Persistence pays off
by Steve Weinberg Posted Sat, Jan 1 2000
Few journalists look for important stories in seemingly boring places. Eileen Welsome’s book, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War, chronicles one reporter’s struggle for the truth. Her book creates a significant and welcome tear in the wall of secrecy that still prevails throughout many federal agencies and research institutions that rely on federal money.
Welsome, a reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune, possesses the relentless curiosity often deemed necessary for any journalist to achieve greatness. In 1987, that curiosity launched her, then an obscure reporter at a medium-sized New Mexico newspaper, on a quest that would pit her against the U.S. national security and medical power structures. Eventually, that quest would benefit society at large, win her major journalism awards for what her newspaper published and lead to a detailed, superb book, just published by Delacorte.
The story Welsome originally intended to pursue revolved around efforts by the U.S. Air Force to clean up hazardous waste sites throughout the nation. It could be important, sure, but pretty much routine. It was only while studying a dense government report on that topic that Welsome noticed an unexpected local angle: several dumps at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.
Buried in those dumps, according to the report, were radioactive animal carcasses. Welsome wondered what kind of animals were buried in those dumps and the reason for their radioactivity. She learned that technical papers about the animal radiation experiments could be viewed at the Kirtland base.
Welsome visited the base, and after hours of dry reading, she decided a story could not be written any time soon on the unexpected angle. Just as she was about to leave, she noticed a footnote describing a human plutonium experiment.
“The information jolted me deeply,” Welsome writes. “One minute I was reading about dogs that had been injected with large amounts of plutonium and had subsequently developed radiation sickness and tumors. Suddenly there was this reference to a human experiment. I wondered if the people had experienced the same agonizing deaths as the animals.”
As Welsome tried to learn more about the disturbing footnote, she realized the experiment on humans had been reported in 1976 by Science Trends magazine and had been mentioned in a 1986 House of Representatives report titled “American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens.” The human guinea pigs, however, had never been identified by name.
“I wondered who these people were, what happened to them after they left the hospital with the silvery, radioactive metal circulating in their veins — if they ever left at all, that is,” Welsome writes.
Nobody within government or the medical world wanted to tell Welsome the names of the participants, or much else either, so she chipped away at the puzzle in stolen moments from her regular newspaper stories. She tracked down technical reports, talked to scientists and used the Freedom of Information Act to ask the U.S. Department of Energy for documents.
As the information trickled in, Welsome learned that 18 people had been injected with plutonium. She started a file for each of the nameless 18 and developed a sketchy profile listing gender, race, date of birth and the hospitals that originally admitted each person for treatment of a specific disease. These same hospitals administered the plutonium injections, perhaps without the full knowledge of the patient.
Years passed, and she continued to search. Many, perhaps most, beat and general assignment reporters would have given up in discouragement, worn down by the bureaucracy. Not Welsome. Though she figured she would never uncover the names of all the patients because the national security censors at the DOE always seemed to delete the crucial information on personal privacy grounds, she remained confident she would be able to publish something enlightening.
Then Welsome decided to systematically review all the information she had collected in 1992. Two words on a page jumped out at her, words that had failed to register previously. The document said that a government scientist had written “to a physician in Italy, Texas, about contacting patient CAL-3.”
“Italy, Texas” were the two words that provided a clue. Based on her painstakingly constructed profile, Welsome knew patient CAL-3 was an African American man who would be about 80 if still alive. She knew he had been injected with plutonium on July 18, 1947, in a San Francisco hospital where he was apparently being treated for bone cancer.
Looking at a Texas map, Welsome learned Italy was a small town near Dallas. Welsome started by calling city hall, and she described the man to the clerk who answered the telephone. That would be Elmer Allen, the clerk said without hesitation. He had died a year ago. The clerk gave Welsome the telephone number of Allen’s widow, still living in Italy.
Welsome traveled to Texas, talked to Allen’s widow and daughter and then started concentrating full-time on the bigger story. Her newspaper’s lawyers filed a revised, more-detailed FOIA request. Eventually, helpful documents started arriving, but rarely did the documents yield more answers than questions. Welsome continued putting the puzzle pieces together herself.
The second patient Welsome located was a California house painter. The document that proved the greatest help of all to Welsome came from Barton Bernstein, a history professor she had met during a 1991-92 journalism fellowship year at Stanford University. Bernstein knew about experimentation on humans at the University of California-Berkeley. A few weeks after Welsome discussed her project with Bernstein, he found a letter between two Berkeley researchers about paying one of the subjects US$50 a month to remain near the campus.
The letter contained three clues. It called the research subject “Mr. Stephens,” it mentioned his occupation, house painter, and it said he owned property in Healdsburg, Calif. Welsome called Healdsburg Museum, and she received the name of genealogist Lorlei Metke, who agreed to search through 50-year-old city directories, telephone books, marriage, death and voting records and talk to human sources.
A man seemed to fit the description, but his name was spelled “Stevens,” not “Stephens.” Metke supplied the whereabouts of Mr. Stevens’ two children because he had died two decades earlier. After talking to one of them, Welsome knew she had the right subject.
Welsome’s third identification started with a cryptic note in a package of documents from DOE. Welsome noticed a few papers that looked different from the official reports. She examined each page carefully and found an unsigned, undated note on which the following words were scrawled: “Charlton — died 198?”
By then, Welsome knew about two patients from the same city, Rochester, N.Y., who had died during the 1980s. Could Charlton be the name of one? Welsome also knew the name of the now-retired researcher who had experimented with those two individuals so many years earlier. Welsome called the researcher, and the name Charlton sounded familiar. The researcher even remembered a first name, Edith, which turned out to be Eda. Welsome finally had enough to begin calling funeral homes in the Rochester area. After locating the correct funeral home, she obtained the name of Charlton’s son. He filled in many gaps for Welsome.
The name of patient No. 4 came easily, as the researcher contacted about Charlton recalled the name of “John Mousso.”
The fifth participant’s identity had its genesis in a document received in yet another mostly unhelpful FOIA disclosure. The document was a summary memo with statistical data on the 18 patients. Three of the code names were accompanied by exhumation dates, presumably so a later group of researchers could study the remains of the subjects. The summary memo did not disclose the location of the exhumations, but Welsome figured at least one might have occurred in or near Rochester. She obtained a list of cemeteries, started calling, and finally found a match. Welsome located Fred C. Sours’ obituary. With five names and life histories in hand, Welsome felt ready to publish. Her editors agreed. However, the Albuquerque Tribune articles in November 1993 received little attention outside New Mexico until DOE Secretary Hazel O’Leary held a news conference on Dec. 7, 1993.
She expressed her shock at learning about the experimentation, then promised a new departmental policy of openness. President Bill Clinton followed up by directing other federal agencies to release information about the matter and appointing an advisory committee on human radiation experiments. Among other awards bestowed upon her during 1994, Welsome won the Investigative Reporters and Editors competition.
Now, five years later, Welsome has gone beyond the clinical-sounding medical reports and bureaucratic reactions to examine the Cold War context in which such horrendous experiments could be condoned by learned people, including those who had sworn to heal patients, not endanger their lives.
Welsome unforgettably renders the culture of secrecy that developed because of atomic weapons dropped during war, weapons kept to secure the peace.
“The secrecy cut researchers off from the healthy sunlight of inquiry that surely would have halted some of the experiments,” Welsome writes. “Working behind their security fences, the scientists developed a them-against-us mentality. This attitude was often manifested in a distrust of the public and disdain for scientific opponents. The cleared researchers even began to think alike, which accounts in part for the remarkably similar statements issued whenever a controversy erupted.”
Much of the information Welsome used can now be located on the Internet at www.hrex.dis.anl.gov and www.doe. gov. Then click on OpenNet.
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.