fort Bragg (command-post maneuvers, tank driving, radar operation and antiaircraft tracking) and at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Fort Benning, Fort Leavenworth, Dugway Proving Ground and Edgewood Arsenal, with nearly 1,500 military personnel tested by the mid-1960s. They also describe an Army interrogation protocol of September 1961 that combined LSD with silent treatment, sustained interrogation, deprivation of food, drink and sleep, isolation, temperature cycling and verbal degradation.⁸ Edgewood Arsenal, "the former chemical center," was merged into Aberdeen Proving Ground on July 1, 1971.⁹

The allergist Harold Abramson, one of the CIA's principal LSD researchers under MKULTRA, held a consulting position with the Chemical Corps.¹⁰ TSS officers seeking samples of "highly poisonous or physiologically active drugs" from pharmaceutical companies sometimes claimed to be from the Army Chemical Corps.¹⁰ After Eli Lilly synthesized LSD, a TSS memorandum to Allen Dulles noted that the government could now buy the drug in "tonnage quantities"; Marks observed that the Chemical Corps and the Air Force could then obtain it in bulk.¹⁰

Harold Blauer

The Chemical Corps held a contract with the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) to test mescaline derivatives on humans for their suitability as chemical warfare agents. On January 8, 1953, Harold Blauer, a tennis professional admitted for depression, died after an intravenous injection of about 450 milligrams of EA-1298, a derivative the Corps had designated as a candidate agent, administered under Paul Hoch without his knowledge or consent. The death certificate read "coronary arteriosclerosis; sudden death after intravenous injection of a mescaline derivative." Within 48 hours the Chemical Corps contract officer Amedeo Marrazzi directed efforts to conceal the Army's involvement, and at a meeting in July 1954 federal counsel, Hoch and Marrazzi discussed anticipated malpractice claims. The Second Circuit found that Hoch "was well aware that the mescaline derivative was a new compound not being administered for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes but as an experiment to study its effect for chemical warfare purposes." James Cattell, who gave the injection, told Army investigators: "We didn't know whether it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him."¹¹

An initial settlement of 18,000 dollars was paid to Blauer's family, half of it covertly by the federal government. The Army disclosed the circumstances to his daughter, Elizabeth Barrett, in August 1975, and in 1987 a federal judge awarded more than 700,000 dollars to his estate.¹¹¹² Hoch became New York State Commissioner of Mental Hygiene in 1955.⁸

1969 and after

On November 25, 1969, President Richard Nixon renounced the offensive biological weapons program, and in February 1970 extended the order to toxins. In 1975 the Church Committee disclosed that the CIA had kept a cache of shellfish toxin from Fort Detrick in defiance of the destruction order.¹³ In testimony of September 28, 1994, the General Accounting Office reported that the Defense Department and other national security agencies had conducted "hundreds of experiments in which hundreds of thousands of people were used as test subjects," involving "radiation, blister and nerve agents, biological agents, and LSD," some "done in secret" and others "without their knowledge or consent or their full knowledge of the risks involved."¹⁴

After the Vietnam War the Corps was partially demobilized and much of its function moved from Fort McClellan, Alabama, to Aberdeen. When Fort McClellan closed under base realignment, the Corps moved to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where it forms part of the Maneuver Support Center with the Engineer and Military Police corps.¹