DYING TO TELL THE TRUTH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000200830006-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 24, 2010
• Sequence Number: 6
• Publication Date: March 22, 1981
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/24: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200830006-2
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THE RILING OF KAREN SILKWOOD: The'
Story Behind the Kerr-McGee Plutonium
Case. By Richerd Roshke. Houghton Mifflin.
407 pp. $11.95
By GREGG EASTERBROOK
RE THE WORST paranoid fantasies
of the Woodstock generation true? Do
the giant corporations crumple up lives and
toss them away like Kleenex, all the while
protected by armies of faceless spies and
spooks?
Or are the worst paranoid fantasies of the
establishment true? Do-activists long to de-
stroy the machinery of industrial progress,
taking drug-crazed pleasure in chaos?
Perhaps more than any other event of the
1970s, the Karen Silkwood case has in-
flamed those who harbor paranoias on ei-
ther extreme. In my experience, mere men-
tion of Silkwood's name can spark vicious,
irrational arguments among otherwise rea-
sonable people.. The angry arguments (and
the paranoia) continue because, after six
years of stories, hearings and investigations"
of Silkwood's death, almost nothing is
THE WASHINGTON POST
BOOK WORLD
22 March 1981
In brief outline, here are the. undisputed
facts. Silkwood was a 28-year-old lab tech-!
nician . in Kerr-McGee's plutonium pro-
cessing plant in Crescent, Oklahoma. She
became ' worried about plant safety, and
started gathering evidence to.hand-over to
her union. ' Meanwhile, things were not
going, well for the union; a decertification
vote, to expell it from the plant, was gearing
up. Neither were things going well for Silk-
wood; her marriage had broken up, she had
attempted- suicide, and she was using sev-
eral drugs, including Quaalude. ? -
In short order the affair became very
-
strange. After a series of minor but trou-
bling radiation exposures Silkwood suffered -1
at. the plant, she found herself contami-
nated with a perhaps-lethal dose. The con-
tamination was traced to a large (by nu-
clear standards) amount of plutonium in
her apartment refrigerator. Who_ put it
there? No one knew. The idea that some-
'body, anybody, could sneak so-much- plu-
toniunr out of what was supposed to be, a
high-security installarion suggested. how--
ever, that something was deeply wrong at
the plant.
Under pressure from her union (which
saw Silkwood as a catalyst to winning a new
contract) she arranged to meet a New York
Times reporter and present documents she
claimed would prove Kerr-McGee's safety
and security failings. On the way to that
meeting in November 1974, her car went off
the road, slammed into a concrete wingwall,
and she was dead. No documents were
found in the wreck. The FBI and other fed-
eral agencies investigated extensively, but
have refused to reveal anything meaningful
about their findings, even under congres-
sional subpoena.
From here Rashke goes on to present a
known with certainty. If anything, the mys-
tery is even more perplexing than be?ore.
An impressive and vital new book, The
Killing of Karen Silkwood, goes a long way
toward changing that. Shunning the fist-
shaking hysteria brought to the case by- -
writers on both sides, author Richard Ra-
shke has produced a chronicle that meets a
demanding test of objectivity. You know in
your- heart Rashke is rooting for Silkwood,
but he seldom lets this prejudice intrude-
faithfully presenting, for instance, all the
unpleasant information about Silkwood's
personal life. He even takes the unusual but
welcome step of listing his sources (most of
which, in the custom of modem "investiga-
tive reporting," turn out to be court docu-
jnrents and congressional reports, not late-
-ht sleuthing). {
balanced, detailed account of what may
have happened that night, and the. many
things that have happened since. His ap-
proach was the right choice-both because
drawing your own conclusions is - usually
more' *persuasive, and because Rashke's
skills, as a reporter seem to outweigh his in-
sight as an analyst. In the end, I think, Ra-
shke marshals enough evidence to answer
once and for all two of the major questions'
of the Silkwood case, and point the way to-
ward the answer to the third. I will try to
summarize his evidence on the three ques-
tions, as best as is possible in the given
,space:.. . I
s Was Silkwood -killed? Officially her'
death is just a strangely-timed random ac-
cident,,-she felt asleep at the wheel either'
from e,haustion or drugs. Rashke presents ;
convincing evidence that she was killed.
The key element in his argument is this:
her car ran along an inclined road shoulder
for 240 feet before striking the wingwall.
Only -a conscious driver could have kept the
car on course.
Rashke speculates a chase car. frightened
Silkwood off the road onto the embank-
ment, then began -racing along parallel to
tier to keep her from getting back on the
road. Whoever was in the chase car, Rashke
-suggests, mightnot-have been planning to
Iilf Silkwood---only to flag her down and
,win her silence.withmoney gr threataSilk-
wood would not stop,; however, and while
shavtas looking back over her shoulder at
the'chase car, she hit the wingwall, which `'
was not visible until it was too late.
? Was her death part of a plot? Again Ra-
shke's answer is yes, and he demonstrates it
convincingly. The most telling piece of evi-
dence is that nearly every law enforcement
agency you can name turns out to be
wrapped up (some intimately) in an inves-
tigation of the affair. It stretches from the
Oklahoma City police and Oklahoma High-
way Patrol to the FBI, the CLa and the Na-
tional Security Agency to a handful of ex-
otic CIA front groups to private agencies
like Pinkerton, Wackenhut and Intertel
and even to SAVAK They are bugging,
tailing, and monitoring everyone in sight
Some of the monitoring began before her
death, and much of it went on years later,)
and involved only minor characters.
The FBI is especially active, throwing up
smokescreens with everything from - Key=
stone Kop-variety slander of tong sional
investigators to sophisticated diversionary !
tactics. The Bureau tricks Congress and the i
Silkwood estate's- lawyers into concentrat-
ing their energies on investigating a decoys
who ultimately turns out to know nothing }
of value.
If Silkwood's death was just'an unfortu-
nate mistake-say, the work of an overzeal-
ous corporate goon squad doing things
Kerr-McGee's management did not con-
-done-why would the CIA and NSA care?"'
Why would an endless string of spooks be
tied to a mere traffic accident? -'
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/24: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200830006-2