Cheerios, the U.S. biological warfare program, the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, and the Congressional IGY report

I will suggest some (tenuous?) relationships between all those topics.

One of the four cereals we keep on hand for breakfast (along with generic corn flakes, generic raisin bran, and homemade granola) is General Mills Cheerios. My editor likes to mix Cheerios with the granola, and won't abide by a generic oat cereal (that I could go with).

Scan of actual Cheerios box at right. Note that this is a General Mills product.

Recently, I read the book Baseless, by Nicholson Baker. I had read some of his fiction in the past. 

According to the dust jacket blurb:

Baker assembles what he learns, piece by piece, about Project Baseless, a crash Pentagon program begun in the early [19] fifties that aimed to achieve "an Air Force-wide combat capability in biological and chemical warfare at the earliest possible date." Along the way,  he unearths stories of balloons carrying crop disease...

The book is presented as a daily journal of sorts, covering just over two months of entries in 2019, describing Baker's quest, thoughts, findings, fears, and his attempts to use the CIA CREST database and the Freedom of Information Act requests to learn about his topic. Those inquiries are sometimes answered, albeit often with redactions, but responses are commonly unduly delayed or the questions mothballed and ignored. This censoring and burial of information that should belong to we-the-people is the flip side of the open archives mentioned in my past post.

A review of this book from The Nation describes Baker's hypotheses as plausible narratives, although not fully confirmed by the publicly available information.

You can also watch a video of an interesting conversation about the book with Baker at the Harvest Book Store.

So, connection #1: In his entry for May 2, 2019, Baker writes:

After the war [World War II] General Mills's president, Harry Bullis [emphasis mine], a friend of Allen Dulles, began a balloon program, General Mills Aeronautical Research Laboratory. Abbott Washburn [emphasis mine], General Mills's head of public relations, became director of an ostensibly private undertaking, the Crusade for Freedom, which used CIA funds channeled through the National Committee for Free Enterprise to launch thousands of leaflet-bearing balloons into Czechoslovakia and other countries of Eastern Europe.

These General Mills balloons

fed into the covert plan to destroy Communist food sources, using high-altitude "balloon disseminators" filled with heated containers of wheat stem rust and hog cholera.  

Not only did General Mills have the research know-how to make cereal crops thrive, but also to poison and destroy them via germ warfare.

Connection #2: That name, Abbott Washburn, rang a bell in my head, different from the ringing I otherwise hear there. In my post of March 10, on the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC) which was established in the IGY year 1957, I wrote that Washburn was:

head of public relations for General Mills Inc. in Minneapolis, and then executive vice chairman of Crusade for Freedom, which raised money for Radio Free Europe. He was deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency from 1953-1961, acting as liaison between the broadcast agency and the White House and National Security Council during a peak period of the Cold War. He served on the Citizens' Advisory Committee in this capacity.

I went on to wonder:

why, you might ask, was a representative of the USIA on the Citizens' Advisory Committee? The USIA was an agency responsible for American "public diplomacy" (emphasis mine; read public diplomacy as propaganda, maybe?), especially during the Cold War. It was the largest public relations organization in the world, with an annual budget over $1 billion in the years directly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It presided over U.S. government communications to over 150 international populations. So yes, you could say those Liberty Series stamps carried an "agenda" around the world. 

I find it interesting that Washburn honed his PR skills with a food company that engaged in activities related to biological warfare, moved to the USIA, and then served on the CSAC, presumably as a point person who helped guide stamp design selection to signal our country's national interests.

Connection #3: Note the mention of Harry A. Bullis (1890-1963) in the Baker book entry above. He was President and then Chairman of the Board if General Mills during the IGY. And last post, the author of the 1973 document, The Political Legacy of the Inertnational Geophysical year, was Harold Bullis, This was another case where I thought these two men were the same. The biographical details don't quite match up. The foreword to the IGY report states that

The author of this study, the 11th in the series on “Science, Technology, and American Diplomacy,” is Mr. Harold Bullis, Analyst in Science and Technology with the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. Mr. Bullis holds baccalaureate and masters degrees in physics from the University of Minnesota and Ohio State University as well as a masters degree in public administration from American University. Prior to joining the Library of Congress he served as physicist with the Wright Air Development Center and the Harry Diamond Laboratories.

This must be this L. Harold Bullis, who was "a specialist in science and technology and head of the Geosciences, Materials, and Industrial Technology Section of the Science Policy Research Division of the Congressional Research Service [my emphasis]." I assume he is also the same as this LHB (1927-2015).

Connection #4: Although I haven't been able via obituaries or other online documentation to link these two Harold Bullises with complete certainty, I assume they are father and son, consistent with their ages, and also with a common Minneapolis (General Mills and University of Minnesota) component in their bios. Growing up in the Washington, DC, area, I had a cousin Bernie (connection #5?) who also worked at the Harry Diamond Laboratories, which among other things developed fuzes for munitions such as bombs, rockets and mortar shells. Both Bullises had associations with companies that made devices useful for warfare. (My first real job in the DC area from 1972-74 with Fairchild Space and Electronics Company involved subcontracts for satellite projects of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.)

Make of these connections what you will, and chew them over with your next bowl of Cheerios.