Radiolab - The Fact of the Matter

Episode Date: September 24, 2012

Getting a firm hold on the truth is never as simple as nailing down the facts of a situation. This hour, we go after a series of seemingly simple facts -- facts that offer surprising insight, facts that inspire deeply different stories, and facts that, in the end, might not matter at all.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. And NPR. Okay, let's see. Hello? Hello. Hi. Is this Errol Morris? I think it's me.

Hello. This is Chad from Radio Lab. Hi. Thank you for your very, very nice but somewhat disturbing email. What disturbed you in the email? The term truth fascist. You called Errol Morris a truth fascist? What were you thinking?

I was trying to, I wrote him an email to try and get him to come talk to us. I don't know why I use that. What is a truth fascist? That was meant lovingly, I should say. Ah! Wasn't exactly the right choice of words. Fundamentalist? Oh, I like it.

But really what I meant is, this is a guy who's always trying to get to the bottom of thinks. He's made all these documentaries, a thin blue line. Got a guy off death row, actually, in a thin blue line. He made The Fog War. He made Vernon, Florida. Yeah, but I contacted him because, you know, I'd recently seen him give this talk about this one investigation of his that for me is like the purest example of the thing

that drives him. The thing that's in all of his films, this desire, relentless desire to figure things out, to get to truth. And it all starts with a photograph. One of the very, very first photographs of war, 1855. Which war? This is the Crimean War that involved Great Britain, France, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and believe it or not, Sardinia.

The fighting took place in what is now basically the Ukraine, the Russians were on one side, everybody else on the other. Half a million people died. It was incredibly brutal. And there's this photograph titled, the valley of the shadow of death that's black and white it shows a dirt road

cutting through this landscape just one dirt road between two hills there's nobody in the photograph no birds no trees no people there's really nothing living in the photograph not even grass nothing but as you stare at this road a little more closely you realize

why nothing is living in this photograph because this road is littered with cannonballs. Cannonballs everywhere. As soon as you notice him, the photograph springs to life. You imagine this fusillade of artillery fire raining down on this landscape. This is one really fascinating thing about photography. It's a time machine. There's a physical connection between that photograph.

and that world. Because you're holding this piece of film that was literally ripped right out of that world. But the context is gone. And more importantly, in this case, you don't even know if that picture is true. What do you mean? It turns out that this photograph

is one of a pair. There is a second photograph exactly the same as the first photograph. Exact same camera position. But in this other photograph, the cannibal. that were on the road are gone.

So one has cannibals on the road and one has cannonballs not on the road, but otherwise they're completely identical. Yes. He thought, that's weird. Let me look into that. And there was a passage in... And he ends up reading

this essay by Susan Sontag. Where she talks about these photographs as though it's just obvious what was going on. And he was like, oh, that word. Well, I don't like, I like the word obvious.

Susan Sontap was basically arguing that the guy who took the picture, Roger Fenton, came to an empty road, put the cannonballs on the road. He staged it. Yes. It's obvious. But... That word. Nothing so obvious that it's obvious. And so I started investigating.

And so began a ludicrous, obsessive, dogged, but kind of sublime pursuit of the slippery little fact that actually inspired this whole hour. So today on Radio Lab, we are going to wrestle with a series of seemingly simple facts that turn out to raise complicated questions. Like, what is truth? Is it just a pile of facts? And how much does the fact of the matter matter? Matter. I'm Jed Abinrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. Back to Errol Morris. I tracked down Fenton's letters from the Crimea, journals, written records of soldiers who were in that area at that given time. Didn't find much. I interviewed five historians.

Two ordered the photographs in one way. Saying yes, it's obvious. He posed the pictures. Two. This was a bit of a surprise. Ordered the photographs in the opposite way. Really? They told them it is actually very possible that Fenton saw the cannon malls, took the picture,

and then soldiers came along, took the cannibals off the road to recycle them so they could fire them back at the Russians. Exactly. Was that kind of recycling common practice? Yes, indeed, it was, actually. So you had a tie, two historians saying he faked it, two saying he didn't. And the fifth? Tiebreaker.

Jump back and forth. I like that you tried to call him the tie breaker and he didn't break the tie. Well, of course, none of these things is subject to vote. Truth isn't something that you vote on. At this point, he says he was feeling a very familiar... Iritation. You thought, you know what? But forget historical interpretations.

What if I could, from the photograph itself, the very photograph itself, determine which photograph came first? From just the photos. So I started A-Bing the photographs. Just sort of superimposing them on each other and flipping back and forth. A-B-B-A, A-B-A, A-B-A, et cetera, et cetera. Nothing. And then he thinks... I know what I can do.

I can start studying the shadows. Which meant... Yeah, let's go to the Crimea. Are you serious? Yeah. His reasoning was, I can't study the shadows unless I know the exact direction the camera was pointing on that day in 1855, which means I need to find the exact spot where Fenton stood. And I had terrible trouble finding this place. Is it marked?

No. All of the guides kept taking me to the charge of the light brigade, that site where Tennyson wrote about, the Valley. of death. No, no, no, no, no, not the valley of death. The valley of the shadow of death. But finally, a guide named Olga. She was fabulous. Helps him locate the spot. It's completely desolate, undeveloped.

Still, after 150 years. With some trial and error, he's able to figure out that Fenton was facing north when he took those photos, and then he goes off to the Crimean War Museum and asks them, could I borrow some cannonballs? Oh, man.

I take the cannonball, take it out to the valley of the shadow of death, and I photograph it. At different times of the day, hoping that he'd be able to see subtle differences in the shadows cast by those cannonballs that could help them order the photos. But nothing. Nothing? There was endless questions about cloud cover, whether you could even measure the shadows on these photographs. In fact, he now suspects that the shadows in those old pictures may not have been shadows at all. But just artifacts of how the prints were made. And on and on.

So was the trip useful at all? Not so much. How many days did you spend photographing and examining the photographs of cannonballs on the road? I was there for about a week. And then he went home with no answer to his question, only that continuing... Iritation. But he was like, no. No.

Not done yet. Look, when you investigate anything, I don't care what it is, whether it's a fentphotograph, or Abu Ghraib or the murder of a Dallas police officer, yes, complications result. Thinking causes complications. I'm sorry. But it's part of that process that we go through of trying to figure out what's out there in the world. What really happened?

This is about truth. Absolute truth. And the pursuit of truth properly considered shouldn't stop short of insanity. So, yes, the Fenn photographs worried me that I might not be able to resolve it to my satisfaction. But then, he's at a party, and he bumps into a friend of his, a guy by the name of Dennis Perse. who is very, very good with Photoshop. We called him up? Hello.

Turns out. Well, I'm an optical engineer. So he's not just good at Photoshop. He actually builds high-tech cameras. In any case, they were talking at this party. And the Fenton picture came up. Errol told him. He had this problem of wondering which came first and said,

could you take a look at these? Dennis takes the pictures home, puts them in his computer. Then I immediately started to compare them. Right away, he started to compare them. noticing differences between the two. The light changed. The weather was different. Shadows. But he comes to pretty much the same conclusion as Errol, that those things ultimately don't help. So he just starts flipping between the photos.

Flipping the back and forth. Back and forth between the two photographs. On the road? Off the road. Flip. On the road? Flip. Off the road. It's doing this for hours. Off the road. Flip. On the road. And then he sees it.

The rocks on the left-hand side. This little group of pebbles up on the left. left bank. Every time he flipped back and forth... Flip, flip. Those little rocks... ...popped out. They moved. Just a little bit.

And when he zoomed in, he could see that there were five of them. Fred, George, Oswald, Lionel, and Marmaduke. We name them, yes. These five guys shifted from one photo to the next. And here's the key. In the picture where the road was empty, they were a little bit higher on the hill. When the road was full of cannonballs, those little rocks shift down. Maybe eight inches or nine inches.

Nine inches. And from the direction of that movement, you could order the photographs. It's basically like this. You could say some rocks fell down the hill. They went from up on the hill to down. Up goes before, down. And if the up photo is the empty road and the down photo is the road full of cannibals, well then... The one with the cannonballs on the road was the second picture.

Imagine the scene. Fenton comes upon an empty road, but he sees cannonballs on the hill. So he and... Whoever was helping him would have walked along the sides of the road and lifted up cannonballs, move them onto the road. In that process, they would have invariably knocked into rocks. And rocks don't fall uphill. They only fall downhill.

It's gravity. So case closed? This has been resolved? Yeah. I think it has. So Susan Sontag was right. For the wrong reasons. But she was right. Fenton staged a photograph.

So in addition to being one of the first photographs of war, this is one of the first photographic lies. I guess he just figured it was a better photo. Yeah. Or you could say. Fenton was a coward. Maybe he didn't want to get too close to the actual fighting, so he put the cannonballs on the road to make it look a lot more dangerous than it would have otherwise. Or maybe he was after some kind of emotional truth. That's what Dennis Purcell thinks. It's obvious why he did it.

Here's that word again. To make it look the way it felt. To put those cannonballs on the road is how you felt when you were there. In which case, he would argue that the second photo, the one he posed, is more authentic than the first. But forget all of that. Who in hell knows what Fenton was thinking? I really don't know what his motivation was. But isn't that kind of the question at the end of the day?

Do I really care whether he put the cannonballs on the road or not? Well, I hope so. I hope you do. Don't you? I do and I don't. Really? Why would you go through all this then? I guess this is what I take from it.

In flipping back and forth between those two photographs... Flip. He says you see the rocks move. Flip. And when you see the rocks move... Flip. You imagine feet kicking those rocks. And when you imagine feet, kicking those rocks...

You feel the soldiers walking. Like really feel it. You feel them hitting into the rocks. You feel, on some deep sense for me, the reality of that scene in a way that I would not have felt otherwise. It's almost as if you've worn. walked through a pinhole camera into the past, that world in which the photograph,

that strange, temporal, evanescent world in which we live is gone. But if you can step between these photographs, you are permitted a brief trespass into something that you thought was lost. Yes. My father died when I was two years old. and perhaps the deepest, one of the deepest mysteries of my life, who was he?

Here are all these photographs around the house. I was very, very young, I have no memories of him. There's a mystery about this man who is central to my life in so many ways, but who I don't know and who I never will know. Aero Morris' latest book is called A Wilderness of Error. This story was taken from his book, Believing as Seeing. I also want to thank Ira Glass for helping us to connect with him. This is Dennis Purcell.

Hi, this is Errol Morris, and he is a good credit for you. Here you go. Here we go. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. Modern world. More information about Sloan at www.floan.org. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. That finishes the credits. Bye. End of message. Hey, I'm Chad Aboumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab and today we've been investigating the truth.

The fact of the matter. And this next segment, to set it up, I guess all I really want to say is it sometimes getting to the fact of matter, a fact of the matter, the way Errol just did, that can be tricky. Yeah. You end up finding things you didn't expect that are way more complicated than you expected. The story begins with our producer, Pat Walters. Started for him when he was talking with an ex-CIA agent. So maybe you've taken me to what, the summer of 1981? Okay, in the summer of 1981, I was being transferred from one overseas posts to another.

This is Merle Pribinoe. And I'm a retired CIA officer. But in 1981, Murrell was still at the CIA, and he was posted out in the sticks, out in the boonies. Somewhere in Southeast Asia. And why were you... Oh, well, that's... I had a little disagreement with my previous chief, and I ended up in this remote jungle backwater, I guess, is the best way to phrase it. Can you say what country are you in?

Um, I'd rather not. In any case, as much as Merle did not want to be there, it turned out that this little backwater was ground zero for what was about to become one of the strangest stories of the Cold War. Just to set the scene, the story happens in Laos, which is that kind of narrow country between Vietnam and Thailand. The time is a few years after the Vietnam War. Now, right after the war, the U.S. Army left,

pulled out all of our troops. And once we were gone, the communists basically took over. the region, the communists being the Viet Cong and their allies in Laos, the Pathet Laos. It was May of 1975. All of the Sun, the Viet Cong, that Pathlau had infiltrated, and they were all over our village, and I knew that the Americans had left. This is Eng Yang, Robert and I spoke with him and his niece Kaliah translated for us. Eng lives in Minneapolis, but in 1975 he lived in a tiny village in the mountains of Laos.

It's part of a tribe called the Hmong. And Inc. says, as soon as the Americans left, Lowe and Vietnamese soldiers showed up in his village. There was a hundred of them. They came in cars. And in a way, you could say they were out for revenge. Because during Vietnam War, thousands of Hmong soldiers had fought on our side. And as soon as we were out of the picture, that's when the killing started. Ang says it began with isolated attacks. Villagers started getting killed in random fields.

Like, they'd just find one of their neighbors shot dead in his rice paddy one day. Or a woman would go fetch water and never come back. Four long. It was a village, and I know the name of the village, I know the name of the village chief. The Pathet Lao, which, again, is the communist army in Laos, had gotten suspicious that these villagers may have been hiding guns in the jungle, like plotting to rebel against the government. Until one day... The Pathet Lao went over and slaughtered the whole village.

That's when we knew. that the laws of humanity had been terminated. And not long after that, Eng and his family, one with thousands of other Hmong fled their villages, went to hiding in the jungle. This is where things stood when Merle got his assignment. Before he left D.C. and flew over to Asia. I stopped in our headquarters,

and while I was there, I was briefed by our desk officer. Who told him about what was happening, the communist raids, the Hmong fleeing. But then the desk officer said something, Kind of odd. There had been these reports from refugees. Refugees like Ang. About this yellow droplets falling from the air. PBS went out to the camps and interviewed some of the refugees.

When the aircraft flew over our area. They said this yellow stuff that was falling out of the sky was coming from planes. We only saw the powder straight from it. Some of the refugees talked about a powder. Some talked about liquid. A yellow mist sometimes. But they all said whatever this was. it landed, it made people violently ill.

And they all talked about how after this stuff fell from the sky... When the powder reached the ground, it stuck on everything. Left behind these yellow spots. Yellow drops everywhere, all over the landscape. Ang remembers the first time he saw it.

He was hiding in the woods somewhere, and somebody came running to him and said, Eng, you have to come and see this yellow stuff just fell on a village up on the hill. And Ang ran up the hill and sort of crashed out of the forest and just stopped. Right there at the edge of the village.

I saw a dead cow and two dead pigs and several dead chicken and all the people who had been exposed, they were all having stomach trouble. Ang says people were doubled over. Covering their stomach. Riving in pain. Throwing up. Some throwing up blood.

Ang said people began to suffer from everything, from diarrhea to headaches, rashes. There was a person, and I have the photo. right here in my keeping, her call, Papa Ma, who had been exposed, and her eyes were destroyed entirely. And many people, Eng says, didn't recover. What I saw was people dying. They wouldn't get better.

They would die. Merle says the thought in the CIA was that this might be some kind of chemical weapon. Right. Did it have a name at that point? Yellow rain. Yellow rain. By the time Merle got to Southeast Asia, hundreds of these reports had come in. Hundreds.

And several thousand people had been reported. killed by this stuff. But, you know, in those kind of situations, and in Southeast Asia, generally, you know, there are tons of rumors. You have to be careful of what you believe and what you don't believe. And you have to rely on evidence, which they just didn't have. No. Until all of a sudden, they did.

It's just a few months after Muriel got there, and they started getting these reports that... Refugees, and collected samples off of leaves. Some refugees had shown up with leaves covered in these yellow spots. Here, here's a close-up. Let's see. Look at that. This is Matt Messelson. He's a Harvard chemist and chemical weapons expert. The U.S. government asked to help examine these samples.

I went up and visited him in his office in Cambridge. Here are some on leaves. These are all dried out now. The leaves are small, black, brittle, which only makes the spots stand out even more because they're this incredible bright yellow. They're tiny. They're two or three millimeters across.

And Matt says when scientists put these leaves under a microscope and looked inside the yellow spots, they saw that the spots... had a very high content of toxin called T2, which is a poison. And while T2 does grow in nature, the concentrations that they found in these spots was way too high to have occurred naturally. Which demonstrated that this was, you know, in fact, a new type of chemical weapon. We now have physical evidence. This is Secretary of State Alexander Haig in the fall of 1981.

Which has been analyzed and found to contain abnormally high levels of potent mycotoxic. Good evening. The United States said today it has evidence that chemical warfare has been waged in parts of Southeast Asia. The U.S. obtained a test sample of twigs and leaves. Chemical analysis found high levels of three toxic chemicals. The news of this poisonous yellow rain became an instant political crisis. Refugees and camps along the Thai border have been telling for years of a yellow rain. A rain that was followed in minutes by vomiting, bleeding, and death.

Because everybody knew the Lao and Vietnamese armies were not capable of making this stuff. No. Vietnam could not even make their own rifles. They were pretty backward in that sense. Which really left only one likely suspect. Circumstantial evidence points to the Russians. The Soviet Union may be engaging in biological warfare. The Soviets, of course, denied they were involved.

The Soviets said it was a slanderous accusation. But the U.S. government did not believe them. The Soviet Union, the Allies, are violating the Geneva Protocol of 1925. And in the summer of 1982, in his speech to the UN, President Reagan officially accused the Soviet Union of supplying and using chemical weapons in Southeast Asia.

There is conclusive evidence that the Soviet government has provided toxins for use in Laos and Campocia. Three years later, Congress passed legislation authorizing the production of a chemical bomb called the Big Eye. It's a 500-pound bomb, and it's meant to be carried on high-performance aircraft. And within two years, a factory in Pine Bluff, Arkansas,

began churning out thousands of bombs designed to carry sarin gas. This would be the first time the United States had manufactured a chemical weapon in nearly 20 years. All this, in effect, because of the yellow rain. But before we jump ahead, in November of 1982,

there were two days of press briefings by the State Department. And this is where things really start to get weird. The State Department had gotten everybody together to explain that some British scientists had looked at the spots, and in addition to the poison, they'd found something else.

All the samples had a very high content of pollen. From flowers, which initially didn't make any sense. Like, why would pollen be toxic? But eventually, the government officials came to this kind of terrifying conclusion that, in fact... This was a very, very clever communist mixture. somehow the Russians had found a way to use pollen as a vector to transmit this toxin.

If it falls right on your skin, it would intoxicate you, poison you. But if these drops should fall on a leaf or a rock, then the wind would redisperse these pollen grains, which were of just the right diameter to penetrate to the depths of the lungs, thereby making it a more deadly weapon. Matt remembers hearing that and thinking, That just seemed completely bonkers to me. I knew a lot about chemical weapons.

He'd never heard of anything like that before. No. So he sent some of these samples around to other scientists he knew. And one afternoon, he's sitting in his lab and he gets a call. I remember the phone call. This is the guy who called. Tom Seeley. I'm a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University.

Matt picked up the phone. Tom said to him, hey, I analyzed the samples he sent me. And then? He said, the State Department explanation is not. not parsimonious. Meaning. Meaning this yellow stuff is not a chemical weapon.

Then he paused and he said, it's B, and then he used a four-liter word. I think we can use that word. Is that all right? Yeah. He said it was bee-sha-b-what? Be-sh-sh-h-what-we-we-we-what-we-wee-what-wee what we call fecal spots of honeybees. That was their idea?

Yeah, they were like, look. Here's the thing. Every winter, bees kind of hibernate. During the winter, there are no flowers, and there is no pollen, and there's no nectar. There's nothing for the bees to go out and collect. So they stay inside. Confined to their hives all winter.

Feeding their babies, fattening up the new worker bees for the next season. And since they're very fastidious, they do not defecate in their nests. They don't poop all winter? Right. So they become immensely constipated. And then...

On the first warm days... They all fly out... On mass... ...to like 100 feet off the ground. And... ...defecate. all at the same time. And it's called a cleansing flight,

and anybody who cultures bees knows this. And if you get caught beneath this situation, Tom says... It feels like light raindrops, hitting your arms, hitting your forehead. So this was their theory, that the yellow rain was not a chemical weapon. It was just... Beedroppings.

They published this, and the government was like, seriously? Even a bunch of prestigious scientists came forward and said... Said it was an absurd explanation. Kind of crazy and embarrassing. A, let's not forget that this rain was toxic, and B, honeybees in Southeast Asia don't even hibernate. There is no winter in Southeast Asia. It's the tropics. So Southeast Asian bees never get constipated, and they never do the big poop.

Those are good objections. No. Matt and Tom counter by going to Thailand. Tom and I flew out there. They go into the jungle, find some beehives, and one day they're staring up at a hive. And in a flash... They see it happen. The bees shoot up into the sky. And within a minute or two after that,

we started to get reined upon by the bee feces. So they tell the government, sorry, we think it happens here too. Wait, that's only half of it. I mean, what about the toxic part? The whole idea that these bees are pooping poison. That is a hard one. But while Matt and Tom were in Thailand, some labs had started retesting those original samples.

Because, you see, the poison had been detected by one particular lab, in Minnesota at the beginning. But now that these yellow spots were such a big deal, other labs all over the world began to retest them. And they couldn't find anything. The British never found a trace. The Swedes never found a trace. The way Matt sees it.

The analyses were wrong. He thinks that lab... The lab in Minnesota that had been doing this work... ...in inadvertently contaminated the pollen, because this lab did lots of other work with mycotoxins. Large quantities of these toxins. The government obviously wanted to be sure. wanted to be sure they did their own retests of the samples.

They didn't find anything. They sent a team to Southeast Asia to verify the bees do the poop shower thing. And they do. And my friend, it's a good friend, Pompete, who was part of that team, told me that in the bar at the end of this multi-day excursion, off the record, one of the gentlemen said, well, I guess we owe the Soviets an apology on this one. Which hasn't ever happened. In fact,

Yellow Rain is still In the U.S. Army Chemical Corps manual as one of the possible weapons that might be used. Oh, really? Yeah, it's still there. It's still there. I have a clarifying question

before I interpret that. So they found toxins initially and then when they looked again at those samples the toxin were no longer there. That's right. Okay. At a certain point in our conversation with Eng, the Mong guy, Robert and I talked to

earlier, with his niece Kaliya translating for him. We explained that the evidence they'd been attacked by chemical weapons seemed... I interpret that for my uncle. A little shaky. Eng's response was, if this was just bee feces... How do you explain the kids dying, the people and the animals dying? That where there is this yellow thing, where there are no bees, whole villages die. We asked Kaliah to tell Eng what...

the scientists had told us that the Hmong were definitely dying. The Hmong were under real attack. They were being fired at from airplanes and by soldiers. But more importantly, even if they weren't killed by those direct attacks, they were on the run through the jungle. They were malnourished and drinking from contaminated streams. Diseases like dysentery and cholera were rampant. And the way a lot of people see it is that they may have misattributed

some of those mysterious deaths to this cloud of bee poop that looked like it could have been a chemical weapon. But Eng says no. Not a chance. I speak to what I've seen, and there is no inkling in my mind. That those dust were not caused by starvation dysentery. It was chemicals that were killing my people. So we wanted to know, and this was an honest question,

did he see something that would contradict the scientist's story? Did the source of the rain, was there always a plane and then rain, a plane and then rain, or did sometimes the rain happen without a plane? We never saw what they said was that it was always just being dropped on them. And it was always being dropped where there are heavy concentrations among people. That's what we knew. We don't know whether there was a plane causing it. It was just, you just see the dust.

You have to understand that the planes are shooting bullets and bombs every day, all the time. And so whether it was a bombing plane or a yellow plane was incredibly hard to distinguish. Everybody runs when you hear the plane. So Hmong people don't watch bombs coming down. You came out, you sneak your head out, and you watched what happened in the aftermath.

You saw broken trees, you saw yellow in the aftermath of what had been bombed. I saw with my own eyes the bee pollen on the leaves eating through holes. With my own eyes, I saw pollen that could kill grass, could kill leaves, could kill trees. But he himself is not clear whether it's the bee stuff or whether it's other stuff because there was so much stuff coming down from the sky. You know, you know, you're using to be able to

but he's not but he's not bad here. It's not you know that there were chemicals being used against the in the mountains of Laos

whether this is the chemicals from the bombs or yellow rain chemicals were being used. It feels to him like this is a semantic debate

and it feels like there's a sad lack of justice that the word of a man who survived this thing must be pitted against a professor from Harvard who's read these accounts. But as far as I can tell, your uncle didn't see the bee pollen fall. Your uncle didn't see a plane. All of this is hearsay.

My uncle says for the last 20 years he didn't know that anybody was interested. in the deaths of the Hmong people. He agreed to do this interview because you were interested. You know what happened to the Hmong happened? And the world has been uninterested for the last 20 years. He agreed because you were interested. That the story would be heard and that the Hmong deaths would be documented and recognized. That's why he agreed to the interview.

That the Hmong heart is broken, that our leaders have been silenced. And what we know has been questioned again and again is not a surprise to him or to me. I agree to the interview for the same reason, that radio lab was interested in the Hmong story, that they were interested in documenting the dust that happened. There was so much that was not told. Everybody knows the chemical warfare was being used. How do you create bombs? If not with chemicals, we can play the semantics game.

We can. But I'm not interested. My uncle is not interested. We have lost too much heart and too many people in the process. I think that the interview is done. Now, that wasn't the end of the interview. They kept on talking. Robert and Pat explained to Kaliah that we're reporters,

we're just trying to figure out what happened. One thing I do want to make clear, we informed the Yangs in advance that we wanted to talk about the controversy surrounding Yellow Rain. We were very clear about that. We did not intend to ambush them. But this interview troubled us. We talked about it for months,

arguing back and forth about what it meant. to the story, what it meant for us personally. And we decided at a certain point to bring that conversation into the studio. We're going to play you that conversation as we originally podcast it, and then we'll have some things to say on the other end. That started by talking about the moment that you just heard on tape. Somehow that moment was when the whole story changed for me. How exactly?

I think that there was something about, like, the way that she was, was pointing away from the thing that we had been looking so hard at and saying stop looking at that look over here yeah like she like she didn't convince me at all that this wasn't a chemical weapon but she convinced me that we were missing something yeah what i'm hearing her say there not having been in this interview is quit focusing on this yellow rain stuff because when you do that you're shoving aside the much larger story name that my people were being killed. Right.

That's exactly what she's saying. And that is wrong. To my mind, that is not fair to us. How is it not fair? It's not fair to ask us to not consider the other stories and the other frames of this story. The fact that the most powerful man in the world, Ronald Reagan, use this story to order the manufacture of chemical weapons for the first time in 20 years. If the United States were to manufacture chemical weapons again and then use the story, them because the Russians supposedly had, then people would have died ugly deaths in the

consequence of that. And that is not unimportant. That's hugely important, but it's not important to her. So should that not be important to us? But I, yeah, I mean, I do think that, I don't know, I think that until she said the things that she said at the end of that interview, I don't think that I had fully. appreciated the volume of pain that was involved in that moment for them. Yes, I thought her reaction was very balancing.

But her desire was not for balance. Her desire was to monopolize the story and that we can't allow. I'm not sure we can say that, though. Oh, if you listen to the words, that's what she said. No, I just think that they feel like their trauma has never been fully acknowledged. And that they've attached it to this because maybe they felt that they had to. They've attached it to this idea that yellow rain was a chemical weapon. And if yellow rain suddenly isn't a chemical weapon, that doesn't just unvalidate the yellow rain.

It negates their whole loss. And I think she might be right. But I also think that the scientists are right. It's not a chemical weapon. And I also think you're right that to call it a chemical weapon has big consequences. So what do you do when three truths are right at the same time? This is where we stop. So that was our original conversation.

And when the podcast went out, a lot of people were very upset by me in particular. So I think I want to, if I could add just a couple of things here. First of all, clearly it was wrong to say that Kali Yang was trying to monopolize our conversation because after all, we are the editors. We choose what to put on the air. And in this case, we chose. We were looking for evidence that despite what the scientists thought, that maybe there was a chemical weapon here.

and we wanted to find an eyewitness to see if anybody saw a bomb open and yellow rain come out. That's what reporters do. We test truths, and that is why I was persistent. I had no idea what the Yangs were going to say, and when they got angry, I was embarrassed, and when I got angry in my conversation with Jed and Pat, that was not right, and for that I apologize to Kalia and Mr. Yang in particular. I have to ask questions and search for truth, but in this case, given how much Mr. Yang had already suffered,

I should have done it with more respect and more gently. Hi, this is Eleanor Wilmack from Brooklyn, New York. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. I don't really know where Tim is, so we're just going to try. Hey, I'm Chad I, I'm Robynch.

old album today. We're talking about truth and facts. Yeah. Facts of the matter. So recently, our producer, Pat Walters, and I, we were trying to get in touch with a guy, Tim Kreider. Hello, Tim? Nope, not there. I think if we just shout very loudly. Out the window.

We wanted to talk to Tim because Tim is, not only is he a wonderful writer. And before that, a cartoonist. He has this essay, which kind of gets to the heart of a very different kind of truth than we've tackled so far, and that is, can you truly know somebody? even after everything you thought you knew. Turns out to be wrong. Hello, Tim? Yes.

Oh, there you are. You sound great, too. We should say this is a story not about Tim, but about his friend, who he names Skelly, just to protect his identity. Right. So let's try, if it's okay with you, if we could maybe just talk about Skelly

as if we were just kind of hanging out at a bar, even though you're in a tiny booth on the other guy. If I had a little, if I had a beer in this tiny room, that would be easier. Tell us how you met this guy. He was part of a group of friends I made when I was working a post-collegiate job going door to door for the environment. To knock on doors with clipboards and get people to donate. It was like vacuum salesman knock-knock kind of thing?

Yeah, you're dropped off by a van in a suburban neighborhood, and I can still faintly feel the dread of having to knock on your first door of the night, which was always. was the worst. But, you know, like being in the Army, it was a bonding experience. Especially because the knocking on the door stuff was just really, you know, a few hours a day. Then there's going out to the bars afterwards, which became as much a part of the job for us as anything else. And one of those nights out drinking with friends, he got to talking with Skelly. What do he look like, by the way? You know, he forbade me ever to draw him. I used to put my friends in my cartoons all the time. And I did that once to him, and he interdicted me from doing that again.

So you don't want to draw him on the radio? No, he's about to. Oh, he's about to. Okay, I'm sorry. He had this great mop of curly hair, glasses that were literally held together by duct tape. The overall effect was warmth and intelligence. But from the beginning, he says,

basic facts about this guy were a little hard to pin down. It wasn't really clear at first whether he was. belonged to our camp, the hippiest young people, or whether he was someone slightly older whose first life hadn't worked out. As it turned out, he was the latter. He had been a practicing lawyer, and he had quit being a lawyer for reasons that remain unknown to me. I mean, I'm not sure it was entirely voluntary quitting. But Tim says at the time he liked the guy. Yeah. For one thing, women seemed to like him. They were charmed by him right away. All my girlfriends always liked him. And beyond that, you know, he and I were two of the readers in the group.

We each always had a book with us. So they began to swap books, and as they got to be good friends, Skelly even showed him his writing. I still have it somewhere, in Longhand even, beautiful longhand. He was clearly a sort of kindred spirit. But then some questions popped up. One day, Skelly told him that he had written a novel and that it had been accepted for publication.

Tim was like, wow, I was excited for him. You probably thought, you got published. That's amazing. I wanted to do that. Yeah. So, you know, I kept bugging him about, well, when's your book coming out? Skelly would say, well, you know, in a few months, and then the few months would pass, and Scully would say, well, they just pushed it back.

It's coming. And, you know, we had a close little group of friends, and like all people on Earth, we talked about each other behind each other's backs. And it may be that someone else sort of clued me in, like, Tim, there's no book. I mean, maybe he wrote a book, but it's not being published. Initially, Tim thought, well, there's probably some truth to it. You know, even if the truth was only the kind of truth that's contained in dreams. But then there were other stories.

One of his stories was about having been married briefly in France and having a daughter over there. And there was a time, at least one time, when he was on vacation from the environmental canvas. and he supposedly was going to be in France, visiting his daughter, who lived with her maternal grandparents there. And our boss saw him walking on Charles Street in Baltimore during that time. Obviously, he was not in France. And they were never like, dude, someone saw you in Baltimore.

Were you really in France? No, we didn't say that. And, you know, I've met, I mean, I've spent, I've logged a lot of time hanging. out in bars, and you do meet pathological liars in that line of work. And, you know, I'm always duly impressed by their stories when I first hear them until they pile up and they're always able to one up your story. You know, they've always met someone more famous than you.

Something more tragic has always happened to them. And then they start to seem creepy and repellent. And all I can say is he didn't feel that way. He just seemed like a really good guy. guy who happened to lie more than most. In any case, after they left the canvassing job, they both stayed in Baltimore and they stayed close. We frequently ended up crashing on the same floors together, closed down the bars together every night. They take road trips together, blasting classic rock.

He loved Led Zeppelin. And after a while, those stories? Like, I've published a novel where I have a daughter. in France. We didn't hear that stuff anymore. Our theory is that he did not expect that we would end up being friends for the next 20 years and he would have to maintain these

stories. And, you know, we liked the guy so much that it would have been unthinkably mean-spirited to bring this stuff up. So we just sort of pretended we'd never heard it. And he says they kept themselves from asking too many questions. Like, yeah. They knew he had a job at the Opera House fundraising, but he was always broke, always hitting them up for money.

And he was, they wonder, why was he always house-sitting and spending the night at the library? You just never knew. You did have to, you did have to triangulate from the few facts available. And, you know, in a way, it was fun. It was fun to speculate about and fun to tease him about, only behind his back, of course. For example, Tim told us about one time he and his friend Nick were up at their cabin near the Chesapeake Bay, which is about an hour outside Baltic. And we had had a lovely afternoon eating oysters, drinking beers overlooking the bay,

and we're supposed to drive to a train station about 20 minutes, half an hour away to pick Skelly up. He's going to take the train up there and join us. And so we break away from our pleasant setup on the water and we drive down to the train station to pick him up. The train comes and goes. He's not on it. And we're both a little peeved at having been torn away from our afternoon to come get him

only to be stood up at the train station. So my friend checks his cell phone to see if maybe there's a message, and indeed there is. And the message goes like this. Hey, guys, this is Skelly. I missed the train. First of all, there's the background noises of what is clearly a bar. Glass is clinking the TV on, unmistakably, the Mount Royal Tavern.

How do you know that? We just knew. And he says, so I'm really. sorry about this, but I was in a meeting that ran a little longer than I expected, and I tried to catch it, but I was like, three minutes too

late, but I checked and there's another train at 7.20, it gets in 745. I'll definitely be on that one, so hopefully y'all get this message and be there to meet me. Okay, again, sorry about that. Hope I'll see you soon. And then there's 30 or 45 seconds of him fumbling to figure out how to hang

up this borrowed cell phone, throughout which we can hear the sounds the bar clearly in the background. And I listened to this message and I just smiled and shook my head and handed it speechless to my friend Nick. Do you have any sense of what's, when you're not being told something, do you have any feeling for what you're not being told? Or do you just think it's just silly details? No. You know, I don't, he was just a very secretive guy. We got the sense that, I mean, he told me once, you know, the less people know about you, the better off you are. I mean, we weren't supposed to know for a long time that he lived at home with his mother, you know, which is not unheard of, but an embarrassing thing when you're a grown man.

And it became really obvious that he did, because if you called his house sometime, you got his mother. And he had a complex cover story about how, oh, well, if the phone rang enough times at his house, it was forwarded to his mothers to pick up. Which, you know, I had never heard of that. I didn't know the phone company offered that service. So, you know, we knew the deal, but we weren't going to challenge him on it because it so clearly was something he was embarrassed about and eager to conceal. I think he probably saw himself and was worried that others would see him as, you know, marginal or pathetic or loserish.

And, you know, we didn't see him that way. We love the guy. He was just one of us. You know, there are conditions that come with every friendship. People are weird, and most of the people who are really worth being friends with are weird. And you learn to accept that there are unspoken rules in certain friendships. Until the day comes when the rules don't apply anymore. Fast forward a few years, Tim has moved to New York.

Skelie, still is in Baltimore with his, well, his mother had died. but he was living in the same house. I still saw him pretty often. He'd take the train up and we'd get some beers and some chicken wings. And one day, I got a phone call from a friend of mine, and he sounded very badly shaken. Tim's friend said that he'd been worried about Skelly. Because he hadn't heard from him for a while,

and then he called work, and it turned out he hadn't been there, and he knew something was wrong. So he went to his house, and, you know, I think he was able to get the door, open enough to see inside and he called in for him and he heard nothing and he forced his way in and found him lying on the floor dead the coroner ruled that that death was drug related so i went back to baltimore right away um because i assumed there would be a memorial service and so on and for a couple of days nothing happened at all because he had kept His life so thoroughly compartmentalized that no one knew how to get in touch with his family.

Although, at the last minute, the day before his funeral, we got in touch with his extended family, and they were able to send some people up. Just before they arrived, it occurred to Tim, well, maybe we should go through his house. You know, and just clean up and, you know, find out if there's anything there that we should, you know, disappear before his family shows up. And we were talking to the guy who first found him. And he said, yeah, well. Here's the thing.

He told them, you guys, you can go back into that house, but I'm not going back in there. He had warned us, but as soon as we stepped in, it was still shocking and terrible. What did you see when you walked in? There are aspects about that that I will never tell you or anyone else. But suffice to say that as soon as you walked in, you could tell that someone had ceased living. like a human being. I mean, there were heaps of things. Heaps.

And he'd stopped throwing things out. There wasn't electricity. There wasn't working plumbing. Really? No plumbing. At all? No. No, I don't think so.

And words are going to fail me here. I mean, the simplest way to say it would be to say it was clearly a place where an insane person had lived. For someone who was mentally ill, had lived. I don't know if that's what to call it because most people who are mentally ill

don't know to conceal their mental illness. He was just a very gentle, decent, kind-hearted guy, but something horrible had happened. But on some level, he had understood that, I mean, it was a secret that he was keeping, and he kept it locked inside. that house. And I think we were all appalled to realize that something had been so drastically wrong with him

all this time. And the single most upsetting aspect of it was imagining how utterly alone he must have felt himself to be. Did you ever have moments of feeling guilt? Like, I should have gotten into that place. I shouldn't have... No, I don't think there is anything that anyone could have done for him. I mean, he had so clearly determined not to let people in to that chamber of his life.

And the other thing is that he was so convincing in his dissembling. I mean, we really didn't think there was anything seriously wrong. Yeah. He was his best and most decent and sanest self when he was in our company. But you didn't know so much about him. And I guess I just, in light of that, I wonder what it means to know someone or who exactly it was that you think you knew. Yeah, well, you know, the only people I knew of who ever got mad at him for telling what they would have called him. lies were women. I mean, he was a guy, so he was not above trying to impress girls. And, you know,

the things he was trying to impress them with were his novel, his storied history. And often when they found out that those things were not, strictly speaking, true, they felt lied to and betrayed. And none of his friends ever felt that way. And I always felt that perhaps this patronizing or nasty of me, but I always felt that what those girls were really mad about was that they believed him. They'd fallen for it. But in the sense, you and your friends fell for something, too. Well, I don't know. I mean, what I would say we fell for was the thousands of hours we spent in that guy's company, which seems to me like a more direct and reliable form of knowing than hearing facts, either made up or real.

I mean, there was a day when Skelie and I drove up to my cabin to check on the place because there'd been a blizzard. And there is a grove of bamboo trees there. And the weight of all the snow had bent them over the driveway so that they formed a kind of continuous arch. And we parked and we walked down through that arcade. and we would tug on every bamboo tree. And it would shake the snow off,

and it would suddenly spawning up into the air, and it would fling its load of snow 50 feet into the sky. We did that with every tree, walking all the way down the driveway. And it was so beautiful and so much fun that we cracked up like boys. And I'm the only one who remembers that now. That was a moment that only he and I were there for and he's gone.

He shared that with me and nobody else ever will. You're imagining it because I've described it to you, but that's not the same thing. And if you don't know someone by having experiences like that and memories like that with them, then I would submit that you cannot ever know anybody at all. Thanks to producer Pat Walters and to Tim Kreider, whose book, which includes this story, is called We Learn Nothing. Kim Crider, I've been asked to call and leave a voice now recording your credits. Here they are.

Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abimrad. Our staff. Our staff includes Ellen Horn. Thorin Wheeler. Pat Walzerz. Jim Howard. Rhettieff. Ren. Farrell.

Melissa O'Donnell. Dylan Keefe. Andy Mills. Lynn Levy. And Sean Cole. With help from Matt Kilty, Daisy Rosario, and Nadja Wilson. Special thanks to Rebecca Katz, Gene Gwilliman, or possibly, Jean Guillauman, and Paul Hill.

That's it. Hope that works okay for you guys. Bye-bye.