Dugway Official’s Top Secret Briefing to FBI Special Agent Details Germ War Capabilities
On November 15, 1950, Jay C. Newman, Special Agent in Charge at the Federal Bureau of Intelligence’s Salt Lake City office, wrote a memo to J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI. The subject was a briefing he received from a top military official concerning work on biological warfare experiments at the secretive U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground (DPG), some eighty miles southeast of Salt Lake City.
The Newman report, and a similar report stemming from an earlier FBI briefing at Camp Detrick, are important as they provide a contemporaneous portrait of U.S. biological warfare readiness, at least as much as the secretive Army Chemical Corps was willing to share with FBI officials at the time.
These reports describe an agency ready to conduct covert biowar sabotage activities, and nearing completion of more extensive capabilities with missiles and bombs.
The reports also belie claims from academic biological warfare expert Milton Leitenberg, who has maintained his research shows no bioweapon using a human pathogen was “ready until the end of 1954, about 16 months after the Korean War was over” (pg. 8).
Despite these and other refutations of Leitenberg’s ostensible refutation of the charges of U.S. use of biological weapons…
