US’s Biowarfare in Cuba?
FORT DETRICK – SOURCE of COVID-19?
During World War II, Fort Detrick became the site of intensive biological warfare research using various pathogens. But after the War, the U.S. government under Gen MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, gave immunity and took Japan’s Unit 731 scientists home (including Shiro Ishii and 3,607 of his associates); and this is how Fort Derrick was where many of the Japanese scientists ended up; and where the U.S.’s bio-weapon program got its foreign momentum, expanded and its effects worldwide.
So, is there any U.S.’s biowarfare in Cuba?
JFK Files Reveal US Biological Warfare Plans Against Cuba
In the summer of 1975, congressional staffer Loch Johnson was searching through classified papers at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, when he came across something he couldn’t believe — a covert plan by the US military to deploy biological weapons against Cuba.
The American public knew that their government had a tense relationship with Cuba, especially with its feisty leader, Fidel Castro. The US had unsuccessfully underwritten a Cuban-exile paramilitary invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 — a disaster in every sense. And just a year later, the world came to the brink of nuclear apocalypse after a showdown with the Soviet Union over nuclear missiles it had placed in Cuba.
Johnson relayed to his superiors at the Church Committee the details of project SQUARE DANCE:
The proposal envisioned the destruction of the Cuban economy by introducing aerially from off-shore a sugar cane plant parasite called Bunga. The program would begin with a 30 percent reduction of anticipated Cuban sugar production and within three-to-six years the ruination of the sugar industry would be achieved.
But that wasn’t all. Johnson quoted directly from the JCS memo:
The economic and political disturbances caused by this attack could be exacerbated and exploited by such measures as spreading hoof-and-mouth disease among draft animals, controlling rainfall by cloud seeding, mining canefields, burning cane, and directing other acts of conventional sabotage against the cane milling and transportation systems.
Hoof-and-mouth disease (sometimes referred to as foot-and-mouth disease) is highly infectious and affects farm animals such as cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. The disease causes high fevers followed by blisters in the animal’s mouth and feet. While very rarely affecting humans, it can bring devastating economic consequences to farmers. Containing a 2001 outbreak in the UK cost some £8bn ($12bn) in public and private outlays.
A JFK document released last year revealed an intelligence memorandum from 1962 discussing the possibility of using biological agents to induce crop failure “which would appear to be of natural origin.” A US Army memo from 1963, recently released by the National Archives, lists a number of “Ideas to Exploit Cuban Vulnerabilities,” including the initiation of “biological warfare against vegetable and animal tissue (except human).”
The October 30,1964, memo, referenced in Johnson’s book National Security Intelligence but digitally released last month by the National Archives, gives us a clearer picture of what that might have looked like.
“Bunga,” known also as Aeginetia Indica, is a flowering weed that acts as a root parasite to nearby plants. It can be particularly harmful to sugarcane crops, which were Cuba’s primary economic output. US intelligence sabotage efforts had long targeted sugar crops, including night raids from offshore boats planting incendiary devices in fields. But this was something different.
Like the earlier memo from 1962, this one mentions the need for deniability: “It appears feasible to introduce gradually Bunga into Cuba and maintain a basis for plausibly disavowing US involvement.”
It has been rumored that the U.S. employed biological weapons against the Communist island nation of Cuba. Noam Chomsky claimed that evidence exists implicating the U.S. in biological warfare in Cuba, but these claims are disputed. Allegations in 1962 held that CIA operatives had contaminated a shipment of sugar while it was in storage in Cuba.
Also in 1962, a Canadian agricultural technician assisting the Cuban government claimed he was paid $5,000 to infect Cuban turkeys with the deadly Newcastle disease. Though the technician later claimed he had just pocketed the money, many Cubans and some US citizens believed a clandestinely administered biological weapons agent was responsible for a subsequent outbreak of the disease in Cuban turkeys.
In 1971 the first serious outbreak of African Swine Fever in the Western Hemisphere occurred in Cuba. The Cuban government alleged that U.S. covert biological warfare was responsible for this outbreak, which led to the preemptive slaughter of 500,000 pigs. The outbreak was labeled the “most alarming event” of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.
Six years after the event, the newspaper Newsday, citing untraceable sources, claimed that anti-Castro saboteurs, with at least the tacit backing of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officials, introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba six weeks before the outbreak in 1971, to destabilize the Cuban economy and encourage domestic opposition to Fidel Castro. The virus was allegedly delivered to the operatives from an army base in the Panama Canal Zone by an unnamed U.S. intelligence source. Evidence linking these incidents to biological warfare has not been confirmed.
Accusations have continued to come out of Havana charging U.S. use of bio-weapons on the island, after the official end of the US biological weapons program in 1973. The Cuban government blamed the U.S. for a 1981 outbreak of dengue fever that sickened more than 300,000. Dengue, a vector-borne disease usually carried by mosquitoes, killed 158 people that year in Cuba, including 101 children under 15. Tensions between the two countries, coupled with confirmed U.S. research into entomological warfare during the 1950s, made these charges seem not implausible to some people.
For behold, the LORD will come with fire, and with His chariots like a whirlwind, to render His anger with fury and His rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire and by His sword will the LORD plead with all flesh; and the slain of the Lord shall be many. Isaiah 66:15
Joel Huan
The Mystery of Ephraim 