Grunt (22 page)

The first document in the file was dated August 4, 1943, and addressed to Stanley Lovell at OSS—America’s espionage agency during World War II. It was from one of his British liaisons, and it referenced a memo from a gadget man in the British intelligence agency SOE (Special Operations, Executive). “Replying to your letter of the 6th July,” the memo began, as though we were headed for some dusty government protocol. And then veered abruptly off the tracks.

“Up to the present our employment of evil-smelling substances has been mainly for the purpose of contaminating individuals’ clothing.” The memo contained the secret formula for “S liquid” (
S
for stench), an oily mixture with a “highly persistent smell suggestive of personal uncleanliness.” Included as well were plans for two delivery systems: a gelatin capsule to be pierced with a pin, squirted, and “dropped immediately once the operation is completed,” and a small brass spritzing device midway between a perfume atomizer and a pesticide sprayer, the latter to be “carried about secreted in the hand or pocket.” I pictured a British operative’s wife stumbling upon one in the pocket of her husband’s blazer, lifting it in front of her face and squeezing the bulb, expecting cologne and receiving instead another disquieting hint that her spouse was not wholly forthcoming about the particulars of his career.

The goal: “derision or contempt.” The demoralization and alienation of German and Japanese officers in occupied countries. Allied espionage agencies were keen to find cheap, low-profile devices to put into the hands of saboteurs and resistance groups, motivated civilians eager to help the cause.

The OSS, with help from weapons developers at the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), got to work on a stench of their own devising. In his memoir, which was published twenty years after the war, Lovell downplayed SAC-23—“Contaminator, Stench”—as “comic relief,” an antidote to the “grim, bloody and sordid” job of creating “new and special weapons to kill people.” But the thickness of the files and the detailed, deadpan formality of their contents indicate otherwise. The SAC-23 project dragged on for two full years, sapping the patience and clogging the in-boxes of seven majors,
*
eight lieutenants, four captains, and a wing commander.

Lovell’s original directive, as stated in his memoir, was for a substance with the “revolting odor of a very loose bowel movement.” (“Who, Me?” was Lovell’s cover name for SAC-23.) He wanted something to distribute among Chinese resistance elements for the purpose of humiliating Japanese officers. For some reason, Lovell believed the Japanese to be uniquely vulnerable to harassment of this nature: “A Japanese thought nothing of urinating in public, but he held defecation to be a very secret, shameful thing.” (Like racism.) The NDRC set forth additional requirements. It should have a “range” of at least ten feet “without backfire.” “It should be silent in operation.” Inconspicuous. Impervious to rain, soap, solvents. Conferring shame for a minimum of several hours.

A chemical engineering firm out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was brought on board to develop the formula. The Arthur D. Little Company put their top odor and flavor man—their “Million Dollar Nose”—on the job. Ernest Crocker rose to the challenge like the reek off a landfill on a summer’s noon. “A stink among odors may be compared to a weed among plants, . . . a plant out of place, such as a potato in a flower garden,” he wrote in a background memorandum. In other words, context is key.
†
At an Italian deli counter, a whiff of butyric acid reads as parmesan cheese; elsewhere, vomit. Likewise, the odor of trimethylamine can be described as fishy or vaginal—as Crocker coyly put it, “pleasant or unpleasant according to circumstances.” Very few smells can be classed by their very nature, regardless of context, as repulsive. These were the ones the OSS needed: the “stink-makers.”

The main active ingredient of the Brits’ “S liquid” was skatole, an intensely fecal-smelling
‡
compound produced by gut bacteria as they break down meat. Thus wrote Crocker in a second memo, breezily entitled “Facts about Feces.” Acids from digested carbohydrates, he went on, yield the sour notes of flatus. Trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide provide the telltale rotten egg stench. And so on. The takeaway being that it’s no simple task to make a man smell like shit. The smell of human feces is, like any in nature, staggeringly complex, comprising dozens if not hundreds of chemical compounds. (This is why novelty “fart sprays” smell abominable but not especially like farts.) A high-fidelity simulant would be a daunting and costly prospect.

And, Crocker felt, not optimally effective. “In general,” he wrote, “a mixture is best for it bewilders.” Olfaction, like taste, is a sensory security guard, an early detection system for chemicals that might be harmful. If you don’t recognize the smell, you can’t know that it’s safe. Over the millennia, humans who played it safe and backed away from strange smells were more likely to survive to pass on their genes. Thus an unidentifiable foul smell is a more potent weapon than one that is merely foul.

The more typical military application for “malodorants”—as modern olfactory nonlethal weapons are known—has been “terrain denial”: keeping (or getting) people out of a targeted piece of real estate: a Viet Cong tunnel, a terrorist hide, a weapons cache. Almost always, these have been cocktails of odors. In its “evil-smelling substances” memo, the SOE described tiny glass stench ampules distributed to resistance groups to be dropped on the carpet in known Nazi meeting places. The officers would unknowingly crush them with their showy black lion-tamer boots, and an unplaceable, rank sulfur-plus-ammonia stench would fill—and then empty—the room.

Our man Crocker got to work. He set up in-house “organoleptic testing” sessions to gauge the effectiveness of dozens of heinous blends.
Organoleptic
means “involving the sense organs.” It means you didn’t want to be employed at Arthur D. Little in the later months of 1943. Crocker eventually settled on a blend of skatole; butyric, valeric, and caproic acids; and a mercaptan: shit, vomit, smelly feet, goat, and rotten egg. Samples were prepared and delivered to the NDRC in two formats: a more intense “paste-form stink,” for smearing, and a liquid stink in a squirtable two-ounce lead tube. Crocker assured his clients that the latter would render a target “highly objectionable for not less than two hours at 70 F.” He promised nothing short of “complete ostracism,” concluding his report with a tagline surely unique in the annals of marketing: “as lastingly disagreeable as a product of this kind can be.”

P
AM DALTON
has a bottle of Who, Me? in her lab. Dalton works at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, an independent nonprofit with ties to the nearby University of Pennsylvania and a long history of Defense Department–funded malodor research and a four-foot-tall bronze nose out in front. I first met her in 1997, when she was serving as an expert witness in a pig farm lawsuit. She was the saucy redhead happily walking the fence lines, sampling fumes with a handheld electronic nose. She has a few more laugh lines now, but her hair is still red and she still loves her work.

The Dalton Lab has no detectable smell, though there are many things in here that stink. On a shelf over our heads is a box of firefighter underarm odor, each subject’s contribution sealed in a Ziploc bag. Where other refrigerators would hold ketchup and salad dressing, Dalton’s has a bottle of civetone, a synthetic version of the anal scent gland secretions of the civet cat. The weapons-grade smells are over beneath the fume hood. The Who, Me?, which tends to cause panic if it gets into the building’s ventilation system, has been bottled, taped, double-bagged, and entombed in a small, reclosable can.

Dalton Lab manager Christopher Maut
é
unwraps it for me. Maut
é
has high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and glossy dark hair that sweeps back from his romantic-lead hairline seemingly without the help of product. Underneath he is all science. He is, by his own description, the guy who smells the roses at the wedding reception and says, “Mmm, phenylethyl alcohol.” Maut
é
holds the opened bottle near my face, although doesn’t relinquish his grip on it. If I drop the Who, Me? all of Monell West becomes, as Ernest Crocker liked to say, highly objectionable.

A tentative sniff confirms that it is awful, but it’s not what I had expected. This particular version landed far afield of Lovell’s original diarrheal objective. Dalton just returned from the Milpitas, California, dump, and the smell takes her straight back there. It’s sulfury, but not in a jokey-farty rotten egg way. It’s got a meaner, spikier disposition.

Mauté recaps the Who, Me? and reaches under the hood for another bottle. A hand-printed label says Stench Soup and, in larger letters, DO NOT OPEN. In 1998, the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate commissioned Monell to develop a superlative malodorant for clearing buildings or benignly dispersing a violent mob. Stench Soup is what Dalton’s team came up with.

Maut
é holds
the cap in front of my face. Dalton takes two steps backward, anticipating the moment when the smell climbs from its hole. It’s bad, gag-bad. It’s Satan on a throne of rotting onions. Maut
é
quickly closes it and puts the container back.

“Put the hood down,” Dalton says, calmly but firmly. And then, less calmly: “PUT THE HOOD DOWN.”

It seems like a good time to go out and get some lunch. I follow the pair to a nearby oyster house to hear the story of how the world’s most objectionable smell, the mixture known as Stench Soup, came to be.

It began with a confection called US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor. (The government being the developer of the smell, not its natural source.) The smell was developed during World War II as part of an effort to create a compound for deodorizing field latrines. I have seen old photographs of these: the row of grinning GIs, naked rear ends slung over a log fence rail erected above a pit. To test the various deodorizers they concocted, Army chemists needed to re-create the stench in the lab. It was apparently unique. “Open field latrines used by hundreds of men over an extended time, often in sweltering heat, don’t resemble very well what occurs in a typical residential bathroom,” says Michael Calandra, of the flavor and fragrance company Firmenich. Firmenich has an entire “library” of malodors available to industry for testing cleaning products and deodorizers.

“So we took Bathroom Malodor,” Dalton says, forking something trimethylaminey, “and we sweetened it up a little.” The inspiration was provided by a panicked Las Vegas hotel owner who had telephoned Dalton after his sewage pipes backed up. The addition of the flowery-smelling cleaning product he’d used had made the smell yet more odious.

Maut
é
reveals the other reason Stench Soup includes a fruity top note. “Most people when they do an initial sniff, it’s shallow. And then if the top note is pleasant, they’re willing to embrace it.”

Dalton jumps in. “So the sweet note hits you, and you inhale more deeply and—” They’re like excited siblings home from a field trip.

“—and that sulfur is just waiting for you on the keeper inhale.”

“And the sulfurs, once they get in your nose? They last. They get trapped in the mucous. They keep rebinding to the same receptors.”

It’s impressive, the ingenuity that goes into a top-flight noxious-smelling substance. The British S liquid included a compound that delayed the onset of the odor, thereby “improving the chances of the operator being able to escape before the smell was detected.”

Would that wars could be fought and won this way—with weapons that didn’t kill or harm. If sacrificing lives for the larger good of nation or cause were not part of the moral equation, imagine the enterprise that would have gone into morale-sapping instead of atom-splitting and armor-piercing. In the same delightful category as Stench Soup, we have the brainchild of Bob Crane, a materials engineer at a research lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base who attended a nonlethal weapons brainstorming session during Operation Desert Storm.

Crane set the scene for his idea. The enemy is hunkered down, taking fire. Days go by. The supply lines are cut off. The men are hungry, lonely, angry. Now you introduce the secret weapon: the nostalgic aroma of fresh-baked bread. Crane is an expert in microencapsulation, the technology behind, among many other things, scratch ’n’ sniff. It’s possible to encapsulate a scent in tiny grains of a powder that could then be dropped over the enemy position while the fighters sleep. The next day they walk over the microcapsules, breaking them open and releasing the scent. It’s too much. They miss home, they miss their mother, they decide to desert.

A
S CROCKER
promised, SAC-23 stank “lastingly.” No one knew this better than the quality control testers of Maryland Research Laboratories, to which the OSS had shipped off a box of two-inch lead tubes of it. “Almost without exception,” states the report, “the operator was contaminated when squirting the contents of the tube.”

A Major John Jeffries of the OSS ran some tests of his own. Twelve percent of the tubes, he wrote in an acid letter from July of 1944, were leaking
when they arrived in his office
. When ten of the nonleaking tubes were placed in an oven to approximate warm weather warehouse conditions, all commenced to ooze. To assess the real-life practicalities of discharging SAC-23, Jeffries dressed a dummy in a military uniform. One out of three tubes “backfired” onto his hand. Even just unscrewing the cap, he wrote, it was “impossible to prevent getting some of the liquid on my hand.”

Storage and dispersal issues have continued to vex the malodorant community. There were so many problems with a Vietnam-era concoction that the developers considered a binary delivery system, two compounds kept segregated like epoxy components, producing a stench only in combination. Dalton told me the story of a catastrophic misfire during a test of Stench Soup. To contain the stink, Dalton had subjects wear an airtight plastic hood. “It was like a biosafety suit, only we were putting the contaminated environment
inside
.” A flexible tube delivered malodorized air through a sealed port in the hood. On the third day, the system malfunctioned. Instead of pumping in Stench Soup as a gas of carefully calibrated concentration, it bubbled in the undiluted source. The subject happened to be one of Dalton’s military funders. When it was over, the man pulled off his hood and reached up to find the whole back of his head saturated with the oil. Dalton was speechless. “I kept opening my mouth like a carp, and nothing would come out. My technician goes, ‘Gosh, was it on you when you got here?’ Trying to put the blame on him! Like, ‘Perhaps your hair gel?’” The man was heading straight from Monell to the airport. “We had to take him up to the animal floor and let him take a shower.”