In late September of 1950, just as U.S. armed forces were surging up the Korean peninsula, residents of the San Francisco Bay Area noticed an odd odor. The unidentifiable smell hung around for a week. People scratched their heads and pointed fingers—they thought the problem could be their neighbors cooking brussels sprouts, or maybe it was sewer gas. What they didn’t suspect is that they were being sprayed with microorganisms by their own government.
But they were. From offshore ships, researchers working for the Army, Navy, and CIA engulfed the area in Serratia marcescens, Bacillus globigii, and zinc cadmium sulfide particles. Residents, not realizing they had become unwitting test subjects, breathed it in—“nearly everyone of the 800,000 people in San Francisco,” according to a governmental report. In theory, the germs and chemicals were innocuous, but a local hospital was surprised by the sudden appearance of nearly a dozen cases of Serratia marcescens bacterial infections, never seen in that hospital before. One infected patient, a retired pipe fitter, died.
It wasn’t the only time the U.S. government did this. Federal researchers secretly fogged Minneapolis and St. Louis during the Korean War. In 1966, they would run a similar experiment on New York City, dropping light bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis variant niger into subway stations during rush hour to see how far the bacilli would spread—more than a million New Yorkers were exposed. In all, the Army acknowledged having conducted bacteriological tests on 239 populated areas between 1949 and 1969.
The tests were part of a large-scale, secret program of germ warfare research and development. The CIA researched possible targets, such as the Moscow subway, and military researchers designed a biological balloon bomb that could carry infectious spores far into enemy territory. The Pentagon tested and stockpiled means of inducing illness. By 1971, its arsenal of weaponized disease contained, among other articles, 220 pounds of anthrax, 804 pounds of tularemia, 334 pounds of Venezuelan equine encephalitis, 5,098 gallons of Q fever, and tens of thousands of bombs.
Did the United States ever drop one of those bombs, spray some of that anthrax, or splash a little Q fever on its enemies? Did it ever purposefully release bacteria known—perhaps even modified—to make humans ill? Did it ever, in other words, wage biological war? That is the question of Nicholson Baker’s engaging, bracing, and moving new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act. As his subtitle suggests, it is an exasperatingly hard one to answer.