Fort Detrick

Fort Detrick was the Army's biological research center in Frederick, Maryland, home to the Special Operations Division (SOD) and the larger U.S. biological warfare program. Built on the principle of concentric circles, with secrets concealed inside secrets, the base required not only the highest security clearance but a "need to know" authorization to enter the inner regions where SOD operated. To enter the SOD building itself, one needed an up-to-date shot card with anywhere from 10 to 20 immunizations.¹

From Detrick Field to Camp Detrick

The installation began as Detrick Field, a small Maryland National Guard airfield established in 1931 and named for Frederick L. Detrick, an Army flight surgeon who had served in World War I.² In March 1943, with the United States at war, the War Department acquired the site and re-christened it Camp Detrick, making it the headquarters of a crash program to develop both defenses against and an offensive capability in biological warfare. The wartime laboratories, later formalized as the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories, pioneered work in biocontainment, decontamination, sterilization, and the production and purification of pathogens.² In 1949 engineers completed a one-million-liter spherical aerosol test chamber, informally called the "8-ball," in which animals were exposed to airborne agents.² The Army made the post permanent in 1956, redesignating Camp Detrick as Fort Detrick. The center remained the heart of the American offensive germ warfare effort from 1943 until 1969.²

The SOD-CIA partnership

Under the MKNAOMI program, the CIA's TSS paid SOD about $200,000 a year to develop biological weapons for covert operations. Sidney Gottlieb and his TSS colleagues worked intimately with SOD scientists like Frank Olson, Vincent Ruwet, Benjamin Wilson, and founder John Schwab. Twice a year, the SOD and TSS men held planning sessions at remote sites like Deep Creek Lodge in Western Maryland, where they could brainstorm without interruption.¹ The arrangement gave the CIA access to a covert arsenal that included shellfish toxin for rapid death, botulinum considered for use against Fidel Castro, and pathogens chosen to appear indigenous to a target region, an approach raised in connection with the 1960 operation against Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. SOD also built the delivery hardware: aerosol generators, dart guns adapted from .45-caliber pistols, and devices concealed in everyday objects.¹

Three fatalities occurred at Fort Detrick during its 27-year history as a germ warfare center. When a Detrick employee died of anthrax, Frank Olson told his wife the man had died of pneumonia, maintaining the code of secrecy that pervaded the installation.¹ Olson himself had joined Detrick in 1943 and specialized in the airborne delivery of disease; he served briefly as acting chief of SOD in 1952 and 1953 before his death.¹

1969 termination and the shift to biodefense

On November 25, 1969, President Richard Nixon renounced the American offensive biological weapons program and ordered the existing stockpiles destroyed, a decision followed in February 1970 by an order extending the ban to toxins.³ SOD continued to manufacture and stockpile bacteriological agents for the CIA until that point.¹ Detrick's mission shifted to defensive medical research: the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) was established at the post in 1969 to develop countermeasures against biological threats, and in 1972 a portion of the grounds was turned over to the National Cancer Institute for cancer and, later, AIDS research.² The dismantling of the offensive program did not end the CIA's involvement: in 1975 the Church Committee revealed that the Agency had retained a cache of shellfish toxin taken from Detrick in defiance of the 1970 destruction order.³