Edward Tyczkowski doesn't look like someone who would leave a bunch of chemical warfare agents lying around. Distinguished, courteous and soft-spoken, he has a shock of brushed-back white hair that is amazingly thick for a man of 79 years. With a Ph.D. in chemistry from Duke, Tyczkowski seems more like a tweedy retired professor than the guy responsible for creating the dangerous mess in Tennessee -- a place that an EPA official has called "one of the five worst sites in the history of the southeast United States."

Even his harshest critics agree that Tyczkowski is a first-rate scientist with an impressive résumé. Over the past half-century, he has conducted groundbreaking research for private industry, made rocket propellants for the U.S. military, and supplied blue-chip corporate clients with exotic chemicals, many of them unavailable from any other source in the world. But his extraordinary intelligence has never extended to public relations. The warning signs were evident as far back as 1970, when Tyczkowski opened a chemical company in a poor neighborhood of Durham, N.C. The company's name, he says, was "sort of a joke between my wife and me." He called it Armageddon Chemical.

What Armageddon produced was no joke. Tyczkowski specialized in producing compounds made with fluorine, a versatile element that has helped scientists prevent tooth decay, make medicines, manufacture computer chips and create Teflon. It is also very reactive and corrosive and can be extremely toxic. That's why fluorine is often used to make chemical weapons, including PFIB and Sarin, the nerve gas released in Tokyo's subways in 1995 by members of a religious cult, killing 12 and injuring more than 5,000. Company records indicate that Armageddon's many government clients included the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, the nation's principal research and development center for chemical and biological defense.

But according to those who knew him, Tyczkowski's main motivation was neither patriotism nor profits. "Ed just wanted to make chemicals," says a former employee. "He was happy in the lab." Even after years in his profession, he was like a brainy kid with a brand-new chemistry set: just as excited and perhaps just as heedless of the risks. "I got the impression from him that no one was as smart as he was about anything, particularly when it came to chemistry," says Dan Hawkins, an official with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation who spent years investigating Tyczkowski. "And in a way, that's right -- he probably knew more about fluorine than anyone else in the country. It was like he was above it all -- that he was so intelligent that the laws didn't apply to him."

The trouble at Armageddon started with a side business that Tyczkowski spun off to investors while maintaining an operational role. Located in a residential neighborhood just yards from family homes, the plant -- which recycled industrial solvents -- was essentially a large metal shack. Stacked high in the dusty yard outside were hundreds of barrels of hazardous waste, some rusting, some leaking, some spray-painted with question marks because the exact chemical identity of their contents was unknown. "There were kids running through the site with open barrels around," recalls Steve Unruhe, a local high school teacher who campaigned against the facility. "It was unbelievable." Then, in 1983, a cloud of toxic vapor escaped from the recycling plant. Residents were evacuated for more than five hours and two firefighters were overcome by fumes, even though they were wearing masks and air packs. It's not clear the release posed any real danger to the community -- but the company did little to cooperate with city officials, and Tyczkowski's imperious attitude only helped galvanize opposition to the plant. "Life is hazardous," he said at the time, dismissing the risks. Under pressure from the city and state, the recycling facility was forced to close two years later.

But the controversy did nothing to dampen the U.S. military's enthusiasm for Tyczkowski. Armageddon Chemical continued to receive defense contracts. In a letter to the scientist dated Feb. 11, 1987, August J. Muller, a research chemist at Aberdeen, praised his "excellent service in the past" and predicted he would receive a new contract "in the near future."

Unfortunately, the Army apparently didn't bother to monitor how Tyczkowski disposed of the dangerous chemicals he used and produced. In 1995, a customer who was getting his car fixed at an auto shop next door to Armageddon wandered through an open gate at the site, by then abandoned, and discovered barrels of toxic chemicals -- including cyanide, mercury, lead and various acids -- strewn inside and outside the building. When city officials demanded that Tyczkowski clean up the mess, he simply packed up many of the chemicals and shipped them to a new lab he had set up in Newport, Tenn.

Amazingly, the federal government helped pay for his move. His new company, the Flura Corp., was located on the edge of the Cherokee National Forest in a poverty-stricken area of Appalachia that Esquire magazine labeled "the acknowledged moonshine capital of the world." Tyczkowski promised to create dozens of jobs in a county where unemployment was running at more than 17 percent. In return, the feds financed a state-administered $225,000 loan to help him buy Rock Hill Laboratory, an abandoned facility in Newport that had previously conducted research on chemical weapons for the military. Tyczkowski didn't bother to mention his troubles at Armageddon on his loan application, and even some state regulators weren't sure what he was doing on the hill outside of town. "I knew that they made gases," recalls Hawkins, "but I thought they probably just sold oxygen or dental gases or something." Hawkins soon learned otherwise. As laid-back as Tyczkowski is aloof, Hawkins projects a frazzled, regular-guy demeanor -- think Columbo with a Tennessee twang. On March 3, 1997, he and a co-worker arrived at Flura to investigate toxic wastes that had been dumped on the property by the lab's previous occupants -- a formidable environmental problem in itself. Among the compounds known to have been manufactured at the lab was BZ, an extremely potent chemical-warfare agent that attacks the central nervous system. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the U.S. military maintained weaponized stocks of BZ -- also known as "agent buzz" because its effects on the brain, which include hallucinations and memory loss, are thought to be even more powerful than those of LSD or mescaline.

Not taking any chances, Hawkins and his co-worker had brought along protective moonsuits. The two men were standing in the parking lot of the lab, about to climb into the bio-gear, when they heard a loud pop, followed by a hiss. They looked up to see a cloud of yellowish gas leaving the facility and heading their way.

"We thought it was steam at first, but then it didn't dissipate like steam would," Hawkins says. "By the time we realized that it wasn't steam, there was nothing we could do about it. We had nowhere to run." Within seconds, the two men were engulfed by a sulfury-smelling cloud.

After it drifted past, Hawkins set out in search of Tyczkowski to find out what had happened. He was alarmed to discover that the gas might have been sulfur tetrafluoride -- potentially fatal when inhaled -- and equally disturbed by the chemist's dismissive response.

"You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time," Hawkins remembers Tyczkowski telling him.

Even more unsettling was what Hawkins observed inside the lab that day. Entering by a back door, he found the facility in disarray, its storage areas overcrowded with containers showing obvious signs of rust and decay. Realizing there was "a tremendous problem" at the facility, Hawkins began keeping a close watch on Flura. In March of 1999, having received reports of worsening conditions at the lab, he returned for an unscheduled inspection.

What he found terrified him. There were leaks in a 20,000-gallon storage tank filled with hazardous wastes. There were highly toxic gases stored in containers that were about to breach. There were explosive chemicals that had been allowed to recrystalize, ready to detonate at the slightest shock. And perhaps most alarmingly, there were canisters of PFIB that "looked like they had been laying out rusting for about 100 years."

Although the military initially denied to local media that it had done business with Tyczkowski, an investigation by Salon and Rolling Stone confirms that the Army awarded him a $137,000 contract in 1990 to produce the PFIB for what was then known as the Chemical and Biological Defense Command. The purpose of the gas remains classified -- but at the time it was purchased, U.S. military officials were concerned that the Russians, and possibly other former Eastern Bloc states, had developed PFIB as a weapon. One Tennessee official who has investigated the sale says Army scientists used it to study how to protect U.S. soldiers. "They probably killed a lot of lab rats with the stuff," the official said. After completing the Army's order, Tyczkowski simply held on to surplus canisters of PFIB, selling it as a research chemical.

Hawkins was no stranger to toxic substances, but in 20 years of environmental work, he had never seen anything that frightened him as much as Tyczkowski's lab. "Nothing ever came close to this from a purely 'this will hurt you today' standpoint," he says. "I was shocked. I was scared. I was in a state of disbelief at all the things that he had. Some of this stuff was so far off the chart as far as being dangerous. It was just the worst of all nightmares."

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