Orchestrating America's first large-scale bioterrorist attack
Appears in 1 documentary
Ma Anand Sheela was born Sheela Silverman in Baroda, India, in 1949, and her name would become synonymous with one of the most audacious criminal conspiracies in American history. She is a figure who defies easy categorization — at once a devoted disciple, a ruthless power broker, and a convicted felon whose actions forced the United States government to confront the fragility of small-town democracy and the dangers of unchecked authoritarian control within religious movements.
Sheela first encountered the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later known as Osho, in the 1960s, and she became one of his most fervent followers. By the early 1980s, she had risen to serve as his personal secretary — a title that understated her actual authority enormously. When the Rajneeshee movement relocated from India to a 64,000-acre ranch in Wasco County, Oregon, in 1981, establishing the commune they called Rajneeshpuram, Sheela became its de facto administrator, public face, and enforcer.
She negotiated with county officials, appeared on national television programs, and managed a community that at its peak housed approximately 7,000 residents. Her manner was confrontational and theatrical, qualities that made her both effective and dangerous. She understood that media attention could be weaponized, and she wielded it with precision, turning hostile interviews into platforms for the movement’s message while concealing the commune’s darkening interior.
What unfolded between 1984 and 1985 revealed the full scope of Sheela’s ruthlessness. In September 1984, operatives acting under her direction contaminated salad bars at ten restaurants in The Dalles, Oregon, with Salmonella typhimurium — the first large-scale bioterrorist attack on American soil. The outbreak sickened 751 people. The goal was to incapacitate local voters ahead of a county election the Rajneeshees hoped to influence. No one died, but the attack marked a profound threshold: a religious organization had deliberately poisoned American civilians as a political instrument.
The conspiracy extended further. Sheela oversaw a wiretapping operation that surveilled commune members, including Rajneesh himself. She orchestrated a plot to assassinate the United States Attorney for Oregon, Charles Turner. Her inner circle attempted to murder Rajneesh’s personal physician. When investigators from the Oregon Attorney General’s office began closing in, Sheela fled to West Germany in September 1985.
She was extradited, and in 1986 she pleaded guilty to charges including attempted murder, assault, wiretapping, and the orchestration of the poisoning attack. She was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison but served less than three years before receiving early release for good behavior. She subsequently moved to Switzerland, where she later operated care homes for people with disabilities — a life chapter that added another layer of complexity to an already contradictory story.
Sheela’s historical significance reaches beyond the sensational details of her crimes. Her story exposed structural vulnerabilities that American institutions had not seriously contemplated: that a domestic religious community could construct a biological weapon, deploy it against civilians for electoral gain, and do so largely undetected for over a year. The investigation that followed her flight helped establish prosecutorial frameworks that later informed responses to domestic terrorism more broadly.
Her story also illuminated the psychological architecture of authoritarian control within insular communities — how loyalty, ideology, and isolation can be engineered to suppress dissent and enable atrocities. The Rajneeshpuram episode became a case study in radicalization, coercive control, and the manipulation of democratic processes that researchers and law enforcement officials continued to reference decades later.
The 2018 Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country, which brought her story to a new global audience, revealed something else: Sheela remained unrepentant and articulate, still capable of commanding a room. Whether viewed as a cautionary figure or a perversely compelling one, Ma Anand Sheela occupies a fixed and uncomfortable place in the history of American religious movements — proof that the machinery of devotion, when placed in the wrong hands, can be turned toward genuinely catastrophic ends.
The companion release to the Emmy-winning documentary series that brought Sheela's story to a global audience, featuring extensive archival material and interviews.
A detailed journalistic account of the Rajneeshpuram commune that places Sheela's role and criminal conspiracy in full historical context.
Written by a former insider, this account traces the movement Sheela served and helps explain how her authority went unchallenged for so long.
On March 10, 1957, the gates of The Dalles Dam closed on the Columbia River. Within hours the rising water covered Celilo Falls, where Native people had fished from wooden platforms for eleven thousand years, and tribal members stood on the banks weeping as the oldest continuously used fishing site in North America went silent.