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January 1981, Vol. 45, No.1, The Progressive, The Deepening Mystery of Karen Silkwood, by Jeffrey Stein,
The wide-bodied Braniff jet slowed for its long approach to Nashville as I pulled the packet of documents .from an envelope, studying them for one last moment as I began yet another investigation...
...Everything will be okay for you," Olson replied in a tone indicating he was trying to code his remarks in fear of being taped, "if you just sit tight...
...The FBI, it seems, had made a desperate attempt to deflect the focus of the investigation away from the unanswered questions surrounding it and toward the victim— a classic intelligence ploy—and had failed...
...security operations that had nothing to do with the Tennessean...
...If it was a game, the assertions made to Srouji that afternoon were like matches tossed into a puddle of gasoline, for Srouji had long ago been drawn into a web of international intelligence operations involving the FBI, the CIA, and the Soviet KGB...
...In my briefcase was a sheaf of papers that seemed to have originated from an anonymous source inside the publishing company—an outline for a book on the Kennedy assassination, submitted by a Cuban exile...
...ordinarily such a task would be given to a senior ranking officer...
...Although a Federal district court in Oklahoma found Kerr-McGee absolutely liable for Silkwood's contamination and awarded $10.5 million in damages to her estate, the ultimate questions surrounding her death remain unanswered...
...She had become a double agent...
...We did meet, right there in the restaurant of the Oklahoma City airport...
...This provided a terrific glimpse at the Russian mind and the meaning of detente and an opportunity very few Nashvillians would ever have...
...She stammered, stalled, and wept...
...In 1967, she toured the Middle East and lived, for a while, on an Israeli kibbutz...
...Also found was a bill from a California company called Research West for "investigative services rendered...
...Attorney in Nashville...
...Srouji changed her story— Why...
...Enter again Larry Olson, Jacque Srouji's former control officer, now the FBI's resident agent in Oklahoma City and the Bureau's liaison with Kerr-McGee officials in nearby Cimmarron...
...As the FBI continued to funnel inside reports to Srouji, her newspaper associates began to wonder...
...She had drawn de Lorenzo's attention after writing a two-part series on nuclear power favorable to the industry for the local city magazine, Nashville.' Contracted by de Lorenzo to write a book on nuclear power, Srouji became convinced that de Lorenzo was, in fact, a CIA agent—a conviction that was bolstered when the publisher drew her aside one afternoon and listed his purported CIA connections for her on a sheet of yellow legal paper...
...The Navy...
...I'm news editor of the Tennessean...
...According to an affidavit Silkwood attorneys filed in support of their allegations, Lieutenant William Vetter, former commander of the Oklahoma City police department's organized crime unit, and other officers were trained at the Florida company in illegal electronic surveillance techniques...
...Dominic de Lorenzo: A notoriety-seeker who published Srouji's pro-nuclear book with its chapter on Karen Silkwood, yet warned his writer not to probe too deeply into the case...
...But it is possible to speculate that he may have been worried about the involvement of Srouji with another U.S...
...Naval Reserve in Washington, holding the super-secret "Q" security clearance and working on the Navy's Project Seafarer, a plan to bury a huge underground electronic grid in Northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for the transmission of radio signals to submarines at sea...
...In the...
...Events moved rapidly...
...A year later, he walked into de Lorenzo's office to peddle his version of the affair, which, he asserted without proof, was financed and controlled by the CIA...
...Was Jacque Srouji involved in something very top secret...
...Since 1964, Srouji had been an informant for the FBI in its COIN-TELPRO operations to smear and disrupt the civil rights, anti-war, student, American Indian, and other left-wing movements...
...Following Srouji's testimony and the revelations of her ^'special relationship" with the FBI, however, Silkwood family attorneys began to bear down on the question of whether the union activist had been spied on before her death...
...All of the sudden, a light went on in my head," he recounted...
...They can't afford to...
...No, it isn't," she said, "It's real...
...The facts in the case are smothered by Srouji's conflicting statements and the official silence of the Justice Department...
...The Russians...
...Pincus, whom a subsequent Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on the incident identified as an FBI informant, escaped as the plot was discovered...
...Several experts found fresh dents in the rear of the car and concluded that it had been struck from behind by another vehicle...
...His voice was agitated...
...Subcommittee Counsel Peter Stockton pressed Srouji for the documents: She refused...
...In 1978, a suit filed by the Alliance to End Repression, a Chicago coalition, uncovered evidence that the LEIU maintained intelligence files on political activists and had invited representatives of utility companies to sit in on otherwise closed meetings...
...Srouji had good reason to believe there was a black market at the plant...
...All this, she confided to Olson, was known to the CIA...
...You'll just go crazy trying...
...She protested that she had not spied on staff members at the newspaper, that she was involved only in the most sensitive national seshe told Siegenthaler, that the FBI would "turn on her as a KGB agent...
...He called in Larry Olson for a closed-session report later, but the FBI agent also stonewalled...
...It was his opinion that there was a great deal more to Karen's death than had been published, and he encouraged me to pursue it...
...Instead, they led me into an even deeper vortex of intrigue from which I emerged weeks later even more confused—but also more convinced than ever that Karen Silkwood had been the victim of foul play...
...He refused to do it...
...They were into something big for the Government, and now they can get away without anything happening...
...First, they learned that the Oklahoma City police possessed bugging and wiretapping equipment in contravention of state law...
...J.S...
...In the hands of Jacque Srouji, however, the report provided motivation for another trip to Oklahoma, where she began interviewing Kerr-McGee officials and, of course, Larry Olson...
...It was just a game I played," de Lorenzo told me sadly from his hospital bed shortly before he died...
...On a trip to Washington to work on research for the book," she explained in Nashville...
...Can I get arrested...
...Sheet" and subtitled, "Karen Silkwood: Financial...
...Files on Silkwood turned up as far away as Georgia, according to news stories in The Atlanta Constitution, which uncovered the efforts of Georgia Power Company to spy on anti-nuclear activists...
...It seems to have been an elaborate, sophisticated fabrication, and its origin is still a mystery...
...Silkwood had driven less than one-third of the thirty-mile trip to the meeting place when her car veered across the road and smashed into a concrete culvert wall, killing her and scattering her dossier in the blood-red Oklahoma mud...
...Sergey Zaitsev, officially scientific attache at the Soviet Embassy in 1975, but in reality a colonel in the KGB, the Soviet security service...
...Among those questions: 11 Why did the Justice Department shut down its investigation of Silkwood's death within six months...
...One of these was Harry Dean, who despite the Anglo name was a Cuban exile who had infiltrated Castro's "July 26th Movement" and the pro-Havana "Free Play for Cuba Committee" at the behest, he said, of both the FBI and the CIA...
...He told me he had read a number of articles on the dangers of nuclear power and was very much interested in the subject himself...
...It was that simple...
...Srouji says the contacts began "innocently...
...He had given her a lot of documents...
...On April 26, 1976...
...Areview of news stories carrying Jacque Srouji's byline shows that she wrote flattering profiles of the LEIU and its Southern regional chairman, James Sorace, in 1967...
...And then he added: "Everything can be all right with this outfit...
...An Oklahoma City policeofficer whose training in illegal surveillance techniques was exposed during investigations into the Silkwood case...
...It is naive, she tells intimates, to think that Siegenthaler had not previously known of her FBI past...
...He said I should talk to the Kerr-McGee people—the head of security, specifically—and try to get more information...
...I don't want to see him or Jackie [sic] get away with what they did to Karen Silkwood...
...Why did the investigation "not include possible suspects or motives," according to Thomas Henderson, deputy director of the Department's management and labor section...
...He was told of two shipments from Kerr-McGee out of the country in September 1974, before Silkwood's death, and more following it...
...Hoover's finest along for the swim...
...According to internal company documents obtained by The Progressive, Research West was founded in 1949, when it contracted with local San Francisco shippers and law enforcement agencies to supply them with information on union activists during a dockworkers' strike...
...When she returned to Nashville, Srouji was convinced that Karen Silkwood had discovered a plutonium "Am I in trouble...
...But it was not quite that simple...
...And then he added, "Concerning the nuclear black market—stay away from that, because it would really cause a blowup...
...Sensing, correctly, that she was about to be fired from her newspaper job, and hoping to bolster her credibility, Srouji reached into her hard-shell briefcase and pulled out an FBI document classified "confidential...
...The jury had decided that Kerr-McGee, a titan of the energy industry that had dominated Oklahoma's business and political life for half a century through the maneuvering of its founder, the late Research for this article was assisted by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism...
...the [deleted] for five years," and that "it had been suggested she write a book on the nuclear industry in order to make contacts in that area...
...According to an internal FBI memorandum written by Olson when the Bureau was conducting an investigation of the circumstances in which Srouji came into possession of FBI documents relating to the Silkwood case, she claimed she was writing Critical Mass at the urging of an unspecified intelligence service...
...After the death of Karen Silkwood, Olson had entered the case and pursued it with an attitude unchanged since, years earlier, he had tried to peddle the Martin Luther King "bedroom tapes" to the U.S...
...None of this would have seeped into the public record had not Srouji become involved in yet another bizarre event surrounding the Silkwood affair...
...Siegenthaler dismisses Srouji's insinuations as paranoia...
...Srouji wanted to go back to Oklahoma and investigate further, but de Lorenzo turned her down...
...J\t the time, Jacque Srouji happened to be on duty with the U.S...
...I made it up...
...Anti-nucfear activists have long suspected a concerted industry-Government campaign to harass them and keep them under surveillance...
...The attorneys then turned their attention to Kerr-McGee security-chief James Reading, a twenty-year veteran of the local police force and a close friend of Vetter...
...At first, he developed a Someone faked a smuggling report—Who...
...She had contracted to write her book, Critical Mass, for Dominic de Lorenzo, and it is at this point that her portrait as a reporter-informant begins to blur...
...Srouji asked him...
...magazine, "I got to thinking, 'Gee I've really got to get this book out of the hills of Tennessee and into the world arena.' So I went to the Soviet Embassy and later the Chinese Liaison Office...
...Having exhausted all those leads, however, Olson began to learn about the plutonium...
...And he did attract a swarm of shady characters to his offices along Nashville's "Music Row...
...John Siegenthakn Once with the Justice Department, now the editor of the Nashville Tennes-sean...
...From 1964 until she was unmasked The word came to Olson: stop tracking the missing plutonium—Why...
...Who placed plutonium in Silkwood's refrigerator, and who took her documents on conditions at the Kerr-McGee plant...
...Later, the figure rose to 100, then 140 pounds...
...In 1975, Dean showed up with a tale that he could name a second assassin of John Kennedy, financed by a group of right-wing Texas enterpre-neurs...
...Last summer, I obtained a copy of this investigative report and began to check out its intricate detail...
...Olson's statements immediately leaked to the press and reached John Siegenthaler, the editor of the Tennes-sean...
...It was an appointment she was not to keep...
...Her death has never been subjected to the rigors of a homocide investigation...
...One of them, News Editor Dolph Honnicker, an outspoken critic of the Nixon Administration, the Vietnam war, and nuclear power, told me that one night Srouji tried to entice him into ripping a Nixon portrait off the wall of a local post office...
...f Was Karen Silkwood spied on by Kerr-McGee and Government agencies before she died under a national industry-Government partnership to neutralize anti-nuclear activists...
...A unit of the company, headed by a former CIA officer and Bay of Pigs veteran, Arthur Benson, had amassed voluminous files on the anti-nuclear movement-some of them gained illegally through bugging and surveillance equipment purchased from Audio Intelligence Devices...
...1960s and 1970s, according to Congressional investigators, the firm gathered information on anti-nuclear activists for California utilities...
...Officially, Srouji's job was to evaluate how the Navy was doing in its effort to sell the people of Michigan and the public at large on Project Seafarer (now called Project ELF), which was encountering much public opposition...
...His request was turned down...
...William Wetter...
...I went up to the doors and knocked and told them who I was...
...According to one version Srouji tells, she merely called Olson to see whether he could help with her book: "He agreed to meet me for a cup of coffee at the airport...
...It has been a rich and interesting thirty-one years— especially the Soviet trek...
...Had it not been for the sudden eruption of the Jacque Srouji mystery, the Silkwood case might not have gained the attention and momentum it retains today...
...Today, he is deputy chief of police...
...There were sensitive matters that needed to be protected, he said...
...Later, Olson observed, "We've got some rear problems here...
...following her appearance in connection with the Silkwood case before a Congressional committee in 1976, Srouji's activities in behalf of the FBI were wide-ranging...
...In any event, he saw no place for such a person on his staff...
...By the late 1960s, the LEIU was firmly rooted nationwide, employing a Federally funded computer in East Lansing, Michigan, and directing its investigations at political as well as criminal targets...
...The reference was to Dominic de Lorenzo, then the head of Aurora Publishing, a notoriety-seeking book salesman who liked to run in the fast company of Cuban exiles, deposed Eastern European monarchy, and a constantly-revolving staff of attractive female assistants whom he invited to accompany him on frequent business trips in this country and abroad...
...Partially-censored FBI reports from its internal investigation of the Olson-Srouji relationship established that Olson had obtained sixty-six photocopied pages of the investigator's notes...
...smuggling ring at the plant, and that Silkwood had been murdered by four men who followed her in a car on Route 74 on the night of November 13...
...Seriously frightened, she made an appointment with an OCAW official and a reporter for The New York Times, planning to tell her story...
...Dean left de Lorenzo with a book outline and catalogue of purported tapes and diaries that would "prove" his assertions—and promptly disappeared...
...It states that Srouji "claimed to be an [deleted] for The U.S...
...She called him later from Nashville to talk about it...
...Last February, an Oklahoma City jury awarded Karen Silkwood's estranged husband and children damages of $10.5 million—a verdict that surprised most courtroom observers and stunned the nuclear industry...
...Whose vehicle...
...Srouji was already off on another tack...
...And why...
...Fourteen years later, Olson and Srouji would be added to the list of defendants in the conspiracy charges against Kerr-McGee and the Government...
...But now she was worried, The document, dated July 1975, outlined sensitive espionage operations against the Soviet Union...
...Was the book the idea of the Soviets, the FBI, the CIA, or the Navy...
...He also demanded an explanation from the FBI and Justice Department...
...a photocopy of a passport belonging, it would turn out, to a man who had traveled to the Philippines in an assassination plot, and a weathered newspaper clipping about the Silkwood case...
...Sorace had come to Nashville in the early 1960s to study nuclear engineering at Van-derbilt, had opened a campus coffeehouse catering to the anti-war crowd, and a few years later emerged as head of the Nashville police's Red Squad...
...Stunned, he ordered all members of the newspaper's staff to search their memories for Srouji's activities at the paper...
...In November 1974, Silkwood discovered that cheese and bologna in her refrigerator had been laced with plutonium...
...He summoned Srouji into his office and asked for an account of her covert activities...
...And then they asked her to service a "dead drop" near the Arnold Engineering Center, a sensitive nuclear weapons manufacturing facility in Tullahoma, Tennessee...
...Then he, too, disappeared...
...operatives with foreign connections in her frequent front-page stories for the newspaper...
...Yet the last few days in the life of this otherwise unextraordinary young woman remained a subject of intense speculation and the focus of continuing legal battles...
...Her sources in the FBI amaze me," Tennessean Managing Editor Wayne Whitt wrote in a memo to Siegenthaler...
...The FBI...
...The information you seek," said the tight-lipped judge, "is sinister and secret, and should never see the light of day...
...You're not justing blowing smoke at me are you...
...Her investigations turned up "close to a thousand pages" on the Silkwood affair, but Srouji is not telling what they say...
...The documents we obtained also show that Research West is affiliated with Marketing Analysts, Inc., which is headed by former CI A agent Harold Chipman and maintains twenty-three overseas and domestic offices to gather information for multinational corporations as well as local and Federal police agencies...
...Right now, as oral arguments in the company's appeal of the damage award are being heard, another decision is imminent that could penetrate to the heart of the continuing controversy in the case: Attorneys for the Silkwood family expect the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals to decide whether Karen Silkwood was the probable victim of a conspiracy...
...rouji returned to Nashville and ^ wrote a memo to de Lorenzo, dated April 23, 1975: "There is a possibility that Karen Silkwood may have been on to a nuclear black market and deliberately contaminated . . . a good possibility...
...She's going to get hurt unnecessarily...
...now he says she "was involved in something very top secret—deep cover," James Reading: A Kerr-McGee security chief who gathered information on Karen Siikwood's personal life and shared it with the FBI...
...She is an agent out of control...
...But her cover was not yet completely blown...
...In so doing, they began to unravel an elaborate network of espionage directed against the anti-nuclear movement...
...On May 5, she wrote a dramatic memo to Siegenthaler that indicated the posture she would take from that day forward: "If my stream does become infested with piranhas—and a sacrifice is in order—then I can certainly take some of Mr...
...Georgia Power's Benson, according to ITie Constitution's series, had obtained the Silkwood files through a contact in the Georgia Police Bureau of Investigation who was, in turn, a member of an organization called the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU), an informal police network established in California in 1956 for the ostensible purpose of exchanging information on organized crime...
...H Did the Justice Department make a concerted effort to smear Silkwood after her death by leaking innuendos about her sexual life and alleged drug use...
...The association with the FBI began in 1964, when she was introduced to Nashville resident agent Lawrence J. Olson iathe offices of James Stahlman, publisher of the Banner, where she was working as a cub reporter...
...The comings and goings of such bizarre characters were closely watched by Jacque Srouji, a part-time copy editor at the daily Nashville Tennessean...
...He fired Srouji when her FBI connections were revealed...
...Siegen-thaler immediately fired her—and notified the Justice Department, "alarmed she was involved in something very top secret—deep cover...
...intelligence a g e n - cies...
...A second character drawn to de Lorenzo was Robert Lewis Pincus, a thirty-six-year-old drug dealer who had been involved with other underworld figures from Nashville in a 1974 plot to assassinate Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos...
...and that she herself had been contaminated by the carcinogen...
...Together, these items formed a mosaic suggesting a conspiracy to murder Karen Silkwood...
...Stahlman decided it would be a good idea if she shared her information with the FBI...
...It was Srouji's connection to the Silkwood case that sent me to Nashville last summer, and to the offices of Aurora Publishing Company, the small, regional house started in 1969, which issued Srouji's 1976 book Critical Mass...
...Don't screw up...
...Contrary to the private assertions she had made to Olson about the CIA and missing plutonium, Srouji now rehashed the discredited allegations about Silkwood's sex life and drug usage...
...I had no reason not to...
...From the beginning, however, she had been in regular contact with the FBI...
...You're in over your head...
...By the time Jacque Srouji arrived on the scene in April 1975, Olson is believed to have written a memo to Washington outlining the evidence of missing plutonium and asking permission to deepen his investigation...
...Who had "suggested" that she write Critical Mass...
...This thing is so complicated you'll never figure it out...
...Until the blowup, the Silkwood case was virtually dead in the water...
...He jotted on Srouji's memo that he thought she had enough on the Silkwood case, and that it wasn't "worth the expense of going back...
...In her capacity as a reporter at the Banner, Srouji gathered information on left-wing groups and painted portraits of the leaders as drunkards, sexual deviates, and secret is working for the FBI...
...informants have been uncovered in a half-dozen states, and otherwise unexplainable events continue to be reported...
...she suddenly showed up to testify on the Silkwood case before the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment...
...Feigning sympathy for their causes, she joined pro-Cuba and Palestinian rights organizations under a variety of names...
...She had picked up what at first appeared to be an official investigative report headed, "Kerr-McGee Data In 1972, Karen Silkwood came to Rerr-McGee's plutonium fuel works near Oklahoma City as a laboratory technician, eagerly resuming a science career she had given up years earlier for marriage and motherhood...
...source who told him forty to fifty pounds of plutonium were missing from Kerr-McGee inventories...
...Somewhere, Jacque Srouji has stashed away "a ton of FBI documents," insurance for the day she is called to trial as a defendant in a Karen Silkwood conspiracy trial...
...Just recently, for example, intruders broke into the Washington* D.C., home of Potomac Alliance activists and removed their files...
...I arrived in Nashville in August, hoping the documents would provide new clues to solving the Silkwood mystery...
...The CIA...
...De Lorenzo, now dead, did not say, Lawrence J. Olson: An FBI agent who pursued with gusto jKerr-McGee's hints that Karen Silkwood was a dope-smoking lesbian who drove off the road in a drug overdose—until he discovered large amounts of pluto-m'um missing from the Kerr-McGee plant...
...The Justice Department instructed them not to answer on the grounds of "national security" and requested a confidential talk with Federal Judge Frank G. Theis...
...Forget it," Olson told one Congressional investigator...
...Ignoring evidence that suggested the possibility of foul play at the accident site, the Justice Department shut down its investigation of Karen Silkwood's death early in 1975 with a four-and-a-half page summary report dismissing the possibility of murder or any relationship of missing plutonium to the case...
...Olson, who had provided Srouji with what she later described as "almost a thousand pages" of raw reports on the progress and findings of the Silkwood case, including the "scope of investigation," seemed unnerved by what his former informant had told him...
...I believed him," Srouji confided...
...They traced the equipment's purchase to Audio Intelligence Devices, a firm in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which sold listening devices to both domestic and foreign police agents (including the assassin of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, DINA agent Michael V. Townley), and trained them in its use...
...FBI records show that Bureau agents met with Srouji thirteen times before and immediately following her House testimony...
...After a short discussion, he left the publisher with back-up materials, including a photostat of his passport showing entry and exit from the Philippines...
...I'm writing a column against the war...
...Don't screw up, now...
...They amaze me so much that I have concluded it is quite possible she Indeed...
...Give it up...
...Jacque Srouji had maintained "a very special relationship with the FBI...
...Meanwhile, Srouji's close and clandestine relationship with the FBI was slowly unraveling...
...After all, she notes, Siegenthaler was Attorney General Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant at the Justice Department during the secret war against Fidel Castro...
...The Progressive was able to obtain a copy of the Navy's fitness report on Srouji...
...Navy, and the Soviet government, and claims to have applied for CIA work...
...She attended a Washington conference on nuclear power sponsored by Ralph Nader—her air fare from Nashville picked up by the Russians...
...Navy Commander J. L. Pape, acting assistant chief of information for operations, reported, "This was a most unusual assignment for a second-class petty officer...
...She did confess her COINTELPRO connection with the FBI while she had been a reporter at the Banner years earlier, and she even took credit for "smashing SDS"—the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society—in Nashville...
...Jacque Stubbel Srouji: A pro-nuclear author and former copy editor for the Nashville Tennes-sean who apparently worked simultaneously for the FBI, the U.S...
...Silkwood began to examine the plant's safety record for the union, building up a thick folder of evidence suggesting not only disregard for worker safety, but also the disturbing possibility of "fixed" fuel tests and doctored quality control records...
...H What was the role of Jacque Srouji, a part-time copy editor at the Nashville Tennessean, who had been an informant for the FBI in its COIN-TELPRO operations against the Left for a decade, and who wrote a pro-nuclear book with a chapter on the Silkwood affair...
...In the case of public agencies, the documents state, information is given out on "an oral basis only" to avoid the reach of the Freedom of Information Act...
...A trooper at the scene reported stuffing the papers back into the car, but they were gone when it was checked a day later...
...In passing, she also mentioned that she had seen "a ton of FBI documents" on the case, "close to a thousand pages...
...Navy gave Srouji 'a most unusual assignment'—Why...
...That is where, she later confided to a Nashville friend, she also " applied to work for the CI A." ssociates at the rival Nashville MJk Tennessean, to which she / * moved as a copy editor in the early 1970s, grew wary of her...
...or foreign intelligence agency...
...The wide-bodied Braniff jet slowed for its long approach to Nashville as I pulled the packet of documents .from an envelope, studying them for one last moment as I began yet another investigation into the death of Karen Silkwood...
...She was ushered out of the building...
...Should the court agree to hear allegations of conspiracy in the case, new avenues will be open to explore several questions that have vexed investigators, fueled far-flung speculation, and made Karen Silkwood what Paris Match called "the world's first anti-nuclear martyr...
...With its letterhead blocked out to disguise its origins, the report indicated that Karen Silkwood herself had been a part of a plutonium smuggling ring at the plant, which, through an elaborate series of financial blinds in Dallas, Texas, was selling bomb-grade material to agents from Israel and India...
...Today, Srouji lives quietly in Nashville with her husband and two children, convinced she was set up by dark forces in the Government after she had discovered that plutonium was missing at Kerr-McGee...
...Senator Robert Kerr, was responsible for the plutonium contamination detected in Silkwood on three occasions shortly before she died...
...But the fast-talking dc Lorenzo (who died of cancer last October in a New York hospital) had another unsettling habit that eventually dragged him into the spotlight of the Karen Silkwood case: He liked to leave the impression that he was connected with U.S...
...After the FBI told him to look no further, he passed some of what he knew on to Srouji...
...The key to all these questions may be held by Jacque Stubbel Srouji, one of the most enigmatic figures in the recent history of American journalism...
...In May 1978, lawyers for the Silkwood family put Olson and Srouji under oath in Oklahoma City and tried to question them on the details of their relationship and their activities in connection with the Silkwood case...
...After close examination, I concluded that it originated not with any official agency but with an unknown, private source engaging in a deliberate attempt to defame Silkwood...
...Through the months, Srouji claims, she met regularly with the Soviets and, at one point, traveled to the Soviet Union for "research" on her book...
...Just forget the whole thing...
...The memo, obtained by The Progressive, was partially censored by the FBI...
...There were several similar incidents in the following years...
...To the amazement of her colleagues and the Tennessean'?, editor, John Siegenthaler, Srouji was able to come up with the raw FBI investigative files for a series of stories the paper was pursuing...
...One of the contacts she made was with Dr...
...They found, through subpoenas and investigative interviews, that Reading possessed much information about Silkwood's personal life and had shared it with Larry Olson in the initial stages of the investigation into her death, They surmised, and later affirmed, that Kerr-McGee had obtained its information from a private investigator...
...The FBI will never tell you the truth...
...She took her suspicions to OCAW leadership in Washington, and was sent back to continue her investigation...
...In the few first months, Olson had energetically followed leads provided him by Kerr-McGee security agents that Silkwood was a dope-smoking lesbian who probably had contaminated herself during labor negotiations in an effort to embarrass the company, and who had driven off the road after taking an overdose of methaqualone...
...Please, leave Srouji out of this...
...When they emerged from Theis's chambers, the judge told Silkwood lawyer Daniel Sheehan that Olson and Srouji would not have to answer his questions about their intelligence activities...
...These papers were taken from de Lorenzo's file," began the typewritten, unsigned note that accompanied the documents...
...A string of accidents and labor disputes dampened her enthusiasm, however, and in 1974 she won a seat on the steering committee of the local of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW) that represented plutonium workers at the plant...
...I mean, this isn't just a lot of smoke, is it...
...It had been almost six years since Silkwood died under mysterious circumstances on a lonely stretch of highway not far from the Kerr-McGee nuclear fuel plant in Oklahoma where she worked as a laboratory technician...
...Srouji has refused to comment on this conversation, and I could not reach Olson for comment...
Vol. 45 • January 1981 • No. 1
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