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>>>>>>>>>>>> BEE-FECES THEORY STILL HAS NO STING <<<<<<<<<<<
William Kucewicz 6/20/88
The Wall Street Journal, 9/17/1987
[BRIEF REVIEW OF PRECEDING CONTROVERSY by P.B.:
Kucewicz is the WSJ's outstanding writer who revealed the extent
of Soviet research on Soviet biochemical warfare in a brilliant series
of articles in April-May 1984 [AtE Jun 84]. He also reported
convincing evidence that the Soviets had supplied biochemical weapons
to their surrogates in SE Asia, who used them on the recalcitrant
Hmong people and elsewhere. The evidence was revealed in two
outstanding WSJ articles (9/6/85 and 3/31/86), but disputed by the
"liberal" science writers of the New York Times, Science, and others.
A particularly vicious piece palmed off as scientific research was
published in the Sept. Scientific American by Harvard biochemistry
prof Matthew Meselson and two others. Meselson, whose trip to SE Asia
had been financed by the leftist MacArthur Foundation, collected bees'
feces (droppings) far away from any war zone, examined the material by
electron microscopy and other methods, not surprisingly found some
toxins in it, and not surprisingly found no man-made toxins
attributable to Soviet weapons. His trivial and irrelevant
experimental findings were never under dispute; his conclusion
attributing all evidence of Soviet biochemical warfare to bee feces is
little short of scientific fraud.
In 1987 Meselson returned with more false and scandalously
doctored whitewash of Soviet biochemical warfare in Foreign Affairs.
The following article, apart from summarizing the whole issue, also
throws light on Meselson's sleazy suppression of evidence.]
Six years ago this week, the US government first revealed
physical evidence that the "yellow rain" loosed by aircraft on
villages in SE Asia was a toxin warfare agent, most probably being
field-tested for the Soviet Union. The probable motive was hatred by
the Communist governments of Laos and Vietnam for the anti-Communist
Hmong people of Laotian villages and for Cambodians at war with
Vietnam.
Refugees arriving in Thailand had been reporting the attacks
since 1975, and several hundred were interviewed by US doctors.
State Department officials and journalists, including the Asian WSJ's
Barry Wain. They told of planes and helicopters dropping a yellow
powder. People and animals become violently -- sometimes fatally --
ill.
In 1981 and 1982, scientists involved in the investigations
concluded from the symptoms, blood tests and autopsies that the
poisons being used were trichothecene mycotoxins. Evidence of Soviet
involvement was less strong, but included sightings of what looked
like chemical weapons being unloaded from Soviet ships at a Vietnamese
port. It was well known by then that the Soviets had developed
chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents and equipped troops and
military vehicles with anti-CBW devices. The Laotians or Vietnamese
surely lacked the know-how to develop a poison gas of their own.
Finally, trichithecenes were found on a Soviet gas mask recovered in
Afghanistan where Afghan combatants had described poison-gas attacks
by Soviet troops, in one case on an undefended village.
After the findings and suspicions received international
publicity from this newspaper, the Reader's Digest, ABC News, the
State Department and others, the attacks in SE Asia began to peter
out. But the debate in the US, so it seems, is still with us. The
evidence of poison gas had been challenged by Harvard biochemist
Matthew Meselson, one of the intellectual fathers of the Biological
and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972, requiring worldwide destruction
of such weapons. Surely the Soviets wouldn't violate his treaty, he
insisted, so there must be some other explanation. He proffered the
the theory that yellow rain was in fact bee feces.
That mainly drew laughter, but a few weeks ago, Prof. Meselson
returned to the fray. In a Foreign Policy magazine article co-authored
with Julian Robinson of the University of Sussex and Jeanne Guillemin
of Boston College, he insisted that newly declassified US documents
show that "the administration's claim of toxin warfare rests on
evidence that, over the past several years, has been discredited."
Mr Meselson, as in the past, focused on leaf samples collected to
establish the presence of trichothecenes. These samples were only part
of a larger body of evidence, but they interested Prof. Meselson. He
asserted that once more that what was found on them was nothing but
"innocuous excrement of honey bees."
The latest Meselson piece would probably have gone unnoticed had
not two reporters, Philip M. Boffey [a vicious antinuke of long
standing, see AtE Dec 79, P.B.] of the New York Times and Philip J.
Hilts of the Washington Post, renewed their support for his thesis.
The Times backed its reporter with an editorial titled "Yellow Rain
Falls." A separate attack on the yellow-rain evidence had been mounted
earlier by Elisa D. Harris, also a Harvard researcher, in
International Security magazine.
Prof. Meselson's attack zeroed in on the investigative work of a
three-man team of CBW experts from the State and Defense department
stationed in Thailand from Nov. 1983 to Oct. 1985. This, of course,
was after the attacks had largely ended. But Foreign Policy Editor
Charles Wm. Maynes was impressed enough with the latest Meselson
arguments to claim that they would "demolish definitively" the US
government's case against the Soviet Union and its SE Asian allies.
It's hard to know how an article mainly about bee feces would
achieve such an astonishing result. Even the professor's handling of
the declassified papers displays a certain selectivity. The Journal
has obtained copies of these same papers, and they are not very
interesting.
One telegram from the US Embassy in Bangkok refers to nothing
more exciting than a visit to the embassy by Prof. Meselson and two
colleagues, who had been wandering around in the jungles of Thailand
(not Laos or Cambodia) observing the habits of bees. The telegram,
but not the Meselson article, makes clear that he and his Thai
colleague did not entirely agree even on these observations. Prof.
Meselson said that the bees' "cleansing" flight was too high to be
seen, but the Thai told US officials that he actually saw an estimated
10,000 bees in flight. If bees on cleansing flights can be low enough
to be seen, why in none of the hundreds of yellow-rain reports has no
one ever mentioned bees?
The article focuses on the paucity of leaf samples that tested
positive for trichothecene mycotoxins. Indeed, the only positive US
tests of environmental samples from SE Asia were done in the
laboratories of Chester Mirocha of the University of Minnesota and
Joseph Rosen of Rutgers University (who also found man-made
polyethylene glycol in a sample obtained by ABC news in 1981).
By innuendo, Mr Meselson implies that the independent work of
Profs. Mirocha and Rosen is faulty. But he never explains where they
might have made mistakes. In fact, neither scientist has ever reported
a false positive in any of the control samples [unknown to the
resarchers, innocuous ones, P.B.] submitted to them by the US
government to verify their testing techniques.
The Meselson report fails to mention any of the numerous
biological samples from SE Asia that tested positive for the toxins.
In 1982, for instance, the US government tested 73 yellow-rain victims
and got 24 positives for the toxins -- a rate of 32.9% and much too
high to indicate a natural poisoning that had previously gone
unnoticed. Indeed, epidemiologists from the US and Canada have never
found any evidence of illness due to natural exposure to triothecene
toxins in SE Asia.
The Foreign Policy article falsely says: "At no time, then or
now, was any case documented in which diagnostic examination or
autopsy provided clear evidence of exposure to chemical warfare
agents." In fact, a report by Secretary of State George Shultz in
Nov. 1982 provided detailed autopsy results for a chemical warfare
attack victim in Cambodia. The results include the precise levels of
toxins found in the victim's heart, stomach, liver, kidney, lung and
intestine. The tests were conducted separately by Profs. Mirocha and
Rosen, and each found high levels of the toxins.
Prof. Meselson makes a Point of extensively quoting the testimony
of a resistance leader from the Phu Bia region of Laos contained in a
May 1984 telegram to the State Department. In his eight years in the
region, the Hmong leader said that he never saw a yellow-rain attack,
adding that other Hmong often relate "what they hear and feel" and
not what they actually see. He said that he "always speaks the truth."
After this seeming rebuke to eyewitness testimony, Prof. Meselson
chose not to quote the next telegram, referring to another witness.
"[Name deleted] is a 40-year-old female who claimed to have lost
six of her 10 children in a CBW attack from a rotary wing aircraft
during the last harvest season (November-December 1983). The alleged
attack took place in a rice field one hour walking distance from Phu
Pad village ... in Vientiane Province [Laos] ... [She] stated that on
a cloudy and windy morning a helicopter passed over 22 Hmong working
in a rice field. One heard an explosion followed by a cream-colored
rain. [Name deleted] stated that she immediately became dizzy and
remained so for 10 days. Other symptoms were vomiting with blood and
bloody diarrhea..."
Prof. Meselson also selectively reports the data from one of the
most well-documented yellow-rain attacks -- at the Thai village of Ban
Sa Tong, near the Cambodian border, in February 1982. He asserts there
was no "abnormal incidence of clinical illness" and the "yellow spots
later were shown to consist almost entirely of pollen."
The facts about the attack on Ban Sa Tong, related by a Canadian
team of epidemiologists, are quite straightforward. A plane dropped a
yellow substance over the village. Thai and Canadian experts saw the
powder liberally covering houses and vegetation. Only those villagers
in direct contact with the powder became ill, while none of the others
were affected. Allergic reaction to pollen cannot account for the
high incidence (one in three) of central nervous system disorders
among those in the sprayed area. Two laboratories in Canada and one in
the US found the trichothecene toxins in the yellow powder from Ban Sa
Tong. Moreover, a plastic bag later collected from the site and said
by villagers to be part of the weapon contained high levels of two
trichothecenes and, the Canadians said, "almost no pollen."
As opposed to confirming the bee-feces theory, the State
Department telegrams actually bolster the US government's case that
yellow rain was a man-made chemical weapon. The CBW team from late 1983
to 1985 came across very few reports of yellow-rain attacks, and
trichothecenes were no longer found. The worldwide publicity about
yellow rain had apparently discouraged the further use of the weapons
and doubtlessly saved lives. The bees, of course, were still there,
defecating. But the yellow-rain attacks stopped.