The Rajneeshee Bioterror Attack
In September and October 1984, members of the Rajneeshee religious cult based in Wasco County, Oregon, covertly contaminated salad bars at ten restaurants in The Dalles, Oregon with Salmonella typhimurium bacteria, sickening 751 people in the first large-scale bioterrorism attack in American history. The attack was orchestrated by Ma Anand Sheela, personal secretary to cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, as part of a scheme to incapacitate voters in advance of a local election the Rajneeshees hoped to influence in favor of their candidates. Forty-five people were hospitalized; no one died.
Health investigators initially struggled to identify the source of the outbreak, which was attributed to food handling errors rather than deliberate contamination. The truth emerged nearly a year later, in 1985, when the cult community at Rajneeshpuram began imploding amid internal power struggles. Rajneesh himself broke with Sheela and called police, claiming she had run a criminal organization within the commune. Investigators discovered a clandestine laboratory where the bacteria had been cultured, along with evidence of wiretapping, attempted murder, and other crimes.
Ma Anand Sheela and her co-conspirator Ma Anand Puja were arrested and pleaded guilty to assault and wiretapping charges. Sheela received a twenty-year sentence but was released after serving twenty-nine months. Rajneesh was deported to India in 1985 after pleading guilty to immigration fraud, having been denied entry to every other country. The Rajneeshpuram commune dissolved.
The Rajneeshee bioterror attack remained relatively obscure for years but was brought to wide public attention by the 2018 Netflix documentary series "Wild Wild Country," which presented the full scope of the commune's activities and generated enormous global interest. The case is now studied as the foundational American bioterrorism incident, establishing frameworks for public health emergency response and the intersection of religious extremism, political manipulation, and criminal conspiracy. It demonstrated that mass casualties from biological attack were achievable by a non-state actor with modest resources.