THE COLD WAR - A STORY UNTOLD

An excerpt from “Rat Killers”

An Unpublished Manuscript from the Annuals of the Defense Intelligence Agency

By Dr. Ralph Eyler M.D.

 This part of a partially unclassified document I am giving to Rod Cook, with some touchups. I was in charge of Pathology for project “Rat Kill.” I was responsible for “hijacking Rod during the Top Secret “Black” project described below.    Later, Rod and his cohorts hijacked me to work for the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center under the Defense Intelligence Agency.  None of our lives were ever the same after this massive project!  Dr. Ralph Eyler Ltc. USA Retired. 

In 1977, The Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center, under the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), ran the world’s largest ever Top Secret nutritional  research project.   Trouble shooters and scientists came in from all over the world to work on it.  It could be compared to the Manhattan project that developed the atomic bomb.  In fact, some of the same scientists that developed the atomic bomb worked on this super secret project.  Some things seen today, such as the ORAC test for anti-oxidants, had their birth in this project. 

In late 1976 Russians successfully tested a medium range missile with multiple warheads carrying Neutron bombs.  For those of you not familiar with Neutron bombs, they kill (or severely maim), all living organisms within range of detonation.  All inorganic buildings, houses and airfields are left undamaged.  One missile with six Neutron warheads could wipe out an American Army division of 15,000 men.  Not all would die at once but the medical assets on the ground would be injured and any chances of survival from radiation would be wiped out because of lack of medical care.  There is only one word to describe U.S. reaction – panic!  Three of these missiles could kill 45,000 U.S. soldiers in 15 minutes. 

The project to try to counter the effects of the Neutron bombs actually started with the American capture of a Russian Nuclear submarine with a leaky atomic reactor in the 1960’s.  With the radiation dose the crew in the submarine were saturated with (over 1200 millirems accumulated), they should have all been dead (see footnote).  U.S. forces found three things on the deadly sub that evidently allowed this amazing medical miracle.  Empty bottles of brandy and wine were found. The Russian crew gave credit to the “submarine wine”, “vortexed water” and brandy for saving their lives.  If you see the movie about the capture, or hear official reports, the U.S. never “captured” this Russian sub.  One word – Politics! 

The U.S. military had very little in our arsenal for serious radiation attacks.  We had an injectable form of Glutathione, but it was fragile (heat and freezing) and the enzyme extracts were expensive and time consuming to prepare.  Glutathione had no prophylactic effect, meaning a large group of soldiers could not take it ahead of a suspected radiation event.  We also had potassium iodide which was good for the thyroid gland, but that wouldn’t be much good if the rest of the human organism died before it’s thyroid got cancer. 

Colonel Jack Fitzpatrick M.D. (internist) came back into the Department of the Army from the position of Medical Director for the Atomic Energy Commission to run the project.  Dr. Fitzpatrick picked me to be the Medical Pathology Director because of my Special Forces combat medic (before med school) experience.  "I highly recommended the project pull in a young Army Captain (an ex-combat medic) with a heavy back ground in chemistry and physics in his undergraduate degrees. This Captain, Rod Cook, would of spend much of his off duty time, when not flying med ships, working in my pathology lab or the emergency room at Nuremberg Medical Center, Nuremberg, Germany.  Plus I knew that Rod was a trouble shooter." Colonel Fitzpatrick picked up the phone to DIA HQ and Rod and two of his sergeants were sent to Ft. Sam Houston for a 18 hour a day, 30 day crash course in advanced laboratory procedures to include the latest in lab test equipment (radiation protection included) and their use and maintenance.  "Rod was a little upset. Little did I know at that time, he was running spy missions behind the Iron Curtain under a medical support cover." 

ROD’S SIDE OF THE STORY: OPERATION “RAT KILL”

I was really upset when the DIA jerked me out of my happy life in Germany.  They had set me up for medical spying behind the Iron Curtain which was fantastic.  Then we were grabbed!  Two of my super great sergeants and I were flown directly to Ft. Detrick, MD with 12 hours notice.  Things got better fast.  I reported to Colonel Fitzpatrick, saluted and got a ten minute briefing.  The first question out of my mouth was, “what’s my budget?”  He replied, "$40 million", my mouth dropped.  Next thought? Knowing military paperwork I could see myself parked behind a desk 24/7.   I asked sadly, “how do I spend it.” Col. Fitzpatrick grinned and said, "cash or check!  Never more than one piece of paper, and if I’m not here you can sign both authorizations on the disbursement form". Our project “Rat Kill” used “black funds” (did not exist on any military books) and was classified “Top Secret.” Since Project “Rat Kill” did not exist,  the normal bureaucracy did not exist!  Heaven!  The Colonel sent my two cohorts and me to Fort Sam Houston the next day. Personnel were still being shanghaied to staff the project while we were at school.  We got in at 4 pm San Antonio time and advanced laboratory school started that night at 8 pm.  That further impressed me, because it was Saturday!  Thirty straight days of hell training did not let up from that day.  Terrible duty! Why? I was single and staying in a BOQ full of Army nurses with no time off! 

 While at Fort Sam, I stayed on the phone every chance I got.  On my way back to Fort Detrick, I requisitioned and loaded an old cancer treatment Cobalt Gamma machine (14 tons with shielding) from Walter Reed leaving me an extra $10 million in my “kitty”.  We “borrowed” two electron microscopes from Medical R&D command one night, leaving me an extra $7 million.  The first check I had to write was for $6 million dollars worth of lab equipment.  Project “Rat Kill” was the first government agency outside of Fort Sam to have advanced High Pressure Liquid Chromatographs, not just one, but three, because we had to identify the all active elements in the nutrition products we were testing. 

 We started Gamma blasting normal lab rats to establish our baseline, to see how long the tagged rats would live after being hit with deadly radiation.  By the end of the project, we killed almost one hundred thousand rats and I had a crew of over one hundred Army medics circulating cages twenty four hours a day to record individual times of death.  We had twenty four Army lab techs doing dissection, and five civilian temporary hires from the Ft. Detrick bio tech lab shooting pictures.  In all, the staff grew to over two hundred sixty-three people on the project including M.D.s and fifty high level consultants.  We started with six nutritionists and a couple of nutrition formulators, but lost most of them when they flunked training that included a day in the “dying rat” hangar. 

The second group of rats to die were the happiest.  We fed them brandy for two weeks before we zapped them with six hundred “rat equivalent” millirems of Gamma radiation (see chart below for human exposures).  Then we started feeding the batches of  two hundred and fifty rats wine, and then next batches both wine and brandy mixed and expanded to nutritionals from there.  We established mapped protocols that today’s pharmaceutical companies would kill to have, using AFMIC’s IBM mainframe and programming in Cobol. 

My sergeants and I were working sixteen hours a day, so in our spare time, we started building the first (that we know of) “vortexed” water machine in the U.S.  Today this type of water is commonly known as “structured” water. The theory is that by breaking water into smaller molecular “groups” they enter the living cell more easily.  During our experiments, the stats showed the rats fed structured water lived about .8% longer after being hit with LD radiation.  I still use structured water today.  That finding was turned over to R&D Command – Army Corps of Engineers.  I heard later they could find no practical way to make and maintain structured water on the battlefield and the project was dropped. 

We tested mixed and blended hundreds of nutritionals.  Dr. Edward Teller (yes, one of the fathers of the Hydrogen bomb) suggested broccoli because in Hungry (where Dr. Teller was born) there was a farming region that raised broccoli and the population lived to old ages.  Years later he was proved right, research has shown Cyanohydroxybutene in broccoli converts to higher levels of Glutathione in the human body which we knew helped fight radiation sickness.  For what we wanted, it was only about a 2.31% improvement and we wanted better. 

I don’t have space, but this was a star studded “black” project. With my forty million dollar check book, we had the top consultants and advisors in atomic energy and medicine.  By the way, Dr. Teller came for free, out of patriotism and his care for mankind. God bless his departed soul but, I had to fight with him, even to pay his airfare!    All of these VIP’s stayed in a ratty WWII barracks, with lousy air conditioning, and big ugly guards with machine guns outside.  We had great food (catered) and furniture because I had a spare $17 million in the magic checkbook.  The word anti-oxidant was classified “Top Secret” and not even used in “the barracks.” 

We went in ten directions, mixing and testing at once. In one phase of “Rat Kill” we started making wine.  As results went up, we focused on making low pulp, high wine skin.  We didn’t know how close we were.  We made wine, fermenting it ourselves in vats, and vacuum distilling knowing that heat would change the composure and might destroy what we were looking for.  Later, we separated the wine skins and pulp and fermented them separately.  We used 100F vacuum distillation at 22 millibars and liquid nitrogen in the chiller.  This gave us more brandy to test with (sometimes on ourselves).  What was left were the leftovers to feed our rat “volunteers.”  After 10 months we got a mix of structured water and grape skin that increased radiated rat life span 5.86% over the controls.  That was the best we got...  better, but not good. 

The whole project came to an abrupt slowdown.  Dr. Teller and Dr. Ralph (above) found a pair of Russian scientists who were willing to sell two bottles of real Russian "submarine wine".  I gave the final test on the check book, I went to Army finance at Fort Detrick and wrote a check (disbursement form) for $100,000 in 1,000’s. I was off to Budapest with a $100,000 in a black bag to have the CIA (our worst enemy) almost ruin my skin (someday this article and more will be in a book). 

SUMMARY: Many of the developments out of this “Black” operation are in circulation today.  ORAC value by another name originated with “Rat Kill.”  Some scientists from the Department of Agriculture came up with the idea from our structured testing that led to the Brunswick Lab process today.  This was the first use of HPLC testing on nutritionals.   Now we know what we were looking for. It was the ingredient in the Russian “submarine wine”.   Today the brand and common name are Resveratrol.  What Dr. Sinclair (world’s top researcher on Resveratrol) has found, is it is a great antioxidant, but bigger than that? DNA Mitochondrial strands  breaking during cell replication.  When people ask me why I look younger than my age?  I have a 30 year jump on the rest of you.  Since the end of the cold war the secret U.S. Army reserves of Resveratrol in Europe have been dropped.  I will bet you that with North Korea and their atomic bomb fanatics...  we have a good stock in South Korea for our troops and allies. 

ROD'S FAMILY HISTORY NUTRITIONALS

I always say I have a thousand years of nutritional use as medicine behind me.  My great grandfather was one of the last of the true Comanche medicine men.  While a boy, his great granddad took him into the wilds of Texas hunting healing plants.  Rod says, “we would go on week trips walking creek banks and the hills of Texas looking for certain plants that were used by Comanche medicine men for healing.  We would shoot with bows and arrows to eat rabbits.  We would run trout lines for fish and sleep on the ground in a bed roll.”  For a 10 – 12 year old boy this was a pure paradise.  One of my long term projects is track down some of those plants today.  Of special interest are, the rare obscure ones that cured big sicks (translation from Comanche).  “Big sick” included infections (internal) and cancer.  If the Comanche could cure that, the value to society today would be immeasurable, because millions are going to die today because we are running out of any antibiotics that work! 

HIRING A FORMULATOR?

If I am under contract to you as your MLM consultant, I will test them for you.  Since I operate on a biochemistry base, I really don’t like talking to some of these people.  So if they are an M.D. or masters level (or above) biochemistry major, I can actually have a good time chatting with them.  My daily reading includes thousands of nutritional RESEARCH articles each year.  Pub Med, from the National Library of Medicine (another story), run by the National Institutes of Health, is an old friend and gets daily visits. 

Example of questions I might ask in an interview with a nutritional formulator:

Question: There is an MLM company selling glutathione as a nutritional?  What do you think of that, what can you tell me?  My answer:  They may be prematurely aging people if they quit taking the product, but some studies have shown the body produces less glutathione if glutathione is used as a supplement.  It would be a lot safer to use a glutathione booster like Acetylcysteine (or NAC) to do the same thing. 

Question:  Some new MLM companies have anti-oxidants that they claim have an ORAC value of over 3000.  What do you think?  My answer:  This may be dangerous.  There have been no serious tests done on high ORAC value products.  Some food scientists are questioning an ORAC value over 1000 or 1200.  My grandmother always taught me too much of a good thing is usually bad.  If future research shows high ORAC’s are harmful, the MLM company not only has hurt people... but class action lawsuits will destroy the company.

 Rod

  

Reference radiation exposure above:

Acute Radiation Exposure Effects of Large, Whole-Body Radiation Doses

Effect                                     Dose (rems)

 

No observable effect           0-25

 

Slight blood changes           25-100

 

Significant reduction

in blood platelets and
white blood cells

(temporary)                            100-200

 

Severe blood damage,

nausea, hair loss,
hemorrhage, death in

many cases                            200-500

 

Death in less than two         over 500

months for over 80%

 

Rod