In his book '' Lab 257 : The Disturbing Story of the Government 's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory , '' which relied heavily on research obtained through the Freedom of Information Act , Michael Christopher Carroll wrote that in a 2002 raid of the Kabul , Afghanistan , residence of Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood , a nuclear physicist who American officials have identified as an associate of Osama bin Laden , C.I.A . operatives and Army commandos found a '' dossier '' containing '' information on a place in New York called the Plum Island Animal Disease Center . ''