The Salad Bar Plot: America's First Bioterror Attack
Oregon
In the fall of nineteen eighty-four, the small city of The Dalles in Wasco County became the site of the first and largest bioterrorist attack in American history. The perpetrators were not a foreign government or a shadowy cell. They were members of the Rajneeshee commune, followers of the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who had established a settlement called Rajneeshpuram on a sprawling ranch about forty-five miles east of here in Wasco County.
The commune was locked in a bitter political dispute with local residents over land use and county governance. With two seats on the Wasco County Circuit Court up for election in November, commune leaders feared their candidates could not win a fair vote. So they decided to change the math, by keeping county voters too sick to go to the polls.
Ma Anand Sheela, Rajneesh's personal secretary, directed followers to culture Salmonella typhimurium bacteria in makeshift laboratories at Rajneeshpuram. Between September ninth and seventeenth, commune members visited ten restaurants in The Dalles and contaminated the salad bars. Over the following days, seven hundred fifty-one people fell ill with salmonellosis. Forty-five were hospitalized. By a stroke of luck, no one died.
The Oregon Health Division initially chalked it up to poor food handling. It took a full year, and Sheela's flight to Europe and a cascade of internal commune accusations, before investigators confirmed the deliberate attack in February nineteen eighty-five. The FBI eventually arrested Sheela in West Germany. She and her co-conspirator pleaded guilty to attempted murder and assault, serving twenty-nine months before early release.
Rajneesh himself was deported for immigration fraud in nineteen eighty-five. The commune at Rajneeshpuram dissolved, its grand utopian project abandoned in the high desert. What remained in The Dalles was a town reckoning with the strange fact that its salad bars had been turned into weapons, not for vengeance, but for votes.
