JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today ...

ROBERT: We've been investigating the truth.

JAD: The fact of the matter. And this next segment, to set it up, I guess all I really want to say is that sometimes getting to the fact of the matter, a fact of the matter, the way Errol just did, that can be tricky.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: You end up finding things that you didn't expect, that are way more complicated than you expected.

ROBERT: The story begins with our producer, Pat Walters.

JAD: It started for him when he was talking with an ex-CIA agent.

PAT ROBERTS: So maybe take me to, what, the summer of 1981?

MERLE PREBBENOW: Okay. In the summer of 1981, I was being transferred from one overseas post to another.

PAT: This is Merle Prebbenow.

MERLE PREBBENOW: And I'm a retired CIA officer.

PAT: But in 1981, Merle was still at the CIA, and he was posted ...

MERLE PREBBENOW: Out in the sticks. Out in the boonies.

PAT: ... somewhere in Southeast Asia.

PAT: And—and why were you ...?

MERLE PREBBENOW: Oh well, yeah. [laughs] I had a—I had a little disagreement with my previous chief, and I ended up in—in this remote jungle backwater, I guess is the best way to phrase it.

PAT: [laughs] Yeah. Can you say what country you were in?

MERLE PREBBENOW: I'd rather not.

PAT: In any case, as much as Merle did not want to be there, it turned out that this little backwater was ground zero for what was about to become one of the strangest stories of the Cold War. Just to set the scene, the story happens in Laos, which is that kind of narrow country between Vietnam and Thailand. And the time is a few years after the Vietnam War. Now right after the war, the US Army left, pulled out all of our troops. And once we were gone, the Communists basically took over the region. The Communists being the Vietcong and their allies in Laos, the Pathet Lao.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

KAO KALIA YANG: It was May of 1975. All of a sudden, the Vietcong and the Pathet Lao had infiltrated, and they were all over our village. And I knew that the Americans had left.

PAT: This is Eng Yang. Robert and I spoke with him and his niece Kalia translated for us.

KAO KALIA YANG: [speaking Hmong]

PAT: Eng lives in Minneapolis. But in 1975, he lived in a tiny village in the mountains of Laos.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

PAT: He's part of a tribe called the Hmong. And Eng says as soon as the Americans left, Lao and Vietnamese soldiers showed up in his village.

KAO KALIA YANG: There was a hundred of them. They came in cars.

PAT: And in a way, you could say they were out for revenge because during the Vietnam War, thousands of Hmong soldiers had fought on our side. And as soon as we were out of the picture ...

KAO KALIA YANG: That's when the killing started.

PAT: Eng says it began with isolated attacks.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

KAO KALIA YANG: Villagers started getting killed in random fields.

PAT: Like, they'd just find one of their neighbors shot dead in his rice paddy one day, or a woman would go fetch water and never come back.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

PAT: Before long ...

KAO KALIA YANG: It was a village. And I know the name of the village. I know the name of the village chief.

PAT: The Pathet Lao, which again is the Communist army in Laos, had gotten suspicious that these villagers may have been hiding guns in the jungle, like plotting to rebel against the government. So one day ...

KAO KALIA YANG: The Pathet Lao went over and slaughtered the whole village. That's when we knew that the laws of humanity had been—had been terminated.

PAT: And not long after that, Eng and his family, along with thousands of other Hmong, fled their villages and went into hiding in the jungle. This is where things stood when Merle got his assignment.

MERLE PREBBENOW: And ...

PAT: Before he left DC and flew over to Asia ...

MERLE PREBBENOW: I stopped in our headquarters, and while I was there, I was briefed by our desk officer.

PAT: Who told him about what was happening, the Communist raids, the Hmong fleeing. But then the desk officer said something kind of odd.

MERLE PREBBENOW: There had been these reports from refugees ...

PAT: Refugees like Eng.

MERLE PREBBENOW: About this yellow—these yellow droplets falling from the air.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

PAT: PBS went out to the camps and interviewed some of the refugees.

[NEWS CLIP: When the aircraft flew over our area ...]

PAT: He said, "This yellow stuff that was falling out of the sky was coming from planes."

[NEWS CLIP: We only saw the powder spray from it.]

PAT: Some of the refugees talked about a powder, some talked about liquid.

MERLE PREBBENOW: You know, a yellow mist sometimes.

PAT: But they all said whatever this was, when it landed, it made people violently ill. And they all talked about how after this stuff fell from the sky ...

[NEWS CLIP: When the powder reached the ground, it stuck on everything.]

PAT: Left behind these yellow spots.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

KAO KALIA YANG: Yellow drops everywhere, all over the landscape.

PAT: Eng remembers the first time he saw it. He was hiding in the woods somewhere, and somebody came running to him and said, "Eng, you have to come and see. This yellow stuff just fell on a village up on the hill." And Eng ran up the hill, and sort of crashed out of the forest and just stopped right there at the edge of the village.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

KAO KALIA YANG: I saw a dead cow and two dead pigs and several dead chicken, and all the people who'd been exposed, they were all having stomach trouble.

PAT: Eng says people were doubled over.

KAO KALIA YANG: Covering their stomachs.

PAT: Writhing in pain.

KAO KALIA YANG: Throwing up.

PAT: Some throwing up blood.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

PAT: Eng said people began to suffer from everything from diarrhea to headaches, rashes.

KAO KALIA YANG: There was a person, and I have the photo right here in my keeping. Her camapa who had been exposed, and her eyes were—her eyes were destroyed entirely.

PAT: And many people, Eng says, didn't recover.

KAO KALIA YANG: What I saw was people dying. They wouldn't get better. They would die.

PAT: Merle says the thought in the CIA was that this might be some kind of chemical weapon.

MERLE PREBBENOW: Right.

PAT: Did it have a name at that point?

MERLE PREBBENOW: Yellow rain.

PAT: Yellow rain. By the time Merle got to Southeast Asia, hundreds of these reports had come in.

MERLE PREBBENOW: Hundreds.

PAT: And several thousand people had been reported killed by this stuff.

MERLE PREBBENOW: But—but, you know, in those kind of situations and in Southeast Asia generally, you know, there are tons of rumors. You have to be careful of what you believe and what you don't believe.

PAT: And you have to rely on evidence which they just didn't have.

MERLE PREBBENOW: No.

PAT: Until all of a sudden, they did. So just a few months after Merle got there and they started getting these reports that ...

MERLE PREBBENOW: Refugees had collected samples off of leaves.

PAT: Some refugees had shown up with leaves covered in these yellow spots.

MATT MESELSON: Here. Here's a close-up.

PAT: Oh, I see. Look at that.

PAT: This is Matt Meselson. He's a Harvard chemist and chemical weapons expert the US government asked to help examine these samples. I went up and visited him in his office in Cambridge.

MATT MESELSON: Here are some of the leaves.

PAT: Oh, wow!

MATT MESELSON: These are some of the leaves brought back. These are all dried out now. It's just ...

PAT: The leaves are small, black, brittle, which only makes the spots stand out even more because they're this incredible bright yellow.

MATT MESELSON: They're tiny. They're—they're two or three millimeters across.

PAT: And Matt says when scientists put these leaves under a microscope and looked inside the yellow spots, they saw that the spots ...

MATT MESELSON: Had a very high content of toxin called T-2.

PAT: Which is a poison. And while T-2 does grow in nature, the concentrations that they found in these spots was way too high to have occurred naturally.

MERLE PREBBENOW: Which demonstrated that this was, you know, in fact a—a new type of chemical weapon.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alexander Haig: We now have physical evidence ...]

PAT: This is Secretary of State Alexander Haig in the fall of 1981.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alexander Haig: ... which has been analyzed and found to contain abnormally high levels of potent mycotoxin.]

[NEWS CLIP: Good evening. Poisonous substance.]

[NEWS CLIP: The United States said today it has evidence that chemical warfare has been waged in parts of Southeast Asia.]

[NEWS CLIP: The US obtained a test sample of twigs and leaves.]

[NEWS CLIP: Chemical analysis found high levels of three toxic chemicals.]

PAT: The news of this poisonous yellow rain became an instant political crisis.

[NEWS CLIP: Refugees in camps along the Thai border have been telling for years of a yellow rain, a rain that was followed in minutes by vomiting, bleeding, and death.]

PAT: Because everybody knew the Lao and Vietnamese armies were not capable of making this stuff.

MERLE PREBBENOW: No. [laughs] Vietnam could not even make their own rifles. They were pretty backward in that sense.

PAT: Which really left only one likely suspect.

[NEWS CLIP: Circumstantial evidence points to the Russians. The Soviet Union may be engaging in biological warfare.]

PAT: The Soviets, of course, denied they were involved.

[NEWS CLIP: The Soviets said it was a slanderous accusation.]

PAT: But the US government did not believe them.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ronald Reagan: The Soviet Union and their allies are violating the Geneva Protocol of 1925.]

PAT: And in the summer of 1982 in a speech to the UN, President Reagan officially accused the Soviet Union of supplying and using chemical weapons in Southeast Asia.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ronald Reagan: There is conclusive evidence that the Soviet government has provided toxins for use in Laos and Kampuchea.]

PAT: Three years later, Congress passed legislation authorizing the production of a chemical bomb called the Big Eye.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's a 500-pound bomb, and it's meant to be carried on a high-performance aircraft.]

PAT: And within two years, a factory in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, began churning out thousands of bombs designed to carry sarin gas.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Three, two one, release. Item away.]

PAT: This would be the first time the United States had manufactured a chemical weapon in nearly 20 years. All this, in effect, because of the yellow rain. But before we jump ahead ...

MATT MESELSON: In November of 1982, there were two days of press briefings by the State Department.

PAT: And this is where things really start to get weird. The State Department had gotten everybody together to explain that some British scientists had looked at the spots. And in addition to the poison, they'd found something else.

MATT MESELSON: All the samples had a very high content of pollen.

PAT: From flowers—which initially didn't make any sense. Like, why would pollen be toxic? But eventually, the government officials came to this kind of terrifying conclusion that, in fact ...

MATT MESELSON: This was a very, very clever Communist mixture.

PAT: Somehow, the Russians had found a way to use pollen as a vector to transmit this toxin.

MATT MESELSON: If it falls right on your skin, it would intoxicate you, poison you. But if these drops should fall on leaf or a rock, then the wind would redisperse these pollen grains, which were just the right diameter to penetrate to the depths of the lungs, thereby making it a more deadly weapon.

PAT: Matt remembers hearing that and thinking ...

MATT MESELSON: That just seemed completely bonkers to me. I knew a lot about chemical weapons and ...

PAT: He'd never heard of anything like that before.

MATT MESELSON: No.

PAT: So he sent some of these samples around to other scientists he knew, and one afternoon, he's sitting in his lab and he gets a call.

TOM SEELEY: I remember the phone call.

PAT: This is the guy who called.

TOM SEELEY: Tom Seeley. I'm a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University.

PAT: Matt picked up the phone. Tom said to him, "Hey, I analyzed the samples you sent me." And then ...

MATT MESELSON: He said, "The State Department explanation is not parsimonious."

JAD: Meaning?

PAT: Meaning this yellow stuff is not a chemical weapon.

MATT MESELSON: Then he paused and he said, "It's bee," and then he used a four-letter word.

PAT: I think we can use that word.

MATT MESELSON: Is that all right?

PAT: Yeah.

MATT MESELSON: He said it was bee [bleep].

JAD: Bee what?

PAT: Bee [bleep]

TOM SEELEY: What we call fecal spots of honeybees.

JAD: That was their idea?

PAT: Yeah. They were like, "Look, here's the thing. Every winter, bees kind of hibernate."

MATT MESELSON: During the winter, there are no flowers and there is no pollen, and there is no nectar. There's nothing for the bees to go out and collect.

PAT: So they stay inside.

TOM SEELEY: Confined to their hives all winter.

PAT: Feeding their babies, fattening up the new worker bees for the next season.

MATT MESELSON: And since they're very fastidious, they do not defecate in their nests.

JAD: They don't poop all winter?

PAT: Right.

MATT MESELSON: So they become immensely constipated. And then ...

TOM SEELEY: On the first warm days ...

MATT MESELSON: They all fly out ...

TOM SEELEY: En masse ...

PAT: To, like, a hundred feet off the ground.

TOM SEELEY: And defecate.

PAT: All at the same time.

MATT MESELSON: And it's called a cleansing flight. And anybody who cultures bees knows this.

PAT: And if you get caught beneath this situation, Tom says ...

TOM SEELEY: It feels like light raindrops hitting your arms, hitting your forehead.

PAT: So this was their theory, that the yellow rain was not a chemical weapon. It was just ...

MATT MESELSON: Bee droppings.

PAT: They published this, and the government was like, "Seriously?" Even a bunch of prestigious scientists came forward and said ...

TOM SEELEY: Said it was an absurd explanation.

MATT MESELSON: Kind of crazy and embarrassing.

PAT: A) Let's not forget that this rain was toxic; and B) honeybees in Southeast Asia don't even hibernate.

MATT MESELSON: There is no winter in Southeast Asia. It's the tropics.

PAT: So Southeast Asian bees never get constipated, and they never do the big poop.

JAD: Those are good objections.

MATT MESELSON: No.

PAT: Matt and Tom counter by going to Thailand.

MATT MESELSON: Tom and I flew out there.

PAT: They go into the jungle, find some beehives. And one day, they're staring up at a hive.

TOM SEELEY: And in a flash ...

PAT: They see it happen. The bees shoot up into the sky.

TOM SEELEY: And within a minute or two after that, we started to get rained upon by the bee feces.

PAT: So they tell the government, "Sorry, we think it happens here too."

TOM SEELEY: [laughs]

JAD: Wait, that's only half of it. I mean, what about the toxic part? The whole idea that these bees are pooping poison?

PAT: That is a hard one. But while Matt and Tom were in Thailand, some labs had started retesting those original samples. Because you see, the poison had been detected by one particular lab in Minnesota at the beginning, but now that these yellow spots were such a big deal, other labs all over the world began to retest them—and they couldn't find anything.

MATT MESELSON: The British never found a trace. The Swedes never found a trace.

PAT: The way Matt sees it ...

MATT MESELSON: The analyses were wrong.

PAT: He thinks that lab ...

MATT MESELSON: The lab in Minnesota that had been doing this work ...

PAT: ... inadvertently contaminated the pollen, because this lab did lots of other work with mycotoxins.

MATT MESELSON: Large quantities of these toxins.

PAT: The government obviously wanted to be sure. They did their own retests of the samples. They didn't find anything. They sent a team to Southeast Asia to verify the bees do the poop shower thing. And they do.

TOM SEELEY: And my friend, he's a good friend, Pom Tep ...

PAT: Who was part of that team.

TOM SEELEY: ... told me that in the bar at the end of this multi-day excursion, off the record, one of the gentlemen said, "Well, I guess we owe the Soviets an apology on this one."

PAT: Which hasn't ever happened. In fact ...

MERLE PREBBENOW: Yellow rain is still ...

PAT: That's Merle again.

MERLE PREBBENOW: ... in the US Army Chemical Corps Manual as, you know, one of the possible weapons that might be used.

PAT: Oh, really?

MERLE PREBBENOW: Yeah, it's still there.

PAT: Oh!

MERLE PREBBENOW: It's still—it's still there.

KAO KALIA YANG: I have—I have a clarifying question before I interpret that. So—so they found toxins initially, and then when they looked again at those samples, the toxins were no longer there?

PAT: That's right.

KAO KALIA YANG: Okay. [speaking Hmong]

PAT: At a certain point in our conversation with Eng, the Hmong guy Robert and I talked to earlier, with his niece Kalia translating for him, we explained that the evidence they'd been attacked by chemical weapons seemed ...

KAO KALIA YANG: I interpret that for my uncle.

PAT: ... a little shaky.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

PAT: Eng's response was, "If this was just bee feces ..."

KAO KALIA YANG: How do you explain the kids dying, the—the people and the animals dying? That where there is this yellow thing, where there are no bees, whole villages die.

PAT: We asked Kalia to tell Eng what the scientists had told us, that the Hmong were definitely dying.

MATT MESELSON: The Hmong were under real attack. They were being fired at from airplanes and by soldiers and ...

PAT: But more importantly, even if they weren't killed by those direct attacks, they were on the run through the jungle. They were malnourished and drinking from contaminated streams. Diseases like dysentery and cholera were rampant. And the way a lot of people see it is that they may have misattributed some of those mysterious deaths to this cloud of bee poop that looked like it could have been a chemical weapon.

KAO KALIA YANG: [speaking Hmong]

PAT: But Eng says, "No."

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

PAT: "Not a chance."

KAO KALIA YANG: I speak to what I've seen, and there is no inkling in my mind that those deaths were not caused by starvation, dysentery. It was chemicals that were—that were killing my people.

PAT: So we wanted to know—and this was an honest question—did he see something that would contradict the scientists' story?

ROBERT: Did the source of the rain—was there always a plane and then rain, a plane and then rain, or did sometimes the rain happen without a plane?

KAO KALIA YANG: [speaking Hmong]

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

KAO KALIA YANG: We never saw what they said it was. It was always just being dropped on them. And it was always being dropped where there were heavy concentrations of Hmong people.

PAT: Hmm.

ROBERT: But ...

KAO KALIA YANG: That's what we knew.

ROBERT: ... we don't know whether there was a plane causing it. It was just—you just see the dust or see the ...

KAO KALIA YANG: You know, you have to understand that the planes were shooting bullets and bombs every day all the time.

ROBERT: Hmm.

PAT: Hmm.

KAO KALIA YANG: And so—so whether it was a bombing plane or a yellow plane, it was incredibly hard to distinguish.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

KAO KALIA YANG: Everybody runs when you hear the plane, so Hmong people didn't watch bombs coming down. You came out, you sneak your head out, and you watched what happened in the aftermath. You saw broken trees. You saw yellow in the—in the aftermath of what had been bombed.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

KAO KALIA YANG: I saw with my own eyes the bee pollen on the leaves eating through holes. With my own eyes, I saw pollen that could kill grass, could kill leaves, could kill trees.

ROBERT: But he himself is not clear whether it's the bee stuff or whether it's other stuff, because there was so much stuff coming down from the sky.

KAO KALIA YANG: [speaking Hmong]

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

KAO KALIA YANG: You know that there were chemicals being—being used against the Hmong in the mountains of Laos. Whether this is the chemicals from the bombs or yellow rain, chemicals were being used. It feels to him like this is a semantic debate. And it feels like—like there's a sad lack of justice. That the word of a man who survived this thing must be pitted against a professor from Harvard who's read these accounts.

ROBERT: But as far as I can tell, your uncle didn't see the bee pollen fall. Your uncle didn't see a plane. All of this is hearsay.

KAO KALIA YANG: [speaking Hmong]

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

KAO KALIA YANG: My uncle says for the last 20 years, he didn't know that anything—anybody was interested in the death of the Hmong people. He agreed to do this interview because you were interested. You know, what happened to the Hmong happened, and the world has—has been uninterested for the last 20 years. He agreed because you were interested.

ENG YANG: [speaking Hmong]

KAO KALIA YANG: That the story would be heard, and that the Hmong deaths would be well documented and recognized. That's why he agreed to the interview—that the Hmong heart is broken, that our leaders have been silenced. And what we know has been questioned again and again is not a surprise to him or to me. I agreed to the interview for the same reason that Radiolab was interested in the Hmong story. That they were interested in documenting the deaths that happened. There was so much that was not told. Everybody knows that chemical warfare was being used. Well, how do you create bombs if not with chemicals? We can play the semantics game. We can, but I'm not interested. My uncle is not interested. We have lost too much heart and too many people in the process. I—I think that—I think the interview is done.

JAD: Now that—that wasn't the end of the interview. They kept on talking. Robert and Pat explained to Kalia that, you know, we're reporters, we're just trying to figure out what happened. One thing I do want to make clear: we informed the Yangs in advance that we wanted to talk about the controversy surrounding yellow rain. We were very clear about that. We did not intend to ambush them. But this interview troubled us. We talked about it for months, arguing back and forth about what it meant to the story, what it meant for us personally. And we decided at a certain point to bring that conversation into the studio. We're gonna play you that conversation as we originally podcasted it, and then we'll have some things to say on the other end. Pat started by talking about the moment that you just heard on tape.

PAT: That—somehow, that moment was when the whole story changed for me.

JAD: How exactly?

PAT: Like, I think that there was something about, like, the way that she was pointing away from the thing that we had been looking so hard at and saying, "Stop looking at that. Look over here."

ROBERT: Yeah.

PAT: Like, she—like, she didn't convince me at all that this wasn't a chemical weapon, but she convinced me that we were missing something.

JAD: Yeah. What I'm hearing her say there, not having been in this interview is, "Quit focusing on this yellow rain stuff, because when you do that, you're shoving aside the much larger story, namely that my people were being killed."

ROBERT: Right. That's exactly what she's saying.

JAD: So you're saying ...

ROBERT: And that is wrong. That is absolutely— and to my mind, that is not fair to us.

JAD: How is it not fair?

ROBERT: It's not fair to ask us to not consider the other stories and the other frames of this story.

JAD: Wait ...

ROBERT: The fact that the most powerful man in the world, Ronald Reagan, used this story to order the manufacture of chemical weapons for the first time in 20 years. If the United States were to manufacture chemical weapons again and then use them because the Russians supposedly had, then people would have died ugly deaths in the consequence of that. And that is not unimportant. That's hugely important, but it's not important to her. So should that not be important to us?

PAT: But I—yeah, I mean ...

ROBERT: She's saying ...

PAT: And I do think that—I don't know. I think that until she—until she said the things that she said at the end of that interview, I don't think that I had fully appreciated the—the volume of pain that was involved in that moment for them.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Yes. I thought—I thought her reaction was very balancing, but her desire was not for balance, her desire was to monopolize the story, and that we can't ...

JAD: I'm not sure we can say that though.

ROBERT: Well—oh, if you listen to the words, that's what she said. She says ...

JAD: No, I just think that they feel like their trauma has never been fully acknowledged, and that they've attached it to this because maybe they felt that they had to. They've attached it to this idea that yellow rain was a chemical weapon. And if yellow rain suddenly isn't a chemical weapon, that doesn't just invalidate the yellow rain, it negates their whole loss. And—and I think she might be right.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: But it's like—and I also think that the scientists are right, it's not a chemical weapon. And I also think you're right, that to call it a chemical weapon has big consequences. So what do you do when three truths are right at the same time?

ROBERT: This is where we stop.

ROBERT: So that was our original conversation. And when the podcast went out, a lot of people were very upset by me in particular. So I think I want to, if I could, add just a couple of things here. First of all, clearly it was wrong to say that Kalia Yang was trying to "monopolize" our conversation, because after all we are the editors. We choose what to put on the air, and in this case, we chose. We were looking for evidence that despite what the scientists thought, maybe there was a chemical weapon here. And we wanted to find an eyewitness to see if anybody saw a bomb open and yellow rain come out. That's what reporters do. We test truths. And that is why I was persistent. I had no idea what the Yangs were gonna say. And when they got angry, I was—I was embarrassed. And when I got angry in my conversation with Jad and Pat, that was not right. And for that, I apologize to Kalia and Mr. Yang in particular. I have to ask questions and search for truth, but in this case, given how much Mr. Yang had already suffered, I should have done it with more respect and more gently.

 

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