Cassidy's Run by David Wise Read Free Book Online

continued to live around Bel Air as they slipped into their seventies and eighties. They remained a close-knit group.
    Benjamin L. Harris had been technical director of the army’s chemical labs for eleven years when he left Edgewood in 1981. The retired nerve-gas scientists, he said, formed a club called the GOBs, for Good Old Boys. In the early 1990s “the Good Old Boys still met in Edgewood every Friday at Vitali’s restaurant, in a motel at the junction of Route 24 and I-95.” By 1997, their ranks had dwindled to four. “Now they meet at Denny’s, across the road.”
    Not all the ex-scientists at Edgewood joined the GOBs. Saul Hormats was definitely not a member of the club. White-haired and bespectacled, in his mid-eighties when interviewed for this book, Hormats was a maverick who had broken with his fellow scientists and publicly opposed the development and use of nerve gas. Born in Troy, New York, he grew up in Baltimore, earned a chemical-engineering degree at Johns Hopkins University in 1931, and three years later started at Edgewood. He worked there for thirty-seven years, serving as deputy director and then director of development, before he retired in 1972. Not one given to false modesty, he described himself as “the godfather of chemical warfare in the United States.”
    Hormats explained how Edgewood was organized into a research group, which worked on the nerve gases, and a development section, which designed a production facility. “Production plants were scattered around the country, one at Pine Bluffs, Arkansas, for example.
    “We ran toxicity tests on animals—mostly mice and dogs. It was done by our medical division. We had to make damn sure the stuff was stable, effective, not flammable, et cetera. It was then put into a one-fifty-five-millimeter shell, and sometimes an eight-inch shell, or a four-point-two mortar shell. All with GB.” 6
    Just to the north of Edgewood Arsenal is the army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, a weapons-test area. “Aberdeen would take a shell and fire it to see the trajectory, strictly for munitions testing. Target effects were all done at Dugway,” said Hormats.
    At Edgewood, the scientists concentrated primarily on sarin (GB). But they progressed to more compounds designated with letters of the alphabet, beyond GA (tabun) and GB. They skipped over GC, for fear that it might be confused with phosgene (CG), an older poison gas used widely in WorldWar I. 7
    The Edgewood chemists also experimented with soman (GD), and conducted research on a nerve gas designated only as GE, an ethyl version of sarin. They experimented as well with cyclo sarin (GF), a colorless, odorless nerve gas that is apparently as lethal as its cousins. According to Jeff Smart, Edgewood’s official historian, “We only standardized GB. We decided to declare it the main agent and produce it on a large scale.” Although no one at Edgewood would confirm it, there is some evidence that the scientists also may have conducted research into GH, a nerve gas that combines an organophosphorous compound with isopentyl alcohol. 8
    The chemists at Edgewood were not content with this research. They strove at great length and at considerable expense to develop an even more powerful nerve gas. In the end, however, the technical problems they encountered were insurmountable. But this failure was to become the core of Operation SHOCKER
    From the questions the GRU asked Cassidy, it was clear the Soviets were anxious to know which nerve gases were being produced and put into weapons. Had the United States decided to choose one of the three gases, or was it developing more than one?
    The GRU was also eager to discover whether the United States was developing a binary system to deliver nerve gases. In a binary system, the chemicals that combine to form nerve gas are kept separate—in two compartments in an artillery shell, for example—and mix only on approach to a target. A binary system is a much safer way to