By 1960 the team was assembled. Ochsner was formally separated from Tulane. Sarah Stewart, M.D., Ph.D., was probably recruited as the scientific director of the secret project. She was the most famous cancer researcher at the National Institutes of Health, and believed that an anti-cancer vaccine was possible. For her, it would have been a once-in-a-lifetime chance to have all the power and all the resources she needed to develop an anti-cancer vaccine. Stewart left NIH and transferred to the U.S. Public Health Service at this time. She could have secured the USPHS Hospital in New Orleans as a laboratory, with Nixon instructing the CIA to take millions of dollars from their laundered bank accounts to pay for the linear particle accelerator. By 1962 the machine had been installed, and the secret lab was fully operational. It would have been then that Ochsner and Stewart brought Sherman into the project. They both knew her well, trusted her, and respected her knowledge of the effects of radiation on cancers.
All this made me realize that there had been two underground medical labs in New Orleans in the early 1960s. I will call them the Big Lab and the Little Lab. The Big Lab was the U.S. Government’s lab at the Public Health Service Hospital. It had the linear particle accelerator. It was where Mary Sherman apparently died. It started up around 1960 and continued until Mary Sherman’s death in 1964. The Little Lab was on Louisiana Avenue Parkway near David Ferrie’s apartment.
In the Big Lab, Mary Sherman was a high-level player who directed the medical research. Due to the security around the project, anyone involved with the lab had to have a high security clearance. Obviously they needed to find someone with a similar clearance to do the day-to-day work, like take care of the mice and prepare tissue samples for microscopic examination. David Ferrie had the right security credentials because he flew missions for the CIA, and he needed a job because he had recently lost his position with Eastern Airlines. Ferrie became a low-level player brought in to do routine lab work and oversee the mice. Ironically, our most persistent question had suddenly answered itself!7
My guess once was that Mary Sherman’s only contact with David Ferrie was through their covert working relationship in the Big Lab. Sherman’s professional colleagues had no way of knowing she knew Ferrie, and Sherman had no reason to tell people she did. But Ferrie’s situation was different. As Ferrie’s life collapsed into alcohol and drug addiction, he continually “shot off his mouth” about his covert activities to impress his young friends. He used the fact that he had once worked with a famous cancer researcher (like Mary Sherman) to bolster his image, and to prove his legitimacy as a cancer researcher. This is when Ferrie listed himself as Dr. David Ferrie in the phone book.
Sherman’s death demonstrated the political risk of the covert medical research at the Big Lab. Enormous political muscle had to be mobilized to shut down the New Orleans Police Department’s investigation so abruptly.
The Big Lab had to be shut down. The accelerator had to be dismantled. Mr. Y was called in from Boston to survey the damage to the equipment and to make sure the accelerator could be safely removed.
Did Mary Sherman ever go to the Little Lab on Louisiana Avenue Parkway? For a long time my answer was “No.” While I considered the odds to be extremely high that David Ferrie knew Mary Sherman through his custodial role at the Big Lab at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, I thought that Sherman had died before Ferrie brought any mice back to the Little Lab on Louisiana Avenue Parkway. Even if Ferrie planned to use the viruses as a biological weapon, I thought that Mary Sherman should not be associated with those motives, since she was already dead. In Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus, I challenged any researcher to come forward with real evidence to support the claim that Mary Sherman was David Ferrie’s closest female friend.
As we will see shortly, the evidence brought forward indicates that Sherman and Ferrie had a close working relationship. And it involved cancer and monkey viruses!
BUT WHAT ABOUT INCA, OSWALD, and the radio debates? Did any of that fit in? Was it part of the larger pattern?
I picked up the phone and called Carol Hewett, an attorney who had helped me during my research. When she answered the phone, I simply said, “Hello. We found the accelerator.”
“Where was it?” she countered with equal brevity.
“At the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in New Orleans.”
“Hold on,” she replied, as she typed “ U.S. Public Health Service” into her computer.
“Here we are,” she continued. “It’s in Volume 19.”
“Volume 19 of what?” I asked.
“The Warren Commission Volumes. The FBI went to the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital on 11/25/638 looking for evidence of either Lee Harvey Oswald or A.J. Hidell.9 They went back a second time on 11/26.”
The FBI was looking for Oswald at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital! I could hardly believe my ears. “Why?”
“According to the Dallas Police, Oswald had a vaccination card issued to him by the U.S. Public Health Service on 6/8/63, when he lived at 4907 Magazine Street in New Orleans. It was issued to Lee Harvey Oswald, and signed “Dr. A.J. Hidell.” The FBI reports are in Volume 19. I’ll send you the citations.”10
Had Lee Harvey Oswald been on the grounds of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital at the time the linear particle accelerator was there?
Take a look at the map. Does it strike you as unusual that both Lee Harvey Oswald and Dr. Alton Ochsner lived within one mile of the most secret government laboratory in America?
Here one should also consider the testimony of Dr. Adele Edisen, a Ph.D. neurologist, to the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. She stated that she had been given Lee Harvey Oswald’s name and his New Orleans phone number in mid-April 1963, approximately three weeks before Oswald moved to New Orleans.11 To me, her twenty-one-page narrative strongly suggests that the location of Oswald’s apartment was not accidental, and that it had been selected in advance for some reason. Was this reason its close proximity to the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital? Had Lee Harvey Oswald been sent to New Orleans to spy on the secret experiments at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital?
Now the timing of Sherman’s murder comes into focus. With Oswald in the picture, the fact that Mary Sherman’s murder happened underneath the noses of the Warren Commission’s investigators takes on a whole new light. Had someone sabotaged the linear particle accelerator in order to create a high-profile incident that would blow the cover off the secret laboratory and call attention to its connection to Lee Harvey Oswald? And what would have happened to the “lone nut” theory if the public began to suspect that Lee Harvey Oswald had been spying on a top-secret U. S. Government laboratory? Would it have seemed unusual that the doctor who ran that same secret government laboratory had also arranged the radio debates which discredited the soon-to-be-accused assassin of the President?
In my opinion, if this event was intentional sabotage of this laboratory, whoever planned it was well aware of Oswald’s proximity to the lab, Ochsner’s involvement with Oswald, the FBI investigation of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, and to whom the trail of accountability would lead, once the public discovered that the government was secretly mutating monkey viruses because they had released a polio vaccine contaminated with such cancer-causing viruses.
Sabotage of the linear particle accelerator may have been a hardball tactic in a big-league game of power. In this bold arena, our celebrated concepts of truth and justice give way to more fundamental questions like “Who rules?”
Mary Sherman may have been the incidental victim in a war between political Titans. Luck was not on her side. If Dr. Ochsner had grabbed the circuit breaker, things would have been different, at least for Mary Sherman. If such a plan to expose the secret medical experiments at the Infectious Disease Laboratory of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in New Orleans had worked, American history may have turned out differently.
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1 FOIA stands for Freedom of Information Act, a U.S. law whi
ch gives citizens access to government documents. It is used as a verb by researchers to refer to the process of using the law to request documents from the government. Ultimately, the government still decides what gets revealed and what does not. Each agency has a FOIA officer who functions as a censor, deleting words, sentences, and paragraphs for a variety of reasons. To “redact” is to cross out with a black marker so that the requester cannot read the section. A heavily redacted document is one where many things have been blacked out. An unredacted document is one where the requester has protested the redaction and the government has agreed to issue a new version of the document with no redactions. FOIA was originally set up by LBJ in response to the argument that the government did not have the legal right to keep documents secret. The original law was so restrictive, critics called it the Freedom From Information Act. There are whole books written about how the process works.
2 While Harvard’s name is universally respected, it is seldom mentioned in the popular press in connection to the development of nuclear technology. Instead, the stories recount once-secret, but now familiar, events like the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Japanese cities during World War II. The featured names are usually Einstein, Fermi, and Oppenheimer. The featured locations are usually Chicago and New Mexico. I did not question this perspective until I found a photograph of a scientist dismantling a particle accelerator for use in the Manhattan Project. I had not thought about centers of nuclear research that existed before the project. The caption explained that the accelerator (and the scientists) were about to be shipped to New Mexico for the super-secret Manhattan Project. The accelerator that they were dismantling was at Harvard. The point was so simple and so obvious. It was Boston, not Chicago or New Mexico, that was the actual intellectual headwaters of nuclear research in the United States. Of course, Boston would have been where the first commercial linear particle accelerators were built. At least Mr. Y was from the right place.
3 But he did say that Dr. Ochsner was involved.
4 The Children’s Hospital used to be named the Crippled Children’s Hospital. The name was changed around 1973.
5 The building appears to be two stories from the outside, but the attic was finished, and functioned as the third floor.
6 Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease sent me the FBI file on Mary Sherman. The New Orleans Police Department had requested the FBI’s help. Asst. Director DeLoach, speaking on behalf of the Director of the FBI, turned them down, saying it was a local murder and that it was not within the FBI’s jurisdiction. Agents were ordered not to participate in any manner other than routinely researching published sources. No FBI interrogation was allowed. An FBI agent in New Haven was threatened with a reprimand when he interviewed a doctor about Mary Sherman. Had Mary Sherman’s body not been moved from the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, the case would have automatically been in the FBI’s jurisdiction. Did the FBI take this position to preserve the secrecy of this covert government operation?
7 The idea of Ferrie working under Sherman’s direction in this lab makes a lot more sense to me than the claim that Sherman worked alongside Ferrie in his lab.
8 11/25/63 was the Monday following the JFK assassination (Friday 11/22/63) and the day after Oswald had been murdered (Sunday 11/24/63).
9 A.J. Hidell was an alias that Lee Harvey Oswald used during his first month in New Orleans.
10 Warren Commission, Volume XIX, Exhibit # 2012, memos from the New Orleans FBI office. Also HSCA, Cadigan 23 & 24.
11 Dr. Edisen said she was given Oswald’s phone number by Jose A. Rivera, M.D., Ph.D., a Director of NIH’s Institute for Neurological Diseases and Blindness. Subsequent research proved Dr. Rivera to be Colonel Jose A. Rivera of the U.S. Army’s biowarfare unit and that he had lived in uptown New Orleans during 1960-61, a fact which he later concealed from the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Rivera may have been involved in the secret experiments at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital.
Oswald’s 4907 Magazine St. apartment was a small fat usually rented by Tulane or Loyola students. The phone number given to Edisen belonged to the building’s landlord. Like the other tenants, the Oswalds borrowed their landlord’s phone and never had a phone of their own. Dr. Edisen eventually called the phone number and spoke to Oswald himself. She was surprised to hear Oswald say that he did not know Dr. Rivera, and cautioned him: “Well, he sure knows who you are.”
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CHAPTER 12
That Other Epidemic
AS WE ENDED THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, a new plague stalked our planet. The official projections from the World Health Organization predicted that, by the millennium, 30 million people would be infected with this new virus. Other experts put the number over 100 million.1 According to the Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS, the actual number was 30.4 million; 18.8 million had by then succumbed to the disease.2
The damage would be worst in the Third World, where population and poverty are the highest and where education and sanitation are the lowest. But this plague knows no borders and, in time, will likely infect every city in the world. In the words of a WHO spokesman, this is “the worst public health disaster ever — beyond anything in our comprehension.”3
Most articles published in the American press about “where AIDS came from” concentrate on the spread of the virus. The theories published in the United States tend to say that AIDS came from either Haiti or Africa. In Haiti, they prefer to say it came from the U.S. or Africa. And in Africa, they’d rather say it came from the U.S. or Haiti. And many people have heard about the homosexual Canadian flight attendant whose promiscuous activities helped spread the virus in the late 1970s and early 1980s.4 This flight attendant story is an interesting example showing how fast a sexually transmitted disease can travel over great distances and how slow a bureaucracy can be about responding to something that it does not want to see.
When I ask Americans where AIDS came from, most of them say Africa. This is primarily due to publicity about the huge number of HIV-1 cases in Zaire in central Africa, about the relationship between the AIDS virus and an African monkey virus, and about the discovery of HIV-2 in Senegal on the western coast of Africa. But remember, Dr. Robert Biggar of the National Institute for Health said, “There is no conclusive evidence that the AIDS virus originated in Africa, since the epidemic seemed to start at approximately the same time as in America and Europe.”5 It is interesting to note that in 1985, after four years of tracking AIDS globally, there were 9,000 cases in the U.S. but only 2,000 cases in Africa, Europe, Australia, Haiti, and Asia combined.6
Most of the efforts to tie the origin of the AIDS epidemic to Africa are based upon efforts to tie Kaposi’s sarcoma to AIDS. While Kaposi’s is one of the cancers which frequently accompanies HIV infections, AIDS and Kaposi’s are separate diseases. Kaposi’s has been recognized as a distinct disease and studied as such since the 1800s.7 HIV is new. As Robert Biggar titled his article: “Kaposi’s sarcoma in Zaire is not associated with HTLV-III [AIDS] infection.”8
It is interesting to note that in 1983, before Zaire exploded with HIV-1, before the relationship with SIV was discovered, and before HIV-2 was found in Senegal, a researcher named Jane Teas from the Harvard School of Public Health published a theory which suggested that AIDS was caused by a mutation of the African Swine Flu virus to which the Cuban pig population had been intentionally exposed, as an act of political sabotage, and which then spread casually from Cuba to the nearby island of Haiti, where it reached epidemic proportions in the tolerated prostitution environment.9
When the monkey virus connection was announced, the pig virus theory evaporated quickly. But because “pig” was wrong does not mean “Cuba-to-Haiti” was wrong. What epidemiological evidence did this researcher from the Harvard School of Public Health have for saying that AIDS spread from Cuba to Haiti? This is an area that needs to be explored further. It is important to note that we have virtually no public health information fro
m Cuba during the 1960s and 1970s. And if we did have it, we probably would not believe it anyway. After all, Communists have always said that AIDS came from an American lab.
But it was a French epidemiologist who suggested that the spread of AIDS between the Caribbean and Africa may have been the result of a Cuban military airlift during the mid-1970s, and from the Caribbean to the U.S. via a Cuban exile boatlift to the US in 1977.10
What is known about AIDS in the Caribbean is that HIV-1 cases were reported very early in Haiti. In one particular case, a French engineer received a blood transfusion after he lost an arm in an automobile accident in 1977. Back in France, he developed AIDS and died. This is pretty conclusive evidence that HIV-1 existed in the Haitian blood supply around the mid-1970s. (AIDS was not reported in the U.S. until 1981.)
Further, a highly respected American scientist, Matilda Krim of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, suggested that the sudden and massive outbreak of AIDS among American homosexual males might have been due to infected batches of gamma globulin (an immune system booster commonly given to Third World travelers, and a health fad in the American gay community at the time) which were made from tainted human blood bought in the Caribbean during the 1970s.11
IN ORDER TO BE CONSIDERED a possible creator of HIV-1, one would have had to possess both the capability of mutating a monkey virus and the opportunity to do so within the established timeframe.
Let’s analyze capability first. If you were going to mutate a monkey virus, the first thing you would need is access to monkey viruses! Where would you get them? Drug stores do not sell monkey viruses. A zoo may have monkeys, but if you asked the zookeeper which one had a given retrovirus, he would not be much help. The obvious answer to “Who would have had access to monkey viruses?” The people who were doing medical research on monkey viruses!
Dr. Mary’s Monkey Page 25
