There is something about scouring classified documents for long-hidden military secrets that attracts a certain type of obsessive. Nicholson Baker, who once wrote a 147-page essay tracking an archaic use of the word lumber through centuries of Anglophone literature, is that type. He somersaulted onto the literary scene in 1988 with The Mezzanine, a heavily footnoted novel about an office workers uneventful lunch hour. Bakers learned notes, down-the-rabbit-hole digressions, and verbal flash have invited comparisons with the virtuoso meanderings of David Foster Wallace, though Baker comes off as gentler, less tormented by his demons, and, frankly, nicer.

In the late 1990s, Bakers career took an unexpected turn when he got caught up in the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. The pair had exchanged books as gifts: The president had given his young intern Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass, and shed given him Bakers Vox, an experimental novel in the form of a phone-sex conversation (one character reports seeing the great seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as she climaxes). Both choices were telling. Clinton offered an erotic but classroom-safeand thus technically aboveboardcollection in which one of the most famous poems is about loving a president. Lewinsky, less inhibited and less of a narcissist, tossed back a fresh bouquet of surreal horniness.

Baker has not stopped writing weird sex novels. But he has also turned to more overtly political investigations with impressive and admirable zeal. His powerfully argued Double Fold (2001) took libraries to task for needlessly throwing out books. In Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids (2016), he offered a painful account of Maines public school system, where he worked as a substitute teacher. In Human Smoke (2008), his history of World War II, writing as a pacifist, he excoriated the Allied leaders for their moral blindness.

Soon after Human Smoke, Baker turned to the Korean War, in which the United States faced persistent accusations of having used biological weapons. Baker researched the topic for nearly 10 years without reaching conclusions as firm as he would have liked. That is in large part because whenever he asked for the relevant documents from the government under the Freedom of Information Act, he received nothing. Really, nothing. Years went by, presidents came and went, and he continued to wait. Some requests were refused, others idled in bureaucratic limbo. On occasion, documents arrived but were slathered in redactionsa devils checkerboard of blackouts.

The Freedom of Information Act requires federal agencies to respond to requests within 20 business days or, if multiple agencies must be consulted, with all practicable speed. Yet there is no speed, Baker finds during his researches. There is, on the contrary, a deliberate Pleistocenian ponderousness. Baker waited seven years for one set of documents without receiving them. Five federal agencies have requests that have been pending for more than a decade, and the National Archives has one thats more than 25 years old. The issue isnt that we dont know what the government is currently doing. Its that we dont know what it has done, and we may never know.

The mists of secrecy swirl particularly thickly around potentially embarrassing topics, such as the use of biological weapons. This has made the question of germ warfare in Korea nearly impossible to answer satisfactorily. Its an intellectual briar patch in which well-intentioned scholars have lacerated and ensnared themselves for decades without reaching a consensus. Nevertheless, there are things we can see through the dark fog of redaction.

To start, we know that waging biological war was not unthinkable for the U.S. military in the years following World War II. Five days after the Korean War started, a committee charged with studying unconventional weapons issued a set of emphatic recommendations, known as the Stevenson Report. The United States must not arbitrarily deny itself the use of biological weapons or use them only in retaliation, the report stated. It should prepare to wage biological warfare offensively. This view was championed by General Jimmy Doolittle, famed for having bombed Tokyo in 1942. In my estimation, we have just one moral obligation, he told his fellow officers at an interservice symposium. And that moral obligation is for us to develop at the earliest possible moment that agent which will kill enemy personnel most quickly and most cheaply.

Not everyone agreed with him, but the Pentagon nevertheless backed a crash program, spending nearly $350 million on biological warfare development during the Korean War. Scientists were put to work weaponizing diseases, from familiar scourges like plague to epidemiological deep cuts like coccidioidomycosis, a fungal infection of the lungs. At no point while fighting in Korea did the military acquire the ability to wage all-out germ war with dedicated units of trained biological weapons handlers and mass-produced stockpiles of tested weapons. It could make small, experimental attacks, though.

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The Great Germ War Cover-Up - The New Republic