Rajneeshees and the Bioterror Attack

Overview

In the fall of 1984, followers of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh contaminated salad bars at ten restaurants in The Dalles, Oregon, with Salmonella typhimurium, sickening 751 people and hospitalizing 45. It remains the largest bioterrorist attack in United States history. The poisoning was not an act of ideological warfare or geopolitical terrorism — it was a dress rehearsal for stealing a county election.

The Rajneeshee story is one of those rare cases where the confirmed facts are stranger than any conspiracy theory could invent. A wealthy Indian mystic who preached spiritual liberation and collected Rolls-Royces. A commune of thousands carved out of Oregon ranchland that incorporated itself as an actual city. A personal secretary who ran the operation like a paramilitary state — complete with a biological weapons laboratory, wiretapping rooms, a private airstrip, and a scheme to bus thousands of homeless Americans to the commune to register as voters. An attempted assassination of a US Attorney. An attempted murder of Rajneesh’s own personal physician. And at the center of it all, the enduring question: did the guru know?

The crimes are confirmed. Multiple members pleaded guilty. The commune was dismantled, the city dissolved. But the full scope of what happened at Rajneeshpuram — and the question of who was ultimately directing it — remains one of the more unsettling chapters in the history of organized crime on American soil.

The Guru

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was born Chandra Mohan Jain on December 11, 1931, in Kuchwada, a small village in British India’s Central Provinces. He studied philosophy at the University of Sagar and taught at the University of Jabalpur before leaving academia to become a full-time spiritual teacher in the late 1960s. His teachings drew from Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, and Western philosophy, but what set him apart from other Indian gurus was his explicit embrace of materialism, sexuality, and capitalism. He rejected asceticism. He mocked Gandhi. He told his followers that poverty was not holy — it was stupid.

By the mid-1970s, Rajneesh had built a substantial following at his ashram in Pune, India. Thousands of Westerners — many of them well-educated, professionally successful Europeans and Americans — traveled to Pune for his lectures, meditation programs, and therapy groups, which incorporated everything from primal scream therapy to nude encounter sessions. His followers wore sunset-colored clothing and took new Sanskrit names. They called him “Bhagwan,” meaning “the blessed one.”

Rajneesh was brilliant, charismatic, and deliberately provocative. He gave sprawling daily lectures that ranged across world religions, psychology, politics, and sex — often landing on sex. The Indian press called him the “sex guru.” Western media followed suit. He cultivated controversy the way other gurus cultivated silence. He was also, by the late 1970s, accumulating enormous wealth from donations and fees paid by his followers.

In 1981, Rajneesh left India under murky circumstances. The Indian government had begun scrutinizing the ashram’s tax-exempt status, and there were legal disputes over land use. Rajneesh entered the United States on a medical visa, ostensibly for treatment of a spinal condition. What happened next was not a quiet recuperation.

Building Rajneeshpuram

In July 1981, the Rajneesh Foundation International purchased a 64,229-acre ranch near the small town of Antelope, Oregon (population 40), for approximately $5.75 million. The property, known as the Big Muddy Ranch, was arid, remote, and largely undeveloped. Within months, thousands of red-clad followers — sannyasins — descended on it and began building.

What they built was astonishing. In roughly three years, the Rajneeshees constructed an entire city from nothing: residential buildings, a 10,000-seat meditation hall, a shopping mall, restaurants, an airport with a paved runway long enough for commercial jets, a bus system, a fire department, a sewage treatment plant, a reservoir, and extensive agricultural operations. They called the city Rajneeshpuram and incorporated it in 1982 under Oregon law. At its peak, approximately 7,000 people lived there.

The commune operated on a model of intensive communal labor. Sannyasins worked twelve-hour days — sometimes longer — building infrastructure, farming, cooking, and cleaning. They signed over their assets, donated their savings, worked without pay. In exchange, they got housing, food, community, and proximity to their guru. Many described it as the most meaningful period of their lives. Others, later, described it as exploitation.

The relationship with local Oregonians was hostile from the start. Wasco County residents viewed the Rajneeshees as a cult invasion. Zoning disputes, land-use battles, and cultural clashes escalated into a grinding legal and political war. The tiny town of Antelope became a proxy battleground: the Rajneeshees moved enough members into Antelope to take over the city council, renamed the town “Rajneesh,” and used it as a power base to challenge county and state authorities. Oregon’s attorney general filed suit challenging the legality of Rajneeshpuram’s incorporation on grounds that it violated the separation of church and state.

In the middle of all this, Rajneesh himself was largely invisible. In 1981, he had entered a period of public silence — he stopped giving lectures and communicated only through his personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela. This silence would last until 1984. It was during this period that the commune’s criminal operations expanded from legal maneuvering into outright conspiracy.

The Bioterror Attack

Ma Anand Sheela — born Sheela Ambalal Patel in Baroda, India — had been Rajneesh’s personal secretary since the early 1970s. With Rajneesh in silence, she became the commune’s de facto leader: spokesperson, strategist, and enforcer. She was confrontational, media-savvy, and increasingly authoritarian. Under her direction, the commune developed an inner circle that operated as a shadow government, running operations that the rank-and-file sannyasins knew nothing about.

The biological weapons program was organized by Ma Anand Puja — born Diane Yvonne Onang, a Filipino-American nurse who ran the commune’s medical clinic, known as the Pythagoras Medical Center. Puja had a background in nursing and laboratory work, and she applied those skills to building what federal investigators later described as a surprisingly sophisticated bioweapons operation.

The commune’s laboratory acquired cultures of Salmonella typhimurium from the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), a nonprofit biological repository that at the time sold bacterial samples to virtually anyone who could fill out an order form. (The ease of this acquisition later led to significant reforms in the regulation of biological agent sales.) Puja’s laboratory grew and maintained the salmonella cultures, and also experimented with other pathogens, including the HIV virus and Salmonella typhi, the far more dangerous agent that causes typhoid fever.

In September 1984, Rajneeshee operatives began contaminating salad bars at restaurants in The Dalles, the county seat of Wasco County. The method was simple: team members visited restaurants, approached salad bars, and poured liquid containing salmonella cultures onto food — lettuce, salad dressings, coffee creamers. Over a two-week period in September and October, ten restaurants were hit.

The results were immediate and severe. Seven hundred and fifty-one people fell ill. Forty-five were hospitalized. No one died, though several victims were critically ill. It was the largest foodborne illness outbreak in Oregon’s history, and investigators initially treated it as a natural contamination event — a failure of food handling at multiple restaurants.

What the investigators did not know at the time was that the September-October attack was a test run. The real plan was larger: incapacitate enough Wasco County voters before the November 1984 election to swing the results in favor of Rajneeshee candidates running for county commissioner and other local offices. If enough of The Dalles’ population was too sick to vote, the commune’s bloc — reinforced by additional tactics — could take control of Wasco County government.

The salmonella attack was not identified as deliberate until a full year later, when members of Sheela’s inner circle began defecting and talking to investigators.

The Election Plot

The bioterror attack was only one component of a broader scheme to take over Wasco County’s political apparatus. The other prong was a voter registration campaign of breathtaking cynicism.

In the weeks before the November 1984 election, the commune began busing homeless people from cities across the United States — Los Angeles, Houston, New York, and others — to Rajneeshpuram. The program, called “Share-A-Home,” was presented publicly as a charitable outreach effort. Buses arrived at the commune carrying hundreds of transient people, who were housed, fed, given red clothing, and registered to vote in Wasco County.

At its peak, the Share-A-Home program brought an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 homeless individuals to the commune. The scale was staggering — it would have been enough to overwhelm the existing electorate of Wasco County, where total voter registration was only around 13,000.

Oregon Secretary of State Norma Paulus responded by requiring all new registrants to appear in person to verify their eligibility. Wasco County officials challenged the registrations. The legal battle consumed the weeks leading up to the election. Ultimately, the Rajneeshees’ candidates were defeated, and the voter-registration scheme failed.

But the homeless people who had been bused to the commune presented a new problem. Many were mentally ill, addicted, or both. After the election scheme collapsed, the commune had no further use for them. According to later testimony, some were sedated with the tranquilizer Haldol administered in beer — allegedly to keep them manageable. Many were simply dropped off in cities across Oregon, including Portland, where social services agencies were suddenly dealing with hundreds of disoriented, newly homeless individuals.

The Collapse

By mid-1985, Rajneeshpuram was disintegrating from the inside. Sheela’s inner circle had fractured. Several top lieutenants defected and began speaking to federal and state investigators. Rajneesh himself broke his three-year silence in September 1985, held a press conference, and publicly denounced Sheela and her associates, calling them a “gang of fascists.” He invited law enforcement to investigate the commune and claimed he had known nothing of the criminal activities.

Sheela fled to Europe with several associates. State and federal investigators moved into Rajneeshpuram and began cataloging what they found: the salmonella laboratory, a wiretapping operation that had bugged Rajneesh’s own living quarters and most of the commune’s phones, an arson attack on a Wasco County planning office, and evidence of the attempted murder of Rajneesh’s personal physician, Swami Devaraj (George Meredith), who had been injected with an unknown substance in a near-lethal assault. Investigators also uncovered a plot to assassinate Charles Turner, the US Attorney for the District of Oregon, which had been planned but never carried out.

The wiretapping operation was particularly extensive. Sheela’s team had installed listening devices throughout the commune, including in Rajneesh’s personal quarters, the hotel where visitors stayed, the telephone system, and even in the bedroom of the commune’s elected mayor. The operation was run from a hidden room in Sheela’s residence that investigators dubbed “the bugging room.”

On October 28, 1985, Rajneesh himself was arrested while attempting to leave the country on a chartered jet that had stopped for refueling in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was carrying $58,000 in cash, 35 platinum watches, and a loaded handgun — though the gun belonged to one of his companions. Federal authorities charged him with immigration fraud, specifically arranging sham marriages to allow foreign followers to remain in the United States.

Rajneesh entered an Alford plea to two felony counts of immigration fraud. Under the plea agreement, he paid a $400,000 fine and agreed to leave the United States and not return for at least five years. He departed the country in November 1985.

Sheela was arrested in West Germany in October 1985 and extradited to the United States. She pleaded guilty to charges including attempted murder (for the attack on Swami Devaraj and the salmonella poisoning), assault, wiretapping, arson, and immigration fraud. She was sentenced to twenty years in federal prison but was released after serving only twenty-nine months, a remarkably short term that itself generated suspicion and controversy.

Ma Anand Puja pleaded guilty to attempted murder and other charges related to the bioweapons program. She served two and a half years in prison.

Rajneeshpuram was abandoned by the end of 1985. The city was disincorporated. The property was eventually purchased by Young Life, a Christian youth ministry, which operates it as a camp to this day.

Did Rajneesh Know?

This is the question that has never been fully resolved, and it remains the central point of conspiracy debate around the Rajneeshee case.

Rajneesh’s position, maintained consistently from September 1985 until his death, was that Ma Anand Sheela had operated independently. He claimed that during his period of silence, he had been meditating, unaware that Sheela had transformed the commune into a criminal enterprise. He framed himself as a spiritual teacher exploited by a power-hungry subordinate. When he broke his silence to denounce her, he used the language of a victim.

There are reasons to take this claim seriously. Multiple former sannyasins have described Sheela as genuinely controlling — she managed Rajneesh’s access to information, decided who could and could not see him, and ran the commune’s daily operations with a tight inner circle that excluded most members. The wiretapping of Rajneesh’s own quarters suggests that Sheela may have been monitoring him, not serving him.

But there are equally compelling reasons for skepticism. Rajneesh was not a passive figure. Before his silence, he had given detailed instructions on virtually every aspect of the commune’s operations. Former close associates, including his physician Swami Devaraj and his dentist Swami Devageet, have suggested that Rajneesh was more aware of the commune’s activities than he admitted. Some have pointed to statements Rajneesh made during his silence — communicated through notes and brief verbal exchanges — that appeared to reference or endorse aggressive tactics against local opponents.

The wiretapping evidence is ambiguous. Some tapes recovered by investigators contain recordings of Rajneesh speaking with Sheela in terms that, depending on interpretation, could suggest awareness of the criminal operations or could reflect vague discussions about “dealing with” opponents. The recordings were not definitive enough to support criminal charges against Rajneesh beyond the immigration fraud counts.

Federal investigators, including the FBI agents who worked the case, have expressed varying opinions. Some believe Rajneesh was genuinely isolated by Sheela. Others have stated publicly that they believe he was aware of and approved the major operations, but that the evidence was insufficient for prosecution. US Attorney Charles Turner — himself the target of the assassination plot — stated that he believed Rajneesh had knowledge of the criminal activities but that proving it beyond a reasonable doubt would have been extremely difficult.

The commune’s structure created a convenient layer of deniability. Rajneesh spoke in elliptical, metaphorical language even when giving direct instructions. He cultivated an air of otherworldly detachment. If he told Sheela to “take care of” a problem, what exactly did that mean? This ambiguity may have been deliberate. It may also have been sincere. The question cannot be answered with the available evidence.

Aftermath

Rajneesh returned to India after his deportation and eventually resettled at his old ashram in Pune, which he renamed the Rajneesh International Meditation Resort. In 1989, he changed his name to “Osho.” He died on January 19, 1990, at the age of fifty-eight.

His followers attributed his death to poisoning. Rajneesh himself had claimed publicly that the United States government had exposed him to thallium or some other radioactive substance during his twelve days in federal custody in October-November 1985. He pointed to deteriorating health — bone pain, hair thinning, immune system problems — that he said began after his incarceration. His personal physician, Swami Amrito (formerly Swami Devaraj), maintained that symptoms consistent with thallium poisoning were observed.

There is no independent evidence to confirm the poisoning claim. No blood or hair tests from the period of custody have been made public that would demonstrate thallium exposure. The US Marshals Service denied the allegation. Rajneesh’s supporters noted that the US government had a plausible motive — Rajneesh had embarrassed federal and state authorities — and that thallium poisoning would be difficult to detect without specific testing. Skeptics pointed out that Rajneesh had been in declining health for years, had a history of chronic conditions including asthma and diabetes, and had allegedly used nitrous oxide recreationally, which could account for many of the symptoms he described.

The poisoning allegation remains unresolved. It is not impossible — the US government has a documented history of using chemical and biological agents against individuals it considers threats, as the MKUltra and COINTELPRO records demonstrate. But no specific evidence has emerged to corroborate Rajneesh’s claim, and his preexisting health conditions offer an alternative explanation for his decline.

Ma Anand Sheela, after her release from prison, moved to Switzerland, where she runs two residential care homes for people with developmental disabilities. She has given numerous interviews over the decades, maintaining her position that she acted to protect the commune and that Rajneesh knew more than he admitted. The Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country (2018) brought her back into public attention and, somewhat remarkably, rehabilitated her image for a new generation. She was portrayed in the series as a complex, compelling figure rather than a simple villain — a framing that victims of the salmonella attack found difficult to accept.

The bioterror attack itself had lasting consequences for public health policy and biodefense. The ease with which the Rajneeshees obtained dangerous pathogens from the ATCC led to the enactment of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 and contributed to the regulatory framework that governs the sale of select agents today. The case became a standard reference in bioterrorism preparedness training for public health and law enforcement officials.

It also exposed a troubling vulnerability. The initial investigation by the Oregon Public Health Division and the Centers for Disease Control concluded that the salmonella outbreak was the result of poor restaurant hygiene. The deliberate contamination was not identified for more than a year — and then only because insiders talked. If the Rajneeshees had kept their silence, the first bioterror attack in American history might never have been recognized as one.

Timeline

• 1931 — Chandra Mohan Jain (later Rajneesh, later Osho) born in Kuchwada, British India
• 1966 — Resigns from university teaching to become a full-time spiritual lecturer
• 1974 — Establishes ashram in Pune, India; attracts growing Western following
• 1981 — Rajneesh enters the United States on a medical visa; enters a period of public silence
• July 1981 — Rajneesh Foundation International purchases the 64,229-acre Big Muddy Ranch in Wasco County, Oregon
• 1982 — Rajneeshpuram incorporated as a city under Oregon law; construction accelerates
• 1983 — Rajneeshees take over Antelope city council; town renamed “Rajneesh”; commune acquires salmonella cultures from ATCC
• September-October 1984 — Rajneeshee operatives contaminate salad bars at ten restaurants in The Dalles, poisoning 751 people
• October-November 1984 — “Share-A-Home” program buses approximately 3,000-4,000 homeless people to commune for voter registration
• November 1984 — Rajneeshee candidates are defeated in Wasco County elections; voter-registration scheme fails
• September 1985 — Rajneesh breaks his silence, denounces Ma Anand Sheela, invites investigators to the commune
• September 1985 — Sheela and associates flee to West Germany
• October 1985 — Sheela arrested in West Germany; Rajneesh arrested in Charlotte, North Carolina, while attempting to leave the country
• November 1985 — Rajneesh enters Alford plea to immigration fraud, pays $400,000 fine, agrees to leave the United States
• 1986 — Sheela pleads guilty to attempted murder, assault, wiretapping, arson, and immigration fraud; sentenced to twenty years
• 1988 — Sheela released from federal prison after twenty-nine months
• 1989 — Rajneesh changes his name to Osho; Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act signed into law
• January 19, 1990 — Rajneesh dies in Pune, India, at age fifty-eight; followers attribute death to thallium poisoning during US custody
• 2018 — Netflix releases Wild Wild Country, a six-part documentary series that brings renewed public attention to the case

Sources & Further Reading

• Abbott, Carl. “Retrospective: Utopia and Bureaucracy — The Fall of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon.” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 59, No. 1, 1990.
• Brecher, Robert, and Harvey Klehr. “The Dalles, Oregon, 1984: A Bio-Attack Case Study.” In Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons, edited by Jonathan B. Tucker. MIT Press, 2000.
• Carter, Lewis F. Charisma and Control in Rajneeshpuram: The Role of Shared Values in the Creation of a Community. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• FitzGerald, Frances. “Rajneeshpuram.” The New Yorker, September 22 and September 29, 1986.
• Hamilton, Rosemary. Hellbent for Enlightenment: Unmasking Sex, Power, and Death with a Notorious Master. White Cloud Press, 1998.
• Maclean, Way and Maclean, Chapman, directors. Wild Wild Country. Netflix, 2018.
• McCormick, Win. “The Rajneesh Files.” Oregon Magazine, 1985.
• Oregon Public Health Division. “Outbreak of Salmonella Gastroenteritis — The Dalles, Oregon, 1984.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), Centers for Disease Control, 1984.
• Stoen, Tim. “The Largest Biological Weapons Attack in US History.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2014.
• Torok, Thomas J., et al. “A Large Community Outbreak of Salmonellosis Caused by Intentional Contamination of Restaurant Salad Bars.” Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Vol. 278, No. 5, August 6, 1997.
• Tucker, Jonathan B. “The Rajneeshees.” In Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons. MIT Press, 2000.
• Zaitz, Les. “Rajneeshees’ Utopian Dream Crumbled as Reality Set In.” The Oregonian, April 14, 2011.

Related Theories

• MKUltra — The CIA’s confirmed mind control program, which also involved the covert administration of substances to unwitting subjects and demonstrated the US government’s willingness to conduct human experimentation. Rajneesh’s claim that the government poisoned him with thallium resonates with MKUltra’s documented history.
• Bioweapons Conspiracy — Broader theories about government and non-state development of biological weapons. The Rajneeshee case is one of the few confirmed instances of a non-state actor successfully deploying a biological agent against a civilian population in the United States.