U.S. Army Covered-up Reason Why Camp Detrick Commander Shot Himself
Seventy-three years ago, the Commander at America's secretive germ warfare center was found shot to death in his car at Camp Detrick. What really happened?
It was November 13, 1950, a chilly Monday afternoon at Camp Detrick, Maryland, the U.S. secretive center of biological warfare research. There were still patches of snow on the ground in some areas. In what newspapers called a “remote area” of the 1200 acre facility, Lt. Colonel Harold J. Isbell, Commandant at Camp Detrick since 1948, was found dead in his car, shot with a single bullet in the head. “A soldier and a civilian employee at the ‘top secret’ camp” had discovered him.
The story made headlines around the country. “Chief Kills Self at Army Germ Warfare Camp,” blasted the New York Daily News. “Col. Isbell Is Found Dead of Gun Wound,” wrote The News, the local paper in Frederick, Maryland, which typically covered Detrick affairs. “Bacteria Warfare Camp Commander Reported Suicide,” stated a United Press (UP) story in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
The UP story had some interesting details. According to this article, “Officers who lived near Isbell and his wife on the post were baffled for an explantation.”
They said he had been "acting normally" and was in buoyant spirits. Authorities found no note, but discounted possibility of foul play. He was slated for a change in assignment. His replacement, Col. Fred J. Delmore, already was on the post.
The army dropped a veil of secrecy around the camp after the shooting.
The angle that Isbell was slated for new assignment never panned out. Isbell’s demeanor didn’t appear to be consistent with a psychological profile of suicide. But psychologists know that the private emotional life of individuals doesn’t always reveal itself publicly. On the other hand, could there have been a nefarious angle to these events. Could Isbell have been murdered?
This question was certainly in the minds of some of the press. A story in the Marysville Tribune in Ohio was headlined, “Doubt Officer Was a Suicide.”
The Tribune article also noted, “only last week [Isbell] was promoted from major to lieutenant colonel.” Most people don’t commit suicide after a promotion at work! Indeed, Major Isbell had been advanced to lieutenant colonel on November 2. Meanwhile, the Tribune reported how the .45 pistol that presumably delivered the fatal shot was found in Isbell’s right hand.
There were other oddities to the story as well. Why was Col. Delmore, Isbell’s immediate replacement already at Detrick? A “special report” to the Baltimore Evening Sun had some startling revelations.
Lt. Col. Isbell had been relieved of command the Saturday before he died, that is, only two days earlier (and only nine days after receiving his promotion to lieutenant colonel). The four-man Army investigating board assembled to conduct an inquest into the Commandant’s death was led by Isbell’s putative replacement, Col. Delmore, who was previously posted to Edgewood Arsenal.
The other members of the inquest board were Isbell’s executive officer, Major Cecil B. Miller; Detrick’s intelligence and security officer, Capt. Charles Jones; and Dr. Carroll E. Krichbaum, post surgeon.
The Evening Sun article explained:
Colonel Delmore arrived at Detrick Saturday from the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood, Md., to take over command without a formal order having been posted.
An army official said the change in command was made verbally. He said such a procedure was “unusual" but not unprecedented.
There are a couple of other items from the Sun article worth mentioning. The soldier and the civilian who found Isbell in his car had been “walking through the outskirts of the post.” It’s not said what they were doing there. Isbell’s wife, Gladys, who lived with her husband at Detrick, had been hospitalized for “treatment.” Additionally, we learn that Major Miller (Isbell’s old XO and member of the inquest board) had explained to the press that the Maryland state medical examiner didn’t have jurisdiction in Isbell’s death, as Isbell’s death had “occurred on an army post.”
The article ended with what seemed on my initial reading to be an insignificant fact, or a red herring, perhaps. But it turned out to signal a clue to the mystery of Isbell’s death. The Evening Sun article concluded with a mention about the presence of Army Inspector General representatives on the base. “Whether the inspection had been completed or is still being conducted could not be learned.”
The results of the inquest into Isbell’s death were never released, and the story quickly dropped out of sight. Decades later, this article will reveal the best understanding available regarding Lt. Col. Isbell’s death, and a hypothesis about why it was all covered up.
Accelerating the Biowar Program
Harold J. Isbell was from Toledo, Ohio. He joined the Army in 1929. According to a January 3, 1949 article in the Frederick, Maryland News, Isbell had been stationed previously in Hawaii, the Philippines, Okinawa, “and several continental posts.” He also served previously in the Office of the Chief of the Chemical Corps (date not known), probably under Major General Alden Waitt, who had been head of the Chemical Corps, the division of the Army responsible for research on biological, chemical and radiological warfare, from 1945-1949.
Isbell first came to Camp Detrick in October 1947, assigned as executive officer. (Camp Detrick was renamed Fort Detrick in 1956.) In June 1948, he was appointed interim commander, and on December 23 that same year was given full command. Isbell became the public face of what was otherwise one of the most secret Army installations in the country.
Harold Isbell must have been thoroughly briefed and kept up-to-date on the progress and the difficulties attendant upon the U.S. biological warfare (BW) program after World War II. Surely he had to have been aware of problems within the BW program. For one thing, as Nicholson Baker documented in his 2020 book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, while no one died from the following incidents, the Detrick BW program had been accumulating casualties. “In 1948, five staffers at Detrick got sick with rabbit fever, and fifteen came down with brucellosis. In 1949, five more got rabbit fever. Ten got brucellosis. A sewage-plant decontaminationist got cutaneous anthrax” (p. 273).
“Rabbit fever” is otherwise known as tularemia. Brucellosis, anthrax and tularemia were all biological pathogens studied at Camp Detrick for use in germ warfare.
[UPDATE, April 20, 2024: According to a 1947 internal Chemical Corps history of the Chemical Warfare Service Biological Warfare research during World War II, in January 1944 the military’s BW program was reorganized around a new Special Projects Division (PDF pg. 86) within the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. By November, administrative issues arose in terms of who had authority over aspects of the program, the technical directors and scientists, or the military officers in command of the research sites.
The clarification of authorities was announced, and the commanding officers of the military research sites had their authorities significantly curtailed. They had no more say in how the BW program progressed. According to the 1947 history:
“Commanding officers of Camp Detrick, Horn Island and Vigo Plant were declared responsible to the Chief, SPD [Special Projects Division], for the proper performance of all functions at their posts which were the responsibility of the Chief, CWS [Chemical Weapons Service].” (PDF pg. 105]
This change in administrative authorities at the BW research sites meant that the commanding officers were no longer in charge of both administrative and technical issues. By the time Isbell was commandant, he would not have been an essential part of the loop wherein technical matters were worked out on the project of biological warfare. But he would have been responsible for how any changes in projects at the facility might impact or endanger the surrounding community. The change was deliberately made to affect “certain problems of administration” which were a “source of friction in the military organization.” (Ibid.) — End UPDATE]
The BW program had gotten a major shot in the arm in June 1950. An Ad Hoc Committee on Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Warfare had released a report (PDF) to the Secretary of Defense that argued strenuously that “the potential worth and the dangers of BW appear to be great” (pg. 15). The Committee was headed by management consulting firm Arthur D. Little’s President Earl P. Stevenson. The Ad Hoc Committee report became known unofficially as "the Stevenson Report.”
The Stevenson report recommended that “large-scale field tests on the BW agents and munitions should be carried out as soon as possible.” The report added, ominously, “Conclusive information on the military worth of the biological weapons is not likely to be found short of their use in war.” Stevenson and his co-authors concluded the policy of use of chemical and biological weapons in “retaliation only” be abandoned. Research on BW needed to be expanded.
This expansion opened up the opportunity for corruption in the BW program. As one example, Baker noted in Baseless, after Stevenson, the President of the Arthur D. Little company, sounded the alarm about the need to upgrade the U.S. biowar program, the company “was soon to have a contract, with the Chemical Corps to produce an infectious aerosol generator” (p. 288). Nice timing, that!
At the time of the Stevenson report’s release on June 30, the Korean War was only five days old, and Camp Detrick commander, then-Major Harold Isbell, had less than five months to live.
The Waitt Scandal
The corruption angle exploded into public view in July 1949 when the Chief of the Chemical Corps, Major General Waitt, was caught up in a major Washington influence peddling scandal. Waitt came under scrutiny due to his relationship with James V. Hunt, a management consultant who was said to have sold access to influential Washington politicians and military officers for a 5% cut in the graft. Waitt was also close to Major General Harry H. Vaughn, an aide to President Harry Truman.
The hearings into the whole scandal produced a lot of embarrassment to Waitt, and he was suspended in July 1949 from his position at the Chemical Corps. According to AP reporting (via Columbia, South Carolina newspaper, The State), Waitt was accused of writing “in the third person, a highly flattering report on himself” for Vaughn, who presumably would lobby Truman for an extension to Waitt’s command of the Chemical Corps. Embarrassingly, Waitt was accused of having “plotted with [Vaughn]… to ‘cut the throats’ of fellow officers eligible to succeed Waitt.”
Waitt also had to answer questions about possible corruption related to his relationship with Hunt. It was intimated that Waitt had asked Hunt to help him get his first assignment as head of the Chemical Corps back in November 1945. Waitt said he couldn’t remember.
The scandal didn’t end well for Waitt, who earlier had, as Nicholson Baker also wrote in Baseless (p. 161), been centrally involved in the U.S. government decision to offer amnesty to Shiro Ishii and Unit 731 personnel. The deal included bargained amnesty for war crimes in exchange for the BW experimental data Imperial Japan had gathered from fatal human BW experiments. Waitt “retired” from the Army at age 56, right after he was restored to active duty.
According to a September 11, 1949 AP report, Waitt’s last months were clouded by the scandal, such that the Secretary of War himself declared that Waitt’s “irregular actions” left him unable to continue as Chief of the Chemical Corps. For his part, Waitt denied any wrongdoing. He was replaced as Chief of the Chemical Corps by Major General Anthony C. McAuliffe, who served for the next couple of years.
“Dishonored checks”
The Waitt scandal is, along with the burgeoning biological warfare program at that time, the background to what turned out to be what one could call the Isbell scandal, a scandal that was covered up by the Army for what appears to be political reasons.
According to a document released to me from the National Archives, an IG special inspection at Camp Detrick found that the newly promoted Lieutenant General Isbell had been involved in passing bad (“dishonored”) checks, and possibly other financial shenanigans, involving the Officers’ Mess and Civilian Welfare Funds. As Waitt’s actions had been called “irregular,” now Isbell’s financial accounts were also deemed “irregular.” Lacking full access to the IG report or any inquest records, we can’t be sure of exactly everything Isbell did, or how much money he stole.
The special inspection had been hidden behind the auspices of an “AGI,” or Annual General Inspection, probably so Isbell wouldn’t get suspicious. The investigation took place from November 6 through November 10, and was led by Lt. Col. E.R. Goodenow of the Inspector General’s Division.
Isbell’s presumed fraud resulted in some unspecified loss of funds to the Officers’ Mess and Civilian Welfare Funds. A note appended to a name index card for Harold Isbell’s wife Gladys, held by by the National Archives in their Name Index to General and Confidential Correspondence, 1917–1954 (entry A1 25-A) in the Records of the Office of the Inspector General (Army) (Record Group 159), states that an Army Criminal Investigative Division investigation concluded that Lt. Col. Isbell killed himself. The suicide happened 24 hours or less after Isbell was confronted with the charges and stripped of his command, his fatal gunshot “evidently resulting from relief from command because of [the] irregularities uncovered” during the IG inspection.
While it occurred to me that Detrick authorities may have killed Isbell himself, there’s no evidence they did so. The humiliation and exposure of his crime was likely too much for Isbell to bear. Even so, his death might have been a relief as well to Army authorities, allowing for a quick disposal of the problem. Perhaps, though quite speculative and perhaps fantastic, someone even suggested to Isbell he take his own life for the good of the Corps (it might explain how it came about that a soldier and a civilian were walking about in a “remote” corner of the Detrick grounds and “found” Isbell in his car).
So why didn’t the Army or Detrick authorities release the full story about Isbell’s death? I believe that his death, with its aura of corruption, coming so soon after the Waitt affair, would have been an embarrassment the Army could not afford. The Chemical Corps and Camp Detrick were in the midst of a major increase in biological warfare research in the months after the Stevenson report. Millions of dollars were flowing in to the germ warfare program. On a more covert level, Camp Detrick (with the likely assistance of the CIA) was arranging for the use of biological agents for use in sabotage and by late 1951, in munitions to be dropped by U.S. Air Force and Marine bombers over both North Korea and Northeastern China.
The last thing Camp Detrick or the U.S. Army needed was another Congressional investigation into corruption, or a scandal that threatened funding for, or even worse, exposure of their secret projects.
Last December I wrote about a top secret November 15, 1950 briefing to an FBI Special Agent from an Army official at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. On the same exact day, Harold Isbell would lie in state at the Harry E. Carty Co. funeral home on East Patrick Street in Fredrick, Maryland. The newspaper notice of the event sounds deeply ironic to us after all these years. "…the general public will have the opportunity to pay respect to the man whose death from a gunshot wound followed by only eleven days his promotion from the rank of major to lieutenant colonel," the Frederick News explained.
Meanwhile, over a thousand miles away, the Dugway official was telling Special Agent Jay Newman how the U.S. Chemical Warfare Corps was “in a position to effectively use” anthrax, brucellosis, plague and psittacosis “by covert means and will have perfected methods of distributing them by bombs within a year.”
Newman was also told that botulism toxin, produced by bacteria grown by the Chemical Corps, could “be produced in quantity and is ready for war use.”
I think the truth about Isbell’s untimely death, and the stench of scandal that surrounded it, was sacrificed for the sake of keeping the germ warfare program on track. By January 1952, U.S. planes were dropping biological bombs across Korea and Manchuria. The great, awful germ war experiment of the U.S. government, which used Chinese and Korean military and civilians as unwitting guinea pigs, had begun.