Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (77 page)

“I feel good. I lost 20 pounds on that deal a meal plan. Not that Richard Simmons plan. This is where you play cards, lose, and don’t have enough cash to eat.”

—John McDowell

ANIMAL LAUGHTER

Chimpanzees, apes, orangutans and a few other primates laugh, but no other animals do. Chimps laugh at the relief of tension, when tickling each other, and when playing chasing games. Their laugh sounds like rapid panting, but unlike humans, they are unable to regulate or control the air as they breathe out, which means they can’t change the way it sounds. This lack of ability to control airflow is the same thing that deprives them of speech.

Just because primates can’t talk, it doesn’t mean they can’t share jokes. Chimps and gorillas that have learned sign language have been known to sign one another for laughs. Sometimes they give incorrect signs in “conversation,” and then laugh audibly with each other; other times they urinate on humans and then sign “funny.”

Karen Silkwood has been the subject of numerous articles, books, and a major movie, but few people know what really happened to her. Here, from the book “It’s a Conspiracy,” are the details of her controversial life and mysterious death.

O
n November 13, 1974, Karen Silkwood left a group of coworkers at the Hub Cafe in Crescent, Oklahoma, headed to a crucial meeting with a
New York Times
reporter. On her way out, she told them that she had proof that the plutonium plant where they all worked—Kerr-McGee’s Cimarron River plant—had repeatedly covered up safety violations and falsified records. But she never made it to her meeting.

A little more than 7 miles outside of Crescent, Silkwood’s car went flying off the straight highway and crashed into a concrete culvert, silencing Silkwood forever. Official statements claim that Silkwood fell asleep at the wheel, but evidence suggests otherwise.

KAREN SILKWOOD VS. KERR-McGEE

• Soon after she started working for Kerr-McGee in 1972, Karen Silkwood joined the local branch of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW). In the spring of 1974, she was elected to the governing committee and began to voice her concerns about the company’s safety record. She believed Kerr-McGee was sloppy in its handling of radioactive materials and indifferent to the health of its workers.

• She became even more concerned when several coworkers were directly exposed to plutonium—perhaps the most toxic substance on earth. And a production speedup that required employees to work 12-hour shifts increased the danger.

• On August 1, 1974, Silkwood herself was contaminated when airborne plutonium entered the room in which she was working. She began worrying about her own health as well as the effects of company safety lapses on her coworkers. She began carrying a notebook with her constantly to record the infractions she observed.

• On September 26, she and two other local union officials flew to Washington D.C., to meet with national OCAW leaders. They alleged serious health and safety violations and charged that plant documents had been falsified to conceal defective fuel rods. National union leaders were so alarmed that they immediately took Silkwood to testify before the Atomic Energy Commission.

• This charge had “very deep and very grave [consequences],” according to OCAW official Steve Wodka—“not only for the people in the plant, but for the entire atomic industry and the welfare of the country. If badly made pins were placed into the reactor without deficiencies being caught, there could be an incident exposing thousands of people to radiation.”

• After presenting her charges in Washington, Silkwood returned to Kerr-McGee and continued to document the safety violations she observed on the job.

CONTAMINATION

• On Tuesday, November 5, Silkwood was in the metallography lab, where she was handling plutonium in a safety case called a “glovebox.” When she finished her work, monitoring devices revealed that she had been contaminated again—this time from her hands all the way up to her scalp.

• The contamination on her coveralls was up to forty times the company limit. Any exposure above the company limit required emergency decontamination—scrubbing repeatedly with a mixture of Tide and Clorox, which left Silkwood’s skin raw and stinging. Within a few days, she noted, “It hurt to cry because the salt in my tears burned my skin.”

• Health officials required Silkwood to supply urine and fecal samples so they could monitor the radioactivity level in her system. Samples taken over the next few days showed new, extremely high levels of radiation. Baffled by the source of the contamination, officials eventually checked her apartment. They found that it was so contaminated that most of its contents had to be removed and buried. While officials gutted her apartment, Kerr-McGee lawyers interrogated Silkwood, insinuating that she had smuggled plutonium out of the plant.

• Her health began to deteriorate. She began to lose weight and had trouble sleeping. A series of doctors prescribed sedatives to relieve her anxiety. Now, terrified by the trauma of decontamination scrubbings, the burial of her belongings, and the high levels of contamination in her body, Karen Silkwood believed she was dying.

• She spent November 10 to 12 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, undergoing tests to assess how much radiation she had absorbed. Doctors determined that she was in no imminent danger—the amount of plutonium that her body had absorbed was below the maximum absorption that “cannot be exceeded without risk.” But no one could assure her that the radioactivity would not lead to cancer or other health problems in the future.

• Then, on November 13, six days after the contamination was discovered in her house, Silkwood drove to meet a reporter from
The New York Times
, with documents she believed would prove Kerr-McGee’s criminal neglect. En route, her car veered across the road and down the left-hand shoulder, and slammed head on into a concrete culvert, killing her.

WAS IT A CONSPIRACY? #1

Was her car wreck an accident—or murder?

• The official explanation of Karen Silkwood’s death is that she brought it on herself: she took too many tranquilizers and dozed off while driving. “An autopsy revealed that her blood, stomach, and liver contained methaqualone, a sleep-inducing drug, and it was surmised that she fell asleep at the wheel,” according to the
Encyclopedia of American Scandal
. “Justice Department and FBI investigations found no wrongdoing.”

• This was possible. To cope with insomnia, changes in her work shift, and growing tension at the plant, Silkwood had gotten a prescription for sleeping pills. Her boyfriend, Drew Stephens, says that she had taken them for tranquilization, not for sleep—especially during the last week of her life. (Ms.)

• But colleagues who had been with Silkwood shortly before the accident said she appeared alert, spoke clearly, and acted normally. “It would never have crossed my mind that she might not be capable of driving a car safely,” one coworker said. What’s more, the road her car went off was perfectly straight, and Karen was an excellent driver—she’d won several road rallies in previous years.

• When Silkwood left her colleagues to meet with the reporter from
The New York Times,
she was carrying a brown manila folder and a large notebook. One coworker who had been at the Hub Cafe recounted some of Silkwood’s last words: “She then said there was one thing she was glad about, that she had all the proof concerning the health and safety conditions in the plant, and concerning falsification. As she said this, she clenched her hand more firmly on the folder and the notebook she was holding.” (Ms.)

Suspicious Facts

• Silkwood’s manila folder and notebook disappeared after the accident. “A trooper at the scene reported stuffing the papers back into the car,” said one reporter, “but they were gone when it was checked a day later.”

• The road was straight. If, as the police suggested, she fell asleep, her car would probably have drifted to the right because of the road’s centerline, or crown, and the pull of gravity. But instead it crossed the road and went off the left shoulder.

• Experts disagreed about the meaning of the tire marks at the accident. Police said her car left two sets of rolling tracks with no evidence of having attempted to brake or control the car. An investigator hired by the OCAW, however, thought the car had been out of control, as if it had been hit or pushed by another car.

• Experts also disagreed about a scratch along the side of the car. Police said it was made when the car was towed away from the culvert. But the OCAW analyst said microscopic exams showed metal and rubber fragments in the scratch, as if another car had bumped Silkwood’s.

• Several years after the accident, family members filed a lawsuit against Kerr-McGee, claiming that the company intentionally contaminated Silkwood. In 1979, an Oklahoma jury ordered Kerr-McGee to pay Silkwood’s estate more than $10.5 million in damages. The decision against Kerr-McGee was later overturned on appeal because the “award was ruled to have infringed on the U.S. government’s exclusivity in regulating safety in the nuclear power industry” (
Encyclopedia of American Scandal
). Four years later, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “courts could impose punitive damages on the nuclear-power industry for violations of safety.” Kerr-McGee eventually settled the suit for $1.3 million. Under the out-of-court agreement, the company admitted no guilt for the automobile accident.

WAS IT A CONSPIRACY? #2

If Silkwood was murdered, could agents of the U.S. government be responsible?

Suspicious Facts

• At least forty pounds of plutonium—the active ingredient in nuclear warheads—were missing from the Kerr-McGee plant. Silkwood was among the first to suggest this, and company officials later confirmed it.

• According to
The Progressive
, the Justice Department, “ignoring evidence that suggested the possibility of foul play at the accident site…shut down its investigation of Karen Silkwood’s death early in 1974 with a four-and-a-half-page summary report dismissing the possibility of murder or any relationship of missing plutonium to the case.”

• According to
Rebel
magazine, “Every attempt to get the government to release related intelligence files has been replied to by the Justice Department with claims of ‘national security’ and ‘state secrets.’ The FBI even tried to get a permanent gag order against Silkwood attorneys forbidding public disclosure of what they were finding.”

• Attorneys working on the lawsuit brought by Silkwood’s estate alleged that there was a relationship—and perhaps a conspiracy—between Kerr-McGee and the FBI. These attorneys said that Silkwood was being spied on and that transcripts of her private conversations were later passed from a Kerr-McGee official to both an FBI agent and an author (alleged to have CIA and Navy-intelligence links) who later wrote a disparaging book about Silkwood’s activities.

• Attempting to clarify the relationship between Kerr-McGee, the FBI, and the author, Silkwood attorney Danny Sheehan repeatedly pressed the author in court to tell who had commissioned her book. The FBI objected 30 times, citing “national security.” Finally, after conferring with FBI officials, the judge told Sheehan, “The information you seek is sinister and secret, and should never see the light of day.”
(The Progressive)

• The Oklahoma City Police Department (OCPD) also appears to have been involved in Kerr-McGee spying operations. “Silkwood estate investigators insist they found [OCPD] Intelligence Unit officers on Kerr-McGee’s security payroll during the time Silkwood was being spied on,” according to
Rebel
magazine. Moreover, “an FBI source claims OCPD’s Intelligence Unit had been infiltrated by either CIA or [National Security Agency] undercover agents, and OCPD-gleaned FBI surveillance reports on Silkwood were transmitted via a NSA code classified top-secret.”

• Sheehan, still trying to uncover possible CIA links to the case, pressed on until finally, he says, he was warned by a former Carter White House source to call his investigator off: “You’re in way over your head. You don’t have any idea how sensitive this issue is. You’d better contact your man…and tell him to stand down…. They’ll kill him. And I promise you, no one will do anything about it.”
(Rebel)

• As for the missing plutonium, the English weekly
The New Statesman
suggests that “there is evidence that the material was sold on the black market to South Africa, Israel or Iran under the Shah. In our opinion, [Silkwood] had that kind of evidence—that’s why she was killed.”

RECOMMENDED READING