minneapolis behind laos' and tears - city...

12/6/12 Minneapolis Behind Laos's yellow rain and tears -‐‑ City Pages

1/10www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/2643267/

Mark N. Kartarik

Eng Yang and his niece, Kao Kalia Yang, at St. Paul'sHmongtown Marketplace

courtesy of Fred

This Hmong boy reported that his stomach rash was a result ofyellow rain

courtesy of Fred

A team of Hmong resistance fighters returned to Laos to lookfor samples of yellow rain. Here, they present their findings toa Ban Vinai camp leader, the man in the blue blazer. Eng Yangstands to the right.

Olivia LaVecchia

Behind Laos's yellow rain and tearsA controversial Radiolab episode opens old woundsand raises countless questions for Minnesota's HmongBy Olivia LaVecchiapublished: November 14, 2012

On the morning of May 16, Eng Yang rose early. Heread notes he had taken 30 years earlier in books thathad survived the trek out of the mountains of Laos,across the Mekong River, through the refugee camps ofThailand, and beyond the Pacific, all the way to hisBrooklyn Park home.

He put on a white button-up and a sweater and set outfruits and juices. Just before 10 a.m., his niece, theauthor Kao Kalia Yang, arrived with a sound engineer.The three connected their phone to a studio at WNYC,New York City's public radio station, and got on theline with a producer and co-host of Radiolab, a popularscience show that boasts more than four millionmonthly listeners via downloads or streaming, andeven more who catch broadcasts on over 300 radiostations nationwide.

For the next two hours, Eng, with Kalia translating,told the producer, Pat Walters, and the host, RobertKrulwich, what he remembered. He talked about wherehe was born, about the Laotian village where he grewup. He talked about how his people, the Hmong, hadfought along with the Americans during the VietnamWar and the Secret War in Laos, and how, after the U.S.pulled out of the region, the Vietnamese and the Laoretaliated.

He talked about how their Communist militias usedbombs and guns, and something else. There wereplanes, he remembered, that sprayed some kind ofsubstance, a gas or a powder. The Hmong who had seenit described it as pink, blue, and green, but most oftenas yellow. Like a yellow rain.

Months later, on Monday, September 24, Radiolabreleased a podcast of its segment on yellow rain. Theepisode, titled "The Fact of the Matter," was supposedto be about the nature of truth.

The middle segment of the hour-long show explored



Fred inspects slides of his photos from Ban Vinai RefugeeCamp in the 1980s

courtesy of Eng Yang

Eng Yang grew up near what he remembers as "hundreds" ofhoneybee hives. One recent day, he sketched on a napkin theapproximate sizes of several species local to Laos andThailand, to illustrate his familiarity with bees (and theirbyproducts).

collection of the Center for Hmong Studies,

Concordia University

Narrative embroidery tells the story of the Hmong escape,including, at left, yellow rain

the story of yellow rain. As Radiolab described it, withthe help of a former CIA agent and two leadingscientists, the belief that yellow rain was a chemicalweapon almost single-handedly re-escalated the ColdWar.

After walking through what the stuff was, how thegovernment came to believe it was toxic (and to blamethe Soviets), and how it led to the U.S. producing itsown chemical weapons for the first time in 20 years,the show threw listeners a curveball.

The two scientists explained how their work led themto hypothesize that yellow rain wasn't a manufacturedchemical at all. It was honeybee droppings.

Earlier in the segment, Radiolab had introduced theYangs, and after unpacking the honeybee theory, theshow returned to them.

"At a certain point in our conversation," relatedWalters, the producer, "we explained that the evidencethey'd been attacked by chemical weapons seems alittle shaky."

Eng disagreed. "How do you explain the kids dying?" heasked. "That where there is this yellow thing, wherethere are no bees, whole villages die?"

Walters conceded that the Hmong had definitely died."They were malnourished and drinking fromcontaminated streams; diseases like dysentery andcholera were rampant," he said in the podcast. "And theway a lot of people see it is that they may havemisattributed some of these mysterious deaths to thiscloud of bee poop that looked like it could have been achemical weapon."

Kalia began to feel that the inquiry had become an inquisition. "There's a sad lack of justice,"she said, "that the word of a man who survived this thing must be pitted against a professorfrom Harvard."

Krulwich didn't let up. "But as far as I can tell, your uncle didn't see the bee pollen fall," heargued. "Your uncle didn't see a plane. All of this is hearsay."

When Kalia answered, her voice cracked and she started to sob through her words. "We havelost too much heart and too many people," she finally concluded. "I think the interview isdone."

Once the podcast hit, listeners started commenting in swarms. Radiolab has since amended the



episode. One of the show's hosts, Abumrad, issued a response. The other, Krulwich, apologizedboth in writing and at the end of the altered podcast.

But as the hosts tried to mitigate the damage, audience comments continued to spiral into thehundreds. For David Shih, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, it was atextbook example of media bullying.

"This was a racialized event," Shih says. "This was members of an advantaged group speakingfor members of a targeted group and saying, 'You don't know what really happened to you. Wedo.'"

Eng Yang has a wide, friendly face, flecked with sun spots and laugh lines. But when heremembers his life in Laos in the 1970s, that face becomes serious, concentrated. He wants totell the story carefully.

In the aftermath of the American wars, when the Vietnamese and the Lao started attacking hispeople, Yang became a leader of the Hmong resistance. By the mid-1970s, he had fled hisvillage and gone to live in a rebel hideout in the caves of Phu Bia mountain.

The Thai government supplied the outmatched Hmong fighters with some supplies, Yangremembers, like medicine. They also sent a radio.

Yang was tasked with operating this radio and using it to report to Thai officials. So one day,around March 1978, when he heard from the resistance headquarters that three Hmong campshad been attacked, he went to investigate.

"I had been trained to be a reporter and a recorder of what was happening to my people," Yangsays. "The rule was for me to be as diligent as I could."

When Yang arrived at the first village, it had been a day or two since the attack, but he couldstill see yellow spots on the leaves. The largest were the size of corn kernels, and the smallestwere like round rice grains.

Yang started interviewing people, and they told him that this yellow stuff on the leaves waswhat was making them sick. He remembers them vomiting, and washing their skin with opiumto dull the pain.

Yang had been trained as a medic during the war and through the years treated case after caseof dysentery and cholera. What he was seeing in these people wasn't that, he was sure.

"The first time I saw people suffering, I knew it was different from anything I had seen before,"Yang says. "These symptoms together was all new for us."

So he looked more closely at the yellow drops. "It was clear to me that it wasn't part of a liquidexplosion from some bullet," he remembers. "It wasn't bee poop, either."

When he reported what he had seen to the Thai, they told him to cover his mouth and his nosewith wet cloths on future investigations.



Not long after the first few incidents, "so many reports started coming in," Yang says. Heguesses that he reported about two attacks per month for the next year. Yang trusted thepeople he was interviewing when they said they got sick following the yellow rain attacks. Buthe couldn't be certain a chemical was poisoning his people.

"I believed," Yang says, "but I didn't have the ability to test, so I couldn't say for sure."

In 1979, Yang finally fled the jungle, swimming across the Mekong River to seek refuge inThailand. Once over the border, he was eventually sent to Ban Vinai Refugee Camp.

It was the largest refugee camp in Thailand, a teeming city of more than 40,000 that hadsprouted up in 1975. The grounds were packed with newly minted refugees beginning theprocess of creating a new life for themselves, as well as Thai and U.S. officials, United Nationsworkers, and aid groups of all kinds.

When Yang first got there, the camp had no sanitation or public health. But a year later, anAmerican volunteer, Fred (not his real name) arrived. Fred had served as a medic in Vietnam,and soon returned to the region. He never left. Now, decades later, he continues to work there,and so prefers to use an alias when discussing yellow rain.

In 1980, as Fred went about procuring a pump truck to empty latrines that had been full fortwo years, organizing the camp's bamboo heath clinics, and generally trying to improveoperations, he started hearing about something the Hmong called chemi — yellow rain.

By 1982, after a brief stint back home in Minnesota, Fred returned to the camp. The ChemicalBiological Weapons Information Project hired him to interview Hmong who said they hadexperienced yellow rain attacks. Over the next two years, Fred reported on over 100 cases.

New groups of refugees arrived once or twice per month, and if they knew of yellow rain, campleaders referred them to Fred. He split them up, questioned them individually, recorded theirresponses on a form, and filed it.

"They were shy, sometimes afraid, to talk to a Westerner," Fred remembers. "Sometimesthey'd never seen one before."

Many of them described nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and in severe cases, hemorrhages anddeath. Some of them could recall the particular fixed-wing planes they had seen just prior tothe attack, and when Fred showed them pictures of several aircraft models, he says that amajority pointed at the same one.

Fred was no doctor, but he had seen his share of diseases — both as a medic during the war andlater when setting up Ban Vinai's public health operation. When the people he was interviewingtold him their symptoms, though, the accounts didn't match any illness with which Fred wasfamiliar.

The only signs he could see for himself were lingering rashes, which victims blamed on thechemi. Fred remembers these as odd.

"They were unusual-looking, and startling," he says. "You couldn't diagnose it quickly. It wasn'tscabies, even infected scabies."



Fred never interviewed Eng Yang, but the two met and became friendly. One day, Yangremembers, an American woman gave out a pamphlet with a person in a gas mask on the frontcover. Inside were photos of people with rashes. Their skin looked exactly like what Yang hadseen on his neighbors' bodies back in Laos.

"That's when I knew it was yellow rain, a chemical," Yang recalls. "My heart had alwaysbelieved, but now I had no more questions."

Chester J. Mirocha settles into an armchair in the living room of his St. Paul home with a cupof tea and a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. His white beard is neatly trimmed, and hewears a bird-embroidered denim shirt tucked into denim pants.

He doesn't look much like the kind of man to bring chemical warfare to light.

For more than 30 years, Mirocha was a plant pathology professor at the University ofMinnesota's St. Paul campus. He was also one of the world's leading experts in mycotoxins, thekind of poison the government suspected was carried in yellow rain. He had been working withthese specific toxins, known as trichothecenes, for over a decade.

"We had done most of the work on trichothecene toxins," Mirocha recalls, adding that his labhad worked on major government contracts for several years. During that time, he had notonly developed new analysis methods, but had "kind of pioneered" a particularly precisemethod, known as mass spectrometry.

Mirocha remembers his lab's accomplishments carefully, with the measured words of ascientist. "I can only speak for my lab," he says, "but I think we were rather good."

Mirocha wasn't just a leading expert in mycotoxins: He was an expert in Russian mycotoxins.In the early 1970s, he had traveled to Russia twice to study problems the Soviets were havingwith these kinds of poisons.

Following World War II, Russia had suffered a serious natural outbreak of a particular type oftrichothecene, known as T2 toxin, after citizens ate wheat that had been left to mold undersnow. Mirocha obtained samples of the toxins from the Soviets, studied them, and publishedhis results. He suspects that the Russians would have been able to weaponize T2.

"The Soviets had an excellent background in toxicology," Mirocha says. "And they hadstockpiles of a lot of biological weapons."

In 1981, Mirocha was sent a leaf sample and asked to test for that same substance, T2 toxin. Hedidn't know where the sample was from or who was sending it, but he performed the test asusual. He found several toxins, reported the result, then flew off to Cairo to teach at amycotoxins workshop.

In Egypt, Mirocha received a phone call. There was a reporter on the other end, but theconnection was fuzzy, and all he could hear were questions about his analyses — somethingabout secret research.

While Mirocha had been overseas, the world had been waking up to yellow rain. On September



13, 1981, Secretary of State Alexander Haig gave a dramatic speech in West Berlin: "We nowhave physical evidence from Southeast Asia which has been analyzed and found to containabnormally high levels of three potent mycotoxins — poisonous substances not indigenous tothe region and which are highly toxic to man and animals."

The analyses Haig referenced were — by all declassified accounts — Mirocha's.

When Mirocha got back to St. Paul, his name was in the papers. On September 28, 1981 — just15 days after Haig's speech — a two-inch headline on the front page of the St. Paul Dispatchread, "U professor made secret tests for biological warfare agents."

The paper argued that Mirocha had conducted secret government research, in violation ofuniversity policy. The university, however, recognized that he hadn't been doing anythingclandestine, just standard tests that were part of his job.

His name was quickly cleared. But it was his first taste of yellow rain's political baggage.

"I was a celebrity for a while," Mirocha remembers. "These people were coming in with thesebig cameras and things, and taking up all the space in the hallways. It was kind of hard to take."

On top of the reporters, FBI and CIA agents arrived to question him and inspect his labprocedures. Mirocha testified twice before Congress, and took a trip to the Pentagon to listento the government's theories.

He went on a six-mile run every day to manage the stress.

"My priority was our work in mycotoxins," he says. "But in terms of politics, that was hijacked,because politics became more important to other people."

Matthew Meselson first became suspicious of the official explanation for yellow rain inNovember 1982.

He was reading through State Department briefings on the new threat, when he noticed thatthe yellow samples had a high pollen content. One of the defense scientists speculated that theRussians had added pollen to the toxin to aerosolize it.

To Meselson, a Harvard biochemist and expert in chemical biological weapons, this wasnonsense.

"When I read that, I knew they had set their foot down a blind alley," he says.

So he got to work forming a hypothesis of his own. Meselson organized a brainstormingmeeting in Cambridge, and later called a honeybee expert at Yale by the name of Tom Seeley.Meselson described the yellow spots to Seeley — their size, their color, and how they wereloaded with bee pollen.

"'The State Department explanation is not parsimonious,'" Seeley said, according to Meselson'srecollection. "'It's bee —.'" Meselson breaks off, laughing. "And then he used a four-letterword."



Seeley told Meselson how, after hibernating, North American bees take "cleansing flights,"where they swarm from the hive and defecate en masse. But Seeley wasn't sure if SoutheastAsian honeybees did the same thing. So in March 1984, Meselson and Seeley took a trip toThailand to try to investigate the phenomenon.

Fred, the public health guy from Ban Vinai, joined them for part of the trip as a guide andtranslator. One day, he remembers, the team spread out sheets of paper in concentric circlesaround a hive in Khao Yai National Park, a forest north of Bangkok.

"Sure enough, in the morning, the bees pooped en masse, and I watched it land on the sheets,"Fred says. "I stood there and watched yellow rain."

But then he catches himself. "At least what they were saying was yellow rain."

Meselson recalls two other incidents during the trip when the team got caught in fecesshowers. During one, they were driving when a hive in front of them "kind of changed color,"Meselson says. Seeley had his bee gear on and watched, but Meselson took cover in the car.

"We could actually hear these spots hitting the metal roof of the Land Rover," Meselson says.

The scientists had proven that Southeast Asian bees also take cleansing flights. They didn'tthink the bees were pooping out toxins, though. They thought that Mirocha had been wrong.

Meselson speculated that Mirocha could have easily contaminated the samples. His lab at theU trafficked in high quantities of these same toxins, and he was testing for tiny amounts of it.

"To do that work you have to be sure that your lab is very, very clean," Meselson says. "Andpreferably that it's a lab that has never seen those very same substances."

As yellow rain became an increasingly bigger issue, more and more labs around the worldbegan testing samples. And none of them found any poison.

Other pieces of the case had started breaking down too. Deeper analyses of the pollen showedthat it was from plants native to Southeast Asia, and from a wide variety of them — meaningthat it was almost certainly natural in origin.

As Meselson looked into it more, he discovered that a similar scenario had unfolded before, ina province in China. In 1974, the area had suffered a large earthquake, and in its wake, Chinesevillagers reported mysterious yellow spots, which they thought were poisonous. But when aprofessor took samples of these spots, he discovered that they were full of pollen.

"They were frightened by this and simply didn't recognize what it was, even though they hadlived there for generations," Meselson says. "If you have a population under stress, you canunderstand how they can attribute their illness to something like this happening that theydon't understand."

Meselson believes that's what happened to the Hmong.

"There's not a single shred of objective evidence," Meselson says today. "Deep inside theUnited States government I think they knew it was a mistake, but unfortunately they have



never admitted it."

Mirocha knows Meselson and the honeybee theory well. But he disagrees that it debunks thestories of toxic yellow rain.

"The honeybee fecal matter explanation is a red herring," Mirocha says. "If the Hmong peoplewere told that they were not really the victims of chemical warfare, then that is nonsense."

Mirocha stands by his initial findings, and insists that his lab procedures were excellent. Twoyears after the first analysis, his lab participated in a trichothecene testing trial, and was one ofthe few labs involved in the experiment that produced fully accurate results.

Furthermore, recently declassified government data confirms that all of the environmentalcontrols Mirocha tested came back negative — in other words, he didn't find false positives inthe toxin-free samples.

Mirocha's analyses and methodology had been "put through the wringer" and come out intact,said Gary Crocker, the State Department's senior intelligence officer at the time, in a 1991 NewYorker article on yellow rain. Crocker added, "One thing I can say about Dr. Mirocha is that heis not involved in politics. He's a pure scientist."

Crocker also readily admitted that "an awful lot of our environmental samples were nothingbut bee spots," which is in fact what Meselson showed.

But not all of them were. Recent research by professors from Princeton and GeorgeWashington University, who concluded that chemical weapons were likely used against theHmong, found that some of the government's environmental samples didn't contain any pollen— meaning they weren't bee droppings.

Mirocha sees an additional oversight. Meselson and Seeley "did very good work" with theirhoneybee research, he says. "That article came out as the first account of mass honeybeedefecation."

Then Mirocha shakes his head. "But the natives had known this for hundreds of years!"

From Mirocha's perspective, this lack of consideration of local knowledge was just one way theoriginal controversy was unfair to the Hmong.

"I believed what was going on over there. It would be stupid for me not to, because it's just ano-brainer," Mirocha says. "People are being killed. People are dying. And they're not lying."

Mirocha recalls being "disgusted" by how the Hmong testimonies were treated, as the scientificand political narratives spiraled out of control.

"I remember reading an editorial that said something like, 'Well how can these Hmong peopleidentify what planes were dropping the chemicals, they have no knowledge of planes,'" Mirochasays. "But we trained some of the Hmong people as pilots! They fought on our side. They mightnot have been educated, but they're intelligent."



Fred, who worked both with yellow rain victims and with Meselson and Seeley, agrees thatbees take the cleansing flight, and that it can appear as rain. He also believes that some of thesamples really were bee crap — especially later, as word got out that Americans were lookingfor the stuff, and people got less rigorous about what they were collecting.

"I'm pretty open-minded, because of my experience with both sides, frankly," Fred says. "Butthat doesn't mean that some of the other samples weren't chemicals. I can't imagine anyonesaying that 100 percent."

As Jonathan B. Tucker, a chemical weapons expert, wrote in a definitive 2001 account on thescience of yellow rain, "Whether or not toxin warfare agents were used in Laos and Cambodiabetween 1975 and 1983, and if so which ones, remains a mystery."

Both sides of the issue hold fast to their beliefs. Both the U.S. and the Russian governmentsstill keep their separate secrets. On one side, information about the former Soviet Union'sweapons program continues to emerge, and on the other, the State Department maintains thatit has further research that proves once and for all that yellow rain was a chemical weapon.This evidence, however, remains classified.

When asked what that smoking gun might be, Mirocha says that to him, yellow rain has alreadybeen proven. The exact combination of toxin, or toxins, used in an aerial spray remains unclear,according to Mirocha. Not all of the symptoms the Hmong experienced can be explained. But,he says, "Indeed Hmong people were killed by some aerial spray."

"What proof would be enough?" he asks. "Well to me, the personal, first-hand informationfrom the Hmong people is enough."

Through a spokesperson, Radiolab and WNYC declined to comment on this story. DeanCappello, WNYC's chief creative officer, has written that Walters, the producer, spent "monthsreviewing nearly 20 years' worth of academic papers and media reports on Yellow Rain," and"completed an in-depth examination of competing theories to the 'bee feces' hypothesis." Hesays that, based on this research, the show "strongly believes...that the accumulation ofevidence would not have served the story or Mr. Yang's version of events."

Thomas Seeley, the honeybee expert, is sympathetic to the show's aims. "You have to look atthe body of evidence, not individual opinion," he says.

But Paul Hillmer, a history professor at Concordia University, is one of the people not buyingit. In his view, even though Radiolab's segment was only 25 minutes long, it should have mademore clear that what Cappello calls the "bee feces hypothesis" was just one theory, not fact.

"People for the most part are outraged that Robert Krulwich was rude, right?" Hillmer says."When the real sin is that the bee dung theory is not open-and-shut, and they didn't tell theiraudience that."

Kao Kalia Yang isn't just upset because the show aired her breakdown, or even because itdismissed parts of her uncle's story and the Hmong experience. She's upset about the facts ofthe matter.



"They made it seem as though they were telling the truth, and we just couldn't handle it," Yangsays. "But none of what they were telling us was new information. Really, it was that I knewwhat they were presenting as truth was not the full truth."

Yang received an email from Cappello two weeks after the podcast. Although Krulwich made apublic apology, Yang has not heard from him directly. She says her emails to Krulwich andWalters, and her reply to Cappello, have gone unanswered.

"To be honest, I feel exploited," she says. "To be used as a pawn in a political debate — that'swhat happened in the war, and it happened again on the show."

minneapolis behind laos' and tears - city...

Documents