[News] New Evidence Implicates CIA in 1971 Attack on Cuba with African Swine Fever Virus

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2020/10/05/new-evidence-implicates-cia-in-1971-attack-on-cuba-with-african-swine-fever-virus/
New
Evidence Implicates CIA in 1971 Attack on Cuba with African Swine Fever
Virus
October 5, 2020 - Ken Lawrence
------------------------------
*Plum Island*, location of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps base at Fort Terry
from 1952 to 1956, was established to pursue a program of research and
development of certain anti-animal (BW) agents. (a.k.a. biological weapons)
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to operate the
Plum Island center while they build a new home for the laboratory at
*Manhattan,
Kansas*, scheduled to open in 2021 as the National Bio and Agro-Defense
Facility (NBAF). *Navassa Island* is the location where the Navy was
investigating the possible presence of biological toxins around the time
that agents were reported to have brought dangerous microbes to the island
in preparation for a biological attack on Cuba. [Source: CovertAction
Magazine]

*[Ken Lawrence is an investigative journalist and veteran writer for
*CovertAction
Magazine*. Since the magazine’s founding in the late 1970’s, Lawrence
regularly penned the popular column “Sources and Methods.” See the archives
<https://covertactionmagazine.com/archives/>. In this piece, he continues
his column and presents new evidence of the 1971 CIA attack on Cuba with
the African Swine Fever virus (ASFV).—Editors.]*

“Cuban Outbreak of Swine Fever Linked to CIA”
<https://www.uky.edu/~rmfarl2/cubabio1.htm> headlined a January 9, 1977,
article by Drew Featherston and John Cummings in *Newsday*, a Long Island,
New York, daily paper. It began,

With at least the tacit backing of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
officials, operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African
swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971. Six weeks later an outbreak of the
disease forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal
epidemic.

A U.S. intelligence source told Newsday he was given the virus in a sealed,
unmarked container at a U.S. Army base and CIA training ground in the
Panama Canal Zone, with instructions to turn it over to the anti-Castro
group.

The 1971 outbreak, the first and only time the disease has hit the Western
Hemisphere, was labeled the “most alarming event” of 1971 by the United
Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. African swine fever is a highly
contagious and usually lethal viral disease that infects only pigs and,
unlike swine flu, cannot be transmitted to humans. There were no human
deaths in the outbreak, but all production of pork, a Cuban staple, came to
a halt, apparently for several months. . . .

The U.S. intelligence source said that early in 1971 he was given the virus
in a sealed, unmarked container at Ft. Gulick, an Army base in the Panama
Canal Zone. The CIA also operated a paramilitary training center for career
personnel and mercenaries at Ft. Gulick. . . .

Another man involved in the operation, a Cuban exile who asked not to be
identified, said he was on the trawler where the virus was put aboard at a
rendezvous point off Bocas del Toro, Panama. He said the trawler carried
the virus to Navassa Island, a tiny, deserted, U.S.-owned island between
Jamaica and Haiti. From there, after the trawler made a brief stopover, the
container was taken to Cuba and given to other operatives on the southern
coast near the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay in late March, according to
the source on the trawler.

It was an explosive story, reprinted in newspapers across the country. The CIA
officially denied
<https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-01208R000100220009-0.pdf>
it six days later, in response to a request from the U.S. Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence, but the *Newsday* reporters had cited so many
corroborating sources, with such specific details, that the denial was not
widely believed.

The most compelling reason for trusting the credibility of the *Newsday*
report was that the only place in the Western Hemisphere where the virus
was known to have been kept before the outbreak in Cuba was at the secret
Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) laboratory off the eastern tip of
Long Island, where local *Newsday* reporters had been cultivating sources
since the one and only time reporters had been allowed inside in October
1971.

Plum Island had hosted the U.S. Army Chemical Corps base at Fort Terry from
1952 to 1956. According to *Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons since 1945*
by Mark Wheelis and Lajos Rózsa, the mission at Fort Terry was “to
establish and pursue a program of research and development of certain
anti-animal (BW) agents.” (a.k.a. biological weapons) The U.S. Department
of Agriculture (USDA) took over from the Army in 1956.

President Richard Nixon ordered biological weapons research to cease in
1969, but in 1975 the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence revealed
that the CIA had continued to maintain a stockpile of biological agents and
toxins in violation of the order.
<https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94intelligence_activities_I.pdf>

*Newsday* had made no mention of Plum Island, perhaps to protect its
reporters’ sources, but other reporters quickly made the connection. In the
2004 book, *Lab 257* by Michael Christopher Carroll, the author wrote,

According to the federal government, Plum Island is the only location in
the United States where African swine fever virus is permitted. No one will
say on the record that the virus for the Cuban mission was prepared on Plum
Island and sent to Fort Gulick. However, given the frequent traffic between
Plum Island and Fort Detrick, Maryland samples—with or without the USDA’s
knowledge of the ultimate purpose—could have been sent to Fort Detrick for
transshipment to Fort Gulick. . . .

Norman Covert, Fort Detrick’s historian, shows how the CIA could easily
have been involved—and unwittingly co-opted Plum Island. “There were CIA
people who infiltrated the [Fort Detrick] laboratories. They did their own
work with LSD and other psycho-illnesses. They had their own cell
there—they worked on their own, and I suspect a very small circle of people
knew that.” This type of information isolation—informing people of project
details on a need-to-know basis—is the brand of secrecy that might have
been used to poison Cuba’s food supply with germs. Compartmentalization of
each step made Plum Island an unknowing accomplice when it trafficked in
viruses between Fort Detrick and elsewhere.

Efforts to explain away the outbreak as a natural occurrence do not hold up
to close examination. The theory that food wastes from Spanish aircraft
were fed to domestic pigs fails to address that Cuba, like the United
States, had always kept their nation disease-free through strict
importation quarantines. Cuban investigators claim ASFV broke out
simultaneously in two distant locations; germ warfare experts say that
contemporaneous sites of infection are unnatural and point to a
deliberately caused outbreak. Because it is impossible to disprove, the
logic of a methodical scientist dictates that a germ warfare attack cannot
be ruled out. CIA assassination plots (some of which involved germs) and
the Bay of Pigs invasion stand as acknowledged covert acts by the United
States government to force regime change upon Cuba.

*View from Plum Island, bottom of photo, site of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture laboratory for infectious animal diseases. At top of photo is
Orient Point, Long Island, two miles away and separated by the waters of
Plum Gut channel. (October 23, 1971) [Source: AP wirephoto*]

Forty-nine years after the biological warfare attack on Cuba, the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to operate the Plum Island
center while DHS builds a new home for the laboratory at Manhattan, Kansas,
scheduled to open in 2021, to be known as the National Bio and Agro-Defense
Facility (NBAF).

USDA will own, manage, and operate the new facility, as it formerly did at
Plum Island. According to the DHS website, “The federal government will
execute a plan to provide for seamless transition of the agricultural
defense mission from PIADC to the NBAF that includes an overlap of
operations to make certain there is no interruption of the critical science
mission and operational capabilities.”
JFK files reveal U.S. biological warfare plans against Cuba. [source:
whowhatwhy.org
<https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/05/09/jfk-files-reveal-us-biological-warfare-plans-against-cuba>]


Today, as in 1977, the government officially denies sponsoring an offensive
biological warfare program. Further, today, as then, it asserts claims of
security that prevent any effective independent verification and critical
oversight. But a scarcely noticed detail of the *Newsday* report offers
grounds for a fresh look at the evidence of the 1971 attack:

…the trawler carried the virus to Navassa Island, a tiny, deserted,
U.S.-owned island between Jamaica and Haiti. From there, after the trawler
made a brief stopover, the container was taken to Cuba…

Despite Haiti’s objection since 1858, Navassa Island is the original United
States overseas possession claimed in 1857 and officially declared a U.S.
“appurtenance” in 1859. My Navassa research file includes a previously
unreported document that lends circumstantial support to the *Newsday*
story—a 1986 typescript draft of an article by U.S. Coast Guard lighthouse
historian Neil Hurley titled “Navassa Island Light, ‘Where Chickens Only
Miraculously Survive the Attacks of Lizards.’”
Despite Haiti’s objection since 1858, Navassa Island is the original United
States overseas possession, claimed in 1857 and officially declared a U.S.
“appurtenance” in 1859. [Source: CovertAction Magazine]

When Hurley’s article appeared in the Winter 1988 issue of *The Keeper’s
Log*, under the title “Navassa Lighthouse,” these two sentences from his
earlier draft were omitted: “In 1971, a U.S. Navy Research team visited the
Island to look for animal diseases that could be transmitted to man. They
found one bird carrying malaria.”

It might be a coincidence, but it seems remarkable that the Navy was
investigating the possible presence of biological toxins on Navassa Island
at about the time that agents were reported to have brought dangerous
microbes to Navassa for a biological attack on Cuba.

By itself, the two-sentence unpublished excerpt from Hurley’s monograph
doesn’t amount to much. However, two U.S. Navy missions to Swan Island off
the coast of Honduras in 1960 and 1961 provided essential logistical
support for the CIA’s communication and propaganda center for the 1961 Bay
of Pigs invasion.

The unpublished lines in Hurley’s typescript leave this lingering question
unanswered: Did the 1971 U.S. Navy mission to Navassa Island provide
support for an African swine fever attack on Cuba, a decade after two Navy
missions transported supplies to another Caribbean island for the CIA’s
failed invasion of Cuba?
------------------------------

*Ken Lawrence* is an investigative journalist and veteran writer for
*CovertAction
Magazine.* Since the magazine’s founding in the late 1970’s, Lawrence
regularly penned the popular column “Sources and Methods.” See the archives
<https://covertactionmagazine.com/archives/>.

Lawrence was born in 1942 and raised in Chicago. At age 17, in 1960, he
traveled to Atlanta to attend the conference of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, and witnessed the emerging civil rights movement at
first hand. The following spring, after his second year of college,
Lawrence left school to become a full-time activist. He moved to
Mississippi in 1971 to work full time as an organizer and writer. From 1971
to 1975, he was the Deep South representative of the Southern Conference
Educational Fund (SCEF), and correspondent for The Southern Patriot, a
monthly civil-rights movement paper. Today, Lawrence is a free-lance
writer, researcher, editor, lecturer, historian, and media consultant
living in rural Pennsylvania.
------------------------------
*CovertAction Magazine* is made possible by *subscriptions
<https://covertactionmagazine.com/subscribe/>*, *orders
<https://covertactionmagazine.com/orders/>* and *donations
<https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=SA3KBFLUKNW5E&source=url>*
from
readers like you.



When you donate to *CovertAction*, you are supporting investigative
journalism. Your contributions go directly to supporting the development,
production, editing, and dissemination of the Magazine.

*CovertAction Magazine* does not receive corporate or government
sponsorship and does not sell advertisements. Yet, we hold a steadfast
commitment to providing compensation for writers, editorial and technical
support. Your support helps facilitate this compensation as well as
increase the caliber of this work.

Please make a donation by clicking on the donate logo above and typing in
the amount and your credit or debit card information.

*CovertAction Magazine,* *CovertAction Quarterly* and *CovertAction
Information Bulletin* are projects of *Covert Action Publications, Inc.*, a
not-for-profit organization incorporated in the State of New York.
*We sincerely thank you for your support.*

*Disclaimer:* The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of
the author(s). Covert Action Publications, Inc. (CAP), including its Board
of Directors (BD), Editorial Board (EB), Advisory Board (AB), staff,
volunteers and its projects (including *CoverAction Magazine*) are not
responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. This
article also does not necessarily represent the views the BD, the EB, the
AB, staff, volunteers, or any members of its projects.

*Republishing:** CovertAction Magazine* (CAM) grants permission to
cross-post CAM articles on not-for-profit community internet sites as long
as the source is acknowledged together with a hyperlink to the
original *CoverAction
Magazine* article. Also, kindly let us know at info at CovertActionMagazine.com.
For publication of CAM articles in print or other forms including
commercial internet sites, contact: info at CovertActionMagazine.com.

*By using this site, you agree to these terms above.*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20201005/8495d90d/attachment.htm>