Reporter: A Memoir

by Seymour M. Hersh

in a highly respected magazine, and there was a ton of declassified congressional testimony raising questions about the intent of the program. I got the go-ahead and headed back to the Pentagon, but not to Correspondents Corridor. I went to the Pentagon library with a list of the known army CBW bases, as published by Langer, and tried to dig up copies of the weekly newspapers at those bases. I had written for such a paper at Fort Riley and knew that every retirement party for a colonel or general routinely made it into print, invariably with details of where the old-timer planned to retire. I got a list of names and addresses, made some calls, and took off, full of my customary enthusiasm. I spent much of the next two months on the road, visiting retirees as well as the small towns that were the locales for the secret CBW laboratories and production facilities. Small towns have newspapers, too, and given that the bases themselves were totally off-limits, those offices were my first stop. I learned about unreported deaths of laboratory workers and delivery boys who had gone into the wrong lab at the wrong time. I also learned about animals infected with the most deadly of diseases that had escaped—in one case to the mountains of Maryland near Camp David, the much-used retreat for American presidents. I was led to a newly retired colonel who had spent his career—much of it filled with doubts about the morality of his work—in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. It did not take long...