<div dir="ltr">
<div id="gmail-toolbar" class="gmail-toolbar-container">
</div><div class="gmail-container" dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-header gmail-reader-header gmail-reader-show-element">
<font size="1"><a href="https://covertactionmagazine.com/2020/10/05/new-evidence-implicates-cia-in-1971-attack-on-cuba-with-african-swine-fever-virus/">https://covertactionmagazine.com/2020/10/05/new-evidence-implicates-cia-in-1971-attack-on-cuba-with-african-swine-fever-virus/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">New Evidence Implicates CIA in 1971 Attack on Cuba with African Swine Fever Virus</h1>
<div class="gmail-meta-data">
<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">October 5, 2020 - Ken Lawrence<br></div>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<img src="https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/map3-1024x633.png?resize=696%2C430" alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="446" height="276"><strong>Plum Island</strong>,
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 <strong>Manhattan, Kansas</strong>, scheduled to open in 2021 as the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF). <strong>Navassa Island</strong>
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]
<p><em>[Ken Lawrence is an investigative journalist and veteran writer for </em>CovertAction Magazine<em>. Since the magazine’s founding in the late 1970’s, Lawrence regularly penned the popular column “Sources and Methods.” See the <a href="https://covertactionmagazine.com/archives/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">archives</a>.
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.]</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.uky.edu/~rmfarl2/cubabio1.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Cuban Outbreak of Swine Fever Linked to CIA”</a> headlined a January 9, 1977, article by Drew Featherston and John Cummings in <em>Newsday</em>, a Long Island, New York, daily paper. It began,</p>
<blockquote><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. . . .</p><p>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. . . .</p><p>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.</p></blockquote>
<p>It was an explosive story, reprinted in newspapers across the country. The <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-01208R000100220009-0.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CIA officially denied</a> it six days later, in response to a request from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, but the <em>Newsday</em> reporters had cited so many corroborating sources, with such specific details, that the denial was not widely believed.</p>
<p>The most compelling reason for trusting the credibility of the <em>Newsday</em>
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 <em>Newsday</em> reporters had been cultivating sources since the one and only time reporters had been allowed inside in October 1971.</p>
<p>Plum Island had hosted the U.S. Army Chemical Corps base at Fort Terry from 1952 to 1956. According to <em>Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons since 1945</em>
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.</p>
<p>President Richard Nixon ordered biological weapons research to cease in 1969, but in 1975 the <a href="https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94intelligence_activities_I.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">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.</a></p>
<p><em>Newsday</em> had made no mention of Plum Island, perhaps to
protect its reporters’ sources, but other reporters quickly made the
connection. In the 2004 book, <em>Lab 257</em> by Michael Christopher Carroll, the author wrote,</p>
<blockquote><p>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. . . .</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p></blockquote>
<img src="https://i2.wp.com/covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/map2.png?resize=468%2C571&ssl=1" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="366" height="446"><strong>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</strong>]
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<img src="https://i1.wp.com/covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/cuba1.jpg?resize=696%2C464&ssl=1" alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="446" height="297">JFK files reveal U.S. biological warfare plans against Cuba. [source: <a href="https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/05/09/jfk-files-reveal-us-biological-warfare-plans-against-cuba" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">whowhatwhy.org</a>]
<p>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 <em>Newsday</em> report offers grounds for a fresh look at the evidence of the 1971 attack:</p>
<blockquote><p>…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…</p></blockquote>
<p>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 <em>Newsday</em> 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.’”</p>
<img src="https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/map.jpg?resize=696%2C408&ssl=1" alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="446" height="261">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]
<p>When Hurley’s article appeared in the Winter 1988 issue of <em>The Keeper’s Log</em>,
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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Ken Lawrence</strong> is an investigative journalist and veteran writer for <em>CovertAction Magazine.</em> Since the magazine’s founding in the late 1970’s, Lawrence regularly penned the popular column “Sources and Methods.” See the <a href="https://covertactionmagazine.com/archives/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">archives</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="gmail-block-64cb3d1b-8390-433a-a4ef-4eb0460e07dc"><span><em><strong>CovertAction Magazine</strong></em> is made possible by <strong><a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://covertactionmagazine.com/subscribe/" target="_blank">subscriptions</a></strong>, <strong><a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://covertactionmagazine.com/orders/" target="_blank">orders</a></strong> and <strong><a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=SA3KBFLUKNW5E&source=url" target="_blank">donations</a></strong> from readers like you.</span></h2>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td><br></td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<div id="gmail-block-4d163e24-2402-41b2-809c-c3462f97ad4f"><p>When you donate to <strong>CovertAction</strong>,
you are supporting investigative journalism. Your contributions go
directly to supporting the development, production, editing, and
dissemination of the Magazine.</p><p><em><strong>CovertAction Magazine</strong></em> 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.</p><p>Please make a donation by clicking on the donate logo above and typing in the amount and your credit or debit card information.</p><p><strong><em>CovertAction Magazine,</em></strong> <strong><em>CovertAction Quarterly</em></strong> and <strong><em>CovertAction Information Bulletin</em></strong> are projects of <strong>Covert Action Publications, Inc.</strong>, a not-for-profit organization incorporated in the State of New York.</p></div>
<h3 id="gmail-block-81ef0adf-47e6-483a-a318-b1ad6e5c8ab9"><strong><span>We sincerely thank you for your support.</span></strong></h3>
<p id="gmail-block-ba75ceca-1810-4c4c-b2ed-1e90e170967c"><strong>Disclaimer:</strong> 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 <em>CoverAction Magazine</em>) 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.</p>
<p id="gmail-block-e8ee8eef-59bb-4766-8473-48785f70e5ea"><strong>Republishing:</strong><em> CovertAction Magazine</em>
(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 <em>CoverAction Magazine</em> article. Also, kindly let us know at <a href="mailto:info@CovertActionMagazine.com">info@CovertActionMagazine.com</a>. For publication of CAM articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: <a href="mailto:info@CovertActionMagazine.com">info@CovertActionMagazine.com</a>.</p>
<p id="gmail-block-42cfb5ce-6c15-4a03-8ff1-111d2cd10672"><strong>By using this site, you agree to these terms above.</strong></p>
</div></div></div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
</div>
</div>