The Retired Vaccine Chimps Got Their Check-Ups. One Has A CIA Radio In Her Skull.

NATCHITOCHES, Louisiana — On 14 July, under sedation for an abscessed tooth, a 61-year-old chimpanzee at a sanctuary in Louisiana had a lateral radiograph of her skull.

Behind her left ear, on the plate, are three thin tracks running through bone into the brain, and above them, under the scalp, a flat coil about the size of a coin.

Her file says she came to the sanctuary in 2015 from a vaccine laboratory, and to the vaccine laboratory in 1974 from a primate contractor in New Mexico, and that her prior use before 1974 was none.

The coil is a receiver. It has no battery. It was put there before 1972, and five receipts in a reading room in Maryland say who was paying for her cage at the time.

The peg

The sanctuary's annual health checks were on the wire this weekend as a story about long-term care: forty-one animals retired from federal vaccine research, sedated in turn, teeth cleaned, hearts listened to. That story is true and this newspaper has nothing to add to it.

This story is about one plate from one of those checks, and where one number on the animal's file leads.

What is on the plate

Dr. Benedikt Oyinlola-Sørensen reads animal radiographs for a living and was given these with no history.

Three electrode tracks, parallel, entering the skull through drilled holes that have long since remodelled, terminating at depths he puts at 28, 31 and 35 millimetres. A subcutaneous induction coil, single-layer, connected to the tracks by a lead that runs under the scalp. No power source anywhere on the plate.

"That is a stimoceiver," he said. "A radio-controlled brain stimulator. The design with an external coil and no implanted battery is early. By 1972 everybody had gone to an implanted pack. This is before that."

He will not say what it did, because a plate cannot tell him.

The number

Her sanctuary file carries one number from before 1974: PV-118, the tag she arrived at the vaccine laboratory wearing.

June Halloway asked the laboratory's federal funder, under the Freedom of Information Act, for the 1974 transfer manifest. It came in 61 days with one column blacked out, headed source. Every other column is legible.

Nineteen animals, from the Pecos Valley Primate Laboratory, a contractor outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, that closed in 1974. Each has a PV number, a sex, an estimated age, and a column headed prior protocols, and in all nineteen rows that column reads closed.

PV-118 is on the manifest. The vaccine laboratory's own intake sheet for her, clipped to it, reads prior use: none.

Closed is not none. One says something was done and finished. The other says nothing was done. A clerk in 1974 turned the first into the second, and every study run on her for the next thirty years was designed on the second.

The receipts

This newspaper has read the surviving MK-Ultra vouchers before. The substantive files were burned in January 1973 and the finance series was in a different building and was not.

Subproject 94 appears in the 1977 Senate hearing by its title, remote directional control of activities of selected species of animals, and by nothing else. In the vouchers it appears five times, in fiscal years 1966 through 1971. Payee: Pecos Valley Primate Laboratory. Line: animal maintenance, 24 head. Total: $41,200.

That is the whole of the paper. Five receipts, one laboratory, twenty-four animals, and a subproject whose title is the only description of it that survived.

Eleven studies, no baseline

Between 1979 and 2004 the vaccine laboratory ran eleven protocols on PV-118, hepatitis B and then HIV, all published, all cited. Dr. Marchetti-Nwosu has read every one. None mentions a skull radiograph, because none was taken, because the file said there was no reason to take one.

The sanctuary did not take one either, in 2015, for the same reason. It took one in July because a tooth was bad and a jaw was open.

The other eighteen

She is the last of the nineteen alive. Twelve were necropsied at the vaccine laboratory between 1981 and 2009. The reports are held by its successor institution, which has not answered two letters from this newspaper.

If those twelve skulls were examined, the answer to whether PV-118 is one animal or one of twenty-four is in a filing cabinet in Maryland. If they were not, it is in the ground.

What this desk takes from it

A programme whose files were burned in 1973 has one living subject, and she is a chimpanzee in Louisiana who does not like the new male.

She will not be operated on, and this newspaper agrees with the woman who decided that. Her next scan will happen when her own health requires one, and we will print it then.

What can be read now is a column on a form. Closed became none in March 1974, and thirty years of science were built on the word that was typed rather than the word that was true. The radio is the story the headline tells. The form is the story the veterinarian tells, at the foot of this page, and she is right about which matters more.