A project that began three decades ago using gerbils as a secret way to sniff out narcotics and capture terrorists is evolving into a tool for ridding war-ravaged Africa of land mines.

At the heart of each new incarnation of the research are rodents that are easily trained and have extremely sensitive noses.

The potential new humanitarian applications of the little rodents' vapour detection, however, belies the tortuous path the innovative Canadian idea has followed.

When the gerbils were brought into Canadian prisons to sniff out drugs, there were suspicions the animals were murdered to keep their twitching noses out of the inmate drug trade, according to documents released under the Access to Information Act.

The project was subjected to sabotage, budget constraints and the ever-present problem of controlling the smell of gerbil urine until a Belgian consortium, with a Canadian consultant, moved forward with the anti-land mine idea.

The research started in the early 1970s, when the government demanded new, top-secret methods to counter terrorist attacks, according to two retired researchers.

It was shortly after terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich and terrorism was a growing international concern.

"The government wanted to train dogs to detect potential skyjackers. They wanted to know if this was possible," said Dr. Gerry Biederman, one of the researchers.

Dr. Biederman, now 61, was then a professor at the University of Toronto specializing in animal learning. He started working with Dr. Lorne Elias, now 71, who was an Ottawa-based scientist with the government.

The team needed a scent associated with terrorists that dogs could be trained to detect. "We turned up adrenalin level as the best indicator for acute stress in a situation where you are about to go in and drop a bomb in an airplane or skyjack it," said Dr. Biederman.

"The problem with dogs, though, is you have this very large dog and a very expensive handler and trainer and it is a very expensive proposition. And you can't really have these man-eating dogs wandering around the airport. People would never stand for it."

That was shown when they demonstrated their progress to government bureaucrats.

The dogs, trained to head for the highest concentration of adrenalin, caught the scent of a civil servant who was terrified of dogs rather than the samples brought in, said Dr. Biederman.

"He was a big shot from the Ministry of Transport and the dog lunges at this guy. The dog just went nuts. [The official] considered it a terrifying but highly successful test because the dogs certainly could sense adrenalin -- just that the highest level of adrenalin in the room happened to be this bureaucrat."

The researchers abandoned dogs in favour of rats and soon switched to gerbils.

"Gerbils are much cheaper than rats and the public reception of gerbils is far different," Dr. Biederman said.

Dr. Elias compared the gerbils' sense of smell with electronic devices -- and the rodents beat the machines every time. "I was quite impressed by the gerbils' ability to detect certain vapours. It convinced me that the gerbils could be trained to be very fast and very effective," he said.

Dr. Biederman created a special unit to house the animals and aid in detection. He was granted U.S. and Canadian patents for the invention.

A gerbil was kept in a metal-lined cage that an official could electrify with the push of a button. Each animal was trained to sniff the air when shocked and to push a red lever if it detected adrenalin and a green one if it did not. The red lever would alert officials by lighting a red alert light.

In the laboratory, the results were impressive after an estimated government expenditure of about $280,000. By the time the prototype was ready, however, government interest in terrorism had waned and drugs had emerged as the new enemy.

Canada Customs, the agency patrolling the borders, and Correctional Services of Canada, the agency running the prisons, wanted to find concealed drugs and, in 1980, came to Dr. Biederman.

"Frankly, we did the drug thing to try to fund the more important stuff, the anti-terrorism stuff. I was not very interested in the drug stuff: I never thought it was where we should be going. But we had to go where the money was," he said.

The government sent drug samples to his lab and a set of gerbils were trained to detect heroin, cocaine, marijuana and hashish, according to government documents.

During a trial run at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, the gerbils alerted officers to a smuggler who had wrapped himself in small bags of cocaine, said Dr. Biederman.

At Correctional Services, the gerbils became known as Operation Probe. Almost $71,000 in funding was allocated, including $6.60 for each of an initial batch of 16 gerbils. Then problems started.

Previously secret government documents highlight the desperate need for a way to control the smell of the gerbil's urine. There was also concern over animal safety.

"A sensitive public issue may be that the animals are stimulated by electric shock," say confidential briefing notes prepared at the time for Robert Kaplan, the Solicitor-General. "The consultant, however, assures CSC that it is a mild electric shock well within the Ontario standards set for laboratory animal experimentation."

Then came the allegations of murder.

In the summer of 1982, gerbils and the cabinet were sent to Cowansville Institution, a medium-security prison in Quebec, for a test. The first trials were successful, government reports say.

A week after the scientists turned the drug detector over to Cowansville staff, however, the gerbils started to die.

"Either they weren't fed or weren't given water or they were poisoned. I have no direct evidence but someone didn't seem to want us to detect for drugs," said Dr. Biederman.

The suspicious deaths also bothered a Correctional Services bureaucrat who, in an internal memo, wrote: "Personally, I cannot shake the thought that it was not all accidental and that no one tampered with the diet."

An autopsy suggested the animals' deaths were consistent with poisoning but a toxicology report found no traces of warfarin, the most common rodent pesticide.

New gerbils were trained for a test at Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security prison in Ontario, but when the cabinet arrived, it had been badly damaged.

The destruction suggested it had been deliberately tampered with, says an October, 1982, report. Retraining and rebuilding began, but Operation Probe was over budget.

On Feb. 21, 1983, Frank Purvis, acting head of operational security, wrote to his superiors recommending the project be terminated. "After all," he wrote, "this was intended to be a pilot project to determine if gerbils were feasible in a harsh penitentiary environment. Time and money have shown they are not."

A year later, the file was closed.

The idea was abandoned by Dr. Biederman, but the results of the tests continued to gain international attention. U.S. prisons, mental hospitals and a Chinese corporation wrote to the government after the project was shelved, seeking information about the research.

Dr. Elias, years after retiring from the government, agreed to work as a consultant for Apopo, a non-profit Belgium corporation developing cheap ways of clearing minefields in Third World countries.

Apopo is testing rats trained to sniff out dynamite, which is the most common active ingredient in land mines.

They first tried releasing trained, cat-sized, vegetarian rats into suspected mine fields in Tanzania, on the east coast of Africa. They were successful but slow, said Dr. Elias. They then started bringing soil samples to the rats.

In a process similar to the gerbil drug detector, the rats alert officials to samples imbued with traces of explosives, suggesting the area from where the soil was taken contains land mines.

"It is quite a different project from the gerbils but it is related," Dr. Elias. "We'll see what comes of it this time around."

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-- Anonymous, May 10, 2001