Panama: Bombs on the Beach

Abstract

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With the news last fall that American phosgene bombs and other chemical weapons had been found on a Panamanian island, one part of World War II's secret chemical testing programs came back to haunt the U.S. government.

For years, the Pentagon maintained, at least publicly, that all the chemical weapons it tested in a classified program conducted on San Jose Island between 1944 and 1947 had been disposed of properly. But that claim evaporated with the September 6, 2001, announcement by Panamanian government officials that seven intact weapons, including 500- and 1,000-pound phosgene bombs, M1A2 gas cylinders, and phosgene rockets, had been found on the island. 1

Panama immediately quarantined San Jose, closing down a newly built eco-tourist resort, Hacienda Del Mar, whose owners had been hoping to attract visitors to the island's white sand beaches and tropical rainforests. Hotel staff and a small number of full-time island residents were ordered to leave. Panama also imposed a ban on flights over the area.

The Panamanian government is now trying to determine how many chemical weapons remain on San Jose: The devices found so far seem likely to be only the tip of the iceberg.

Some 31,000 mustard gas and phosgene bombs and other chemical weapons were detonated or dropped on the island as part of a test program code-named “The San Jose Project.” The experiments, led by the United States with support from Canada and Britain, were designed to determine how effective chemical weapons might be in jungle warfare.

Based on its study of American government records, a U.S. peace group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, has estimated that as many as one out of 10, or more than 3,000 of the weapons, may remain—most thought to be bombs that failed to explode after being dropped into the jungle. Others may have been buried when the U.S. military hurriedly closed down the project at the end of 1947. If these devices are still intact and sealed, the chemicals they contain could be deadly. 2

Hacienda Del Mar, the eco-tourist resort on San Jose Island, was closed down in September 2001 after chemical weapons were discovered in the area. Previous page: Canada's 50-pound mustard gas cluster bomb.

At first glance, San Jose appears to be an untouched tropical paradise. Boa constrictors, parrots, and iguanas abound in its lush forests. Hacienda Del Mar, one of the few buildings on the island, sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

On closer inspection, however, the remnants of the San Jose Project are everywhere. Rusted U.S. Army tractors and unmarked metal drums lay abandoned near beaches. A wharf, built to unload thousands of gallons of chemicals as well as bombs and other supplies, still juts out into one of the island's tranquil bays. The concrete skeleton of an American military chapel looks strangely out of place in the middle of the jungle.

During my visit to the island in February 2001, I found the remains of discarded mustard gas bombs on the side of a dirt road leading to the new resort. Walking along a path on my way to the beach, I discovered a U.S.-made chemical weapon cylinder in the grass. Although covered in rust, it appeared intact and in relatively good condition.

Fighting the war in the Pacific

The roots of the San Jose Project can be traced back to the bloody battles fought in the Pacific in late 1943. 3

The United States had begun invading Japanese-held islands, but even after enemy fortresses were pounded by air, troops going ashore faced heavy resistance. At Betio Island, large numbers of Japanese soldiers survived the air attacks, and more than 3,000 American troops were killed or wounded before the island fell.

Gen. William Porter, head of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, reviewed the Betio casualty figures and concluded there was a better way. General Porter believed he could kill or incapacitate Japanese soldiers by saturating their bunkers with mustard gas, phosgene, and other chemicals. He calculated that the entire Japanese garrison on Tarawa, an atoll that included Betio Island, could have been eliminated with as little as 900 tons of mustard gas, compared to the 3,000 tons of high explosives that had been used.

To prove his theory, Porter wanted to conduct chemical warfare experiments in a tropical setting, and military planners quickly seized on San Jose as the perfect location for testing. The island was uninhabited and relatively isolated, yet close enough to mainland Panama, some 60 miles away, to be easily resup-plied. The U.S. military struck a deal with the Panamanian government and the company that owned the island.

Porter then turned to his counterparts in Canada for assistance. By 1943 Canada was at the forefront of chemical warfare production and experimentation. It had opened Experimental Station Suffield in southern Alberta, where it tested mustard gas and other weapons. Canada's mustard gas plant in Cornwall, Ontario, was among the largest in the Allied nations, producing a high-quality thickened mustard known as HT.

Canada had also developed a 50-pound mustard gas cluster bomb, which the U.S. military believed might offer the cheapest and best method of dispersing the chemical. The goals of the San Jose Project and a related test program at Bushnell, Florida, were laid out in a 1943 report by the Canadian Chemical Warfare Inter-service Board. The project would determine just how much gas was needed to produce casualties in tropical terrains ranging from swamp to thick jungle. Scientists also wanted to study how humidity and temperature affected the potency of mustard gas. 4

The roots of the San Jose Project can be traced back to the bloody battles fought in the Pacific in late 1943.

Canadian and U.S. scientists were excited about two things they believed made mustard gas ideal for use on the Japanese. The first was that soldiers fighting in the hot Pacific climate tended to wear lighter clothes and expose more skin than did those on European battlefields, giving them less protection against chemicals. As a bonus, there was the high probability of secondary infections in the tropics. It might take months for the blisters caused by mustard gas to heal.

“It is well known that the slightest scratch or skin injury rapidly becomes infected unless great care is taken,” noted one Canadian Chemical Warfare Inter-service Board report. “It is probable that any injury produced by mustard gas would be similarly infected, thus delaying healing, and increasing hospitalization.”

With Canada and Britain signed on to the project, one of Porter's senior officers, Brig. Gen. Alden Waitt, went to Ottawa in January 1944 to outline the American plan. Waitt was particularly interested in the Canadian cluster bomb to be tested on San Jose—he believed the device offered great potential for saturating the jungle with chemicals. “We are very interested in contaminating large areas of ground for a very long time,” he told his Canadian counterparts. 5

The U.S.-led test program, employing 400 soldiers and scientists working at a newly constructed base on the island, began in May 1944. The experiments covered a wide range of scenarios. Soldiers wearing backpacks outfitted with spray cylinders pumped chemicals into bunkers built to simulate Japanese fortifications. Rabbits and goats were tethered to wooden stakes and doused with mustard gas. According to one of the workers, in one experiment a goat was so heavily contaminated its skin started to fall off. 6

Another experiment used goats to test the relative merits of Japanese and American gas masks. Doused with mustard gas, an unprotected animal and the animal wearing a Japanese mask quickly succumbed, but the goat outfitted with an American gas mask survived.

In San Jose's picturesque bays, the U.S. Navy docked ships, placed goats on their decks, and then proceeded to saturate the vessels with chemicals.

Throughout the experiments, scientists sampled vegetation to see how long mustard gas remained potent. “What we were really interested in was whether the dense jungle canopy would alter the effectiveness of mustard,” recalls Eugene Reid, a former captain in the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service and one of the few remaining San Jose Project participants, who concluded that the mustard remained “very effective.”

American and Canadian aircraft dropped mustard gas bombs on specific ground targets, after which troops clad in protective clothing were ordered to march through the contaminated area. In some cases patches were cut out of the soldiers' protective suits to expose their skin to the gas.

In August 1944, the experiments took a bizarre turn. The scientists wanted to determine if different races would react differently to mustard gas. Military officials believed the skin of non-whites might be tougher than that of Caucasians and better able to resist the effects of mustard. If that were proven, then non-white troops would be used during gas attacks. Because African-Americans were not allowed in front-line combat units at the time, it was decided to conduct tests on Hispanics.

Between August 9 and August 15, 1944, several tests were done to “determine if any difference existed in the sensitivity of Puerto Rican and continental U.S. troops to H [mustard] gas,” according to a San Jose status report. 7

February 2001: Tourists explore an area believed to be an equipment yard for the chemical testing program that ran from 1944 to 1947.

A preliminary experiment involved exposing 10 soldiers from each group. That was followed by a test involving 45 Puerto Ricans and 44 Caucasians. Mustard was put on the forearms of the soldiers, who were then observed for three days. The tests showed no difference; both groups of men writhed in pain, and their skin burned and was covered in hideous lesions. A summary of the tests, prepared in April 1998 for then-Defense Secretary William Cohen, noted that the soldiers were unfamiliar with the use of chemical agents, suggesting they had not been told what to expect. Some had to be hospitalized for their burns.

“We are very interested in contaminating large areas of ground for a very long time,” Brig. Gen. Alden Waitt told his Canadian counterparts.

Early in 1945 the San Jose experiments gained new importance as more higher-ups in the U.S. military began considering the use of chemical weapons against the Japanese. Although none of the Allied nations wanted to be the first to use chemicals, U.S. casualty figures from the invasions of Pacific islands were high and Japanese resistance had stiffened. But all of these considerations were overtaken in August 1945, when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war in the Pacific to a close.

Development dreams

The end of the war did not bring an end to the San Jose Project, however. The experiments continued for another two years until the Panamanian government demanded a return of its territory. At midnight, December 23, 1947, project leaders received orders from Washington to shut down. The military wanted the island cleared of all its chemicals and equipment in just 30 days.

Outside the abandoned U.S. military chapel on San Jose.

By then, San Jose's workforce had grown to about 500 soldiers and proached Washington shortly after, wanting to know whether San Jose was safe for habitation. civilians, some of whom had brought their families along. Soldiers worked around the clock dismantling laboratories and burning down some of the buildings. Three barges full of leaking chemical weapons were taken out into the Pacific and the munitions dumped. The retreat from the island was a hurried affair.

The end of the war did not bring an end to the San Jose Project. Experiments continued until Panama demanded a return of its territory.

For almost 20 years, San Jose sat idle. Then, in 1965 American multimillionaire Earl Tupper bought the island with the idea of eventually developing a resort. Both Tupper and the Panamanian government ap noted an October 22, 1979, memo released by the U.S. government under the Freedom of Information Act. But “in some tests, complete functioning of munitions could not be verified because of the jungle and marsh environment.”

Tupper's workers appear to have had at least one encounter with chemicals left on the island. In 1974, the Tupper family requested help from a U.S. Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team after one of its workers received mysterious burns on his skin from an unknown substance.

Tupper never built his resort, and the island was eventually turned over to the Probst family, which had worked for the multi-millionaire. Development plans were put on hold until the early 1980s, when a group of investors from Florida came up with the idea of building a casino. That plan, however, was scrapped in the early stages of construction when a bulldozer unearthed a rusting canister of unknown origin.

San Jose rediscovered

Despite workers' skin ailments and their encounters with mysterious objects, San Jose's stunning beaches and lush rainforest seemed too valuable to ignore, especially as Panama tried to develop its tourism industry in the early 1990s. Several years ago, Panamanian investors teamed up with the Probst family to try once again to develop San Jose. This time construction went ahead, creating an eco-resort, the Hacienda Del Mar.

Resort owners had hoped to exploit San Jose's “virgin” rainforest and wildlife, according to its promotional literature. Ten cabins were built, along with a swimming pool, bar, and dining room overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There were also plans to establish additional eco-tourist resorts throughout the island. The Panamanian developers knew about San Jose's chemical warfare history, but didn't believe there was a risk to tourists, according to Monica Guerrero, one of Hacienda Del Mar's managers.

But even as the island was being developed, the Panamanian government was slowly building a case that the San Jose Project participants, and the United States in particular, should clean up any weapons that had been left behind. In mid-1998, Panama told Canada, the United States, and Britain that it would be calling on them to dispose of remaining munitions as they were obligated to do under the Chemical Weapons Convention.

A year later Panama presented the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague with a photograph of a bomb that had been discovered on San Jose. But further searches of the island were stalled by Panama's limited financial and technical resources and the fact that the U.S. government refused to release most of the information it had on the San Jose Project. “We have had a great deal of trouble getting all the pertinent information from the U.S. military,” explains Juan Mendez, a Panamanian government official who is dealing with the chemical weapons issue. “When we went to San Jose Island we had some information the owners provided us with—some pretty crappy maps where it appeared to be some markings on where the impact areas were located on the island.”

The Pentagon maintained its official public stance that no weapons had been left behind. “All chemical munitions on San Jose Island were either expended or removed,” Pentagon spokesman Lt.-Col. George Rhynedance told me last August.

Canadian military officials were less sure. Worried about its potential liability, Canada's Department of National Defence began studying the issue in the summer of 1998 after receiving word that Panama intended to ask for a cleanup. “The main risk would be from unexploded ordnance or munitions disposed of in Panama,” concluded an August 26, 1998 briefing note produced for Ken Calder, Defence's assistant deputy minister for policy.

The bomb casing of an expended chemical weapon found on the island.

But it was not just weapons found on the surface of the island that could pose a problem. Scientists from the Canadian military's Defence Research Establishment Suffield produced two reports in 2000 on the potential for long-term contamination with mustard gas from Canadian weapons, in particular from the 50-pound cluster bomb. 8

Suffield's scientists believed it was highly unlikely unexploded Canadian cluster bombs could have survived on the surface; they were made of thin sheet metal construction and would have corroded over the decades. But they also warned that “testing of the Canadian 50-pound bomb may well have resulted in deposition of mustard gas below the surface of the ground or into one of the marshes on the island. If so, mustard gas contamination could well have survived to the present day.”

Another potential problem involved the heavy metal drums that the mustard gas had been stored in on San Jose. “Shipping drums of the type most likely to have been used were very robust and could well have survived to the present day,” concluded one of the studies.

Whatever the case, the Canadian government did not share any of these conclusions with Panamanian officials.

Canada was also reluctant to publicly acknowledge any involvement in the San Jose Project. When I approached the Department of National Defence, its officials initially denied that Canada had been involved in any chemical weapon tests in Panama. It was only after I told them I had obtained San Jose documents from Canada's National Archives that they acknowledged involvement in the wartime experiments.

San Jose's stunning beaches and lush rainforest seemed too valuable to ignore, especially as Panama tried to develop its tourism industry in the early 1990s.

Even then, Francis Furtado, the department's acting director of arms and proliferation control policy, argued there was no actual evidence that Canadian weapons still existed on San Jose. “Even at this stage we don't know we're actually on the hook for anything,” he said.

Such a claim is possible because none of the countries that tested chemical munitions on San Jose ever bothered to conduct a search, notes John Lindsay-Poland, a researcher with the Fellowship for Reconciliation. “Of course if you don't look for them, then you can say that no weapons have ever been found,” he says. “It's a convenient Catch-22.”

Searching the island thoroughly for any abandoned or unexploded chemical munitions may be a problem. The Panamanian government's Juan Mendez says that the terrain is mostly dense jungle, swamp, or marshland.

Rick Stauber, a former U.S. military explosives expert and one of the authors of a 1996 Defense Department report on U.S. munitions left in Panama, also wonders whether any weapons were buried on the island. Stauber says he found documents indicating that chemical munitions had been buried, but when he tried to probe further he was denied access to the relevant files.

At the September press conference, Panamanian Foreign Minister José Miguel Alemán specifically asked that U.S. reports detailing potential burial sites be forwarded to his government. No reports have been forthcoming.

There are also questions about weapons dumped in the ocean around the island. On some old marine charts covering the southwest coast of San Jose there is an area marked “Explosives,” says the Panamanian government's Juan Mendez. “I don't know why it's called ‘Explosives’ or what's out there,” he adds.

By May 2002, San Jose was still off limits and it was expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. But since the September press conference in Panama City, the U.S. government has changed its stance somewhat. It no longer claims it left no weapons on the island.

During a March 2002 U.N. meeting on development issues in Monterrey, Mexico, the Panamanians received a proposal from the U.S. government. It “was very general and referred to the destruction by the United States of the seven bombs so far identified by the OPCW, and training of local personnel for the destruction of future findings,” says Mendez. “We are presently studying the proposal.”

Ultimately it may be easier to cordon off areas of San Jose than to remove or destroy all the weapons. Explosives expert Stauber believes it would be almost physically impossible to clean up the island. The high temperatures of the tropics would greatly limit the time EOD crews could spend in protective suits, and it could take years to properly scour the jungles for unexploded weapons. It would be more practical, says Stauber, to cordon off certain areas, as the French government has done at World War I battlefields suspected of holding unexploded chemical weapons. “As long as those areas are fenced off and isolated, the rest of the island could be developed,” he says. •