Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

by Wendy S. Painting

In 1993, the concerns of veterans groups, researchers and government officials prompted a Pentagon study inquiring into the possibility that U.S. soldiers in the Gulf had been exposed to chemical weapons, which was overseen by former Deputy Defense Secretary and current CIA Director John Duetch. The study’s 1994 report concluded that no evidence existed of Iraqi use of chemical or biological weapons or “any exposure of U.S. service members to chemical or biological warfare agents in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.” The results were suspect, given that the head of the study, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg, had also been on the board of directors of American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit company that made over 70 government-approved shipments of anthrax and