In 1984, 751 people suffered food poisoning in The Dalles, Oregon, United States, due to the deliberate contamination of salad bars at ten local restaurants with Salmonella. A group of prominent followers of Rajneesh (also known as Osho) led by Ma Anand Sheela had hoped to incapacitate the voting population of the city so that their own candidates would win the 1984 Wasco County elections. The incident was the first and largest bioterrorist attack in U.S. history.
Rajneesh's followers had previously gained political control of Antelope, Oregon, as they were based in the nearby intentional community of Rajneeshpuram, and they now sought election to two of the three seats on the Wasco County Circuit Court that were up for election in November 1984. Some Rajneeshpuram officials feared that they would not get enough votes, so they decided to incapacitate voters in The Dalles, the largest population center in Wasco County. The chosen biological agent was Salmonella enterica of the Typhimurium serotype, which was first delivered through glasses of water to two county commissioners and then at salad bars and in salad dressing.
As a result of the attack, 751 people contracted salmonellosis, 45 of whom were hospitalized, but none died. An initial investigation by the Oregon Health Authority and the Centers for Disease Control did not rule out deliberate contamination, and the agents and contamination were confirmed a year later, on February 28, 1985. Congressman James H. Weaver gave a speech in the U.S. House of Representatives in which he "accused the Rajneeshees of sprinkling Salmonella culture on salad bar ingredients in eight restaurants".
At a press conference in September 1985, Rajneesh accused several of his followers of participation in this and other crimes, including an aborted plan in 1985 to assassinate a United States Attorney, and he asked state and federal authorities to investigate. Oregon Attorney General David B. Frohnmayer set up an inter-agency task force composed of Oregon State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and executed search warrants in Rajneeshpuram. A sample of bacteria was found in a Rajneeshpuram medical laboratory which matched the contaminant that had sickened the town residents. Two leading Rajneeshpuram officials were convicted on charges of attempted murder and served 29 months of 20-year sentences in a minimum-security federal prison.
Planning
In 1981, several thousand of Rajneesh's followers had moved onto the "Big Muddy Ranch" in rural Wasco County, Oregon, where they later incorporated as an intentional community called "Rajneeshpuram". They had taken political control of the small nearby town of Antelope, Oregon (population 75), the name of which they changed to "Rajneesh". The group had started on friendly terms with the local population, but relations soon degraded because of land-use conflicts and the commune's dramatic expansion.
After being denied building permits for Rajneeshpuram, the commune leadership sought to gain political control over the rest of the county by influencing the November 1984 county election. Their goal was to win two of three seats on the Wasco county commission, as well as the sheriff's office. Their attempts to influence the election included the "Share-a-Home" program, in which they transported thousands of homeless people to Rajneeshpuram and attempted to register them to vote to inflate the constituency of voters for the group's candidates. The Wasco County clerk countered this attempt by enforcing a regulation that required all new voters to submit their qualifications when registering to vote.
The commune leadership planned to sicken and incapacitate voters in The Dalles, where most of the county's voters resided, to sway the election. Approximately twelve people were involved in the plots to employ biological agents, and at least eleven were involved in planning them. No more than four appear to have been involved in development at the Rajneeshpuram medical laboratory; not all of those were necessarily aware of the objectives of their work. At least eight individuals helped spread the bacteria.
The main planners of the attack included Sheela Silverman (Ma Anand Sheela), Rajneesh's chief lieutenant, and Diane Yvonne Onang (Ma Anand Puja), a nurse practitioner and secretary-treasurer of the Rajneesh Medical Corporation. They purchased Salmonella bacteria from a medical supply company in Seattle, Washington, and staff cultured it in labs within the commune. They contaminated the produce at the salad bars as a "trial run". The group also tried to introduce pathogens into The Dalles' water system. If successful, they planned to use the same techniques closer to Election Day. They did not carry out the second part of the plan. The commune decided to boycott the election when it became clear that those brought in through the "Share-a-Home" program would not be allowed to vote.
Two visiting Wasco County commissioners were infected via glasses of water containing Salmonella bacteria during a visit to Rajneeshpuram on August 29, 1984. Both men fell ill and one was hospitalized. Afterward, members of Sheela's team spread Salmonella on produce in grocery stores and on doorknobs and urinal handles in the county courthouse, but these actions did not produce the desired effects. In September and October 1984, they contaminated the salad bars of ten local restaurants with Salmonella, infecting 751 people. Forty-five people received hospital treatment; all survived.
The primary delivery tactic involved one member concealing a plastic bag containing a light-brown liquid with the Salmonella bacteria (referred to by the perpetrators as "salsa"), and either spreading it over the food at a salad bar, or pouring it into salad dressing. By September 24, 1984, more than 150 people were violently ill. By the end of September, 751 cases of acute gastroenteritis were documented; lab testing determined that all of the victims were infected with Salmonella enterica Typhimurium. Symptoms included diarrhea, fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, headaches, abdominal pain, and bloody stools. Victims ranged in age from an infant, born two days after his mother's infection and initially given a five percent chance of survival, to an 87-year-old.
Local residents suspected that Rajneesh's followers were behind the poisonings. They turned out in droves on Election Day to prevent the cult from winning any county positions, thus rendering the plot unsuccessful. The Rajneeshees eventually withdrew their candidate from the November 1984 ballot. Only 239 of the commune's 7,000 residents voted; most were not U.S. citizens and could not vote. The outbreak cost local restaurants hundreds of thousands of dollars and health officials shut down the salad bars of the affected establishments. Some residents feared further attacks and stayed at home. One resident said: "People were so horrified and scared. People wouldn't go out, they wouldn't go out alone. People were becoming prisoners."
Investigation
Officials and investigators from a number of different state and federal agencies investigated the outbreak. Michael Skeels, director of the Oregon State Public Health Laboratory at the time, said that the incident provoked such a large public health investigation because "it was the largest food-related outbreak in the U.S. in 1984". The investigation identified the bacteria as Salmonella enterica Typhimurium and initially concluded that the outbreak had been due to food handlers' poor personal hygiene. Workers preparing food at the affected restaurants had fallen ill before most patrons had.
Oregon Democratic Congressman James H. Weaver continued to investigate because he believed that the officials' conclusion did not adequately explain the facts. He contacted physicians at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other agencies and urged them to investigate Rajneeshpuram. According to Lewis F. Carter's book Charisma and Control in Rajneeshpuram, "many treated his concern" as paranoid or as an example of "Rajneeshee bashing". On February 28, 1985, Weaver gave a speech at the U.S. House of Representatives in which he accused the Rajneeshees of contaminating salad bar ingredients in eight restaurants. As events later showed, Weaver had presented a well-reasoned, if only circumstantial, case; these circumstantial elements were confirmed by evidence found after investigators gained access to Rajneeshpuram several months later.
Months later, starting on September 16, 1985, Rajneesh, who had recently emerged from a four-year period of public silence and self-imposed isolation (although he had continued to meet with his assistant) at the commune, convened press conferences: he stated that Sheela and nineteen other commune leaders, including Puja, had left Rajneeshpuram over the weekend and gone to Europe. He said that he had received information from commune residents that Sheela and her team had committed a number of serious crimes. Calling them a "gang of fascists", he said they had tried to poison his doctor and Rajneesh's female companion, as well as the Jefferson County district attorney and the water system in The Dalles. Rajneesh voiced suspicions that they had poisoned a county commissioner and Judge William Hulse, and that they may have been responsible for the salmonellosis outbreak in The Dalles. He invited state and federal law enforcement officials to Rajneeshpuram to investigate. His allegations were initially greeted with skepticism by outside observers.
Oregon Attorney General David B. Frohnmayer established a task force among the Wasco County Sheriff's office, the Oregon State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the National Guard that set up headquarters at Rajneeshpuram to investigate the allegations. They obtained search warrants and subpoenas; 50 investigators entered the ranch on October 2, 1985. Skeels found glass vials containing Salmonella "bactrol disks" in the laboratory of a Rajneeshpuram medical clinic. Analysis by the CDC lab in Atlanta confirmed that the bacteria from the Rajneesh laboratory were an exact match to those that sickened individuals who had eaten at local restaurants.
The investigation also revealed experimentation at Rajneeshpuram with poisons, chemicals and bacteria which had been carried out during 1984 and 1985. Skeels described the scene at the Rajneesh laboratory as "a bacteriological freezer-dryer for large-scale production" of microbes. Investigators found a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, and literature on the manufacture and usage of explosives and military bio-warfare. Investigators believed that the commune had previously carried out similar attacks in Salem, Portland and other cities in Oregon. According to court testimony, the plotters boasted that they had attacked a nursing home and a salad bar at the Mid-Columbia Medical Center, but no such attempts were ever proven in court. As a result of the bioterrorism investigation, law enforcement officials discovered that there had been an aborted plot by Rajneeshees to murder Charles Turner, a former United States Attorney for Oregon. An invoice dated September 25, 1984, from the American Type Culture Collection of microbes was discovered, showing an order received by the Rajneeshpuram laboratory for Salmonella typhi, the bacterium that causes the life-threatening illness typhoid fever.
Prosecution
The mayor of Rajneeshpuram, David Berry Knapp (Swami Krishna Deva; also known as KD), turned state's evidence and gave an account of his knowledge of the Salmonella attack to the FBI. He claimed that Sheela said "she had talked with [Rajneesh] about the plot to decrease voter turnout in The Dalles by making people sick. Sheela said that [Rajneesh] commented that it was best not to hurt people, but if a few died not to worry." In Miller's Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, this statement is attributed to Sheela. According to KD's testimony, she played doubters a tape of Rajneesh's muffled voice saying, "if it was necessary to do things to preserve [his] vision, then do it," and interpreted this to mean that murder in his name was fine, telling doubters "not to worry" if a few people had to die. According to the account of Satya Bharti Franklin, when writing about theories about tapes Sheela claimed to have, "As many of us knew, she'd had a wide variety of Bhagwan's discourse tapes edited over the years until they said only what she wanted them to say, while ashram/ranch videos and films had been judiously spliced and edited, rewriting history. It was a process many of us, including me, had been involved with in one way or another. Whatever tapes she had in her possession proved nothing."
John Jay Shelfer (Swami Prem Jayananda), Sheela's husband at Rajneeshpuram, recalled in 2020 that "Sheela was very good at framing the issues in a way that would invite Osho's approval of whatever she approved to do. She might ask a general, broad question, get an answer, and then, she would go back and use that as Osho authorising whatever it was that she wanted to do. She would provide and limit information as it would help support what she wanted."
According to a 1994 study published in the journal Sociology of Religion, "[m]ost sannyasins indicated that they believed that [Rajneesh] knew about Ma Anand Sheela's illegal activities." Frances FitzGerald writes in Cities on a Hill that most of Rajneesh's followers "believed [him] incapable of doing, or willing, violence against another person", and that almost all thought the responsibility for the criminality was Sheela's—according to FitzGerald, the followers believed the guru had not known anything about it. Carus writes in Toxic Terror that "There is no way to know to what extent [Rajneesh] participated in actual decision-making. His followers believed he was involved in every important decision that Sheela made, but those allegations were never proven." Rajneesh insisted that Sheela, who he said was his only source of information during his period of isolation, used her position to impose "a fascist state" on the commune. He acknowledged that the key to her actions was his silence.