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“SOMETIMES WHAT YOU don’t know can hurt you,” said Bob Spiegel.

What’s in the ground under the black rubber blanket at CIC can hurt the residents of Edison—and anybody who might happen to eat a blue crab caught downstream in the Raritan River. Buried in the EPA files is the transcript of a deposition so startling it’s a wonder the court reporter didn’t note in parentheses “(sound of lawyers’ jaws dropping).”

In July 1983 Arnold Livingston was sitting at a table in a nondescript state office in Trenton, his attorney at his side, being questioned by the director of New Jersey’s Office of Cancer and Toxic Substances Research. Late in the afternoon of a daylong session, Livingston’s attorney stopped the process, warning investigators that they were “about to run afoul of National Security laws or regulations.” Questioning could not continue without approval from deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force Lloyd Moseman.

When the Air Force called back to OK the questioning, Arnold Livingston related this story. While he was operating a mixing shack and four chemical slop-pits in a residential neighborhood in New Jersey, he was under contract with the United States Air Force. He had been hired to dispose of the Agent Orange that never got sprayed on the jungles in Vietnam.

He further testified that surplus Agent Orange, by then a known carcinogen, was being remixed and shipped to Brazil for use as an agricultural defoliant. Further, the Air Force was using the Rockefeller Foundation as a go-between for the military and operators like Livingston. The Air Force decided Livingston, the Rockefeller Foundation, and South America were the perfect disposal route for the defoliant associated with cancer in thousands of American servicemen and countless Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.* What didn’t go to Brazil was sent to Surinam and Venezuela. “I thought it was a good idea to save the U.S. government a great deal of money and do a great amount of good for the political situation for the United States and South America,” Livingston explained.

Program directors at the Rockefeller Foundation knew Livingston because they had been helping him move his business operations to the Amazon—in the name of economic development in South America. The Air Force knew him as a producer of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Livingston admitted he had dumped Agent Orange waste in the Edison municipal dump. He told investigators he didn’t recall warning workers who handled the product that it could cause cancer. He vented all his mixing sheds into the residential area, with no emissions protections. After telling his story, he even described himself as a victim of environmental hysteria.

The scheme was so outrageous, it is worth quoting Livingston’s description in full:

In essence, the Air Force, U.S. Air Force had I think about four or five million gallons of Agent Orange at two locations. One out in Johnson Island in the Pacific and the other one was in Gulfport, Mississippi, at a naval facility. Some of the containers that they had there were leaking. Some of the containers I recall had been repackaged several times. The Air Force was looking at various alternatives to dispose of the material. They included various things and a lot of them were considered objectionable for a variety of reasons. It struck me in working on this thing that there would be a very good use for this material if it was reformulated and planned to ship the material, subject to approval of the plan, down to—it was either a refinery or a chemical plant down in northern Brazil.

A major educational program would be undertaken in the areas where brushland was to be reclaimed and good grazing land was to be made. The Rockefeller Foundation would handle all the training down there. . . . We would handle all of the chemical work, all the supplies and provide backup service in the field.

Livingston assured state investigators the Agent Orange he handled was not shipped to the CIC plant—by then