Because the official narrative rarely tells the whole story.
Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026
From the classified volume to its FOIA release
11,969 DAYS
VOL. I DATED 25 FEB 1977  →  RELEASED 3 DEC 2009
RAY COULTER THE FILE
Edward Nevin died five weeks after the Army sprayed a cloud of bacteria over San Francisco
Serratia marcescens bacteria growing on a blood agar plate in a Petri dish
Serratia marcescens, the SM in the Army’s San Francisco test, grown on a blood agar plate in 1973. (Photo: CDC/Dr. Negut, PHIL 10544)
I pulled other men’s files for 26 years at a federal records center outside St. Louis. Most weeks, the paper could tell a family how their man died. Edward Nevin’s family waited 26 years for their page.
The Army has always said its spray did not kill him, and no court ever ruled otherwise. You should hear that from me first.
Edward Nevin was a retired pipe fitter in San Francisco, 75 years old. In the fall of 1950 he lay in Stanford Hospital, getting over an operation.
He died there on November 1, 1950. I was a baby in Dayton, Ohio, in my mother’s arms...
In the last week of September 1950, a Navy ship working for the Army sprayed bacteria into the wind off San Francisco. Almost all of the city’s 800,000 residents breathed some in.
To see how a ship came to be spraying a city, you have to go back eight years, to a memo on Franklin Roosevelt’s desk.
On April 29, 1942, Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote the President that germ war was “dirty business” but the country had to be ready. The Army quoted him in its own history 35 years later.
After a study in May 1949, the Army set up a Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick, Maryland. Its job was to learn how a hidden germ attack on the United States would work.
San Francisco Bay, in September 1950, was its first big outdoor test. The Army’s 1977 history owns up to more than that one.
Which of these did the Army admit to?
Each line below comes from Volume I of the Army’s 1977 history. Pick the ones you think the Army put in writing.
Clouds of test germs let loose to wrap Navy ships at sea off Norfolk, Virginia, in 1950.
Hog cholera virus turned loose on pigs at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, in July 1951.
A test germ spread inside three subway lines in Manhattan in June 1966.
Bacteria and glowing particles sent over San Francisco Bay in September 1950.
Answer at the bottom of this letter.
“These materials were considered to be totally harmless by scientific and medical experts.”
US ARMY ACTIVITY IN THE U.S. BIOLOGICAL WARFARE PROGRAMS, VOL. I, CH. 2, 25 FEB 1977
The file
Document
“US Army Activity in the U.S. Biological Warfare Programs,” Volume I, as the cover reads. The title page inside says “Activities.”
Dated
25 February 1977 on the cover stamp. A King’s College London catalogue lists Volume I as 24 February 1977.
From
The Department of the Army
Written for
Congress, per its first page
Marked
Classified, and exempt from the general declassification schedule of Executive Order 11652
Also printed
An unclassified version, in the 1977 Senate hearing book
Released
3 December 2009, to John Greenewald of The Black Vault, with lines cut under FOIA exemption (b)(2) High
The Army wrote those two words, totally harmless, in 1977. In the fall of 1950, the doctors at Stanford Hospital had 11 patients with the same rare infection.
Dr. Richard Wheat treated Edward Nevin and the others. He wrote the cases up for the Archives of Internal Medicine in October 1951.
Ten of the 11 got better. Edward Nevin’s infection reached his heart, and you already know how that ended.
The Army kept the San Francisco test secret until newspapers dug it out in the 1970s. On March 8, 1977, the Army laid it out for Senator Edward Kennedy’s Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research.
Edward A. Miller, the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Development, spoke for the Army. It had run 239 germ tests in the open air between 1949 and 1969, the Army told the senators.
Senator Richard Schweiker got an unclassified version of the Army’s history into the hearing book. He said much of it had been classified for years.
On May 23, 1977, the subcommittee heard from the scientists. Matthew Meselson of Harvard told them he thought the tests were “idle exercises.”
Then Schweiker asked the question that keeps me up. If the doctors had been warned in 1950, could they have traced the bacteria in those Stanford patients?
Dr. J. Mehsen Joseph of the Maryland health department said it might have been possible, with better facts at the time. By 1977, Schweiker said, the trail was close to impossible to follow.
That is what the secret cost, to my mind. The answer had a shelf life, and the Army let it run out.
Edward Nevin’s grandson, Edward J. Nevin III, was a lawyer in San Francisco. He read about the test in the paper and sued the United States for the whole family.
In August 1979 he wrote to Meselson at Harvard, asking to take his testimony for the trial. The family lost, and in 1983 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the tests could not be second-guessed in court.
My father’s service file burned in the 1973 records center fire in St. Louis. I know what it is to come asking after the paper is gone.
My brother Denny came home from Vietnam in 1969. For 52 years he talked to me about the weather and his truck, and 1968 sat in the middle like a locked drawer.
I waited too long to ask him. The Nevins asked as soon as they knew to ask, and by then the trail to Stanford was 26 years cold.
DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
VOLUME I, 1942–1977
S E C R E T   DECLASSIFIED
25 FEBRUARY 1977
U.S. ARMY ACTIVITIES IN THE UNITED STATES BIOLOGICAL WARFARE PROGRAMS
SUBJECT:  Expansion of the BW Program During the Korean War (1950-53)
(C) The BW test program was also accelerated in this period. (Annex F) In late 1949, vulnerability tests with simulants were started in response to the Baldwin Committee report (See Annex D.) which pointed out the U.S. susceptibility to covert BW attack. The first large area vulnerability test was conducted in San Francisco Bay in September 1950 using the simulants BG, SM and fluorescent particles. (Annex G)
Released
3 Dec 2009
Army RDECOM FOIA
 
Volume I, Chapter 3, page 3-2. Released to John Greenewald, The Black Vault, FOIA FA-09-0021, 3 December 2009.
How long the page sat
April 29, 1942: Henry Stimson tells Franklin Roosevelt germ war is “dirty business.”
May 1949: A study leads the Army to set up a Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick.
September 20–27, 1950: The trials over San Francisco Bay.
November 1, 1950: Edward J. Nevin dies at Stanford Hospital.
January 22, 1951: The Chemical Corps dates its report on the San Francisco trials.
February 25, 1977: The Army dates Volume I of its history.
March 8, 1977: The Army testifies to Kennedy’s subcommittee.
May 23, 1977: Connell, Joseph and Meselson testify.
1983: The Ninth Circuit rules against the Nevin family.
December 3, 2009: The Army mails John Greenewald a cut-down Volume I. That is 11,969 days after the cover date.
Ray’s note
The Army’s 2009 FOIA letter lists two finds: its own report, and an excerpt from Leonard Cole’s book about the Army’s tests. In 26 years of pulling files, I never once answered a request with a bookstore.
Line of the Day
“In my opinion there is no such thing as a safe simulant.”
Dr. George H. Connell, Assistant to the Director, Center for Disease Control
Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, May 23, 1977, p. 277
The answer
All four. Every one sits in Volume I, dated 25 February 1977. The Army called the Manhattan subway germ “harmless” too.
Before the Army sprayed San Francisco, who should have had to say yes?
Pick one. Each button opens a letter to my desk with your answer in the subject line.
One tap opens the letter. No login.
Was your family in the Bay Area in September 1950? Hit reply and tell me who, and which part of town they lived in.
The request desk
Give me a program, a ship or a man’s name, and I will go looking for the file with a number on it.
NAME A FILE →
What I still cannot find
Here is where my search ran out this week.
▪  Volume 2 of the Army’s history, which holds the annexes. Annex G covers the tests that made the news, and the 2009 copy stopped at Volume I.
▪  The Chemical Corps report on the San Francisco trials, dated January 22, 1951. A copy sits in the BAD TRIP papers at King’s College London, and I have found no Army posting of it.
▪  The lines cut in 2009 under exemption (b)(2) High, which the Army’s letter says covers internal Army matters.
That one sentence about San Francisco Bay is the page Edward Nevin’s family waited 26 years for. A chapter earlier, the same report calls the bacteria totally harmless.
My wife Marilyn wants the scanner off the dining room table by Thanksgiving. Tonight it stays, next to my reading glasses and that one sentence.
Talk tomorrow,
Ray
Further Reading:
“Dirty business.” That is Stimson in 1942, as the Army quoted him in 1977. Here is the volume as the Army mailed it in 2009: US Army Activity in the U.S. Biological Warfare Programs, Volume I.
“Idle exercises.” Meselson’s word for the tests, with Connell, Joseph and Schweiker on the same pages: the May 23, 1977 hearing at the Meselson Archive.
“Re: Nevin v. USA.” The grandson’s 1979 letter, asking Meselson to testify for the family: Edward J. Nevin to Matthew Meselson, August 9, 1979.
“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.”
JAMES MADISON, LETTER TO W. T. BARRY, AUGUST 4, 1822

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