NEWSREEL: Scientists are carrying out tests on the package of soil
contaminated with anthrax spores.
Anthrax, it's pretty lethal.
Some pretty horrific ways to die from anthrax.
The whole country had been put at risk as the result
of an environmentalist group's protest.
And everyone was thinking, "I wonder who the hell did that?"
I felt that there was more known than was being said.
She obviously had form,
and it wouldn't have been her first run-in with Special Branch.
You know, there were folk getting their phone tapped.
and we were seen as, you know, the enemy of the state.
Oh, there we go.
It really is, it's releasing death.
NEWSREEL: What were these scientists up to on the island, do you think?
I couldn't very well tell you what they were up to.
We were told not to talk about this at all.
Anthrax must never been mentioned.
Were you involved in Dark Harvest?
They thought we were all hippies.
This reporter, he said, "Come on, go on, you can tell me. Who did it?"
Were you involved?
This was a person of great interest to the authorities.
On the map, this is called Gruinard Island.
Hereabouts they call it the Island of Death.
KEY JANGLES
ARCHIVE: Hebrides, Bailey, westerly six to gale eight,
but locally severe gale nine in Hebrides at first.
# There's a storm coming
# You'd better run
# There's a storm coming
# Goodbye to the sun
# There's a storm coming
# You better run, boy, run
# You'd better run. #
# Can you feel it coming in the air tonight?
# Oh, lord
# Oh, lord... #
NEWSREEL: The police in Scotland have set up a special task force
to investigate a statement from the group calling itself Dark Harvest
and sent to the Glasgow Herald.
It said...
By the time you read this,
the campaign will have started in earnest.
The first delivery will have been made.
And where better to send the seeds of death
than to the place from whence they came?
I thought at the time the authorities were pretty worried.
Bombs were going off in Ireland.
They probably thought, "Oh, God, this is all we need."
A great, long, lengthy letter.
The language is quite dramatic, quite theatrical.
A biblical reference - most unusual to have a biblical reference
in something like that.
"Seeds of death." The implication is, you reap what you sow.
We are simply delivering it back to them
and saying, "We don't want this."
The letter was from an unknown group called the Dark Harvest Commandos,
and their first target was this secret research facility
in Wiltshire.
Inside this ordinary-looking building,
scientists work with some of the most dangerous substances
in the world. It's Porton Down,
the Ministry of Defence's chemical defence establishment.
Porton Down was one of the most secretive places in Britain,
and was closely guarded.
They were on the alert, and they did an initial search
of their premises and found nothing.
They checked again, and this bucket was found outside the perimeter.
The bucket was filled with soil,
but according to their letter,
this soil also contained a deadly agent of germ warfare.
Bacillus anthracis.
Better known as "anthrax".
A Government minister said today that the whole country had been
put at risk as the result of an environmentalist group's protest.
The group dumped a sample of soil, which they claimed
was contaminated with anthrax, near the perimeter
of the Porton Down biological research station, in Wiltshire.
First thing that they did is deny it.
They said it's a hoax,
it's not really anything to alarm the public about,
there's no public risk here.
Those scientists at the station are conducting tests
on the package of soil.
We understand that they think it's very unlikely
that there's any anthrax in the sample.
Anthrax is a naturally occurring but deadly organism.
In the Bible, it was one of the ten plagues of Egypt,
and any outbreak can have fatal consequences.
The bacterium forms spores.
If they're in the air and you breathe them in
and they get into your respiratory system or get into your lungs,
the little seeds will germinate into bacteria,
the bacteria will start to grow,
and then they start producing nasty things which will cause you to die.
It's pretty lethal.
On the skin, blisters, often with very black spots,
look very ugly.
Swellings, flu-like symptoms - you're getting the whole works.
You're getting nausea, you're getting hoarseness,
you're getting bloody vomit, abdominal pains,
bloody diarrhoea, septicaemia, meningitis.
Some pretty horrific ways to die from anthrax.
ARCHIVE: In a rabbit, symptoms will appear in about 18 hours.
In a man, about 24. In a child, perhaps a little sooner.
If you can imagine the tissues swelling.
You start bleeding
from the inside out, so it's really quite unpleasant.
The suspect soil that the Dark Harvest protesters left
outside Porton Down was brought into the facility for analysis,
and Government scientists quickly established
it came from over 600 miles away.
Gruinard Island...
..sitting just a mile from the mainland
in the far northwest of the British Isles.
It's a place that holds many secrets.
I've come a long way to visit that island lying out there
in its lonely sea loch.
Hereabouts, they call it the Island of Death, the Mystery Island.
But in the years before the Second World War,
Gruinard Bay was a peaceful place.
The island had been uninhabited since the Clearances,
but was overlooked by a scattering of mainland villages,
which in the pre-tourist era were home
to God-fearing, Gaelic-speaking crofter folk.
Now, this is not a story of old, dark deeds
or Highland superstition.
No, this story started in 1942.
In the early years of the Second World War,
the Northwest Highlands were strategically important -
sparsely populated and far away from enemy eyes.
The British Army arrived in droves.
There were battleships in the bay,
armoured cars in the ditches
and a warm welcome in the villages of Laide, Aultbea,
Gairloch and Ullapool.
The area was changed completely during the war years.
A huge amount of activity. I mean, as a kid,
you loved seeing all the things that were happening.
Soldiers crawling everywhere.
Operations on the island were shrouded in secrecy,
and the locals were kept at a distance.
It was secretive. We knew there was something going on there.
And there was a barrier across the road,
people in white suits going to the island.
There was that feeling that there was things happening,
that people weren't sure what was going on.
I was working on the farm along there, opposite the island,
and I was seeing them back and forth
with the cattle and the sheep.
They ferried them right across to the island.
What were these scientists up to on the island, do you think?
I couldn't very well tell you what they were up to.
I was seven or eight.
We were going to Ullapool in the car, passing the island...
..and when we came to Gruinard, there were sort of puffs in the air.
A few little explosions going off.
But just on this near the part of the island, on this side,
there were several of them,
and they were little sort of puffs in the air.
What on earth is it? What are they doing there?
There were rumours and whispers about
what might be going on on the island,
but over on the mainland, disturbing things began to happen.
My brother went out about eight o'clock in the morning.
First of all, he went to the barn,
and he found one of the cows dead in the stall.
He came in to tell my father.
Then he went down to the hill to have a look at the sheep,
and he found eight dead.
Follow me.
This is the community church in Aultbea.
Please come in.
Danny Grant is an elder in the local church.
As a child, he witnessed something he'll never forget.
I actually saw it with my own eyes -
a big horse dumped in this hole, with the legs...
Rigour mortis had set in, so that...
I remember having to cut... They cut the legs off the horse.
That wasn't a very pretty thing for children to be watching,
but we all... I remember seeing this.
And then telling the adults about all they sheep lying in the fields
with their legs in the air, and they're all dead.
Maybe a dozen or more.
Within hours, I believe, they were finding cows.
And people were obviously alarmed.
I lost one horse, and I lost six or seven sheep.
Now, what happened to these animals? Have you any idea at all?
Well, I'm sure they would be poisoned.
Scientists at Porton Down in Wiltshire
are carrying out tests on the package of soil
contaminated with anthrax spores,
which was dumped at the chemical defence establishment
by a Scottish protest group.
It's taken three days of tests here at the public health laboratories
to confirm that anthrax spores were in the soil,
which was dumped on the perimeter
of the Government's defence establishment.
We've shown that there is anthrax in the soil.
It could be dangerous, but under very unusual circumstances.
It would have to get in through a cut in the skin,
and that would be very unlikely.
The Government seemed very keen to play down any danger,
but the story was now front-page news.
Public attitude changed at that point, and the media as well.
It suddenly became a really serious thing because anthrax,
you know, this stuff is dangerous.
The MOD scientists knew very well how dangerous.
Dark Harvest had targeted Porton Down for a reason.
"Where better to send our seeds of death
"than to the place from whence they came?"
With the war on a knife edge,
Churchill feared the Nazis had developed a biological bomb,
so he tasked his team of top scientists
with finding ways to harness anthrax as a weapon.
This was highly secretive.
You can get all sorts of different strains of anthrax,
but this was one of the more potent strains.
Some of the moral equivocations of peacetime
had to be put to one side just to see the potency
and potential of this form of weapon system.
To see whether this particular strain
would have the effects they expected.
What they didn't know, of course, was what would happen
if they were trialled in more realistic field conditions.
They had to find a testing site that was remote, uninhabited,
isolated but accessible from the mainland.
And that's where you bring the story up to Gruinard.
Wartime scientists carefully packaged their weaponised anthrax
and headed 600 miles north.
Transporting this was a risk in itself.
It's a long, long way from Porton,
but it's also a long, long way from
people who could be affected by an accidental downwind
draft of anthrax spores.
A beautiful and uninhabited little island
was about to witness one of the first weapons of mass destruction.
In a lot of ways, this island is the key to some of the big secrets
and what ifs of 20th century history.
ARCHIVE: It was here in 1942
that the very first scientifically controlled BW field trials
were carried out.
You have the UK using the Highlands as a base of operations
for war on a scale that people hadn't comprehended before.
You're seeing on this seemingly uninteresting island
the beginning of a kind of terrifying military power
that was just as great as nuclear weapons.
ARCHIVE: There were no facilities anywhere for these tests,
which were, of course, much more hazardous
than comparable chemical warfare trials,
and so this island was picked especially for its isolation.
What actually happened on Gruinard Island
was a source of mystery and rumour until the declassification
of this extraordinary MOD film,
which captured every detail in technicolour.
ARCHIVE: The sheep are being put into exposure crates.
The crate is necessary to hold the animal in the right place
on the layout and to ensure that it faces the cloud.
It's an incredible historical document,
the cutting edge of science,
and they're documenting it as they go along,
step by step, so that potentially they could do this again in future,
somewhere else.
The ambition was to develop a frightening new weapon -
an anthrax bomb.
It is quite a chilling film.
The aim was to test, first, whether the anthrax
would survive explosion in the field.
They didn't know that.
And then, would it remain virulent thereafter?
ARCHIVE: The men wear ordinary cloth overalls, rubber boots and gloves,
a respirator with particulate filter
and a cloth hood to keep the hair clean
and reduce risk of leaks.
One of the men in the protective suits was Allan Elton Younger.
Anthrax is almost indestructible.
Therefore, it was perhaps the best organism to stand up to the blast.
80-odd sheep were tethered at various stages
downwind of the likely explosion.
The explosion was done by remote control.
And you see them all lined up.
ARCHIVE: The bomb was fired and the wind carries the cloud
towards the line of animals and impingers.
Oh, there we go.
This tiny moment, this puff of powder, and it really is,
it's releasing death.
It isn't a great bang - a draft of highly potent spores
moving down on the wind and causing infection and death
wherever it goes.
They sent up clouds of bacillus spores into the air,
the sheep inhaled them, and then they observed the sheep
to see how quickly they died.
ARCHIVE: On the third day after exposure, the casualties begin.
Dead sheep can be seen further down the line.
Also watching from nearby shores were local crofters.
Did you ever see anything?
Well, I used to watch the smoke
coming down on the top of them.
What do you mean "the smoke"?
Was it a cloud of...?
A cloud rolling above the Earth... Uh-huh.
..coming towards these animals.
Where were the animals?
They were staked over there.
I see, they were tied up in a line, were they? Yes, in a line.
I've heard it said that some people did see these animals
falling dead when this cloud hit them.
Well, I'm sure I did the same. Did you?
Yes.
ARCHIVE: All the sheep in the cloud died.
Postmortem is usually carried out to confirm appearances.
One useful feature of this operating theatre is running water.
There's a little waterfall close by.
I think, had I been living locally, I would've...
..been very anxious to hear about it. You know,
there's live anthrax being released less than a mile from your home,
from your farm, I think is enormously anxiety inducing.
Infected sheep carcasses were burnt
or buried under tonnes of rubble...
..when a cliff on the island was blown up.
The experiment was deemed a success,
and in 1943, the scientists packed up and returned to Porton Down...
..but the anthrax remained.
ARCHIVE: The examination of soil samples from the layout
showed heavy contamination.
It soon became clear that the contamination
wasn't confined to the island.
A message came down from here that there had been a case of anthrax,
and that we were suspected. And this came in clear,
and of course, the great secret, as far as we were concerned...
I mean, we were told not to talk about this at all,
and particularly anthrax must never be mentioned.
And this signal came in clear,
which horrified all of us.
On the mainland, in the six months after the experiments,
between 30 and 50 sheep, seven cows,
two horses and three cats died.
Government officials promptly paid compensation to crofters
and persuaded them that the anthrax infection had come ashore
when a carcass was dumped from a passing Greek ship.
Porton Down dispatched two men to Gruinard in another attempt
to rid the island of spores.
We've gone with all our equipment and just set fire to the heather,
which, by that evening, was burning right over the island,
a huge cloud of smoke.
Churchill's anthrax bomb was never used.
By the end of the war,
Gruinard had been poisoned, burned and abandoned.
As months turned to years, and years to decades,
the deadly spores remained.
ARCHIVE: The contamination has continued very heavy
over all these years,
and we might have to wait as long as 100 years for it to get clear.
You don't get any trouble now, of course,
from this long-ago affair, do you?
Well, yes. In this particular place, yes, I lose sheep,
you know, in the spring.
It wasn't until 24 years after the experiment
that the warning signs even mentioned anthrax.
Generations of Highlanders
grew up in the shadow of the Forbidden Island.
They didn't know exactly what happened on Gruinard,
but they were warned they must never set foot on the Island of Death.
Let me get this light on here.
But every year, one local made the short journey across Gruinard Bay.
'83, '82.
'81.
Every January, we had to go out and bolt these ones on.
'85, '86, '87, '88...
ARCHIVE: The island is still so heavily contaminated with anthrax
that anyone wanting to land there needs a protective suit
and a seven-and-a-half month course of injections.
The sign just was to stop people landing.
Anywhere you could possibly get a boat ashore, there's a sign.
It was under experiment and landing was prohibited.
My great, great, great grandfather was born on the island.
When I always hear it being dubbed Anthrax Island,
I kind of feel, well, there was something happened there before.
There were people there before, living there before.
There's no written documents,
so it was just snippets of oral history that's come down.
They would've been cleared off the island.
They were forced out of their homes, like most people were back then.
If you say that an island is forbidden,
I think it does come with a sort of perverse fascination.
This idea that the ground is poisoned
and that it might be dangerous for you to be there
all adds to that sense of taboo, of forbiddeness.
There is some kind of legendary aspect, I think,
to the concept of the toxic island,
the poisoned island, that we all tap into,
and it has some kind of psychological power.
We were never warned, we were just told not to go up on the land.
Just stay on the shore.
It was less than £200 a year. HE CHUCKLES
PRODUCER: To go to Anthrax Island? Aye. Yeah. Yep.
It was a lot of money in them days to us.
Yeah. Yeah.
Four decades passed, and Gruinard was still not safe.
Can you foresee a time when the island will be free
for people to land on?
No. The spores are surprisingly resistant to degradation.
Indeed, that was one of the reasons for them
being selected in the first place.
And we would expect there to be an area of contamination
for the next tens, perhaps even hundreds of years.
Four days after bringing infected Gruinard soil to Porton Down,
the Dark Harvest Commandos were to strike again.
"That we still have the problem to worry about today
"is due to 40 years of total official indifference.
"That's indifference is about to end."
The Conservative Party conference of 1981
was held in Blackpool amidst tight security.
But it wasn't only Thatcher, Heseltine and Heath
making headlines by the sea...
NEWSREEL: At Blackpool this afternoon,
a second suspect package was found.
It was left in the Tower buildings near where
the Conservative conference is being held.
The Blackpool Tower was closed to the public after the discovery
of a tin box believed to contain soil contaminated...
And the oil, contained in a tin box,
was sent to Porton Down for analysis.
This was found behind a locked door, and somebody had somehow managed
to get in to that door during normal operational hours of the tower.
Two packages in five days meant that this was a campaign.
The letter to the newspapers had claimed
that 300lbs of soil had been taken,
enough for many more attacks.
So this was very alarming. Raising the prospect of massive escalations
of this contaminated soil was a huge issue.
The MOD considered putting soldiers on Gruinard to protect it.
They considered sending a gunboat to patrol the waters
or stationing police on the shore to keep guard.
But securing Gruinard seemed next to impossible.
They needed to catch those responsible.
A general alert was issued throughout the UK,
and a special taskforce was formed to track down
the Dark Harvest Commandos.
At the time I was based in Inverness,
I was instructed to go and deal with it.
Detective Inspector Colin MacDonald
followed the winding Highland roads
to Gruinard Bay and the tiny village of Laide.
And I found it quite difficult.
It was a close-knit community,
and they didn't want to say anything, sometimes,
in case they said too much.
That's the only way that you could describe them.
At the local post office,
the police found a petition calling for the clean-up of the island.
One name was of particular interest.
The campaign organiser, John Alick MacRae.
I was involved in getting this list of names
to draw attention to the fact that human beings
were surrounding the island.
They wanted to know who had initiated in the list,
and that is when I was interviewed.
Declassified Government documents that have lain unnoticed
in the National Archives for over a decade
reveal John Alick was indeed a suspect.
"By way of confidential background,
"the Minister may like to know that the local Scottish police
"have a strong suspicion that Mr MacRae,
"the organiser of the petition,
"was party to the action of the Dark Harvest group."
They were convinced because they suspected a local.
But there were other locals living close to the island
who had already carried out covert operations that made headline news.
Here in the vaults of Gairloch Museum,
they hold evidence that connected one local woman
to a very similar caper.
I've got letter here to Kay Matheson from the stonemason
who repaired the Stone of Destiny.
You know, it was broken in two whenever it was stolen.
ARCHIVE: On Christmas morning, the stone was gone.
The Dean of Westminster called the disappearance
an act of sacrilege
and spoke of the stone as a precious relic
treasured by millions throughout the British Commonwealth.
Kay Matheson is from the local area,
became involved with a group of students
who were also passionate Scottish nationalists.
ARCHIVE: A nationwide search was organised.
The police have issued the description of a man and woman
who were seen in a Ford Anglia car near the Abbey
in the small hours of Christmas morning.
So that was described by one journalist
as the greatest heist in history.
And of course, it was all over the papers at the time.
And Kay achieved great notoriety through that.
These initials, JFS, apparently newly scratched on the chair,
are thought to stand for Justice For Scotland,
and support the theory that the stone's disappearance
is the work of extreme Scottish nationalists.
Inevitably, the local woman who famously stole the stone
was suspected of stealing the soil.
She obviously had form in that sense,
and it wouldn't have been her first run-in with Special Branch.
She would have had strong feelings,
I think, about the British Government
using Scottish land in that way.
Behind closed croft doors,
locals speculated and gossiped about this Highland whodunnit,
but nobody was naming names,
and they still won't.
I think they thought a woman might be involved.
A well-known activist woman for other things.
She was definitely for the Highlands, for Gaelic,
for education.
PRODUCER: Who was that?
SHE CHUCKLES
I don't know if I can say much more than that.
We really went round nearly every house in Laide
to see if we could get anything, but it was a closed shop, really.
I felt that there was maybe more known in the community
than was being said.
And it was just an instinct.
The police weren't even allowed to go to Gruinard and inspect
the scene of the crime.
But one person who was authorised to visit the island
was boatman Stuart Flett.
'85, '86.
In his diary, he recorded an important breakthrough...
"Police probe new clue in Gruinard mystery."
..the raiders had used his boat.
It was chained to a tree in the wintertime.
The chain was broken, and a note saying,
"Sorry about the chain, thanks for the use of the boat - Dark Harvest."
The newly found note helped the police build up a better picture
of what happened,
and the letter to the newspapers spelled out in detail
why it happened.
"A team of microbiologists from two universities,
"guided by members of our local population,
"affected a landing on the island last week.
"A large number of soil samples from all over the island,
"with a total weight of 300lbs,
"were securely bagged and removed to the mainland.
"For the next 12 months, these bags will be deposited
"at appropriate points."
The really terrifying thing is that they say,
"This is just the start." This is just the start of a campaign,
and that's when I think the full machinery
of the Secret State would get into gear.
The mystery of who the Dark Harvest Commandos were
played out in a climate of Cold War paranoia and polarised politics.
The Ceilidh Place in Ullapool was a forum for the kind of debates
that radicals and left-wingers were having
throughout the 1980s in Scotland.
We do have to make sure that our view is clearly stated.
We are opposed to nuclear weapons.
We will eventually get rid of them.
People don't expect
any kind of hotbed of radicalism in the Highlands.
But they're wrong.
Jean Urquhart ran the Ceilidh Place and formed the local branch of CND.
As a prominent activist,
Jean was interviewed about Dark Harvest,
and it wasn't the local bobby asking the questions.
It was military police who came up, and we were quite taken aback.
We were quite naive because CND was seen as, you know,
as kind of the enemy of the state.
And of course, it's quite a different thing
to the friendly polis in Scotland.
With these, there was no relaxed conversation about anything.
I mean, it was pretty grim, I remember that.
CAMERA CLICKS
You know, there were folk getting their phone tapped.
And it did, it did have an effect.
In a climate of fear and suspicion,
the Dark Harvest protests were vilified
by the press and politicians.
The Ministry of Defence called their action incredibly irresponsible,
and they warned anyone finding any other packages not to touch them.
But the mysterious group wrong-footed the authorities again
when it was discovered that the second package
placed in the Blackpool Tower was actually harmless, uninfected soil.
The MOD were interrogating, the Special Police Task Force
were investigating, and the press were digging.
Oh, we went after it big time. And it was a really exciting story,
of course it was.
It's a story which it seemed the authorities
couldn't get to the bottom of.
We kind of thought maybe
we had some pretty good candidates.
Iain found out about a hidden community
just across the bay from Gruinard.
This film is about Scoraig,
in the Western Highlands of Scotland.
There are two ways of getting there -
by footpath through the hills,
or by sea,
across what in past times was called the loch of the many winds.
Scoraig was a small alternative community
inhabited by anti-establishment environmentalists,
and all off grid.
Topher Dawson, in his boathouse at the very centre of the community,
is well-placed to observe the passing sea.
Topher set up, without much previous experience, as a boat builder.
They thought we were all hippies, which we weren't, but...
..we were different, and it was kind of homespun.
It wasn't like, "Let's set up a commune."
It was just people arrived one at a time
and gradually it evolved something.
Well, the house is round.
This is the stairs going up to my bed, which hangs from the ceiling.
I don't know if it's a bed or a bedroom.
I haven't really worked that out.
People were conscious that we couldn't live
the way we're living.
They wanted to grow as much of their own food as possible,
to recycle stuff and re-use stuff.
And we were very definitely against nuclear weapons,
and so by extension, bio-warfare too.
We all kind of disapproved of it and felt that
it was a pretty irresponsible thing to do.
Gruinard was just a short boat trip away from Scoraig.
I'd be astonished if the cops didn't look at Scoraig,
because they were living an alternative lifestyle.
They weren't terribly impressed with the establishment in general.
If you wanted to call them hippies,
nonconformist of one kind or another,
well, I suppose that's a qualification for the kind of people
who might've been in Dark Harvest.
It's called gossip, and a lot of people don't like gossip.
I mean...
..I suppose there's a fine line between that
and talking behind people's back.
I got rung up by this reporter, and he said,
"Come on, go on, you can tell me. Who did it?"
And I-I couldn't tell him anything.
I do definitely remember coming home and people saying to me,
"Oh, you missed this great excitement!"
I do remember that.
Topher cannot account for his exact whereabouts at the time of the raid,
but he insists he wasn't on Gruinard Island.
I don't know how many people could think of an alibi for,
I don't know, two, three days, 40 years ago.
I can't.
You weren't driving down to Blackpool?
Oh, no.
After two months, the investigation was going nowhere.
Nobody in the wee coastal villages of Wester Ross
was talking to the police.
They didn't want to say anything that would
take us to a neighbour or to a relation.
There were no clues, no trace of the soil to be found.
And everyone was thinking, "I wonder who the hell did that?"
Running possible candidates past.
In our household, there was definitely
a name thrown about of someone who was local.
Mm-hm.
A neighbour of mine on Scoraig,
he was being pestered by several reporters,
and in the end, he said,
"The person you should speak to is that Topher Dawson.
"He's got a degree in microbiology from Cambridge University."
And, of course, that got them very excited.
I don't have a degree in microbiology.
I'm an engineer.
That's what I... I know nothing about biology.
But he really... He really dropped me in it.
MUSIC: In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins
As the end of 1981 approached,
it seemed everyone was aware of the poisoned island of Gruinard.
Dark Harvest put that story front and centre.
They succeeded in putting the spotlight on what was,
when you think about it, an absolute scandal.
They claimed to have 300lbs worth of infected soil,
and no-one knew where they would strike next.
# I can feel it coming in the air tonight
# Oh lord... #
A new letter appeared...
..pinned to the door of the Scottish Office.
You have a kind of heart in mouth moment.
What have they done now?
Instead of threats,
the letter declared that the aims of the protest had been met,
and there would be no further action...for now.
MUSIC STOPS
They thought they'd done enough.
They were suspending the operation.
Just as mysteriously as they'd appeared,
the Dark Harvest Commandos disappeared.
In 1986, locals again watched as the men in white
returned to the island.
NEWSREEL: Today, Gruinard is a hive of almost surreal activity
as teams of scientists, vaccinated against anthrax
and dressed in protective clothing,
prepare to return the island to its natural state.
The Government had to act and clean up the island.
There's quite a lot of political pressure on us.
I mean, to be frank, it is a political embarrassment.
I just remember we were all delighted.
Somebody's done something.
ARCHIVE: Rows of tubing, not unlike garden hose,
but infinitely more sophisticated,
will spray the infected areas with hundreds of gallons of sea water
and a chemical, formaldehyde.
11 of the 500 acres of the island
were treated with this toxic solution,
and the Gruinard soil was again tested at Porton Down.
Hundreds of soil samples are being analysed,
but it's almost certain that the island
is virtually clear of anthrax,
though there are likely to be a few deeply buried spores left,
and anyway, no test is foolproof.
The scientists worked to find out
if they had solved the problem they created.
But for the authorities,
the investigation into who carried out the Dark Harvest operation
remained unsolved.
And the mystery would deepen some years later
when an investigative journalist uncovered evidence
that implicated a fiery Scottish politician.
It was after I came up to Scotland that I became interested
in Dark Harvest Commandos
and a Glasgow lawyer called Willie McRae.
ARCHIVE: William McRae, the SNP candidate,
was born in Wester Ross and is now a solicitor in Glasgow.
The name of Willie McRae must be linked.
Thinking about who lived in the area,
he was an activist there.
It was the area he had aspired to represent in Parliament.
And I say that, so far as Scotland is concerned,
that is a standing disgrace,
and the primary scandal of over 250 years of union.
He was a great deal more nationalist than most people,
than most nationalists, you know.
We say it's Scotland's oil.
We expect to control and spend the revenue on Scotland's oil.
Willie McRae was a vocal campaigner who successfully opposed
the contamination of Scottish soil with nuclear waste.
He attracted quite a lot of admirers
because of his skilled opposition to this.
Among those was Adam Busby.
I would only condone violence as a last resort anyway.
What do you mean by a last resort?
I mean, as a last resort. I can't really define it.
NEWSREEL: An incendiary device addressed to the Prime...
An incendiary device inside a letter went...
Adam Busby was a violent extremist,
who would go on to organise a campaign of letter bombs
and intimidation to further the aims
of the Scottish National Liberation Army.
Adam Busby was a person of great interest to the authorities.
And then you go into a much more sinister aspect of the whole story.
Adam Busby was a young man with
even more fierce nationalist views.
He was friendly with Willie.
I know that Adam had very high regard for Willie.
The self-declared leader of the SNLA claimed that Willie McRae
had been the inspiration behind Dark Harvest.
Adam Busby told me that this was the idea of Willie McRae.
Willie McRae's suggestion was what about giving the English Government
a taste of its own medicine?
They want to dump nuclear waste here -
why don't you dump anthrax-contaminated soil on them?
Busby, however, was known for self-promotion,
hoaxes and false claims, and even for fellow radicals,
he's an unreliable witness.
Adam Busby, now, he said he was involved with Dark Harvest,
but I very much doubt that.
He claimed a lot more than that. He claimed everything.
Every dog in the street that was run over, almost -
we used to laugh - Busby claimed it.
Things that were done by other groups, he claimed it.
Busby's later actions seem much less sophisticated
than the Gruinard raiders.
But there is a theory that the style of the letter
indicates some involvement of McRae.
I met Willie McRae once, heard lots of speeches by him,
and the dramatic language, the almost biblical language,
in parts, of the letter betrays many of his personal traits.
McRae joined a list of possible suspects,
each with different motives but the same aim.
It's really about getting the island decontaminated
on behalf of the local community.
After being forced to act, after millions of pounds,
after years of spraying and sampling,
the MOD declared Gruinard anthrax free.
It was a moment of joy for the people of Gruinard Bay
and a victory for those watching from the shadows.
The people who carried out the Dark Harvest Commando operation
should've been patted on the back
for trying to bring to the public's attention
what had gone on up there.
I think they're to be commended, to be quite frank with you.
It was a really effective and imaginative action,
and it resulted in a clean up, so I think they're good guys.
And that should have been the end of this sorry tale.
Extensive testing of the island soil meant it was deemed safe
for people to once again go to Gruinard.
But there was a final twist that wrong-footed MOD officials
and raised serious questions about secrecy and safety.
The second letter that had been
pinned to the door of the Scottish Office
not only signalled the successful end of the Dark Harvest campaign,
it also contained a startling new claim
that has implications to this day.
That's when they also revealed that the soil
had not actually come from Gruinard Island at all,
it had been taken from the mainland opposite Gruinard.
That actually it's from the mainland.
It's not just the island that's infected,
this is a much more serious risk,
and far more irresponsible.
At the time, the authorities publicly said,
"We do not really have any evidence to justify
"doing tests on the mainland."
But recently declassified documents show that Dark Harvest
forced the MOD to reassess their wartime experiments
and that their secret findings were extremely concerning.
"On at least one occasion, a test was performed
"when the surface wind direction was at the limit of safety.
"It is possible that one or more clouds of the anthrax aerosol
"passed over the mainland coast."
Forensic examination of these once secret documents is revealing.
This clearly accepts that some clouds of anthrax
could've blown over from the island to the mainland,
and that there was no absolute guarantee
there could be no contamination.
"It would be extraordinarily expensive to sample and measure
"the area that could've been affected."
"I do not believe that it would be sensible to disturb
"the sleeping dog of whether there is any anthrax contamination
"on either of the two headlands downwind of Gruinard Island."
So what he's saying is we should just let it lie
and hope that it will go away.
Timescale over which spores can exist is 40 to 50 years,
but under some conditions might even be viable after 200 years.
I think if somebody were to provide new evidence
that there are anthrax spores in the environment on the mainland,
then, you know, that would be a concern.
These documents raise questions about whether the MOD in Porton Down
in the 1980s, in the wake of the Dark Harvest incident, were honest.
But if it's true, there's been no serious clean-up of the wider area,
the story's not over.
Today, for those touring the Highlands,
Gruinard is just another picturesque little island off the coast,
and anyone can go there.
But the legacy of its past lingers in the mind,
if no longer on the land.
You sort of feel, when you travel through that area,
this terrible irony between the beauty of the landscape
and the horror of what has happened there.
It is a real conflict.
The fact that something so impossibly awful happened
in such a beautiful place does add a lot of psychological depth.
There are a number of MOD documents that remain sealed until 2069...
..and the question of who were the Dark Harvest Commandos
remains unanswered.
PRODUCER: Were you involved in Dark Harvest?
No.
And I know nothing whatsoever about who was involved.
Kay Matheson wasn't backward in promoting the cause
that she obviously felt very strongly about.
But by the early 1980s, she was standing for MP,
and I would suspect that she was perhaps trying
to keep her nose clean.
I think the Gruinard story was probably pivotal for us
because it made us realise, actually, how sensitive
the Government was to groups like ours.
PRODUCER: Were you involved in the taking of the soil?
In an era before eco-warriors and direct action,
this protest saved at least one small piece of the Earth.
It's a bit like Greenpeace before Greenpeace got famous, I think.
PRODUCER: Would you have liked to have done it?
I kind of, you know, it would be...
..it would be something you could be proud of.
You know what I mean?
It's a kind of exciting exploit,
and I just wish I could say that I was part of it, cos I wasn't.
I wish I had been.
I would love to have been that person, but I wasn't.
The people of the Highlands
could once again set foot on Gruinard soil.
Apart, that is, from the 300lbs worth of contaminated soil removed,
put into sacks and hidden away by Dark Harvest.
To this day, it's never been recovered.
The tourists who follow the North Coast 500
up past beautiful Gruinard Bay might want to take care
if they spot an old sack of soil
behind a Highland hideout.