EMERGING VIRUSES: AIDS & EBOLA: Nature, Accident or Intenti

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Chapter 12: Silent Coup in American Intelligence

MY attention focused on Kissinger for the duration of the New York trip. It was inconceivable how little I knew and how much I learned about the man whose power not only challenged presidents, but the greatest American demagogue -- J. Edgar Hoover.

Isaacson revealed that Kissinger and Hoover were virtually at war with each another, and though Kissinger may not have known it, he too, was a target of the FBI director's wiretaps. I Might anything less be expected from the man who, through blackmail, made his way to the "seat of government" and stayed there for more than four decades? Would Hoover bow to the forces of change Kissinger so easily applied against his State and Defense Department counterparts? Not likely.

Hoover and Nixon both distrusted Kissinger as much as he did them. But to Kissinger's advantage, Nixon distrusted Hoover more.2

Besides, Kissinger -- the NSC director -- held power over the Justice Department, and his supporters were a lot wealthier than Hoover's gang of union leaders and mafia chiefs.

The Kissinger-Hoover-Nixon triangle of power, cunning, and deception became one of the most disturbing secrets in political history. To relieve the strain this unholy trinity bore, something had to give. Ultimately, when the smoke cleared, Kissinger led, Hoover was dead, and Nixon may as well have been.

The biggest winners of this Pennsylvania Avenue war were Kissinger's patrons and disciples who seized all the opportunities they could from backing a winner-one whose expressed purpose was global economic and political domination in quest of a New World Order.

Nixon's Perspective

When Kissinger became rabid over the press leaks that announced the North Vietnam bombing operation, Nixon and Haldeman believed Kissinger was one of the leakers. "Get Kissinger away from the press," Haldeman quoted Nixon as saying. "He talks too much."1

Throughout their relationship, Nixon bated Kissinger about his heritage. Isaacson wrote that "Nixon seemed to take a fiendish glee in launching into diatribes against Jews and watching as Kissinger shifted feet nervously, afraid to contradict him."3

"Nixon shared many of the prejudices of the uprooted, California lower-middle class from which he had come," Kissinger later said regarding the president's anti-Semitism."3

During one telephone conversation overheard and recalled by Winston Lord, Nixon bated Kissinger about Jews and blacks. After they hung up, Lord asked, "Why didn't you say something?" Kissinger responded, "I have enough trouble fighting with him on the things that really matter; his attitudes towards Jews and blacks are not my worry."

Hoover's Untenable Position

During the Nixon years, the FBI labored on a project code named "Inlet" to supply Nixon and Kissinger with smut on counterintelligence targets.4

When the dirt was finally received, Kissinger and Haig ridiculed Hoover's work. 'The FBI investigative work I saw was of poor quality," John Ehrlichman said later, "rumor, gossip, and conjecture ... often hearsay, two or three times removed. When FBI work was particularly bad, I sent it back to Hoover, but the rework was seldom an improvement."4

In the spring of 1970, with Nixon strained by an unprecedented domestic terrorism epidemic wherein highly organized revolutionaries dedicated themselves to "the violent destruction of our democratic system," the president proposed a complete reorganization of U.S. intelligence services. 5

Years earlier, Hoover had called for more rigorous counterintelligence activities against blacks and the Nation of Islam. In the late 1960s he had terminated many of the illegal programs and espionage policies that Nixon and Kissinger now felt needed to be expanded. There was much talk among White House and CIA officials that the aged Hoover had grown too weak and timid to effectively lead an invigorated anticommunist campaign at home and abroad. CIA Director Richard Helms's request for the deployment of additional FBI support and surveillance of targeted groups was rebuffed by an angry Hoover who saw this as a breach of command and a threat to his autonomy.5

In February 1970, with Kissinger now at the helm of the NSC, this rift between the FBI and CIA grew. When the CIA refused to turn over information about a Denver FBI agent who turned CIA informant, without Hoover's knowledge or permission, Hoover ended regular liaison with the CIA.

Then, when the feud was criticized by administration chiefs, Hoover ended "liaison with all other external agencies except the White House."5,6

On June 5, 1970, a concerned President Nixon ordered the directors of America's intelligence community to the White House -- Hoover, Richard Helms of the CIA, General Donald V. Bennett of the Defense Department, and Admiral Noel Gayler of the National Security Agency -- and gave them a dressing down. He told them they were disorganized, inefficient, and unproductive. He wanted them to reorganize themselves into a single, streamlined unit that could keep him informed .... Hoover was to be chairman; the staff was to be directed by the White House's Tom Charles Huston, who had been in charge of the administration's campaign to mobilize the Internal Revenue Service against its enemies. Huston had also had the responsibility of collecting information about foreign involvement in campus disturbances, and in the course of this work had formed an alliance with the FBI's assistant director in charge of Domestic Intelligence, William C. Sullivan. [6]


According to author Richard Powers, in the months that followed, Huston attempted to usurp Hoover's power and position as domestic intelligence agency chief, and White House officials attempted to gain Hoover's resignation. Both efforts failed as the director applied the same tactics he had successfully used for almost a half century -- blackmail.

About this time, Haldeman, who had evaluated information on U.S. politicians supplied by Hoover, became uneasy. He believed the FBI director was "lobbying" for Nixon's affection, and "trying to pique the President's curiosity," rather than providing quality intelligence. He also became concerned about Hoover's potential for eavesdropping on the Oval Office. Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's secretary, who was later made famous by her "accidental" erasure of a Watergate tape, was in Haldeman's eyes too friendly with Hoover. He insisted the president "minimize the connection" he had with Ms. Woods. This, according to political investigator and author Anthony Summers, became a turning point in Nixon's relationship with Hoover:

"FBI Director Hoover, Newsweek reported in May 1969, "no longer enjoys direct access to the White House .... " Realizing Nixon's advisers [including Kissinger] were responsible for the change, Edgar struck back in characteristic fashion. That month, using Rose Mary Woods to ensure the message got through, he passed on an astonishing allegation -- that Haldeman, Ehrlichman and a third aide, Dwight Chapin, were homosexual lovers. [4]


Haldeman said, Hoover's report allegedly "came from a bartender who was a source for the FBI on stuff like this. We were supposed to have attended homosexual parties at the Watergate complex. There were dates, places, everything. Well, every factual allegation he made was totally false and easily disproven." John Mitchell advised the accused staff to give depositions to the FBI, to help in their defense should the need arise. They did what he suggested.4

"Mitchell's conclusion," continued Haldeman, "was that this was an attempt by Hoover to lay a threat across our path, to keep us in line, remind us of his potential."4

"This was just the start of the game," Summers chronicled. "In midsummer, after more bizarre statements by Edgar about Robert Kennedy and Dr. King, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark -- and an editorial in The Washington Post -- called for his resignation. The President, it was reported, was looking for a way to dump him."

"Nixon, of course, denied the rumors," Erlichman recalled.4

Sullivan's Switch

While contemplating ways to diplomatically remove Hoover from office, the president and Kissinger were also needed to fend off the growing threat of domestic violence over Vietnam. As a result, they challenged Hoover to step up his anti-black dissident campaign. Then, something strange happened in June, 197 I. Sullivan also began quarreling with Hoover and other FBI executives over a decision to increase the "legal attaches"-FBI agents -- attached to American embassies abroad. After initially supporting the proposal, Sullivan suddenly reversed himself with a scathing attack on the "lack of objectivity, originality and independent thinking" among Hoover's executives." Powers wrote:

He charged that because of "racial conflict, student and academic revolution, and possible increase in unemployment, this country is heading into ever more troubled waters and the Bureau had better be fully prepared .... This cannot be done if we spread ourselves too thin." Puzzled by Sullivan's attack on a policy he had supported a few days before, Hoover had one of his aides analyze Sullivan's memo. The conclusion was ... that he is more on the side of CIA, State Department and Military Intelligence Agencies, than the FBI."4


Hoover's assessment was accurate. Sullivan had turned coat. According to Summers, he became "frustrated by Edgar's stonewalling over domestic intelligence, and by the ending of COIN TEL PRO," a program NSC advisor Kissinger desired to expand. He was also allegedly angry about "Edgar's latest empire building abroad."4

Having lost patience with Hoover, Sullivan established covert contacts with Nixon officials, particularly Assistant Attorney General Mardian.8

Sullivan supplied Mardian with stacks of Hoover's internal correspondence. Mardian passed several of the most select to Attorney General Mitchell, then filed the remainder away in a folder he simply marked "Jones." The administration knew that Hoover would undoubtedly find out about the theft.8

Then, at the height of the furor over the Pentagon Papers (the forty-seven- volume DaD report, leaked to the New York Times by Rand Corporation's Vietnam expert Daniel Ellsberg, that traced America's involvement in Vietnam -- a study in which Kissinger participated), Sullivan told Mardian that Hoover was "not of sound mind," and that Hoover possessed "documents that were 'out of channel,' wiretap information." Hoover, he said, was likely to use these documents to blackmail Nixon, and as long as he held those records, Nixon could not "relieve him."8

The wiretap files to which he was obviously referring were those ordered by Kissinger, directed by Haig, administered by Hoover and the FBI, authorized by Mitchell, and signed off by the president. The Bureau's copies -- taps on at least four newsmen and thirteen government employees -- were then locked away in Sullivan's office.8

Though Summers failed to mention Kissinger's apparent involvement, he noted that Mardian passed word of the blackmail threat to the president. Then orders were sent to Haig most likely by Kissinger to request the FBI (Sullivan) to destroy all such "special coverage."8

In response, Sullivan turned over two satchels containing the tap summaries to Mardian. He locked them up in his vault, then waited for further instructions.

At the FBI, Sullivan and Hoover finally butted heads. On August 28, after discussing his concerns with numerous FBI colleagues, Sullivan addressed a letter to Hoover defining their differences. "I would like to convince you," he wrote, "that those of us who disagree with you are trying to help you and not hurt you .... This letter will probably anger you. In view of your absolute power you can fire me ... or in some other way work out your displeasure with me. So be it. ... "8

Hoover began "the ensuing meeting with Sullivan," Summers revealed, "with a harangue. He said he had given the matter 'a good deal of prayer.' Then he began to sputter and stammer. When Sullivan advised him to retire [as Nixon through Mardian undoubtedly advised Sullivan to do] he said he would not. On the contrary, it was Sullivan" who was forced to leave .... 8

Pretending that he was unaware that Sullivan had passed the incriminating wiretap transcripts over to Mardian, Hoover ordered his aides to search for them in Sullivan's office. The aides pulled every drawer and file but found nothing. When Sullivan returned, Hoover ordered him to reveal their whereabouts. He refused. "If you want to know more," he abruptly said, "you'll have to talk to the Attorney General."8

Months later, following Hoover's death and the total significance of the wiretap program emerged, Mark Felt, Sullivan's replacement wondered: "It is very strange that Hoover did not explain the entire situation to me." Despite ordering Felt to search fruitlessly for the missing wiretap records, Hoover "knew the whole story.'"


Ending an Intelligence Career

On October 3, 1971, Assistant Attorney General Mardian asked Ehrlichman for advice. Having custody of the dangerous wiretap transcripts made Mardian nervous.

"Mardian was very afraid," Ehrlichman recalled, "not only of the integrity of the files but also of his own personal safety. He felt he was being surveilled by Hoover, that it was only a matter of time before Hoover caused agents of the FBI to break into his office vault and recover the records .... "

Days later, in the Oval Office, Ehrlichman and Attorney General Mitchell requested the president's advice. Not until 1991, with the release of the Nixon tapes, was their conversation disclosed:

MITCHELL: Hoover is tearing the place up over there trying to get at them. The question is, should we get them out of Mardian's office before Hoover blows the safe ... and bring them over here?

EHRLICHMAN: My impression from talking with Mardian is that Hoover feels very insecure without having his own copy of those things. Because, of course, that gives him leverage with Mitchell and you.

NIXON: Yeah.

EHRLICHMAN: Because they're illegal. Now he doesn't have any copies and he has agents all over this town interrogating people, trying to find out where they are. He's got Mardian's building under surveillance.

NIXON: Now, why the hell didn't he have a copy, too?

EHRLICHMAN: If he does, he'll beat you over the head with it.

NIXON: Oh ... you've gotta get them out of there.

MITCHELL: Hoover won't come and talk to me about it. He's just got his Gestapo all over the place.

NIXON: Yeah ... just say [to Mardian] that we want to see them. Put them in a special safe. [9]


The troop complied with their general's demand.

For nearly a year, Nixon and his aides discussed how they might neutralize the Hoover risk or remove him from office. Initially, discharging him had seemed too risky given his popularity. But later polls showed that the public's enthusiasm for the aging FBI chief had waned. This was reinforced by a constant barrage of criticism Hoover received from the press.9 Much of this was likely contrived by the CIA under the Kissinger and Haig NSC staff chain of command.

In response, the director had charged the media with being "journalistic prostitutes" and ordered FBI personnel to avoid all contact with The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CBS and NBC -- organizations that Hoover knew maintained strong ties to the CIA. 10

''I'm willing to fight him," said the president lamely during a meeting on October 8, 1971 in the Oval Office. "We've got to avoid the situation where he could leave with a blast. ... If he does go, he's got to go of his own volition .... " The president had struck out in his previous efforts to dismiss Hoover. Now he was undoubtedly shy about trying again.

Two weeks later, the president received a special report on Hoover from Ehrlichman. Further delay, it cautioned, might be disastrous. Blackmail was suggested:

Morale of FBI agents in the field has deteriorated badly .... All clandestine activities have been terminated. Liaison with the intelligence community has been disrupted and key men forced out. ... Hoover has reportedly threatened the President. ... Years of intense adulation have inured Hoover to self-doubt. He remains realistic, however, and on June 30 his most trusted confidant, Clyde Tolson, stated to a reliable source, "Hoover knows that, no matter who wins in '72, he's through."

Sullivan has been "keeping book" on Hoover for some time. He is a skilled writer. His book could be devastating should he choose to expose such matters as the supervisor who handled Hoover's stock portfolio and tax matter; the painting of Hoover's house by the FBI Exhibits Section; the ghostwriting of Hoover's books by FBI employees; the rewriting of FBI history and the "donation" by "admiring" facility owners of accommodations and services which are often in fact underwritten by employee contribution .... [9]


The report recommended Hoover's retirement before the end of the year. Nixon wholeheartedly agreed. "Hoover," he said, "has to realize that he can't stay forever .... I think I could get him to resign, if I put it to him directly that without it he's going to be hurt politically .... But I want this closely held-it's just got to be."9

Despite lengthy preparation, scripting, and rehearsals, the president attempted and failed again. The reason was explained by Summers:

Contrary to what Nixon had imagined at first, the threat [of the White House wiretap transcripts] had not evaporated when Sullivan handed over the FBI copies ... to Assistant Attorney General Mardian. When Mardian checked the list, he discovered some of the transcripts were missing. They had been retained, all along, by Edgar.9


Though Nixon openly claimed to his death that "Hoover never gave any indication to me of blackmail," the truth was known to his intimates. Months after his meeting with Hoover, Nixon confided with Ehrlichman: "The meeting was a total strikeout. He told me I'd have to force him out." "It was my conclusion," Ehrlichman said, that the president believed, "that Hoover's resignation before the election would raise more problems than it would solve." Likewise, Kissinger recalled, "Nixon thought Hoover was quite capable of using the knowledge he acquired as part of his investigations to blackmail the president."9

So rather than heralding his dismissal, the press reported that Nixon wanted "Hoover to remain in office."9

In one of the final interviews of his life, Hoover declared himself fit and determined to carry on: "Many of our great artists and composers," he said, "did their best work in their eighties. They were judged on performance, not age .... Look at Bernard Baruch; he was brilliant in his nineties -- and Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur in their eighties. That is my policy .... "9

Consequently, with COINTELPRO on ice, the FBI stupefied, the CIA cut off from domestic intelligence, the administration blackmailed, and Kissinger's authority blocked along with his patron's economic interests, Nixon was at his wits end. Besides everything else, he was certain his White House still harbored a mole -- someone who might again leak secrets to the press. What's more, the president was still outraged that Hoover had blocked the investigation of a perceived traitor and suspected communist- Daniel Ellsberg. Hoover had apparently befriended Ellsberg's father-in- law, so he felt obliged to come to the family's aid.9

"If the FBI was not going to pursue the [Ellsberg] case," Nixon wrote in his memoirs, "then we would have to do it ourselves."9

Beyond Watergate

In June 1971, seated in his Oval Office, Nixon told his aide Charles Colson, "I don't give a damn how it is done, do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks and prevent further unauthorized disclosures .... I want to know who is behind this ... whatever the cost."

The directive led to the formation of the Plumbers and then to Watergate:

The cast of characters is now well known. The chain of command went from Nixon to Ehrlichman to Krogh and Young, with Colson and the President's Counsel, John Dean, putting in their nickel's worth. In the field, assigned to do the White House's dirty work, were Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy. Hunt was a fifty-two-year-old career CIA officer who had, technically, retired from the Agency and gone free-lance. [Previous to Watergate, he had been investigated by the Warren Commission for his CIA connections and possible role in the assassination of JFK-he was allegedly seen on the grassy knoll behind a puff of smoke at the time the shots were fired and had no alibi."] Liddy had served as an Assistant District Attorney in New York, then as a special assistant in the Nixon Treasury Department, since leaving the FBI in 1962.9


Interesting that Kissinger wasn't in the Plumber's chain of command, I thought. Particularly since he was in charge of the 40 Committee, the group that took charge of authorizing covert actions by the CIA.12 He would have likely known about the entire affair since it was essentially a CIA-run operation according to the Rockefeller Commission. But his name failed to appear in the report and CIA reprimand. 11

I considered that Nixon may have suspected Kissinger's involvement in the Ellsberg case, and purposely kept him in the dark about the Plumbers. But that wasn't likely either, I realized. Kissinger's intelligence network exceeded Hoover's and infiltrated the CIA's by then. If anything went on, Kissinger most likely knew about it.

A Kissinger/Rockefeller Coup?

Then it occurred to me how Kissinger came out on top. He outlasted everyone. In fact, he's still considered the most powerful foreign policy adviser in the world.

Had a Kissinger/Rockefeller coup actually occurred?

I reflected on the fact that Nixon held Nelson Rockefeller in disregard, and snubbed him -- Nixon's 1968 presidential contender -- by giving Kissinger the job Rocky expected. 13 When Kissinger was selected instead of the banking mogul, Rockefeller's staff "were shocked." Kissinger himself suggested that Nixon reconsider Rockefeller rather than him to lead the Defense Department. Before that, Kissinger told Gloria Steinem that the only way he would go to Washington is if Rockefeller became his boss. In retrospect, that's what happened. Rockefeller remained Kissinger's patron before, during, and after the Nixon era.14

I reflected on the fact that it was largely Rockefeller's influence and contacts that helped catapult Kissinger to the top of the business consulting industry. A partial list of his international clients was remarkable to say the least: American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Atlantic Richfield, Coca-Cola, GTE, Chase Manhattan and Midland Banks, Bell Telephone, H.J. Heinz, Revlon, Union Carbide, and Volvo to name just a few. And then there was Merck and Co. 15

Isn't that interesting! I thought, reflecting on my knowledge of George Merck's leadership of America's biological weapons industryl6 as well as the experimental hepatitis B vaccines Merck and Co. prepared for the American gay community. 17

I considered the fact that Nixon and Hoover stood in the way of both Kissinger and Rockefeller -- financially and politically. Hoover was overtly hostile toward Kissinger, he hated jews, wouldn't take orders, and catered to organized crime. And neither Kissinger nor Rockefeller thought much of Nixon. At best they perceived him as inept. At worst, they considered him a paranoid maniac and a mutual threat.

Moreover, both Nixon and Hoover had potentially dangerous intelligence data on Kissinger as well as Rockefeller. Hoover held "a big file of dirt" on Rockefeller. And the two held wiretap transcripts that could have incriminated Kissinger as well as his closest aides.18

Rockefeller, I also recalled, served as President Eisenhower's international affairs assistant. He resigned when Eisenhower refused to endure his Vietnam war plans -- billions in military-industrial revenue. That's when Eisenhower issued his warning about the evil "military-industrial complex." Now Kissinger was playing the same role for Nixon with the "East Coast establishment, the Rockefellers, the media and banking elite pulling the strings.19

Moreover, after Nixon was ousted and Ford became president, Kissinger petitioned Ford to select Rockefeller to be the new vice president. Having hundreds of political colleagues, Isaacson reported, "Kissinger felt the most trust and affection of anyone in public life" for Rockefeller. 19

Then following their White House communion, the "Kissingers and the Rockefellers spent New Year's together at the outset of 1975 at Dorado Beach in Puerto Rico." Isaacson reported that Henry felt very good about himself at the time: "Relaxing in the sun, and married to a socially impeccable former Rockefeller aide, Kissinger seemed more at peace with himself than he had been for a long time."19

Naturally, he seemed more at peace, I observed, their principle political rivals were destroyed. They now maintained sole control of the White House.

Had they played a determining role in discrediting Nixon. Could they have been behind the Plumbers getting caught? And what about Hoover's untimely and mysterious death?

Haig as Deep Throat?

I flashed back to watching a CBS special I had seen a few years ago. The program cited Haig and Kissinger among the likeliest suspects to have played the role of "Deep Throat." Since Kissinger and Haig allegedly had alibis, Mike Wallace concluded Deep Throat was Patrick Gray, a former assistant attorney general "who was appointed acting director of the FBI six weeks before the break-in at the Watergate." Neither Woodward nor the 76-year-old (in 1992) Gray confirmed the report, however, and two sources outright denied it -- Charles Bates (the former assistant director of the FBI at the time of the break-in) and Howard Hunt (one of the CIA operative Plumbers).

It wouldn't be the first or last time CBS and Mike Wallace spread lies to cover up government incriminating truths, I realized.20

It was Rockefeller, I considered, who enlisted Kissinger to join his international military-security business during their meeting at Quantico in 1955. Kissinger's Quantico report laid out Rockefeller's, that is. America's foreign policy objectives and foreshadowed over four decades of violent American history. Most important, it contained military proposals that required, of course, far more spending.20

And it was Kissinger who drafted Haig to be his chief aide at the NSC. And Joseph Califano recommended Haig. The recollection suddenly took on greater meaning. Califano, the former secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW) during the Carter administration. The man who gave the U.S. surgeon general his orders when I was completing my M.P.H. at Harvard! Isn't that interesting.

My mind raced to consider the possible role Califano played during this perilous period of American history. Califano became Secretary of DHEW in 1977, I recalled.21 That was just when the large Merck and USPHS gay hepatitis B study was getting underway. As the secretary of DHEW, Califano was empowered to direct both foreign and domestic vaccination programs for the USPHS, USAID, as well as the WHO.

After letting the Califano connection sink in a bit, 1 continued to consider Deep Throat. Deep Throat fed Woodward and the Washington Post the inside poop on Kissinger/Rockefeller political enemies. That was traditional CIA counterintelligence operations over which Kissinger was in charge at the time. That was why Hoover ordered the FBI to break ties with The Washington Post which he knew was being influenced by Kissinger, most likely through his Washington Special Action Group. (See fig. 11.2 for an organizational chart of the U.S. national security system under Kissinger; also see reference 10.) With the score of CIA- and FBI-sponsored break-ins that went unreported during that time, maybe it's not so astonishing they caught the Plumbers at the Watergate. Deep Throat was most likely Haig.

I searched the library shelves once again in an effort to investigate my hunch. In Len Colodny's fascinating book Silent Coup.' the removal of Richard Nixon, I learned that my suspicions were well founded. Not only was Haig exposed for his virtually certain role as Deep Throat, but Bob Woodward, who himself published a treatise on the CIA, was revealed to be a communications specialist for American intelligence. In fact, Colodny provided substantial documented evidence that Woodward routinely briefed Haig at the Pentagon prior to their Nixon White House assignments. 22

Then, in Summers's book, I read that many believed Watergate was "only the tip of the iceberg." During the Nixon era, the CIA conducted hundreds of break-ins into people's homes and businesses; all of "whom the administration considered to be its 'enemies.' Their spectrum of targets ranged from radicals and subversives to high ranking diplomats and politicians. One such victim, Summers assures us, was J. Edgar Hoover. 18

Why had the Plumbers gotten caught at the Watergate and nowhere else? Could it have been a play, perhaps with Haig as quarterback, to initiate Nixon's downfall, thus, facilitating a Kissinger/Rockefeller coup?

Prelude to the Sting

Isaacson's book revealed that Nixon's relationship with Kissinger had steadily deteriorated:

During his five and a half years in office, Nixon's admiration for Kissinger would gradually become more infected by jealousy and suspicions of disloyalty. With no personal affection to serve as a foundation for their relationship, what had been a love-hate alliance eventually tilted toward the latter. As the president's dependency on Kissinger grew, his resentment and bitterness increased. [23]


Ultimately, when the Plumber's failed to find evidence of the inside leak they expected to find in the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Nixon was in deep trouble. Not only did the media begin chasing "all the president's men," but Hoover knew the truth about the whole affair. Nixon had informed the director personally of his intention to enter Ellsberg's office. (Hoover would have learned this anyway. By that time, his intelligence network had thoroughly infiltrated the White House.) [9]

Push finally came to shove when Hoover learned of Liddy's written report calling for the director's forced removal. Since it was clear he would not go gracefully, nor would Nixon be able to shame him from office, Hoover's assassination became a clear option.9

The director recognized his predicament. On New Year's day 1972, while awaiting his flight back to Washington, Hoover spent forty-five morose minutes discussing his problems with Kenneth Whittaker, his special agent in charge of the city. Parked in his limousine outside Miami's international airport, Whittaker got an earful about how upset Hoover was about his trouble with Nixon. It was the last time he saw Hoover alive.9

Back home, Hoover took a curious step. He asked Andrew Tully, a trusted journalist, to lunch in private. "I have some things to say," he told Tully, "but I don't want you to publish it until after I'm dead." Tully agreed. Then the reporter asked, "Is the President pressuring you to retire?"

"Not anymore he's not," Hoover replied. "I put the kibosh on those jaspers who want to get rid of me. . . . The President asked me what thoughts I had about retirement and I said none, then I told him why. I told him he needed me around."9

Having secured intelligence and illegal wiretaps on virtually all White House notables, Hoover likely suspected a Kissinger/Rockefeller coup was underway. Perhaps this is what he meant when he said Nixon "needed me around."

Later, Hoover threatened to expose the administration's ongoing domestic snooping ring. This fit the story relayed by James McCord, another former FBI and CIA agent. He said, Hoover "resolved that he would have to go to Congress with the facts" regarding the "wiretapping of the news media, the National Security Council staff and of Ellsberg." Undoubtedly, Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and other NSC staffers feared this as well.

The last straw was a Nixon-damning expose that Hoover fed Life. It spilled the beans on how "the White House had intervened to help" Arnholt Smith, "one of Nixon's best friends, and a bookmaker called John Alessio, another Nixon backer, to shake off corruption and tax charges." Hoover, the article said, had "used his personal influence to help defeat the White House moves," to assure "that Alessio faced trial." This, McCord believed, was what "really set Nixon at Edgar's throat."9

The Assassination of J. Edgar Hoover?

Summers filed an intriguing investigation report along with a startling conclusion -- J. Edgar Hoover was very likely assassinated:

A year after Watergate, Mark Frazier, a young reporter working in Washington, was to pick up an intriguing lead. Three sources, he learned, had given affidavits to the Senate Watergate Committee referring to two break-in operations at Edgar's home in Rock Creek Park. They were, allegedly, "directed by Gordon Liddy."

In the welter of news arising from Watergate [or possibly because of official media censorship], Frazier was unable to get the story published in a Washington paper. Instead, it ran in a university publication, The Harvard Crimson.


Hoover's home, the article said, had been targeted twice for break-ins. The first operation, in "late winter of 1972," was intended to "retrieve documents that were thought to be used as potential blackmail against the White House." This attempt failed, but was followed by another which succeeded. "This time," Frazier reported, "whether through misunderstanding or design, a poison of the thiophosphate genre was placed on Hoover's personal toilet articles."22

Thiophosphate, a chemical commonly found in insecticides, is extremely toxic to human beings if ingested, inhaled, or absorbed through the skin. Exposure can cause fatal heart attacks, and can only be detected by an autopsy performed within hours of the lethal poisoning.

Gordon Liddy today denies knowledge of any break-in at Edgar's house. Hunt, contacted in Mexico, said curtly it was "a matter of total disinterest to me." Nixon's former Chief of Staff, Haldeman, however, accepts that something of the kind may have happened. "I have to concede the possibility," he said. "I think Nixon was capable at the time of saying to Colson, 'I want this done. I don't want any arguments about it. I don't want you to talk to Haldeman because he'll just say, Don't do it. Just go ahead and get it done ... .'''

Watergate burglar Felipe DeDiego, who today claims ignorance of the Hoover break-ins, ... [at first said] he knew about the operation and hoped soon to be able "to talk about everything." Then, questioned again, he withdrew his comments. At home in Florida, however, he told Dade County State's Attorney Richard Gerstein that he had inforn1ation on "other burglaries of a political nature."

Another of the Watergate burglars, Frank Sturgis, said in 1988 that DeDiego told him about the Hoover break-ins immediately after Edgar's death. "Felipe told me about it," he said. "I suspected the CIA was behind it. I told him, 'I guess our friends probably wanted to go over there and see what kind of documents Hoover had stashed away.' Felipe laughed and said, 'That's dangerous. It's dangerous ... .' And we didn't talk about it anymore."

Sturgis admitted that the burglars were active in Washington earlier than emerged from the official Watergate investigation. Asked if he himself was involved in the Hoover break-ins, he hedged. "I'm not saying yes to my involvement. Let me say 'no' to that. It opens up a can of worms." [22]


Chief Plumber Krogh coincidentally served time where former Congressman Neil Gallagher was jailed as a result of Hoover's malicious attack -- in Allenwood Pennsylvania's minimum security prison. In 1991, Gallagher signed a sworn affidavit which testified:

"I was the prison librarian, and Krogh would come in .... One night, when I was about to close the place and there were only the two of us there, we talked about Hoover.

"I said I thought the circumstances of Hoover's death were a bit strange. Because of my war with Hoover, I'd followed everything about him closely. I said to Krogh, 'Hoover knew everything that was going on in Washington. He must surely have known about the Plumbers and every_ thing. Do you think Hoover was blackmailing the President?' And then I said, and it surprises me now, 'Did you guys knock Hoover off? You had the troops to do it, and the reason ... .'

"It took several seconds for it to sink in. Then Krogh literally jumped out of his chair. And in a highly charged voice he sort of screamed, 'We didn't knock off Hoover. He knocked himself off.' And I said, 'My God, that explains a lot about the bastard's death coming the way it did.' And with that Krogh ... rushed out of the library. We never had another conversation the rest of the time we were in Allenwood."24

After Hoover's body was discovered by his housekeepers, and his lover Clyde Tolson was alerted, Robert Choisser, Edgar's physician arrived on the scene. "Mr. Hoover had been dead for some hours," he recalled. "I was rather surprised by his sudden death, because he was in good health. I do not recall prescribing him medication for blood pressure or heart disease. There was nothing to lead anyone to expect him to die at that time, except for his age."

Later that morning, two medical examiners, Dr. Richard Welton and Coroner James Luke, surveilled the situation. "It was totally normal," Welton recalled. "There was nothing to suggest trauma. Hoover was in an age group where it could be expected .... It is common for such a person to be found dead after apparently trying to get to the bathroom during the night."

On his way out, considering the need for an autopsy, Welton said to Luke "What if someone should pop up six months from now and say someone had been feeding Hoover arsenic? We'll think we should have done an autopsy."

Summers concluded that, "Neither pathologist had any reason to suppose anyone had been feeding Edgar arsenic, or any other poison."

No one knew that the Watergate burglars even existed, let alone that two of them had consulted a CIA expert about ways of killing columnist Jack Anderson, including the option of planting poison in his medicine cabinet. They knew nothing of alleged break-ins at Edgar's home, nothing of the suggestion that a poison might have been "placed on Hoover's personal toilet articles" -- a poison capable of inducing cardiac arrest. ... They knew nothing of the call Nixon had reportedly made to Edgar late the previous night, telling him it was time to step down.24


Three days after Hoover's demise, having decided against the autopsy, Luke signed the certificate of death:

John Edgar Hoover, male, white.
Occupation: Director, FBI.
Immediate cause: Hypertensive cardiovascular disease.


Life After Hoover

All of this meant that from mid-1970 to mid-1973, the CIA operated without any interference from the Justice Department. During this time, and following Hoover's death, the CIA grew in strength as the nucleus of foreign and domestic espionage operations. Despite the embarrassment of getting caught playing a central role in the infamous Watergate break-ins,25 the CIA was hardly chastised by Congress. 11 It continued to expand agency operations at home and abroad under Kissinger and soon to be Chief of Staff Haig.26 The two Nixon administration survivors ran the CIA, State, and Defense departments. They reinstated COINTELPRO-like operations, 27 expanded its covert operations in Africa,28 and increased biological as well as chemical weapons research.29.30

In 1973, the CIA labored to maintain its positive public image. International condemnation over ongoing American biological warfare "experiments" was imminent. The Rockefeller Commission Investigation on CIA Wrongdoing was also about to begin as was a Congressional investigation in the aftermath of Watergate. It was then that CIA director Richard Helms, succeeded shortly thereafter by William Colby, ordered Mr. Sidney Gottlieb, Chief of the CIA's Technical Services Division, and former head of its MKULTRA -- drug and mind control operation -- to destroy all records pertaining to the "formulation, the development and the retention of' illegal biologicals that were used to wage war and experiment widely on Third World populations. Helms's orders apparently came from his superior- Dr. Henry Kissinger.29-31

By May 1973, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, as international attention focused on Nixon's fall from grace, a shadow government took control of America. The interim administration -- which formed before President Ford was confirmed -- was largely powered by Rockefeller, and commandeered by Kissinger and Haig.32

During the following presidential campaign, Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's campaign manager and old-time Kissinger nemesis from Harvard, launched an embittered attack against the incumbent's foreign policy. Publishing in Foreign Affairs he described Kissinger's tactics as:

Covert, manipulative, and deceptive in style, it seemed committed to a largely static view of the world, based on a traditional balance of power, seeking accommodation among the major powers on the basis of spheres of influence. [33]


Cold and accurate as it was, the irrepressible fact is Kissinger and his realpolitik survived.

While campaigning for the presidency, Carter hailed Kissinger as the real "foreign policy ... president of this country." "Under the Nixon-Ford administration," he said in a speech, "there has evolved a kind of secretive ... closely guarded and amoral ... , 'Lone Ranger' foreign policy, a one-man policy of international adventure." To these attacks, Carter added his standard refrain. "Our foreign policy should be as open and honest as the American people themselves."33,34

One year later, under the more "open and honest" policies established by Carter, Ray Ravenhott, the director of population control programs for USAID, revealed his agency's intention to help sterilize one quarter of the world's women. He argued that this need stemmed from the administration's desire to protect U.S. corporate interests from the threat of Third World revolutions spawned by chronic unemployment.29

Image

TWO PHOTOS: NATIONAL ARCHIVES, NIXON PROJECT

John Mitchell, Henry Kissinger, Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon, and William Rogers aboard Air Force One, 1969. After feeding Nixon intelligence for his 1968 campaign, Kissinger was appointed national security adviser. Not long after, he ordered Defense Secretary Laird to reassess America's biological weapons capabilities, and then discovered the option of viruses for covert operations.

Image

Chief deputy Alexander Haig, Lawrence Eagleburger and Kissinger, 1969. Colonel Haig, the evidence indicates, was most plausibly "Deep Throat" He coordinated secret projects including the White House wiretaps, Cambodian bombings, and very likely the assassination of 1. Edgar Hoover along with the downfall of Richard Nixon.

Image

TWO PHOTOS: NATIONAL ARCHIVES, NIXON PROJECT

Executive Office meetings, 1969. Nixon and Kissinger rambled for hours, engaged in underhanded fantasies, plotted conspiratorial intrigues, and made numerous contradicting decisions. Nixon was openly anti-semitic, racist, and homophobic. Both men believed Black nationalism was a communist plot, and population control was a national security necessity.

Image

Kissinger with Rogers, Ehrlichman, Colson, and Haldeman, 1971. Ehrlichman and Haldeman administered an informal "Henry Handling Committee" to help relieve Kissinger's paranoid fits. Colson organized the Plumber's Unit. This led to Watergate. Oddly then, Kissinger and Haig escaped recrimination.
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Re:  EMERGING VIRUSES: AIDS & EBOLA: Nature, Accident or Int

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Chapter 13: USAID and New York Blood

AS soon as I was able to free myself from the work that had piled up while in New York. I made a return trip to Countway's on-line center to continue my search for clues as to how HIV broke out, as it did. among specific populations.

Knowing that USAID, especially during the 1970s, had focused vast resources on controlling Third World populations, I typed "US AID" into the subject field and pressed "Enter." The computer then gave me several categories from which to choose, including "Population Control," "Vaccines," and "World Health Organization." First I selected "Population Control," and then the period before 1975. In less than a minute, the search located 733 "US AID-Population Control references."

Then I attempted the same search after] 975. To my absolute amazement, the entire field of "Population Control" had vanished 1 The subject heading had been terminated.

Could the whole field have been censored? I questioned. Califano and the Carter administration, apparently, replaced the term "Population Control" with the more comforting phrase "Maternal and Child Health."

Then I did the same period searches for USAID vaccine and WHO reports. During the later, I was directed to a Department of State Bulletin article wherein Califano addressed the WHO general assembly. "Rapid population growth," the Secretary of DHEW warned, "retards social and economic progress in many nations and burdens many families and communities.'"

At the time Califano spoke, I was on the verge of joining the faculty at Harvard's School of Dental Medicine. I wondered at the time, why they were changing the name of the "Population Studies" department at the School of Public Health to "Maternal and Child Health." After reading Califano's speech, and reflecting on the disappearance of "Population Control" from MEDLAR, the influence of America's intelligence community on public health policy took on far greater meaning. I learned that by doing away with the phrase "Population Control," Califano and his subordinates was able to conduct similar programs under the less stigmatized "Maternal and Child Health" venue.

Looking for Merck and USAID in Africa

Next, I considered whether there was a direct link between Califano and Merck. It was certainly a good possibility. After all, Merck was the world's largest supplier of AIDS-related drugs and hepatitis vaccines,2 with documented connections to military intelligence and biological weapons research and development,3 and Califano had his military, intelligence, and public health background. The fit seemed natural. Moreover, Califano was part of the politically ignoble elite. The Rockefeller led military-medical-industrial complex held Kissinger's confidence as he held Califano's.4 Kissinger was also a paid consultant of Merck, Sharp and Dohme (MSD).5 That Califano heralded population control and oversaw many such projects in the Third World just prior to the AIDS outbreak, I felt, deserved further investigation. Had Califano authorized US AID funds for Merck-related hepatitis B vaccine studies in central Africa during his stint as secretary of DHEW?

I followed my intuition and entered a new search path-"USAID"- "Viral Vaccines." In about a minute, the computer retrieved 2,498 viral vaccine study reports from 1975 to 1985. I shuttered over the task of reviewing each entry. So instead, I chose to limit my search to hepatitis vaccine studies. That way, I could investigate my suspicions about Merck-African hepatitis B vaccine research.

Seconds later, MEDLAR produced dozens of abstracts describing various viral hepatitis vaccine experiments. One drew my immediate attention: "Whither immunization against viral infections?" by the chief of Merck's Division of Virus and Cell Biology Research, Dr. Maurice Hilleman.6

The paper was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the journal that during my Deadly Innocence investigation, had published absolutely ridiculous speculations offered by the CDC regarding the Acer case.7 I read the abstract quickly and then retrieved the document.

Hilleman's article argued for the economic and social benefits of preventing infectious diseases through the use of vaccines. By the end of the report I realized, USAID -- that is, the American taxpayer -- and the WHO was undoubtedly supporting Hilleman's research on behalf of Merck.6

A Slight Conflict of Interest

Next, a report titled, "Hepatitis B [HB] vaccine: evidence confirming lack of AIDS transmission" drew my attention. The source was the CDC's Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report. I ran to the stacks again and within minutes retrieved the article by "Anonymous" MSD and CDC authors.8

This December 14, 1984, publication was the CDC's official response to "concerns" that had "been expressed that the etiologic agent of AIDS might" have been transmitted by MSD hepatitis vaccines. The report noted that questions arose because the vaccines had been developed from pooled blood plasma, some of which had come from homosexual males who volunteered for the study. "HB vaccine acceptance in the United States," the authors wrote, "has been seriously hindered by the fear of possible AIDS transmission from the vaccine."8

To consider the possibility of HIV tainted HB vaccines, Merck researchers provided the company's vaccine to two groups of researchers -- one at the Hepatitis Branch, Division of Viral Diseases at the CDC-a group specializing in Don Francis's (and as I would shortly learn -- Dr. Robert Purcell's) area of expertise; the other to a group of researchers at the State University of New York led by Dr. B. J. Poiesz. Poiesz, the article noted in a reference, had worked closely with Robert Gallo in the late 1970s. Together, the two virologists had isolated type-C cancer viruses from patients with lymphomas -- a blood cancer common among AIDS patients.

Despite the groups' best efforts, the report stated, they were unable to find any trace of the AIDS virus in any of the Merck supplied samples.

Next, to put an end to the damaging claims, the CDC reported:

Epidemiologic approaches to detect an association between HB vaccine and AIDS have included an analysis of data on AIDS cases reported to CDC concerning their receipt of HB vaccine and monitoring rates of AIDS in groups of homosexually active men who did or did not receive HB vaccine in the vaccine trials conducted by CDC in Denver, Colorado, and San Francisco, California. To date, 68 AIDS cases have been reported among approximately 700,000 U.S. HB vaccine recipients; 65 have occurred among persons with known AIDS risk factors, while risk factors for the remaining three are under investigation. In addition, the rate of AIDS for HB vaccine recipients in CDC vaccine trials among homosexually active men in Denver and San Francisco does not differ from that for men screened for possible participation in the trials but who received no HB vaccine because they were found immune to HB.8 [Emphasis added.]


After carefully considering their work, I recognized the authorities had, once again, misrepresented the facts and concealed evidence in a fashion reminiscent of their Kimberly Bergalis case investigation.9

Behind the Smoke and Mirrors

The fact is the homosexual men who received the first batches of experimental HB vaccine did not live in Denver or San Francisco. They lived in New York. Szmuness's New England Journal of Medicine report stated:

We report here the initial results of a placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of a hepatitis B vaccine in 1083 homosexual men from New York City.10


Undoubtedly, New York City was the hotbed of new AIDS cases in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There was no other place in America like it. In fact, the same trend observed in gay men from New York was also observed in intravenous drug users living there. I recalled a startling graph depicting this geographic pattern (see fig. 13.1) in the American Journal of Public Health. 11

Why the report by Poiesz's team and anonymous CDC authors included Denver and not New York City study participants was highly irregular and suspicious since: (1) the volunteers were from the "Gay Men's Health Project of New York City and other gay organizations in New York"; (2) Poiesz and his co-workers were also in New York and neighboring states; (3) nineteen months into the AIDS epidemic, 501 of the 1,025 AIDS case fatalities were from New York (California had the second highest mortality rate with 221 AIDS victims);12 and (4) Denver was not considered an especially high AIDS case area.

Moreover, the "experts" presented a flawed contention when they said, "the rate of AIDS for HB vaccine recipients in CDC vaccine trials among sexually active gay men in Denver and San Francisco does not differ from" those who did not receive the vaccine or placebo. I noted the distortion, as did Robert Lederer, a seasoned journalist and AIDS investigator. Lederer pointed out that the CDC's insistence that the vaccine was safe was explained using "circular logic, that all but four of the 64 recipients who developed AIDS had 'other risk factors,' i.e., they were gay. Yet medical follow-up studies of vaccine recipients specifically excluded persons with AIDS, preventing a resolution of this controversy."13

Technically, Lederer's objection about the Merck/CDC authors use of "circular logic" is accurate. The authorities simply used the risk factor -- homosexuality -- as a scapegoat. The fact is the authorities should have and could have controlled for this as they worked to prove or disprove their "null hypothesis" -- that HIV was not transmitted via the Merck/CDC vaccines, but in some other way.

Fig. 13.1. Geographic Patterns In the Spread of HIV and AIDS in the United States Showing New York City's Uniqueness

Image
Lifetime Needle Sharing Experience and HIV Antibody Prevalence Among IV Drug Abusers in Six US Regions, From: Addiction Research Center, National Institute on Drug Abuse, by Lange, Snyder, Lozovsky et al. Am J Pub Hlth 1988;78;4:443-446
Note: Among the locations surveyed, HIV-antibody serprevalence in 1986 ranged from a high of 61 percent in New York City metropolitan area to 9 percent in the Tampa Bay area. Lifetime needle sharing experience was common in all areas, ranging between 99 percent in San Antonio to 79 percent in New York.


Image
AIDS Diagnoses by Half Years in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. Source: Health departments of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. In: Fumento MA. The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, Washington, D.C.: Regenery Gateway, 1990. pp. 314-315.
Graphs depict the number of HIV-positive persons among IV drug users in New York City as well as those diagnosed with AIDS was far greater than in other major cities. These trends could be explained by the theory that homosexual males and drug users in Manhattan had received tainted-experimental hepatitis B vaccines during the early to mid 1970s. Sources are cited in the graphs.


Equally distorted and suspicious was the report by Dr. Robert Hirsch, medical director of the Greater New York Blood Program published that same year. Hirsch insisted that "no [HB vaccine] recipient has been reported to have contracted any disease, including AIDS."14A study published two years later, in 1986, in the Journal of the American Medical Association provided conflicting evidence, some of which follows: 13

Nathaniel Lehrman, a medical physician and Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, noted with suspicion that the percentage of gay men from the San Francisco hepatitis B study group who became infected with the AIDS virus rose dramatically and too quickly-from "4 percent in 1978 to 68 percent in 1984 among the 6,875 members." The rate of HIV infection among homosexual men reported in 1989 varied across the U.S. from 10 percent in some communities to 70 percent in few others. Most telling, five years earlier, and only six years into the AIDS epidemic, the upper range was reached in New York and San Francisco. Lehrman correctly concluded that this oddity lent additional support to the tainted HB vaccine premise. 15

More persuasive knowledge came from Pasteur Production-the Pasteur Institute's pharmaceutical company. Principals of the firm-which generated a good portion of the revenue that financed the privately run institute -- were frantic over rumors that the Merck-manufactured hepatitis vaccine was tainted. 16In 1982, Don Francis assured Luc Montagnier that "no link between AIDS and the vaccine inoculations" had been found. Yet, a year later, Francis sent Montagnier thirteen blood samples to test for the presence of the AIDS virus. The samples came from gay men in the San Francisco study who were dying of AIDS, and who had received the experimental hepatitis B vaccine.17

Additionally, in 1985, Harold Jaffe, deputy director for AIDS science at the CDC and co-worker Andrew Moss "presented data from the San Francisco hepatitis B study that found the virus was present in blood of 4.5 percent of the study's subjects in 1978,20 percent in 1980, and 67 percent by late 1984."18 In contrast, Randy Shilts wrote:

In Pittsburgh, a city with a relatively low incidence of AIDS, 25 percent of gay men in one study were infected with the virus, and an additional 2 percent of local gay men were being infected every month. A Boston study found that 21 percent of a sampling of gay men were HTI...V-IIIpositive. To a large extent, all these studies were biased by the fact that subjects were selected from more sexually active men who went to VD clinics. [Meaning that a much lower prevalence of the virus was likely infecting the general homosexual population throughout the United States.] In San Francisco, or example, only about 40 percent of a randomly selected sample of gay men were infected, compared with the 67 percent infected in the hepatitis cohort. 18 [Emphasis added.]


Dr. Jaffe's revelation should have called greater attention to the Merck HB vaccines as a suspect in the growing AIDS mystery. Jaffe, however, was not the only CDC researcher to present alarming facts.

Don Francis examined the "blood he had collected from the 6,800 [gay] men" who participated in the Merck/CDC study. He "selected 110 blood samples drawn in 1978 and about 50 taken in 1980. Only 1percent in the 1978 study had LAV antibodies, while 25 percent of the group studied two years later were infected. Since then, the infection rate had more than doubled. The retrospective testing bolstered the hypothesis that a new viral agent had appeared among San Francisco gay men in 1976 or 1977 and spread rapidly .... "19

In following that logic, it seemed most plausible that the New York infections had not begun with the famous "Patient Zero" -- Gaetan Dugas -- around 1980 as was promoted by the CDC.20

More likely, I speculated, gay men from New York were being infected before 1976 -- sometime between 1973 and 1975 was my guess. My next thought was I wonder whether Szmuness's group conducted any hepatitis B vaccine trials in New York City in the early 1970s? I decided to look into that possibility posthaste.

Saul Krugman and Company

I quickly returned to the computer terminal I had left a few hours earlier. I typed in the new search path, "USAID" -- "Vaccines" -- "Hepatitis," and entered the database prior to 1975. The search retrieved numerous sources; the most frequently recurring name on this list was S. Krugman -- a name I remembered seeing in Szmuness's report.

I'll have to reread that again when I get home, I thought. Then I spent the rest of the day finding and photocopying other references cited during the search.

Later that evening, after telling Jackie about the CDC's and Merck's "Anonymous" vindication of their hepatitis B vaccine experiments, I pulled out Szmuness's New England Journal of Medicine report and found the New York University Medical Center (NYUMC) affiliate's name all over it. "Krugman" appeared four times on the first page alone; five times in the reference section, and again in each of two acknowledgment sections. Krugman, in fact, was acknowledged as being the chairman of the advisory committee overseeing the entire homosexual hepatitis B vaccine program. 10

Additionally, I recalled the name "New York University Medical Center" was on the list of biological weapons contractors the Army had turned over to the House appropriations subcommittee (see fig. 6.7).21

Then it dawned on me that Szmuness and his colleagues from the New York Blood Center had conducted the gay HB vaccine study in cooperation with researchers from the Division of Epidemiology at Columbia University's School of Public Health -- where Joseph Califano was employed. 22

I reread Szmuness's report carefully to consider Krugman's contributions to the field of hepatitis B virology. "Bingo! There it is." I shouted from the library alerting Jackie to my find. She came over and sat beside me on the arm of the recliner. "Krugman and his colleagues had been investigating various concoctions of live and disabled hepatitis B viruses on monkeys and men in New York City since the early I970s," I said. 10

"In fact," I continued, "Krugman and his colleagues -- R. H. Purcell and J. L. Gerin -- had injected homosexual males with various research reagents during their 1976 and 1977 vaccine trials. The report states that 'Krugman et al., in a classic series of studies [between 1969 and 1978], found that a I: 10 dilution of hepatitis B infective serum (strain MS-2) ... prevented or modified hepatitis B in about 70 percent of vaccinated subjects who were later challenged with infectious material.'''23

"God help the poor souls in the other 30 percent of the group," Jackie replied, then got up and walked off towards the nursery.

I continued reading the report which also stated:

A more sophisticated vaccine, in principle similar to Krugman's, has subsequently been developed by Hilleman and his colleagues at the Merck Institute of Therapeutic Research. This vaccine consists of highly purified, formalin-inactivated HBsAg [HB surface particles capable of prompting an immune response] derived from the plasma of chronic carriers of the antigen. The vaccine has been extensively evaluated for safety, immunogenicity, and efficacy in chimpanzees, and its safety and immunogenicity were confirmed in human volunteers. A similar vaccine has been developed by Purcell and Gerin [colleagues of Krugman and Hilleman with ties to Merck, Sharp & Dohme]. By mid-1978, data obtained from these Phase I and II studies were sufficient to permit efficacy testing in a large-scale field trial with human subjects.10


In essence, the "Phase I and II studies" had been conducted in New York City from 1976 to 1977. Just the right time for prompting a small homosexual outbreak of AIDS cases in Manhattan in 1978.

Figure 13.2 shows how gay male volunteers were solicited for these hepatitis B vaccine experiments through newspaper advertisements.

It was also clear that Krugman -- affiliated with NYUMC -- did the initial studies, and then passed his innovations on to Hilleman and others at Merck.

I walked into the nursery to find Jackie putting together Alena's old crib in preparation for our new arrival. "No doubt Merck paid Krugman a fee for his labor and discoveries," I said. "What bothers me is, here again, the American taxpayer was left footing the bill and holding an empty bag. Government grants, that is, our taxes, undoubtedly funded the discovery of the hepatitis B vaccine; then the rights to it were sold off."

The realization that Merck had been making billions a year from AIDS-related drugs, and fortunes more from hepatitis B vaccines, made me momentarily ill. Particularly since April 15 -- tax day -- was close at hand.

Fig. 13.2. Advertisement Placed in New York Newspapers to Recruit Homosexual Men Into Experimental Hepatitis 8 Vaccination Program

Image
This 1979 ad recruited volunteers for hepatitis-B vaccine experiments conducted by W. Szmuness and other investigators associated with the New York City Blood Center, Merck, Sharp & Dohme, and the CDC. Credit: Gaysweek. Source: Lederer R. Origin and spread of AIDS: Is the West responsible. Covert Action Information Bulletin (Winter) 1988;29:60.

Purcell and Gerin: Merck's NIAID Connection

Szmuness's report revealed that the pilot surveys, Phase I and II, were conducted by "M. R. Hilleman ... and his colleagues at the Merck Institute of Therapeutic Research," and by R. H. Purcell and J. L. Gerin. Therefore, the following day, I decided to investigate their interconnections.

Robert H. Purcell, I learned by digging up one of his grant proposals (see fig. 13.3), was Head of the Hepatitis Viruses Section in the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland.24

Dr. Gerin, who frequently published with Purcell on the subject of hepatitis, was affiliated with the NIAID and "MAN Laboratory."24

From a NIAID Task Force report entitled Virology: Control of Viral Infections published by the USPHS's DHEW at the time Califano was the agency's chief, I learned that Gerin was credited for having prepared "two pilot lots of the hepatitis B vaccine, one subtype adw and the other subtype ayw .... Following extensive safety testing in chimpanzees," Purcell wrote, "both vaccines are currently undergoing safety testing in humans." The human test subjects were the homosexual males who had volunteered for the Merck/CDC HB vaccine trials.24

Purcell, leery of vaccine production costs, explained the complexity of their experiments on monkeys and gay men in advance of Szmuness's New York City HB vaccine trials. He wrote in his 1977-1978 grant proposal:

Although a hepatitis B vaccine ... purified from the plasma of chronic carriers of the antigen is feasible and probably cost-effective for its contemplated uses in the United States, such a vaccine probably will not be cost-effective for the people most in need of a vaccine in the developing world. Therefore, additional studies on alternative methods of purification and inactivation, comparisons of monovalent vs bivalent or polyvalent [that is, different combinations of] vaccines, studies of different vaccine dosages, different vaccination schedules, different routes of administration, studies of possible adjuvants [substances that might be added to enhance the main ingredient's strength] and their interaction with vaccine preparations and further characterization of the immunizing antigens themselves will be carried out [during the human trials for which this grant proposal was written].

In addition, one important observation associated with the vaccine trials in chimpanzees was that type B hepatitis could be prevented in chimps by vaccination after exposure .... Additional studies in chimpanzees to confirm and extend these observations [to humans] are planned.24


Fig. 13.3. NIAID Grant Summary Report: Hepatitis Virus Experiments Conducted on Monkeys and Homosexual Males in N.Y.C.

Image
SMITHSONIAN SCIENCE INFORMATION EXCHANGE PROJECT NUMBER (Do NOT use this space)
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE NOTICE OF INTRAMURAL RESEARCH PROJECT
PROJECT NUMBER
Z01 AI 00026-11 LID
PERIOD COVERED: October 1, 1977 through September 30, 1978
TITLE OF PROJECT: Laboratory and Epidemiologic Studies of Viral Hepatitis Agents
NAMES, LABORATORY AND INSTITUTE AFFILIATIONS, AND TITLES OF PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS AND PROFESSIONAL PERSONNEL ENGAGED ON THE PROJECT
PI: R.H. Purcell, Head, Hepatitis Viruses Section, LID, NIAID
Y. Moritsugu, Visiting Scientist, LID, NIAID
V. McAuliffe, Research Associate, LID, NIAID
Y. Shimizu , isiting Fellow, LID, NIAID
G. Hess, Guest Worker, LID, NIAID
J. Slusarczyk, Visiting Fellow, LID, NIAID
L. Mathiesen, Guest Worker, LID, NIAID
Other:
P. Holland, H. Alter (CC, Blood Bank, NIH)
K. Soike (Delta Primate Center)
J.L. Gerin (MAN Laboratory)
W. London (NINCDS)
J. Maynard (CDC)
L. Barker, D. Lorenz
E. Tabor, R. Gerety (FDA)
COOPERATING UNITS (if any): None
LAB BRANCH: Laboratory of Infectious Diseases
SECTION: Hepatitis Viruses Section
INSTITUTE AND LOCATION: NIAID, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland
TOTAL MANYEARS: 99/12
PROFESSIONAL: 51/12
OTHER: 36/12
CHECK APPROPRIATE BOX(ES): HUMAN SUBJECTS
SUMMARY OF WORK (200 words or less - underline keywords)
This project consists of continuing studies of the chemistry, structure, epidemiology, immunology and pathology of the human hepatitis viruses. The goal of such studies is the control of human viral hepatitis by application of the most appropriate methods, including active and passive immunization, chemotherapy and interdiction of spread of the viruses. Progress: The biophysical and biochemical characterization of hepatitis A viral antigen has begun, and studies of the immunopathology of hepatitis type A in non-human primates, using defined pools of virus, are in progress. An inactivated subunit vaccine for hepatitis type B has been developed and is undergoing extensive tests of safety and efficacy in chimpanzees and man. A third hepatitis B antigen, e antigen, is being characterized and its relationship to infectivity-is being explored. Evidence that populations of hepatitis B viruses may contain defective interfering particles has been obtained, and this finding is being utilized in renewed attempts to isolate the virus. A newly recognized clinical syndrome, type non-A, non-B hepatitis has been further defined and attempts to identify an etiologic agent intensified through transmission studies in chimpanzees.
Source: USDHEW. Virology: Volume 4 -- Control of Viral Infections. NIAID Task Force Report, Bethesda, MD; Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health (NIH) 79-1834, 1979, p. 20-65.


In other words, in Gerin's lab, chimps were being experimentally infected and then vaccinated (as the CDC and Merck currently recommend for healthcare workers following risky body fluid exposures25). Undoubtedly, human trials of this nature were planned and apparently conducted "in the developing world" and in New York City. Were gay males from New York given the honor of volunteering during the mid-l 970s? I would soon find out.

On the next page of his grant application, Purcell discussed his plan to isolate, modify, and transmit liver cancer viruses in efforts to create a vaccine, he wrote:

[P]reparations of high density and intermediate density HB virions [viruses] are being purified ... under conditions of high containment in Dr. Gerin's laboratory. [The same Dr. Gerin who prepared the vaccines for experimentation on New York's homosexual population]. These preparations are being aliquoted and titered [fractioned and standardized] for infectivity in chimpanzees; they will be used for attempts to isolate HBV in a number of tissue culture cell lines.

Cell lines that can be certified as being of ["fetal human or chimpanzee"] liver origin will be inoculated with partially purified HBV that is being titered in chimpanzees. These inoculated cultures will be monitored .

[R]ecently a hepatoma [liver cancer] cell line was isolated in South Africa . . . . It is recognized that this cell line cannot serve as a source for hepatitis B vaccine because of its malignant origin, but it may yield important information on HBV-cell interaction. Attempts to recover the virus ... are in progress. 24


What frightened me was that these recovered viruses were being injected into chimpanzees that might have contacted other monkeys or chimps in Gerin's lab enroute to gay hepatitis B vaccine production and testing. Again, I would soon learn, these fears too were not unfounded. Related concerns were raised by research colleagues of Purcell and Gerin.

"Inner Circle" Interest in Central Africa

What struck me most about Purcell's report, however, was reference to an African connection to Merck-funded researchers in New York and Bethesda. If my suspicions were accurate, the literature held many more.

Merck, the U.S. Army, USAID, Litton Bionetics, and the NCI were all in the same business, I realized -- cancer research. All were interested in vaccines and studies in which cancer-causing viruses were isolated and transported from Africa to the United States and visa versa. I suspected all were financially interconnected as well. My next job was to locate evidence to prove or disprove my suspicions.

I was now beginning to assess the relatively small "inner circle" of researchers running the planet's hepatitis and liver cancer research programs. It included the three Roberts from Bethesda -- Gallo, Manaker, and Purcell -- who were charged with overseeing the NCI and NIAID cancer cell biology programs. Saul Krugman and Maurice Hilleman were their counterparts at NYU Medical Center and the Merck Institute.

My suspicions that they worked together were fueled by several sources of information. First, Dr. Poiesz's arbitrary MMWR report "confirming lack of AIDS transmission" through Merck vaccines.8 From this document, it was clear the SUNY researcher, Poiesz, had worked closely with Gallo in the late 1970s on T-cell leukemia/lymphoma.26 Both sought to isolate cancer-causing viruses under military contracts, and both were apparently supported by Merck.

Indeed, the Poiesz-Gallo connection was so intimate, Poiesz led Gallo's research team in characterizing and reporting HTLV-I and HTLVII -- Gallo's two allegedly discovered leukemia viruses. Combined, the two military contractors reported the AIDS virus relatives were associated with T-cell malignancies. This work was done in the late I970s, allegedly prior to the identification of the AIDS virus HTLV-III.26 And when the time came to disclose the "complete nucleotide sequence of the AIDS virus," Gallo and his team cited Poiesz among the investigators who established, "human T-cell leukaemia (Iymphotropic) viruses HTLV-I, -II and -1lI," the "family of exogenous retroviruses ... associated with T-cell disorders, including adult T-cell leukaemia lymphoma and the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)."27 In essence, Poiesz was among the most intimate of Gallo supporters, and this bias alone could explain but not excuse his Merck-vaccine-vindicating MMWR report -- as an expression of conflicting interest.

Two reports I had already read by Gallo and his colleagues thanked "Merck and Co., Incorp." for supplying them with experimental reagents, including a drug known as cordycepin.28,29 Recalling the channel for one such contribution was the "Drug Development Branch" of the NCI, I realized this was a conduit of experimental reagents and drugs, including vaccines to and from MSD to Gallo and company.29

And now, here were other reports documenting the inner circle -- New York, Bethesda, African researchers' -- connections to experimental vaccines. The many Krugman papers I had photocopied earlier in the day provided clues as to how and why these researchers gathered cell lines from African natives -- cell lines "successfully" infected with cancer viruses. 30

The first Krugman report I read was his 1974 presentation before the "International Symposium on Viral Hepatitis." The conference, held in Milan, Italy, was "very generously" supported by Merck, Sharp and Dohme.31 The report reiterated much of what had been published in Szmuness's report with one exception: Krugman acknowledged that his main source of funding, besides the Health Research Council of the City of New York, was the United States Army Research and Development Command. 31

Krugman, I then realized, aside from his lucrative connections to Merck, was likely among the benefactors of the $142,000 the United States Army gave the NYUMC for biological weapons in 1969.32,33

Most interesting, in this symposium report, was a discussion between Drs. Hilleman, Krugman, their colleague Dr. A. M. Prince, who was in charge of their monkey facility at the Laboratory of Virology at The New York Blood Center, (310 East 67th Street, New York, NY 1(021), and three other participants -- Dr. G. N. Vyas from the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Desmyter from Belgium (where the NATO symposium on "entry of foreign nucleic acids into cells" was held in 1970), and Dr. J. E. Maynard from the COC's Phoenix Laboratories Division (where Don Francis, several years later, became involved in the hepatitis B vaccine trials that these men were discussing). Their conversation revealed the New York group had tested their first batches of experimental HB vaccine even earlier than their other reports indicated. Here they discussed the fact that their initial HB vaccine trials were conducted on chimpanzees in the late 1960s, and "serosusceptible unimmunized persons" between 1970 and 1974.31

Moreover, they were preparing for extensive human trials in the mid- 1970s. During the beginning of their discussion, Hilleman said:

We have prepared 4 lots of vaccine that would amount to perhaps 200,000 human doses and we hope this can soon be put on initial limited clinical test for establishing safety and measuring antibody response.31


Soon thereafter, Hilleman evaded a question from Maynard about "who ought to be given the vaccine" by saying 'This is a question better answered, perhaps, by Dr. Krugman," who also evaded the question by responding:

Our preliminary studies with a heat-inactivated hepatitis B vaccine (JAMA, 217: 21-45, 1971) revealed evidence of protection .... If the hepatitis B vaccine proves to be safe and immunogenic in susceptible adults during the initial trials ... , subsequent studies could be carried out ... at a later time. 31


The "who ought to be given the vaccine" question was finally answered by Szmuness a decade later. In his 1980 HB vaccine trial report, Szmuness wrote:

Several populations in the United States with a high risk of HBV infection were considered for such a trial: patients institutionalized for mental retardation, patients undergoing hemodialysis, members of the medical staff of dialysis centers, American Indians, and homosexual men. 31 Of these groups, a population of HBV-susceptible homosexual healthy young men appeared to be the most suitable. Their risk of HBV infection is unusually high, they are readily accessible through numerous gay organizations, and their cooperation in previous studies has been excellent.10


Undoubtedly, with "200,000 human doses," which Krugman and company hoped in December 1974, to soon test, it is highly unlikely they vaccinated only 1,083 as reported by Szmuness. 10,34 After all, 7,000 local gay men took part in the hepatitis study conducted in San Francisco alone. Homosexuals who, according to Dr. Paul O' Malley, the health investigator who had headed up the Merck/CDC hepatitis B study, suffered "an inordinate number of GRID victims .... Of the first twenty-four GRID cases in San Francisco, in fact, eleven were in the hepatitis B cohort."35

Monkeying Around with Cancer for Profit

During the early 1970s, these researchers were experimenting with various heat treatments for preparing hepatitis B vaccines from infected chimpanzees and humans. Some inactivation methods were effective, they reported, and others were not.31 In any case, the rush was on for immediate human trials.

Following Krugman's evasive statement, regarding who should be tested, Dr. Desmyter responded to concerns that a viral outbreak might occur from these experiments. He and other inner circle researchers knew that Krugman, since the mid-1960s, had been using children at the Willowbrook State School for the mentally retarded as human guinea pigs for Army and Atomic Energy Commission funded hepatitis B studies.36 In an effort to determine the lowest concentration of HBV needed to immunize against hepatitis, Krugman inoculated dozens of New York children with, what was believed to be possible liver-cancer-causing viruses. At the time, their rationale was that the children were likely to become exposed to hepatitis B viruses anyway, in that setting, so little more consideration was given to the bioethics of such experimentation.36

"In relation to Dr. Prince's problem of quarantine for chimpanzees," Desmyter argued, "it is certainly not unavoidable that chimpanzees become infected before or after captivity. We have been monitoring two colonies for about 4 years. In one, more than 60% of the animals have [become infected with the hepatitis virus during holding].... " He then told the group of another monkey colony that fared much better; to which the New York Blood Center's Dr. Prince replied, "Most of the animals that we have examined at the Laboratory of Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates in New York, that have been held for use in other programmes for a year or more, I would say more than 70% have [been environmentally infected with hepatitis B]. ... "31

Prince's admission that 70 percent of their quarantined caged monkeys had sustained hepatitis infections in some unknown way was exactly what I had feared. Being "held for use in other programmes for a year or more," the monkeys were undoubtedly infected with more than just hepatitis B virus. The New York group I learned had, in fact, been experimenting with various types of viruses and mutant strains, just as Gallo and his Litton Bionetics associates had been doing. (The only difference is Gallo focused more on "type-C" cancer virus suspects, including RNA retroviruses that produced leukemia, lymphomas, and sarcomas, whereas Krugman's and Purcell's groups concentrated somewhat more on the herpes-type (DNA) viruses and "type B" RNA viruses associated with various forms of hepatitis and certain cancers of the liver, breast, nasopharynx, and lymph nodes. These included the yellow fever virus, cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex virus, and Epstein Barr virus (EBV) thought to be associated with Burkitt's lymphoma (BL)-most commonly seen in central Africa.37)Their work overlapped so much that they often shared their expertise and resources including viruses.

As documented during my USAID literature search, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Krugman, Hilleman, and Purcell held a virtual monopoly over viral hepatitis research.41Yet their vaccine studies were not limited to hepatitis. Their quest for lucrative grants and contracts included studying dozens of virus strains in search of highly profitable vaccines. This created a grave laboratory and outbreak threat. Their chimps became natural breeding grounds for deadly contagions including hepatitis, herpes simplex, cytomegalovirus, EBV, measles, 38 mumps, 39 rubella, 39 tetanus,40 diptheria, 40 smallpox, 38 and polio viruses. 40Any number of mutant viruses might have been formed as the apes lived captive in Gerin's and Prince's labs. This, then, was one plausible way in which slow acting AIDS-like viruses, developed in Gallo/Bionetics labs, may have been accidentally transmitted to experimental hepatitis B vaccines developed in Gerin's lab -- the vaccines tested in New York on humans, including homosexual males, kidney dialysis patients, the mentally retarded, and other high risk persons, during the Phase I and II studies discussed by Purcel1.24

In 1974, during a virology symposium sponsored by the Gustav Stem Foundation, Purcell and Krugman discussed their problems and progress in developing, what would later become, Hilleman's and Merck's hepatitis B vaccine.41 Purcell stated his failure to culture hepatitis B virus -- the MS- 2 strain that Krugman had pulled from "HAM," a mentally retarded child -- in human cell cultures.42 Likewise, rhesus monkey cell cultures failed to grow the monkey adapted hepatitis B virus. To overcome this problem, live chimpanzees were selected to grow all the different types of hepatitis B virus the researchers needed for their human experiments.41

"To avoid duplication of experiments and wastage of seronegative [scarce and expensive] chimpanzees, we are collaborating with Dr. Barker of the Bureau of Biologics, Food and Drug Administration, and Dr. Maynard of the Center for Disease Control, in an interagency study of hepatitis B infection in chimpanzees," Purcell wrote. "A high priority of these studies is the establishment of pools of hepatitis B virus .... Human serum or plasma containing HBsAg of subtype adw, ayw, adr, or ayr has been inoculated into [the] chimpanzees .... The inoculum chosen to represent subtype ayw was serum supplied by Dr. Saul Krugman from the MS-2 pool of hepatitis B virus."41

"Cross-challenge experiments, and evaluation of various aspects of passive and active immunization against hepatitis B infection," Purcell explained, then proceeded in chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys, and humans. I later learned that Krugman's affiliated NYUMC was the world's leading institution for testing simian-to-man organ transplants, blood transfusions, and vaccine research.43

The final piece of the iatrogenic theory of AIDS puzzle fell into place when Purcell admitted the FDA-CDC-NIAID-NYUMC-AEC-Army and later Merck collaborative experimental hepatitis B vaccines, destined for humans, included viruses grown in chimpanzees containing any number of monkey virus contaminants that could have given rise to HIV-2 or 1.

Further implicating their hepatitis B vaccine, as Shultz explained, "a lentivirus isolated from chimpanzees (SIVcpz)" is "the closest primate relative of HIV-1."44 SIV likely evolved, then, because the chimps had been: 1) used to develop experimental hepatitis B and other vaccines largely because they were primates bearing the greatest similarity to humans; and 2) among the first creatures to be exposed to the man-made retroviruses by way of direct inoculation or experimental monkey cohabitation.

It also occurred to me that even if Merck's human experimental hepatitis B vaccine hadn't included chimpanzee serum, only serum taken from New York's retarded children or gay men, live viral contaminants injected around 1970 could have combined with the simian viruses -- SV40, SIVagm, or SFV -- the "volunteers" likely carried following vaccination with Merck's polio vaccines administered during the previous decade.

In 1976, the Willowbrook State School, under intense criticism for publicized cases of child abuse and neglect, was closed. The children, many possibly carrying the world's first AIDS viruses, dispersed back into the communities from which they came. "Only the State Institute for Basic Studies in Neuroscience stayed open on the campus," explained Leonard Ciaccio, a local biology teacher and historian. "The neuroscience lab conducted microbiological and biochemical studies . . . they were studying how cells were affected by various toxins."45

Though now the accidental theory of AIDS seemed highly plausible, since major funding for all this work came from Merck, the U.S. Army, CDC, NCI, NIAID, USAlD, and AEC, given the Army and Merck connections to Kissinger et al., BW research, and COINTELPRO targeting of gays and blacks, the intentional transmission theory remained to be disproven.

Though now I had identified the "self-serving bureaucracy" strong evidence indicated had brought AIDS into the world (see fig. 13.4),46I realized the hardest evidence still remained to be analyzed-the Krugman-Purcell-Hilleman Phase I and II hepatitis B vaccine lots allegedly in safe keeping at the FDA. Also, look-back studies of AIDS cases among Willowbrook alumni, and others who received these vaccines, were clearly warranted.

Fig. 13.4 Principle Cancer Virus Researchers, Program Administrators, and Their Worldwide Military-Medical-Industrial Connections

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Chapter 14: Central West African Vaccine Trials

THE time had come to investigate the vaccine/immunization studies conducted in Central West Africa during the 1970s. Acknowledging that tainted HB vaccine was the prime suspect in transmitting the AIDS virus to homosexuals in New York, I now suspected the same was true for central west African natives.

By now I also knew the major players in America's vaccine and cancer research effort were closely knit and well funded by the military-medical-industrial complex. My next task was to investigate the specific African vaccine studies and immunization campaigns waged by the human suspects since this information might provide details on how AIDS viruses might have been accidentally or intentionally transmitted there as well.

The USAID MEDLAR search I had conducted days earlier provided numerous abstracts and references, among which were reports published by the International Association for Research in Cancer (IARC). Two IARC abstracts I immediately accessed detailed USAID-supported studies describing "HB vaccine" trials in Central Africa. One report acknowledged large-scale pilot studies carried out on children in order to test the safety and efficacy of Merck's hepatitis B vaccine. The report from Senegal stated:

In 1978 it was suggested that hepatitis B (HB) vaccine should be used to prevent the early hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) carrier state in children. Immunization was effected by 3 injections of HB vaccine at one-month intervals followed by a booster injection after one year. Children in a control group were immunized with DT-polio vaccine according to the same schedule .... In addition, an investigation was carried out on the immune response to HBsAg and tetanus toxoid ... when administered simultaneously to [hundreds more] children in HB vaccine and DT-polio vaccine. In Africa, immunization teams have a limited amount of time to devote to each rural community. . . . These results demonstrate that 2 doses of 5 micrograms of HB vaccine are sufficient to obtain a high immunogenic effect in infants. 1


The second abstract described another USAID HB vaccine study that was launched in Burundi, Zaire's eastern neighbor. A hospital setting was used this time to test new vaccines on infants. The abstract stated:

Vaccination against hepatitis B is carried out at birth in the Bujumbura Hospital in Burundi. The vaccination protocol comprises only two injections, the first being given during the first 48 hours after birth and the second two months later. A booster is given at the age of one year. The results of this vaccination programme are compared with those obtained in a control population. At the time of the booster, 82% of vaccinated subjects had anti-HBs antibodies, compared with 3% of control subjects. Six months after the second injection, all vaccinated subjects had anti-HBs antibodies.2


So it was clear, hepatitis B vaccine studies, similar to those conducted in New York on gay volunteers, proceeded in Africa on children and infants during the same period. Moreover, some of these studies used various combinations of live and inactivated viruses to immunize the test subjects. This could have created additional mutant germs and unusual "tropical diseases."

The Cream of International Vaccine Research

Next, I followed Krugman's paper trail to the WHO office in Washington, D.C. Here on December 14-18, 1970, the WHO held an "International Conference on the Application of Vaccines Against Viral, Rickettsial, and Bacterial Diseases of Man." Once again, the meeting was generously funded by Merck, Sharp and Dohme.3

The Pan American Health Organization, quartered in the WHO's Washington office building, co-hosted the event that made tne world's cream of vaccine research rise to the occasion. Among the 330 researchers in attendance was Dr. Robert Manaker -- Gallo's senior at the NIH.3 Manaker, I learned from the proceedings report, had studied lymphoid-leukemia viruses at the NCI -- Gallo's claim to fame -- while Gallo was still studying to be a doctor at Jefferson Medical College.4 That was 1960 -- more than ten years before Gallo allegedly discovered HTLV-I.

Also in attendance was Dr. S. Paul Ehrlich, Jr. representing the USDHEW. Ehrlich later became the acting surgeon general when Califano became secretary of the department in 1976.At the time, Congress was investigating the DOD for its open-air biological weapons experiments on unsuspecting human subjects in San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere. Ehrlich's department then defended the Army by issuing a statement that read: "We do not know of any evidence that would indicate an association between the deaths reported in the press ... and the organisms reported to have been used in the atmospheric tests." 5

Other famous researchers present were Hilary Koprowski and Stanley Plotkin from the Wistar Institute, Dr. Albert Sabin from the Weitzmann Institute of Science in Israel, Hilleman from Merck, Purcell from NIAID, and Krugman from NYUMC. Hilleman and Krugman were acknowledged for working on the ten-member Program Committee, and Hilleman was given special credit for being a "Consultant" to the organization.6

The most well-represented organizations at the conference included Merck, who had sent a total of ten delegates, the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, the United States Department of the Army in Washington and the Biological Defense Research Center in Fort Detrick, and the Navy Department in Washington. The Behringwerke AG in Marburg/Lahn, the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Frankfort/Main, and the Institute of Immunology (Sera and Vaccines) in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, were also well represented. These three research centers were where, in 1967, the Marburg virus outbreak occurred.

Other organizations represented included the US AID, the CDC, and the NIH.6

Twenty-Country Central West African Experiments

The conference highlights included several presentations and discussions about numerous vaccine trials conducted specifically in Central West Africa. The researchers discussed testing vaccines against the myriad ailments for which Merck and the others maintained huge financial interests. Vaccines, the presenters noted, had been developed for yellow fever, measles, mumps, poliomyelitis, smallpox, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, and rubella. Central West African natives were largely the subjects of the researchers' experiments.

Dr. William Foege from the CDC described the breadth of initial USAID and CDC vaccine trials in the region.? Although "Measles vaccination in Africa" was his topic, his discussion included smallpox. Foege reported that:

In 1961, recognizing the public health significance of measles, the Government of Upper Volta conducted an immunization trial. Because of its success, in 1963 the Government conducted a nationwide immunization program, with assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development ([US]AID). Projects were soon started in other countries, and by 1966 eleven West African countries were engaged in such programs. Early in 1967 measles immunization programs were started as part of a coordinated twenty-country regional program for smallpox eradication and measles control, with technical assistance from [US]AID and the U.S. Center for Disease Control.' The original objective in regard to measles was stated to be control rather than eradication. The methods to be employed consisted of village- by-village programs carried out by mobile teams using jet injectors. Children from 6 months to 6 years of age were to be immunized during the first cycle; the upper age limit for subsequent cycles would be 6 months plus the interval since the previous cycle. [7]


Foege's statement and article was particularly interesting for three reasons:

First, he cited many of the twenty countries that had participated in the Central West African vaccine trials (see figs. 14.1 and 14.2). This I felt was suspicious evidence. As Shilts wrote in The Band:

The spread of AIDS in Africa most likely outpaced the spread in any other region in the world ... one in six [European] AIDS patients was African. These cases could be traced to eighteen sub-Saharan African nations. Two-thirds of the African-linked AIDS cases in Europe, however, came from one country, Zaire, and II percent came from the nearby Congo .... In Zaire, the virus was so widespread that scientists had a hard time constructing studies on risk factors. It was difficult to find a control group that was not infected .... 9


And despite this epidemiologic evidence that the disease had followed a specific path previously worn by multicomponent vaccine trials, "Belgian scientists reported only one major risk factor in the victim nations: heterosexual promiscuity."9

My thoughts diverted to the few scientists who voiced concern about this arbitrary conclusion. The CDC/Merck rebuttal to hepatitis B vaccine suspicions was insufficient at best and at worst scientific fraud. Why, after all, were the New York City AIDS cases spared from HB vaccine analysis? Why had the scientific community not acknowledged their flawed study design? The only educated guess I could render was that anyone in the international scientific community even remotely dependent on grants from the NIH, USPHS, CDC, NCI, NIAID, USAID, and WHO or pharmaceutical industry contracts wouldn't dare object. To buck the system in this way would be like committing academic and economic suicide for anyone dependent on the establishment for their livelihood, and that was almost everyone with the wherewithal to evaluate the hard facts.

Fig. 14.1. Combined Measles/Smallpox Immunization Campaign By Agencies Suspected of Spreading AIDS to Central West Africa

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* Initially defined as population under 5 years of age or 18.5% of total population; the age limits on administering measles vaccine was subsequently lowered, thus the cumulative immunizations will not reach the shaded area.
Graph depicts cumulative measles/smallpox immunization in the estimated target population of 20-22 million West and Central Africa natives from 20 countries. Source: William H. Foege, Center for Disease Control. Reprinted from "Measles Vaccination in Africa" -- presented during the Pan American (World) Health Organization International Conference on the Application of Vaccines Against Viral, Rickettsial, and Bacterial Diseases of Man, December 14-18, 1970, p. 208.


Fig. 14.2. Map of Africa and the Subsaharan Nations Hardest Hit by the AIDS Epidemic

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Map of Africa shows the nations in central Africa hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic where those in which experimental vaccines were administered. This work was supported by USAID, the CDC, the WHO, Merck and Co., Inc., and the NCI. Source: Lederer R. Origin and spread of AIDS: Is the West responsible? Covert Action Information Bulletin 1987;28:43.

Second, Foege's paper documented the extent to which the African smallpox eradication campaign was used to test other experimental vaccines that would eventually be licensed by Merck. 10 This was important because: (1) According to comments by Hilleman, Merck ended up owning the licensing rights to various vaccines even though federally funded investigators did the lion's share of the primary research; 10 and (2) As was documented when Gallo acknowledged the NCI's "Drug Development Branch" for relaying Merck's experimental reagent Cordycepin, there was obviously a channel from Merck to the NCI, and therefore, from Africa to the United States, through which experimental drugs and irnmune-system-impacting biologicals, like vaccines, flowed; II and (3) These African multiviral vaccine tests were clearly dangerous. As numerous scientists had shown, the AIDS virus appears to contain several recognizable components from other viruses.12.13 This, according to Strecker, strongly suggested that AIDS "was constructed." Therefore, vaccine experiments in which particles from different types of viruses were combined in humans, animals, or cell cultures, provided a plausible explanation for new "emerging viruses" from this region of the world. 13

Strecker's theory of man-made HIV development from bovine and visna viruses, however, failed to consider one important fact -- the principal NCI viral researchers implicated by the scientific evidence, were not experimenting with sheep or cow lentiviruses in Manhattan in the early 1970s. They were experimenting with various primate cancer viruses and vaccines. Moreover, Russian researchers were not implicated whatsoever by the paper trail. The spotlight of suspicion focused primarily on Merck, 7,10 Gallo's group at the NCI and Litton Bionetics, and their New York colleagues.

The Heart of the Military-Medical-Industrial Complex

Within minutes of Foege's presentation, Saul Krugman stood up and reported that, in Africa and elsewhere, their measles vaccine studies had been "supported by the Health Research Council of the City of New York" and his organization-the New York University Medical Center. Who was behind the Health Research Council of the City of New York, I wondered? Why were they interested in vaccinating black Africans overseas?

Hilleman had already openly admitted he and his group at Merck followed Krugman's lead in developing the hepatitis B vaccine. 14This was evidence to support the theory that the African AIDS "party" began in New York and was hosted by key players in America's military-medical-industrial complex. Besides the Army, Krugman credited Merck and Dow Chemical Company, both Army bioweapons contractors, for the vaccines used in his trials (see fig. 6.7).15,16

On reviewing the Army's list of principal biological weapons contractors once again, I realized Dow Chemical had just topped Hazelton Laboratories by a few thousand dollars and was closing ground on Bionetics Research Laboratories, which held sixth place. In fourth place was the University of Chicago, where Gallo interned and began to publish his blood cancer research.17 Stanford University, where Gallo had sent his cell cultures to have them examined for bacterial and fungal contamination, was in thirteenth place.18 And last on the list was New England Nuclear Corp., which delivered experimental reagents to Gallo on his request in 1965.17

I then realized that Gallo documented receiving support from at least a third of the Army's top-eighteen biological research contractors, including Bionetics, Hazelton, the U. of Chicago,17 Stanford University,18 Dow Chemical,19 and New England Nuclear Corp.17 -- not including his documented connection to Krugman's staff at the NYUMC or Hilleman's colleagues at Merck.15

Objections and Predictions for Unnatural Disaster

I sat glued reviewing discourses between several conference participants, including Merck's Hilleman, Dr. Frederick Rasmussen, Jr. of the University of California School of Medicine -- another certified bioweapons contractor with links to Gallo and immunosuppressive germ warfare, Dr. Alexander Langmuir of Harvard University Medical School, and the NCI's Manaker, who along with Hilleman held a driving desire to develop a vaccine for cancer.

Hilleman initially stated that new viral vaccine combinations were being prepared for mass immunization campaigns based on studies of soldiers and prisoners, and that "we have measles-mumps-rubella vaccines in various combinations that are up for licensing right now." 10 To which Dr. Langmuir replied:

I am very much in favor of a good vaccine .... I hope they can be licensed, but before a product can be promoted for general use in 200 million people, there needs to be reasonably consistent and solid evidence that it not only produces antibodies ... [but] protects. I insist that this has not been delivered. It is not a question of whether the product protects troops in a military camp or inmates of a certain institution. It should protect the high-risk group: the aged and the chronically ill.

Studies have been made, and some have shown rather good results, but they are anything but consistent. It seems to me that we cannot yet say we have a product that should be promoted for general use. Furthermore, let us not go adding a lot of things to vaccines that themselves are still questionable and hope to give them a little extra aura of authenticity. 10


Here, Langmuir objected to the inconsistent efficacy of some vaccines that, when combined with other vaccines, might reduce even more the overall benefit or even produce harm. One example of the less than ideal results achieved from a mass immunization campaign is shown in fig. 14.3.

More incredibly, Rasmussen added his concern that a slow virus immune- system-destroying disease, essentially identical to AIDS, would be a likely outcome of multiple mass vaccination programs due to the way viruses reproduce by altering their host's immune system:

In view of the complexity and diversity of immunizing antigens and the possible host responses, an occasional adverse interaction should not surprise us. Such proved, widely-used vaccines as pertussis and BCG are known to increase and modify immunological reactivity profoundly. A number of viral immunogens, notably measles, consist of or are prepared from viruses .... There must also be biological interactions, genetic among sufficiently closely related viruses and through sharing of virus coded mechanisms for the synthesis of subunits [viral components and new viruses].

The dangers confronting us in the development and use of new vaccines, together with those known to exist with the present vaccines, may have been overemphasized, but they are very real. ...


Fig. 14.3. Measles Incidence Rate Per 100,000 in Central and West Africa Before and After Mass Immunization Campaign

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Graph shows measles incidence rate per 100,000 population 12 months prior to the mass campaign and 16 months after the mass campaign in West and Central Africa. Data shows a return to precampaign disease levels by month 15 in Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Source: William H. Foege, Center for Disease Control. Reprinted from "Measles Vaccination in Africa" -- presented during the Pan American (World) Health Organization International Conference on the Application of Vaccines Against Viral, Rickettsial, and Bacterial Diseases of Man, December 14-18, 1970, p. 210.

Like Strecker, Rasmussen went on to cite the sheep visna virus as an example of the risk of creating slow progressive immune system and nervous-system-destroying epidemics. He explained:

Among the dangers, ... the possible potentiation or activation of certain slowly progressive viral infections is particularly difficult to combat, because untoward reactions may be so few or so distantly related to the initiating immunizing procedure as to be overlooked unless rigorous and sustained surveillance is undertaken-and, even if recognized, may not become clearly evident until large numbers of people have been placed at irreversible risk.

If we are to anticipate unknown dangers it is imperative that all facets of the immune response and other host responses to any new product be exhaustively studied ....


Furthermore, Rasmussen even warned that vaccines may actually potentiate the cell killing properties of some RNA viruses, and that bizarre, unpredictable, nervous system disorders and lymph cancers, like those associated with AIDS, might be expected from this research.20

Manaker then replied largely in agreement with Rasmussen's concerns, but quickly steered the focus of their discussion away from the controversy and toward the "control of cancer with vaccine." Explaining his work at the NIH and that of his colleagues at the NCI, the cancer virus expert presented some of the challenges they faced with "selective" defining of "populations or groups at higher risk" through blood collection and analysis programs.20

Preventing Liability and Evading Accountability

Next, conference participants discussed their legal and financial concerns in the event their vaccines caused illness, disability, and death.21 Dr. Dull from the CDC directed discussion on "the question of indemnification of persons unforeseeably or unavoidably injured by immunization or other processes in preventive medicine." He noted his "concern over court awards of large money settlements and the fear that the makers may not only discontinue the production of vaccines but also turn their attention from research and development, on which we rely a good deal for advancement in this field." Moreover, he offered a way out through "legislative mechanisms." He argued:

As many of us recognize, the current attitudes have resulted from the fact that we are now much better able to interpret the risks and benefits of immunization than formerly and that we also have a population increasingly desirous of sharing in health decisions and unwilling to assume the risks of injury from the unknown and unavoidable aspects of preventive medicine.

The law, speaking for the consumer or in this case the patient, looks commonly to the deepest pocket, which is often the producer's or the insurance company's, for compensation for injuries possibly related to immunization. If we acknowledge that the benefits of immunization accrue not only to the recipients of vaccines but also to the community, as well as to the producers, it is quite reasonable for us to seek administrative or legislative mechanisms that will spread the costs of unavoidable injuries to all who benefit and will attempt to educate patients so as to enable them to balance in their own minds some of the risks and benefits.

Such mechanisms could prevent the discrediting of the practices of immunization and preventive medicine, the costly litigation of personal injury claims, and the suppression of the imaginative development of new vaccines, drugs, or other preventive medical procedures. At the same time they could increase the public's confidence in acknowledging risks and benefits, reporting adverse reactions, and thus extending our knowledge of the field of preventive medicine.

Many other countries are far ahead of us in these areas. Some in Western Europe and in the Far East already have legislation to this effect or are developing it. Perhaps some of the participants from those countries would like to comment. ... 21


Dr. von Magnus from the Statens Seruminstitut in Denmark responded:

Some years ago in Denmark a number of cases of a polio-like disease occurred that were related in time to the oral polio vaccination campaign and were considered compatible with a diagnosis of vaccine-induced polio. Since the vaccine had been given to a large segment of the population (about 2.7 million doses) within a very short time, these cases were very conspicuous. Claims were made for compensation for the damage considered to have been caused by the vaccine.

The Minister of the Interior, who is the man responsible for our health services, immediately promised indemnification for the damage if it was caused by the vaccine. An expert committee set up for the purpose decided that some six to eight of the cases were actually compatible with such a conclusion, and financial compensation was awarded according to the incapacity suffered.

Since then the whole problem of vaccine-induced incapacity has been raised, particularly with respect to smallpox and pertussis vaccination. A committee has been set up to consider this problem and is at present working on it. Up to now, over a period of about 10 years, we have received about 20 claims for indemnification, mostly from parents of children who had received pertussis vaccination and also two or three cases of encephalitis following smallpox vaccination.

The general plan is to prepare legislation under which the government must take care of these people and pay them financial compensation for their disability in accordance with their reduced earning capacity if it is considered due to the vaccination. This will be handled in much the same way as workmen's compensation. The current idea is that these payments will be made only to people who have become incapacitated from vaccinations that are recommended or required .... I believe that the recommendation will be to create a law whereby those who suffer lasting incapacity from vaccination will receive financial support from the state in the form of an annual pension somewhat higher than is available to persons suffering handicaps caused by other factors.21


Thus, vaccine manufacturers were freed from accountability and liability. Instead, taxpayers shouldered the burden once again. Whatever happened to the Hippocratic oath -- "above all do no harm" -- I wondered?

Immunization Procedures and Propaganda

Another revealing soliloquy came from Dr. James Gear, director of The South African Institute for Medical Research's vaccine studies in Johannesburg. Describing the broad extent of South African vaccination and "propaganda" programs, a paternal spirit may also be recognized in his comments:

South Africa produces or has the facilities to produce nearly all the vaccines required for its own use and helps to meet the needs of the neighboring territories and islands. Vaccines for protection against poliomyelitis, smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus are available and free to all. Vaccines against measles, yellow fever, and cholera are available to all in special need of them. Some local authorities, such as the City Council of Johannesburg, have decided to offer rubella vaccine to all schoolgirls above the age of 10 years. Several vaccines, such as those against herpesvirus [specifically the rage in cancer research at that time], varicella, and cytomegalovirus, trachoma, and bilharzia are under investigation.

Extensive serological surveys have been carried out and are being continued to determine the immunity of different age groups of the population to the enteroviruses and respiratory viruses, including measles and rubella and the arbovirus infections [among Merck's prime research areas]. The findings are of value in determining their needs for vaccine ....

The jet gun has been extensively used in this campaign and is a most valuable timesaving weapon; but it has to be handled by someone expert in its use.

It was our experience that it was essential to launch a propaganda campaign to convince parents of the value of and need for vaccinating their children and also of the dangers of neglecting to have them vaccinated. The most effective means was found to be the radio; it seems that every family in Southern Africa has at least one transistor radio .... 22


Jet Guns, Mosquitoes, and Marginal Advantages

Jet injectors, according to Dr. Paul Wehrle of the University of Southern California School of Medicine, were developed for "more efficient population coverage" and were largely credited for "the apparent success of the smallpox program."23

The jet guns, Wehrle explained, "make for efficient administration of vaccines requiring parenteral inoculations of large volume -- for example, diphtheria, tetanus, and typhoid -- and for immunization programs conducted in more concentrated populations such as the larger villages and cities."23

The device, manufactured in different sizes to accommodate various age groups, "is comparatively expensive, and breakage and maintenance problems are certain to occur unless the operators are carefully selected and trained."23

The chief of arbovirus diseases -- including yellow fever -- for the World Health Organization further explained the way jet gun programs were administered by USAID teams during their "Smallpox-Measles Program." 24

The basic problem Dr. Bres explained was that viral research, initiated in Uganda "in 1936 by the Rockefeller Foundation and continued by the East African Virus Research Institute of the East African Community," was unable to keep up with the flight path of Aedes aegypti -- a mosquito that Bres stated was "the classic vector of urban yellow fever " He noted, however, since it "breeds far away from human dwellings [i]n East Africa, A. aegypti only rarely bites man." Monkeys he explained were believed to be the likeliest "vector species" despite his acknowledgment that mosquitoes, more often than monkeys, bit humans.24

Bres also reviewed the "epidemics in the past decade" and noted that yellow fever had broken out several times between 1958 and 1966 in eight Central West African countries. "230 cases with 216 deaths" were recorded during this period, where "2,000 to 20,000 cases were suspected."24

As a result, the WHO yellow fever expert reported:

Nearly 2 million vaccinations were carried out in a period of two months on the 3 million inhabitants of Senegal. A total of 125,000 doses of 17-D [the yellow fever] vaccine were available at that time to vaccinate nearly a million children under 10 years of age. The use of FNV vaccine instead of 17-D in many children in this age group was followed by 240 complications with 25 fatal cases of encephalitis. 'Ped-O-Jet' injectors were on trial for the first time in an African epidemic and were judged to be very efficient.24


Another example Bres gave was the Ghana, Upper Volta and Nigerian outbreak of 1969. Here he reported five cases in Ghana with two deaths and possibly 250 other jaundiced patients of which 73 died. The cause of death as yellow fever, however, could not be confirmed. Moreover, "on the opposite side of the common border, 87 confirmed cases with 44 deaths" occurred in Upper Volta, but the authorities estimated as many as 3,000 unconfirmed cases with 100 deaths occurred. "As in Senegal," Bres admitted, "the country had previously been vaccinated, and 90 percent of the victims were young children. This "urban-type epidemic he believed was easily controlled by vaccinating 600,000 people with 17-D "carried out by well trained teams of USAID."24

Altogether, during these 1969 epidemics, Bres explained, 4 million doses of 17-D vaccine were administered, "including 1 million supplied by WHO. Most were administered with 'Ped-O-Jet' injectors by USAID teams." In conclusion, he reported:

It is quite easy to protect an individual using 17-D vaccine, but difficulties arise if we aim at the protection of a whole country.

Eradication of A. aegypti is impossible in Africa, because the mosquito breeds in the brush as well as in towns.... Eradication of other possible vectors is equally impossible: mass vaccination therefore appears the most effective method for countrywide protection .... [Such programs] are a question of speed. Several teams are necessary. One team can perform 500 to 1,000 vaccinations an hour. As the vaccine requirements may be considerable in a short time, WHO has constituted a reserve of 2 million doses of 17-D.... 24


Several conference delegates thought it interesting that so much vaccine was being administered in an effort to save so few lives. Arguably, even a single life is precious, but the fear was that fatal vaccine reactions were being under-reported by the same ten-fold factor that cases were.24

Finally, the knowledge that the New York City based Rockefeller Foundation's earliest investments in viral research occurred in Uganda, bordering eastern Zaire, I noted as potentially relevant. Could Rockefeller funding have been behind the Health Research Council of the City of New York? I wondered.

Gaining Public Acceptance

Radio advertising was not the only method needed and used to persuade families to accept western vaccination recommendations. Dr. Carl Taylor, from Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, advanced a complete campaign designed to overcome the "cultural blocks ... influencing acceptance of immunization programs in developing countries."25

Some of Taylor's recommendations reviewed standard WHO policies regarding "propaganda and vaccination teams." The WHO's Epidemiological Research Laboratory headed by Dr. T. M. Pollock had, in 1966, advised that "the propaganda team" should be "headed by the chief health educator, who will distribute the work .... The work of the team is arranged in such a way as to ensure the full cooperation of the public with the vaccination team. The vaccination team consists of four members: its leader-organizer (a physician) ... the registrar (a clerk) ... the physician-vaccinator . . . [and] the assistant."26

And in response to concerns that mass vaccination campaigns may be more risky and costly than they're worth, Dr. Abram Benenson from the University of Kentucky chastised the congregation:

We developed and published statistics of the high rate of [vaccination] complications, but the vast bulk of these complications are entities that have no prognostic significance whatsoever. Part of the discussion ... has borne on the fact that successful immunological control of a disease is based on acceptance by the public and by the medical profession, but from our debates on what is best or what is wrong we are conditioning the public to reject measures that sometimes, in some situations, are very important.


In warning against open communication regarding the risks of vaccination, Benenson said:

We can indeed argue today whether the hazards equal or outweigh the value of vaccination in the United Kingdom or the United States, but as we argue these things we impress those in less developed countries that there is a great danger here, and I am concerned whether we are not doing the total program a disservice.27


Racism and Immunization for National Security

Moreover, Dr. J. D. Millar from the CDC explained the gravest danger posed by a lack of public acceptance of mass immunization programs was the threat posed to whites by "Spanish-Americans and Negroes." This he said was "the greatest motive for supporting mass vaccination campaigns at home and abroad."28

Millar had worked closely with Dr. Foege at the CDC. Together, they administered extensive smallpox and measles vaccination campaigns in West and Central Africa shortly after Hilleman's group at Merck standardized the "mass application of combined live measles-smallpox vaccines" on the same continent. 29

Millar drew the group's attention to excerpts from two 1970 issues of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The first heralded "a marked resurgence" of measles cases in 1969. "Of the 261 cases, 255 were Negroes," which he said showed "the development of new populations of susceptibles in the younger age groups who have not been immunized."

The second excerpt reported "ninety-six cases of tonsillar or pharyngeal diphtheria" in San Antonio through September 6, 1970. He read:

The outbreak is centered in the lower socioeconomic areas of the city and in a few census tracts. The highest attack rates have been in the 5-9 and 10-14 year age groups. Of the 80 patients whose immunization status was known, 43 (54 percent) had no previous immunization against diphtheria, 23 (29 percent) had lapsed for inadequate immunization, and 14 (18 percent) were reported fully immunized.


The table Millar presented depicted that attack rates among Spanish-Americans and Negroes ten times higher than those reported in the rest of the population.

Immunizable diseases such as diphtheria and poliomyelitis, Millar said had also increased substantially in 1970 as had measles among "unvaccinated preschool children residing in poverty areas of major cities." It is apparent he said that "the immunizable diseases are more and more restricted to the disadvantaged peoples in our nation and that the incidence of immunizable disease among these groups is increasing."

Millar then argued that the central issue and greatest risk to public health was one of race, class, and "the crucial group." He said:

It is apparent that race, residence, and riches are factors affecting immunization status. Being nonwhite, residing in the central city, and being poor all [work against immunization practices] .... Activities to maintain high levels of immunization in the population have failed most dramatically among the urban poor, who are predominantly nonwhite. [This] ... medically disadvantaged group, variously described as the 'hard core' or 'hard-to-reach' is at least two decades old.... Reaching them is the fundamental problem that must be solved to control communicable diseases in developed countries.


Millar's motives, it seems, were not singularly humanitarian. Some were coldly utilitarian -- designed to protect the interests of the whites in both the United States and Africa. Immunization programs, according to Millar, served above all to protect the "middle-class suburbanite" who, in light of his earlier remarks, was not at high risk for these diseases.

"The problem," maintained Dr. Millar, was the threat posed by the transmission of diseases from nonwhite minority populations to Anglo- American children and families. The resurgence of disease in 1969 and 1970 -- as Nixon, Kissinger, and Rockefeller began restructuring government to facilitate an international alignment of power -- Millar said, was caused by "an accumulation of susceptibles" for which additional immunization services were needed.

Before closing, he referred to the U.S. Vaccination Assistance Act of 1962, the year, I later learned, the NCI and Litton Bionetics began intense cancer virus vaccine studies (see fig. 22.5). The legislation had encouraged partially successful "community-wide immunization activities across the nation." Reaching the nonwhite "susceptibles," he concluded, was vital in preventing a resurgence of diseases, including polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles.

This he concluded:

... is the fundamental problem that must be solved to control communicable diseases in developed countries. In the United States, the central cities will continue to seethe with immunizable diseases and thereby create a significant risk to other parts of the society until these people are regularly included in immunization practice.28
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Re:  EMERGING VIRUSES: AIDS & EBOLA: Nature, Accident or Int

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Part III: Covert Operations

Chapter 15: The CIA/Detrick Operation


IN 1975, following a storm of public outrage over the CIA's involvement in Watergate, the agency was investigated and indicted by several groups. These included the Rockefeller Commission for numerous incidents of wrongdoing, 1 a House review of the CIA's role in the Watergate break-ins, 2 and a Senate inquiry into the illegal storage of biological weapons.3

Word had leaked from the Army's special (that is, secret) operations division at Fort Detrick that the CIA was still storing supplies of deadly bacteria, viruses, and other toxins -- biological weapons for offensive uses -- five years after the drafting and signing of the Geneva accord by Kissinger and Nixon, respectively.3 As a result, a Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities formed and met at the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, September 16, 1975, to investigate the matter. Senator Frank Church presided over the meeting. Also present were Senators Tower, Mondale, Huddleston, Morgan, Hart (of Colorado), Baker, Goldwater, Mathias, and Schweiker.3 I obtained and read my copy of the testimony at the Boston Public Library.

The chairman opened the meeting by providing an overview of the issues at hand:

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities opens its public hearings today with an inquiry into a case in which direct orders of the President of the United States were evidently disobeyed by employees of the CIA. It is the purpose of this hearing ... to illuminate the need to make certain in the future that Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies perform their duties in ways which do not infringe upon the rights of American citizens.

The committee has not held public hearings prior to this time, because of its concentration on charges that the CIA has been involved in assassination plots directed against certain foreign leaders ....

Because of the serious damage that protracted public hearings on such a subject could do to the United States in its relations with foreign governments, the committee chose to conduct these hearings behind closed doors ....

It is the right of the American people to know what their Government has done -- the bad as well as the good -- and we have every confidence that the country will benefit by a comprehensive disclosure of this grim chapter in our recent history.

Today as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, I am fully aware of the great value of good intelligence in times of peace .... [The CIA and the FBI] were established to spy on foreign governments and to fend off foreign spies. We must know to what degree they have turned their techniques inward to spy on the American people instead. If such, unlawful and improper conduct is not exposed and stopped, it could, undermine the very foundations of freedom in our own land...

The particular case under examination today involves the illegal possession of deadly biological poisons which were retained within the CIA for 5 years after their destruction was ordered by the President, and for 5 years after the United States had entered into a solemn international commitment not to maintain stocks of these poisons except for very limited research purposes.

The main questions before the committee are why the poisons were developed in such quantities in the first place; why the Presidential order was disobeyed; and why such a serious act of insubordination could remain undetected for so many years .... 4

TESTIMONY OF WILLIAM E. COLBY, DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE, ACCOMPANIED BY SAYRE STEVENS, ASSISTANT DEPUTY DIRECTOR, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, CIA; AND MITCHELL ROGOVIN, SPECIAL COUNSEL, CIA. [Emphasis not added]

COLBY: Mr. Chairman .... The subject today concerns CIA's involvement in the development of bacteriological warfare materials with the Army's Biological Laboratory at Fort Detrick .... The project at Fort Detrick involved the development of bacteriological warfare agents -- some lethal -- and associated delivery systems suitable for clandestine use ....

CIA association with Fort Detrick involved the Special Operations Division (SOD) of that facility. This division was responsible for developing special applications for biological warfare agents and toxins. Its principal customer was the U.S. Army. Its concern was with the development of both suitable agents and delivery mechanisms for use in paramilitary situations. Both standard biological warfare agents and biologically derived toxins were investigated by the division.

The CIA relationship with SOD was formally established in May 1952 ... in the laboratory facilities of the Special Operations Division of the Army's Biological Laboratory at Fort Detrick ....

From its outset, the project was characterized by extreme compartmentation, or a high degree of secrecy within the CIA itself. Only two or three Agency officers at any time were cleared for access to Fort Detrick activities. Though some CIA-originated documents have been found in the project files, it is clear that only a very limited documentation of activities took place.5


I immediately realized there would be little if any paper trail to follow here. And with only two or three high-level military scientists at anyone time with access to the CIA's Detrick facility, the operation was very tight.

The intentional transmission theory of AIDS, however, remained to be disproven. A few military scientists, I realized, were all that was needed to transport a vile of viruses from Fort Detrick, or for that matter Gallo's lab, to Hilleman's hepatitis B vaccine lab in West Point, Pennsylvania, or directly to Krugman's group in New York. The African supplies could have easily been tainted the same way, while making their way through the NCI's Drug Development Branch, or somewhere enroute to USAID teams in the field.

Colby: ... By the late sixties, a variety of biological warfare agents and toxins were maintained by the SOD for possible Agency use .... Though specific accounting for each agent on the list is not on hand, Department of Defense records indicate that the materials were, in fact, destroyed in 1970 by SOD personnel, except for the 11 grams of a substance in small medical bottles labeled shellfish toxin, plus the II milligrams of cobra venom, which were found on May 20 of this year.5


Why would they have only saved the shellfish toxin, and no other biological weapon? I questioned.

Then I reflected on Hearing Exhibit No. 1 -- an addendum cited on page III of the publication entitled, "February 16, 1970 DDP memorandum from Thomas Karamessines to Director of Central Intelligence [Richard Helms]." Here Karamessines requested from Helms explicit orders to destroy or maintain in storage a long list of biological weapons that were stockpiled. Karamessines cited the option of transferring the stockpile to "the Huntingdon Research Center, Becton-Dickenson Company, Baltimore, Maryland" where "arrangements have been made for this contingency and assurances have been given by the potential contractor to store and maintain the agency's stockpile at a cost of no greater than $75,000 per annum."

Obviously, Karamessines and his higher-ups had developed contingency plans to store the whole array of biologicals well after Nixon and Kissinger publicly heralded their destruction. The list included biological toxins, several kinds of deadly bacteria, lethal viruses, including Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis virus, and the smallpox virus variola (see fig. 15.1).6

In addition to exhibit 1, there were two memos from President Nixon, reiterating U.S. biological weapons policy following his signing of the Geneva accord. One stated:

The United States will confine its military programs for toxins, whether produced by bacteriological or any other biological method or by chemical synthesis to research for defensive purposes only, such as to improve techniques of immunization and medical therapy.7


Fig. 15.1. Hearing Exhibits -- Exhibit 1

189

HEARINGS EXHIBITS [1]

Attachment D

MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence

SUBJECT: Contingency Plan for Stockpile of Biological Warfare Agents

1. On 25 November 1969, President Nixon ordered the Department of Defense to recommend plans for the disposal of existing stocks of bacteriological weapons. (On 14 February 1970, be included all toxin weapons.)

2. On 13 January 1970, the Special Operations Division of Fort Detrick, Maryland prepared a [illegible] inventory, [illegible] toxins, and submitted it to the Scientific Director, Fort Detrick. This inventory was a required input to [illegible] the Commanding Officer, Ft. Detrick to prepare a comprehensive plan for demilitarization on site of all biological agents/munitions which are stockpiled in support of operational plans.

3. Under an established agreement with the Department of the Army, the CIA has a limited quantity of biological agents and toxins stored and maintained by the SO Division at Ft. Detrick. This stockpile did not appear on the inventory list. The agents and toxins [illegible]:

Agents:

1. Bacillus anthracis (anthrax) -- 100 grams
2. Pasteurella tularensis (tularemia) -- 20 grams
3. Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis virus (encephalitis) -- 20 grams
4. Coccidioidea immitis (valley fever) - 20 grams
5. Brucella suis (brucellosis) -- 2 to 3 grams
6. Brucella melitensis (brucellosis) - 2 to 3 grams
7. Mycobacterium tuberculosis (tuberculosis) - 3 grams
8. Salmonella typhimurium (food poisoning) - 10 grams
9. Salmonella typhimurium (chlorine resistant) (food poisoning) - 3 grams
10. Variola Virus (smallpox) - 50 grams

Toxins:

1. Staphylococcal Enterotoxin (food poisoning) == 10 grams.
2. Clostridium botulinum Type A (lethal food poisoning) - 5 grams
3. Paralytic Shellfish Poison -- 5.193 grams
4. Bungarus Candidus Venom (Krait) (lethal snake venom) - 2 grams
5. Microcystis aeruginosa toxin (intestinal flu) - 25 mg.
6. Toxiferine (paralytic effect) -- 100 mg.

Under criteria determined by the Committee, in consultation with the White House, the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, certain materials have been deleted from these documents some of which were previously classified, to maintain the integrity of the internal operation procedures of the agencies involved and to protect certain information of a national security nature.

This stockpile capability plus some research effort in delivery systems is funded at $75,000 per annum.

4. In the event the decision is made by the Department of Defense to dispose of existing stocks of bacteriological weapons, it is possible that the CIA's stockpile, even though in R&D quantities and unlisted, will be destroyed.

5. If the Director wishes to continue this special capability, it is recommended that if the above DOD decision is made, the existing agency stockpile at SO Division, Ft. Detrick be transferred to the Huntingdon Research Center, Becton-Dickinson Company, Baltimore, Maryland. Arrangements have been made for this contingency and assurances have been given by the potential contractor to store and maintain the agency's stockpile at a cost no greater than $75,000 per annum.

Thomas B. Karamessines
Deputy Director for Plans

Source: Hearings before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session, Vol. 1: Unauthorized Storage of Toxic Agents, Intelligence Activities Senate Resolution 21, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 16, 17, and 18, 1975, pp. 189-190.


Exhibit 6 was a 1967 memorandum from Chief, Technical Service Division, Biological Branch to Chief, Technical Services Division: PROJECT: MKNAOMI, which covered the gamut of activities undertaken by the CIA in cooperation with the Army SOD at Fort Detrick to develop and covertly deploy their wide assortment of biological weapons. The vast majority of text in this document was illegible. This seemed odd since most of the exhibits before and after were much easier to read. Perhaps not coincidentally, for the lay reader, under the description of this document on page III, it read:

Under criteria determined by the committee in consultation with the White House, the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, certain materials have been deleted from these documents, some of which were previously classified, to maintain the integrity of the internal operating procedures of the agencies involved and to protect certain information of a national security nature.6


Additional exhibits included two NSC memos from Henry Kissinger to all agency chiefs reiterating the president's policy (see figs. 15.2 and 15.3).8

Exhibit 11 listed some 184 medical researchers who "received toxins from Fort Detrick." It was not implied these were biological weapons contractors. Moreover, the CIA failed to mention the doctors who were involved in the most important and secret project ongoing at the time of the inquiry, the Special Virus Cancer Program (SVCP)9, or those involved in experimental vaccine research. 10

Among the doctors listed were four who served at Rockefeller's Institute or University, one from New York University Medical Center, one from Columbia University, and several from the U.S. Public Health Service, including several of its institutes. Most of the individuals cited were university- based researchers, but a couple were independent or corporate. One was Dr. James L. Haynes from the Applied Science Division of Litton Systems, Inc. in Minneapolis. 10

Haynes's citation was the first documented evidence of a direct connection between Fort Detrick and Litton Systems, Inc. -- Dr. Gallo's patron -- a connection that I suspected for months (see figs. 6.6 and 15.4).

Fig. 15.2. Hearing Exhibits -- Exhibit 7

207

EXHIBIT 7

NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL
WASHINGTON DC 20506

November 25, 1969

National Security decision Memorandum 35

TO: The Vice President
The Secretary of State
The Secretary of Defense
The Director, Central Intelligence Agency
The Director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
The Director, Office of Emergency Preparedness
The Director, Office of Science and Technology

SUBJECT: United States Policy on Chemical Warfare Program and Bacteriological/Biological Research Program

Following consideration by the National Security Council, the President has decided that:

1. The term Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) will no longer be used. The reference henceforth should be to the two categories separately -- The Chemical Warfare Program and The Biological Research Program.

2. With respect to Chemical Warfare:

a. The objective of the U.S. program will be to deter the use of chemical weapons by other nations and to provide a retaliatory capability if deterrence fails.

b. The renunciation of the first use of lethal chemical weapons is reaffirmed.

c. This renunciation is hereby applied to incapacitating chemical weapons as well.

d. This renunciation does not apply to the use of riot control agents or herbicides. A special NSDM on authorization for their use will be issued.

e. The Administration will submit the Geneva Protocol of 1925, "Protocol for the Prohibition of the use in War of Asphyxiating Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare," to the Senate for its advice and consent to ratification. An appropriate interpretive statement will be prepared by the Department of State in coordination with the Department of Defense to the effect that the United States does not consider that the Protocol prohibits the use of chemical herbicides or riot control agents, widely used domestically, in war. The statement will be unilateral in form and will not be a formal reservation.

f. Existing overseas stockpiles of chemical weapons can be maintained except in Okinawa without additional consultation. If the matter is raised by the FRG, we will agree to consultations about the future of stockpiles located in Germany.

g. The Secretary of Defense, in cooperation with the Director of the Office of Science and Technology, shall continue to develop and improve controls and safety measures in all Chemical Warfare programs.

h. The Under Secretaries Committee shall conduct an annual review of United States Chemical Warfare programs and public information policy, and will make recommendations to the President.

3. With respect to Bacteriological/Biological programs:

a. The United States will renounce the use of lethal methods of bacteriological/biological warfare.

b. The United States will similarly renounce the use of all other methods of bacteriological/biological warfare (for example, incapacitating agents).

c. The United States bacteriological/biological programs will be confined to research and development for defensive purposes (immunization, safety measures, et cetera). This does not preclude research into those offensive aspects of bacteriological/biological agents necessary to determine what defensive measures are required.

d. The Secretary of Defense will submit recommendations about the disposal of existing stocks of bacteriological/ biological weapons.

e. The United States shall associate itself with the principles and objectives of the Draft Convention Prohibiting the Use of Biological Methods of Warfare presented by the United Kingdom at the Eighteen-Nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, on 26 August 1969. Recommendation as to association with specific provisions of the Draft Convention should be prepared by the Secretary of State and the Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, in coordination with other interested agencies, for the President's consideration.

f. The Secretary of Defense, in conjunction with the Director of the Office of Science and Technology, shall continue to develop controls and safety measures in all bacteriological/biological programs.

g. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency shall continue to maintain surveillance of the bacteriological/ biological warfare capabilities of other states.

h. The Under Secretaries Committee shall conduct an annual review of United States Bacteriological/Biological Research Programs and public information policy, and will make recommendations to the President.

[signed]
Henry A. Kissinger
cc: Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
NSC


Fig. 15.3. Hearing Exhibits -- Exhibit 8

210

EXHIBIT 8

NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL
WASHINGTON DC 20506

February 20, 1970

National Security Decision Memorandum 44

TO: The Vice President
The Secretary of State
The Secretary of Defense
The Director, Central Intelligence Agency
The Director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
The Director, Office of Emergency Preparedness
The Director, Office of Science and Technology

SUBJECT: United States Policy on Toxins

Following a review of United States military programs for toxins, the President has decided that:

1. The United States will renounce the production for operational purposes, stockpiling and use in retaliation of toxins produced either by bacteriological or by chemical synthesis.

2. The United States military program for toxins will be confined to research and development for defensive purposes only.

3. The Secretary of Defense will submit recommendations concerning the disposal of existing stocks of toxin weapons and/or agents. These recommendations should accompany the recommendations pursuant to National Security Decision Memorandum 35 regarding the disposal of bacteriological/biological weapons.

4. The Under Secretaries Committee's annual review of United States chemical warfare programs and public information policy, as directed by National Security Decision Memorandum 35, will include review of United States military toxins programs.

[signed]
Henry A Kissinger

cc: Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

DECLASSIFIED
Auth: EO 11652
Date: 18 Sept. 1975
By: Jeanne W. Davis
NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL


Later I discovered that during the 1960s, fourteen biological-weapons-testing contracts were carried out by Litton Bionetics for the Defense Department (see fig. 17.1),11 and during the same period, the NCI was paying Litton Bionetics to conduct a variety of biological and chemical carcinogen studies.12

Here, however, Congress only learned that Dr. Haynes was contracted to help evaluate the effects of human exposure to botulism toxin.10

Finally, exhibit 12 was heavily edited. The official study title had been deleted, and it now read: "Excerpt from 'Summary Report, Working Fund Investigations' from the Special Operations Division." The remaining memo provided an overview of a human study involving the use of a virus that was not listed on exhibit 1 -- presumably because the CIA did not stockpile it -- the colibacteriophage. This is a bacterial virus that attacks human intestinal tract bacteria to produce a variety of stomach, bowel, and digestive disorders.

The CIA, along with the SOD, was interested in studying the effects of contaminating the water supply of a government office building to see how far and fast the viruses would spread and how many people would be infected. The population involved in the study were unsuspecting workers and visitors who took a drink at the Food and Drug Administration Building in Washington, D.C. one day in mid-1969.13

Colby continued his prepared statement:

COLBY: [Over the years] a project approval memo of 1967 identified four functional categories of project activity: maintenance of a stockpile of temporary incapacitation and lethal agents in readiness for operational use; assessment and maintenance of biological and chemical dissemination systems for operational use; adaptation and testing of a nondiscernible microbioinoculator -- a dart device for clandestine and imperceptible inoculation with biological warfare or chemical warfare agents -- for use with various materials and to assure that the microbioinoculator could not be easily detected by later examination of the target; and providing technical support and consultation on request for offensive and defensive biological warfare and chemical warfare.5

Discussions with Mr. Helms, Director of Central Intelligence, and Mr. Karamessines, the Deputy Director for Plans in 1970, have established that both were aware of the requirement that such material be disposed of. They recall that clear instructions were given that the CIA stockpile should be destroyed by the Army, and that, in accordance with Presidential directives, the Agency should get out of the biological warfare business.

With the discovery of the shellfish toxin this year, a complete inventory of the vault in which it was found was taken. The inventory consisted of a stock of various materials and delivery systems accumulated over the years, including other lethal materials, incapacitants, narcotics, hallucinogenic drugs, irritants and riot control agents, herbicides, animal control materials, and many common chemicals.


Fig. 15.4, Selected References From Exhibit 11 -- "Persons Who Received Toxins From Fort Detrick"

Dr. William H. Beers
Rockefeller University
New York, NY 10021

Mr. Thomas Burton [ii]
Department of Hth., Ed. & Welfare,
Food & Drug Administration
1521 W. Pico Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Dr. Ezra Casman [iii]
Food & Drug Administration
U.S. Public Health Service
Washington, DC

Dr. M. Dickie [i]
Dept. of National Health & Welfare
Food & Drug Directorate
Tunney's Pasture
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Dr. V. R. Dowell [i]
National Communicable Disease Center
(CDC) , Atlanta, GA

Dr. Gary Dykstra [ii]
Department of Hth., Ed. & Welfare,
Food & Drug Administration
1560 East Jefferson Avenue
Detroit, MI 48207

Dr. Arthur Eberstein [i]
New York University Medical Center
Institute of Physical Medicine
400 East 34th Street
New York, NY

Dr. H. E. Hall [iii]
Robert A. Taft Sanitary
Engineering Center
U.S. Public Health Service
Cincinnati, OH

Dr. William K. Harrell [iii]
Chief, Microbiological Reagents Unit
Communicable Disease Center (CDC)
Atlanta, GA 30333

Dr. James L. Haynes [i]
Litton Systems, Inc.
Applied Science Division
Minneapolis, MN 55413

Dr. Bortil Hille [ii]
The Rockefeller Institute
New York, NY

Dr. Toshikaru Kawabata [ii]
Department of Food Control
National Institute of Health
284 Kamiosaki-Chojamaru
Shinagawa-Ku, Tokyo, Japan

Dr. John T. Meacham [ii]
Food & Drug Administration
U.S. Public Health Service
850 Third Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11232

Dr. Richard L. Masland [i]
Department of Neurology
College of Physicians and Surgeons
Columbia University
NewYork,NY

Dr. Edward Reich [ii]
Rockefeller University
66th Street & York Road
New York, NY

Dr. Martin Rirack [ii]
Rockefeller University
New York, NY 10021

Dr. B. T. Tozar [ii]
Microbiological Research Establishment
Porton Down, Salisbury
Wiltshire, England

Dr. John F. Winn [iii]
Chief, Biological Reagents Section Communicable
Disease Center (CDC)
Atlanta, GA 30333

Types of biological weapons received:

i. Botulinum Toxin
ii. Shellfish Poison
iii. Staph Ent A & B

Source: Hearings before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session; Vol. 1: Unauthorized Storage of Toxic Agents, Intelligence Activities Senate Resolution 21, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 16, 17, and 18, 1975, pp. 216-239.


The small size of the vault (about 8 by 10 feet) and the few shelves limit the extent of this stockpile. The materials are, for the most part, the residue of a number of different CIA programs ... many different materials were obtained and stored for provision to contractors who did the actual scientific research involved....[i] These involved CIA's effort to keep a close watch on emerging technology -- in this case pharmaceutical technology -- to insure that we did not encounter an unanticipated threat from hostile intelligence services with which we could not contend." [emphasis added]

With that, Colby ended his remarks and passed out copies of his prepared statement.

"Pharmaceutical technology?" I questioned, recognizing the "emerging technology" at the time was cancer-causing immunosuppressive viruses. Colby might have mentioned the $10 million DOD appropriation in 1970 for five additional years of mutant virus research. He could have, at least, shared his opinion regarding Exhibit 12 as it discussed the delivery of a virus into a study population as early as 1967, or regarding the outcome of contingency storage plans for the deadly viruses on Karamessines's inventory list. Instead, he left it up to the committee to gather the hidden intelligence.

The chairman thanked Colby and then opened the hearing to questions from committee members. Mr. Schwartz went first. He suggested that the CIA held lethal biologicals other than shellfish toxin and questioned why the CIA would directly violate an order from the president:

SCHWARTZ: You agree, do you not, that the retention of shellfish toxin, and probably certain other materials, violated that order.

COLBY: I think it was in a quantity which certainly is excessive for research purposes.

SCHWARTZ: And, in fact, no research was done on it after it was delivered to the CIA facilities. Is that right.

COLBY: Right.

SCHWARTZ: And, in fact, it was not for defensive purposes only, was it!

COLBY: No. I do not think you can say it ... 15

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Mr. Smothers, do you have any supplemental questions?

SMOTHERS: Yes. Maybe we could clarify the point that the chief counsel just raised. Mr. Colby, could you be more clear on the responsibility of the people who are involved with these toxins .... In the course of their duties, would these persons have had the opportunity to employ these substances in any manner against individuals or targets, if you will, that they might have selected?

COLBY: I do not quite understand the question.

SMOTHERS: The scientists we are talking about -- would they have had the opportunity in the normal course of their duties with the Agency to determine how these materials might in fact be employed?

COLBY: Oh, they would certainly conduct experiments at Fort Detrick in various forms, but not on people.


"What about exhibit 12?" I wondered out loud, startling my BPL neighbors.

SMOTHERS: Would they be responsible for any employment of these materials beyond experimentation in a laboratory?

COLBY: Generally, no, although they would probably participate to some degree in the detailed planning of an operation. This will vary from operation to operation. Some operations cannot be established without a very close relationship between the technical people and the operational people ....

SMOTHERS: To the best of your knowledge, either during the time of your tenure or that of previous Directors, was there any effort made by any of these persons who had knowledge of the toxins either to urge employment of them or to seek in some manner to use them against persons, or to use them in a non-experimental manner?

COLBY: There were various suggestions made over time, yes. As a matter of fact, I had a job at one time when the idea was proposed to me, and I turned it down.

SMOTHERS: Yes; but was it proposed by these persons who had knowledge of the toxins?

COLBY: It was proposed by an expert. It was not a toxin in that case, but it was a very similar chemical. He was offering a capability, trying to see whether we were interested in using it.

SMOTHERS: How may people work in this laboratory, Mr. Colby?

COLBY: This particular laboratory was really a storeroom in recent years, and it is a very small room. The people who had access to it were only the chief and deputy chief and the secretary of that particular section, except that some additional people would sometimes visit it. But it is in the neighborhood of nine, something like that, in that particular branch.

SMOTHERS: Now, in addition to the lethal substances indicated on the inventory of exhibit 2, were there not, in fact, other substances and materials kept in this storage area?

COLBY: Yes, there are a number of other materials, and I tried to refer to that in my statement. ...

SMOTHERS: Finally, to the best of your knowledge, Mr. Colby, as indicated by both your investigative efforts and any other information you may have, was any unauthorized use made of these materials at any time since their storage in the facility in question?

COLBY: Not to our knowledge.

SMOTHERS: Thank you. I have nothing further, Mr. Chairman.16


After a lengthy discussion about shellfish toxin, its delivery through a pistol that "fires a small dart," the chairman asked Colby if the CIA had any use for shellfish toxin supplies in amounts capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people:

COLBY: I certainly can't today, Mr. Chairman, in view of our current policies and directives.

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Well, even at the time, certainly, the CIA was never commissioned or empowered to conduct bacteriological warfare against whole communities; and quantities of poison capable of destroying up to the hundreds of thousands of lives -- it seems to me to be entirely inappropriate for any possible use to which the CIA might have put such poison.

COLBY: I think the fact that we were jointly doing this with the Army, Mr. Chairman, probably led into this kind of quantitative approach to it....

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Well, who paid for ... the maintenance of a stockpile, about $75,000 a year?

COLBY: Yes; [the CIA] in collaboration with Fort Detrick, that was the sum that was involved. 17

CHAIRMAN CHURCH:... Thank you. Senator Mondale.

MONDALE: Mr. Colby, in your opening statement you observed that the Agency which you head must operate in a secret environment. I think most of us would accept that fundamental concession and serious concessions in a society which is based upon the theory that the American people must know what is going on. But what troubles me is that this record seems to disclose an additional concession, namely, the lack of accountability, so that we not only have a secret agency, but we have an agency about which there is some question as to its accountability to the authority of the President or to the authority of the National Security Council. The record seems to disclose that there is no Presidential or National Security Council order in the first place directing the CIA to establish this program at all.


But in 1969 Kissinger ordered Laird to file a report on America's biological weapons capabilities. Thus, he had to know about their inventory, research, and ongoing projects. Next, MacArthur, Laird's Deputy Director of the Department of Defense asked Congress for $10 million to develop and test AIDS-like viruses.18 As the director of the NSC staff, Kissinger surely knew what the CIA was up to.

MONDALE: Second, there appears to be no report by the CIA to higher authority of the existence of these toxins or biological weapons.

Third, there seems to be no evidence that those in charge of the CIA inquired of subordinates as to the existence of toxins or biological weapons, or that following the Presidential order decreeing destruction of such toxins, that any formal order went forth within the CIA to require their destruction.

In short, the record is a mess and we may never know just exactly what happened. Does it bother you that this kind of record could be available to us and should exist in something as serious as this?

COLBY: It certainly does, Senator Mondale. And I think we have taken some steps to try to overcome the problem .... the theory of the intelligence operations in the fifties -- and that gradually has changed -- but at that time, clearly those matters were not made in a great deal of record. There was some severe compartmentation of sensitive matter, things of this nature. This, then, reduced the amount of record keeping, the amount of involvement of other people in sensitive activities, and you reduced it down to a very small group who knew anything about it.

I think this then explains the difficulty today of reconstructing some of these matters.

MONDALE: But it also apparently created situations where the Agency, or someone in the Agency, pursued a course which violated a fundamental order of the President of the United States and the spirit of a solemn international convention against biological and toxic warfare.

COLBY: There is no question about it that a middle-grade officer made a decision that was wrong.


Middle grade officer? I questioned.

MONDALE: The trouble is we have seen this same phenomenon with respect to other matters that are not before us today, where, if something happened, people at the top did not know about it, or claim they knew about it and said it shouldn't happen. Then someone lower did it, claiming higher authority, not knowing who, no documentation. So, as we seek to reach the issue of accountability in a secret agency, we are left repeatedly with a record which is utterly beyond understanding. And I wonder if that does not go to questions of management and control and Presidential authority in a profound way, as this record discloses.

COLBY: I think it goes to a question of the cultural pattern of intelligence activities and the traditions, the old traditions of how they were conducted. And those are being changed in America and I for one am glad they are.19

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Thank you, Senator Mondale. Senator Baker.

BAKER: Mr. Colby, it is clear to me from the evidence at hand that somebody authorized the formulation, the development and the retention of these toxic materials. Can you tell me who did it?

COLBY: The development, the research and development, I think, was begun in the sixties, the early sixties. I cannot tell you specifically who authorized it.

BAKER: Is there a record that would tell us who did it?

COLBY: The records are very incomplete, as you know sir.

BAKER: Why are they incomplete?

COLBY: Some of them apparently have been destroyed.

BAKER: Do you know who destroyed them?

COLBY: I do. I have a report that one set was destroyed by the Chief of the Division in question before his retirement.

BAKER: Is that Mr. Sidney Gottlieb?17

COLBY: Yes.

BAKER: What was his title at the time?

COLBY: He was Chief of the Technical Services Division.

BAKER: Have you interviewed Mr. Gottlieb?

COLBY: I have not.

BAKER: Has anyone at the Agency interviewed Mr. Gottlieb as to why these records were destroyed?

COLBY: There is a memorandum in the Agency between the Director and Mr. Gottlieb at that time.

BAKER: What does that mean? Does that mean yes they have or they haven't?

COLBY: That they were destroyed explaining --

BAKER: What I am asking you is, do you know; has anyone at the Agency interviewed Gottlieb as to why the material was destroyed?

COLBY: We have had one contact with Mr. Gottlieb in recent days. We have pretty much --

BAKER: Is it true that Gottlieb was at the Agency at Langley just a few days ago, going through his records and other material out there?

COLBY: He was.

BAKER: And did somebody at the time say, "What was it you destroyed, Sidney?" or "How come you did it?"

COLBY: Senator, we have taken the position with this committee, as we have with the other committees and with the Rockefeller Commission, that we would not go outside the current employees of the Agency to try to run down these stories ....

BAKER: Do you know what documents were destroyed?

COLBY: We are unsure as to the total. We do not have an inventory on it.

BAKER: Do you think they might have said who authorized the formulation or the retention of this stuff? Do you have any reason to think it might or might not contain that information?

COLBY: In this case, I doubt it would have very much, because this case, from the evidence we have at hand --

BAKER: Does it say anything or have any reason to indicate that it might say how, if at all, this material was used in an aggressive way against someone to kill someone?

COLBY: Well, there may well be some of that in the material.

BAKER: When was the documentation destroyed?

COLBY: In 1973.

BAKER: It did not happen to be destroyed at the same time as these [Watergate] tapes that the CIA destroyed.

COLBY: In 1972.

BAKER: In 1972? When in 1972?

COLBY: November, I believe it was.

BAKER: In November of 1972. Do you have any idea what volume or records were destroyed?

COLBY: I do not know.

BAKER:... May I ask you only this further question, then, in general, Mr. Colby. You have heard of the doctrine of plausible deniability?

COLBY: Yes, and I have rejected it now, Senator. I say we cannot depend upon that any more .... [Previously] if the United States could deny something and not be clearly demonstrated as having said something falsely, then the United States could do so.

BAKER: In the case of assassinations, in the case of any other -- of domestic surveillance, in the case of the formulation of poisons, under that previous rationale, would the doctrine of plausible deniability have led the Agency to destroy records to conceal evidence or to compartmentalize to the point that it would be -- that a committee such as this later would have been unable to establish what really happened?

COLBY: I think the plausible denial concept was used in the sense of international diplomatic relationships, that our country --

BAKER: And you saying by -- that it would not have applied to the formulation of toxic materials?

COLBY: I would not say it did not have anything to do with it at all, but I think that the basic rationale for the doctrine of plausible denial was so our Nation could deny something and not be tagged with it.

BAKER:... Is that the sort of thing that would prevent us from finding records of responsibility and causal connection to this matter of the formulation and retention or the failure to destroy toxic materials?

COLBY: The effect of it would ....

BAKER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.20

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Thank you, Senator Baker. Senator Huddleston.

HUDDLESTON: ... Mr. Colby, ... I would like to refer you to a memorandum [exhibit I] that was purported to have been prepared by Thomas H. Karamessines .... I understand that this memorandum was not signed by Mr. Karamessines, that the person to whom it was directed indicated that he did not, in fact, see it.

However, it sets out very specifically the situation at that time, in 1970, following the President's order to eliminate our activity in bacteriological and toxin warfare, ... the CIA did have at Fort Detrick certain supplies. It then says that this stockpile did not appear on the inventory list. ...

COLBY: ... [A] certain officer wanted to save this material because it was very valuable.

HUDDLESTON: Mr. Colby, it has already been established that the cost of this research work and development was in the neighborhood of $3 million .... Now, most of the material there, the toxic material, was applied by some sort of injection .... Was there also material there that would be administered in some other way?"

COLBY: Oh, yes; there were various ways you could administer various of these materials, no question about it, both orally and under some kind of a guise and so forth.

HUDDLESTON: And what devices were prepared for that kind of administration?

COLBY: It was really rather the development-to see what the effect of putting the particular material into another substance, what chemical reactions and stabilities were.


Like putting viruses into vaccines, and seeing if they were stable enough to spread plagues? I wondered.

HUDDLESTON: Now, the inventory for the first set of materials that were held at Fort Detrick included an agent that, I presume, was designed to induce tuberculosis. Is that correct?

COLBY: Yes, there is that capability.

HUDDLESTON: What application would be made of that particular agent?

COLBY: It is obviously to induce tuberculosis in a subject that you want to induce it in.

HUDDLESTON: For what purpose?

COLBY: We know of no application ever being done with it, but the idea of giving someone this particular disease is obviously the thought process behind this.


Considering the resurgent tuberculosis epidemic associated with AIDS-related immunosuppression, I wondered whether CIA scientists had entertained this result also.

HUDDLESTON: You mentioned earlier in your testimony that the primary purpose for collecting this material was to induce a temporary situation to prevent harm?

COLBY: That certainly does not apply to the lethal agents.

HUDDLESTON: I would not think it did.

COLBY: No.

HUDDLESTON: What about brucellosis, which we are trying to eradicate in Kentucky. It affects cattle. That was also on the inventory. What was the purpose of that?

COLBY: I think we were talking about an experiment. We were talking about what its capabilities were, what the reactions were, and so forth. I do not think anyone had gone down the trail to a particular use, a particular purpose there. They were dealing as scientists with the different materials available to them.

HUDDLESTON: Was this at the direction of the CIA to develop this or for scientists just looking around trying to find out?

COLBY: These were CIA officers who were responsible for keeping up with the state of the art in various kinds of technical and pharmaceutical areas to see what applications might be appropriate for intelligence-related purposes.


Clearly then, some of the scientists with access to Fort Detrick actually worked for the CIA. A part of me did not want to believe that health professionals who had taken the Hippocratic Oath would work for an agency that covertly killed people. Yet, here was the possibility that some scientist like Gallo, with CIA or SOD clearance, could have easily walked in, accessed the merchandise, and done whatever his or her little heart desired with it.

HUDDLESTON: Thank you. I believe my time has expired, Mr. Chairman.21

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Thank you, Senator Huddleston. Senator Goldwater.

GOLDWATER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I only have one question, Mr. Colby ... have other countries developed bacteriological warfare ability?

COLBY :Certainly Senator; that is one aspect of bacteriological warfare that the President's directive in 1969 and 1970 tells CIA to continue, and that is to follow the activities of other nations ....

GOLDWATER: But you are now prevented from --

COLBY: No; we can follow the foreign ones, that's no problem.

GOLDWATER: You can follow them, but can you do anything to offset them?

COLBY: I think that the defensive against those possible things is a matter for the Department of Defense.

GOLDWATER: Do you feel you are safe in that field?

COLBY: I think in cooperation with the Department of Defense, and advising the Department of Defense of foreign developments in this area, we are giving them the basis for developing such defense efforts as we need them.

GOLDWATER: Thank you, that is all I have, Mr. Chairman.22

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Thank you, Senator Goldwater .... Senator Mathias.

MATHIAS: Mr. Colby, ... We wanted to be sure we had the best intelligence system that was available. But I think we also had in mind John Adams's warning that a frequent recurrence to the principles of the Constitution is absolutely necessary to preserve the advantages of liberty and to maintain a free government. I think the discovery of [these] toxin[s] raises some interesting questions .... For example, I accept your statement that this [shellfish] toxin was never used except in the one instance that you described .... If you had used the toxin, what provision in the Constitution would have afforded authority to do so?

COLBY: I think CIA's operations are certainly overseas operations. They fall under the National Security Act of 1947 and they fall, consequently, under the provisions of the Constitution that call for a national defense and the foreign relations of the United States.

MATHIAS: The use of a toxin of this sort is, of course, the use of force.

COLBY: It is a weapon; yes.

MATHIAS:... And so it seems to me that the discovery of this toxin raises very fundamental questions about the relationship of covert activities of any intelligence agencies, be it the CIA, the FBI, or others, with the constitutional process on which this Government is conducted .... Let me say this imposes responsibilities on the Congress that I do not think have always been discharged very well. I can recall members of Congress who recoiled from the responsibility of knowing what was happening, members of Congress who said, "Don't tell me, I do not want to know." I think that is an indictment of the Congress, just as severe an indictment as those labeled against any of the intelligence agencies.

COLBY: I would not call it an indictment of the Congress, Senator. I think it rather reflected the general atmosphere, political atmosphere, toward intelligence that was the traditional approach and I think we Americans are changing that. This act is an example of that change, as is this committee.23

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: I must say, Senator Mathias, I agree fully. We have been victimized by excessive secrecy, not only with respect to intelligence activities, but also excessive secrecy has created this kind of mischief within the executive branch ....


Church obviously meant the Nixon/Ford White House and the NSC under Kissinger.

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Our next Senator is Senator Hart ....

HART: Thank you Mr. Chairman. Mr. Colby, can you be absolutely sure that there are not in other vaults any poisons in this town or in this country or in our possession in some part of the world?

COLBY: I cannot be absolutely sure, no Senator. We obviously are conducting such investigations and releasing such orders as possible, but I cannot be absolutely sure that some officer somewhere has not requested something.

HART: Could you concisely as possible state for the committee your understanding of the practice of compartmentation?

COLBY: Well, the compartmentation process is merely the strict application of the "need-to-know" principle. If an employee in the intelligence business needs to know something in order to do his job, then he has a right to the information. But if he does not need to know that particular information, he does not have a right to the information. And if the information is one which is required for large numbers of employees, then large numbers of employees will be allowed to know it.

If the particular activity is a very sensitive matter and only a very few employees need to know it, then it will be known to only a very few employees. We make a particular effort to keep the identities of our sources and some of our more complicated technical systems restricted very sharply to the people who actually need to work on them. And many of the rest of the people in the Agency know nothing about them.


Thus the intentional transmission of HIV into vaccines could have happened, and only a single technical person and one or two program directors might have known about it.

HART: ... Mr. Colby, one brief line of inquiry in connection with the case under study. Are you familiar with a reported series of so-called vulnerability studies that were conducted probably sometime in the sixties in connection with this program of toxic weapons and so forth?

COLBY: I think this was a Defense Department activity of determining what possible vulnerabilities our country might have to these kinds of weapons.

HART: To your knowledge, were CIA personnel involved in this?

COLBY: CIA was aware of some of them because they were conducted with Fort Detrick and sometimes there are lessons to be learned from it that were picked up.

HART: But to your knowledge, your employees did not participate?

COLBY: They reported on the activities to us, but it was my impression that they did not actually participate in the experiment itself.

HART: And you are familiar with the fact that one of these experiments was conducted in the Food and Drug Administration here in Washington?

COLBY: I am aware of a report to that effect, yes sir.

HART: And you are also --

COLBY: There were other installations around the country that we looked at to determine what possible vulnerabilities large installations would have.

HART: Major urban subway systems and so forth.

COLBY: Yes.

HART: Did any of these studies in any way jeopardize human life and safety?

COLBY: According to my records ... they were not conducted with hazardous substances. They were simulated rather than real.23


Apparently, Colby maintained additional records that Mr. Gottlieb had not destroyed.

HART: So, to your knowledge, no actual jeopardy occurred to any individual during any of these tests?

COLBY: I do not know of any that were in these studies. I do not know any. Obviously we did have the problem of the testing of LSD on unwitting subjects. That would fall within the category of your question.

HART: I am talking more about the mass --

COLBY: No, the mass ones, it is my impression that they did not risk the lives and health of the people involved.

HART: Thank you, and as far as you know, that one study on the subway system was conducted in New York City?

COLBY: I have seen a report to that effect. That is all I know about that particular program.

HART: There was further indication that some of these toxic elements might have had something to do with the destruction of crops in parts of the world. Do you know if that was ever implemented?

COLBY: I believe it was not. I know it was considered but it was decided not to do it.

HART: That is all I have, Mr. Chairman.24


As the hearing progressed, Senator Schweiker determined that the CIA's stockpile came from "somebody at the Army [who] decided they were going to slip their supply up to CIA."25

The chairman further noted that Karamessines's memo suggested that "the President's order be circumvented by taking the material out of the CIA laboratories and storing it with a private firm."26Considering this was illegal, he asked what right the CIA had for doing this, and if the National Security Council had ordered the CIA "to develop these quantities of poison?"

Colby said "no" and then felt the need to clarify:

COLBY: But the National Security Council certainly expects the CIA to be prepared to conduct paramilitary operations traditionally associated with the covert action areas, and in the process of preparing for those kinds of operations, the CIA has developed different weapons, has maintained different stocks of weapons, and I think that this incident came from the thought process that is represented by the development of that capability for the possibility of such covert operations."27


"Wow," I again verbalized. Colby admitted having received orders from Kissinger to be prepared to conduct paramilitary operations using biological weapons in covert action areas of the world. That's why they kept the stockpile, and possibly moved it to a private firm. I now wondered if Zaire was such a covert action area?

Senator Tower continued Colby's interrogation:

TOWER:... Now, isn't the Agency expected to maintain the competence to perform any operation mandated by the President or the National Security Council?

COLBY: Any operation within the law.

TOWER: Any operation within the law. So in this connection, would specific NSC approval or knowledge be required from the standpoint of experimentation on weapons?

COLBY: On the experimentation, I would say no.... As to the use of such a weapon, either this or another weapons system, then I think it falls clearly within the provision of the memorandum which covers covert operations, which says that I am required to receive the approval for anything major or politically sensitive -- and I think certainly this would fall into the category of politically sensitive.

TOWER: Thank you, Mr. Colby. No further questions."
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Re:  EMERGING VIRUSES: AIDS & EBOLA: Nature, Accident or Int

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Chapter 16: PROJECT: MKNAOMI

AS the Congressional Select Committee's hearing continued, it became more and more obvious to the senators that the CIA was not accountable for any of its actions. It was operating above and obviously against the law. "What bothers me," Mondale said, "based on this evidence -- the evidence we have had in other hearings -- is this whole ... [issue] of accountability, this difficulty of finding out what happened, and this gnawing fear that I have that things are occurring in deliberate contravention and disregard of official orders." 1

The chairman, responded in kind. "In that connection," Church asked, "[are] any of those who failed to obey the President's order ... still with the Agency?"

"Apparently so," Colby admitted.

"What disciplinary action has been taken?"

"I have not yet taken any. I have that under advisement right now, and I am coming to a decision."

MATHIAS: ... [The] CIA had a continuing relationship at Fort Detrick which, in fact, [financially] supported the SOD division at Detrick. Is that not true?

COLBY: Yes.

MATHIAS: And that this was the facility in which experiments were carried out, in which research was done?

COLBY: Yes. It was not solely supported by CIA. It was also supported by the Army.

MATHIAS: But CIA was one of the principal customers.

COLBY: Principal participants, yes. It wasn't the principal, but it was a substantial customer.

MATHIAS: It was a principal customer. All right. ... [But] Fort Detrick was not normally a production facility, though, was it?

COLBY: No. I think this particular material [shellfish toxin] -- it is indicated it did come from elsewhere. It was actually produced somewhere else .... [and] I have a request now from a quite proper research interest not to destroy it, but to make it available to medical research.2


Soon thereafter Senator Hart chimed in with an important question.

HART: To your knowledge, was there any indication or any thought in the minds of those conducting these [population vulnerability] studies that we would make them operational or offensive at some time?

COLBY: I think the vulnerability studies conducted by the Department of Defense were basically defensive in their thought process. I think the intelligence people were observing them and watching them. I am not sure that they had a totally defensive approach toward the possibility of clandestine implementation of some such idea some day under some circumstances which might warrant it.

HART: I think in the memorandum of October 18, 1967 [exhibit 6], identified as MKNAOMI,3 [it] clearly states that anticipated future use of some of these capabilities were certainly intended to be offensive.

COLBY: We are talking about a weapons system that the United States was developing," Colby replied, "and potential applications for it, and through regular military force or through secret methods and during times of war, and some such thing."

HART: So it was not purely defensive."

COLBY: No. I do not think it was purely defensive. I think particularly the intelligence people who were observing it were thinking of possible positive applications when appropriate."


Colby's honest and incriminating admission startled me. Surely the comment would have also startled Colby's higher ups-Kissinger and Ford.

I recalled reading a passage in Isaacson's book that said not long after Colby's testimony, the president and national security advisor met and decided to dump the CIA director. Kissinger was quoted as saying, "Every time that Bill Colby gets near Capitol Hill, the damn fool feels an irresistible urge to confess to some horrible crime."4

TESTIMONY OF NATHAN GORDON, FORMER CHIEF, CHEMISTRY BRANCH, TECHNICAL SERVICES DIVISION, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.

GORDON: Gentlemen, I am appearing before this select committee freely and willingly. I am here, not as a mystery witness or a secret witness. I acknowledge that I have been served technically with a subpoena, but the record will show that I indicated to staff that I did not necessarily need a subpoena; I would be happy to appear before the closed session and the public testimony of my own free will. I would like to dispel the myth that has been circulating around with respect to a mysterious or secret witness.

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: May I say, Dr. Gordon, that a subpoena was issued by the committee with the understanding that it was necessary. The rule that has been invoked is based upon the issuance of the subpoena. Do you understand the subpoena, or are you here on some other basis? I want you to know your rights under the rule, and I think I should read the rule to you.

GORDON: Please do.


After reading Gordon his rights, including the right to prevent the broadcast media from filming, recording, or photographing him, Church looked to Gordon and said:

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Do you accept the subpoena?

GORDON: Yes.

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: All right.

GORDON: May I continue?

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Now you may continue.

GORDON: Let me start from the beginning, please, if I may.

I am appearing before this select committee freely and willingly to describe my involvement in a classified project known as MKNAOMI.

I wish to state that I was a CIA employee, specifically, a chemist, charged with the function of supporting and servicing operational requirements of the DDP -- Deputy Director for Plans. Currently, I believe the designated title, since ... September 30, 1972 ... is the DDO -- Deputy Director for Operations.

It was, and is, my belief that the Agency's policy in this field of behavioral materials was to maintain a potential capability -- I emphasize, gentlemen, the phrase "potential capability" -- in the event the need should arise to use these materials, biological and/or chemical, operationally ....

I would also like to emphasize, that to the best of my knowledge there was never a CIA directive, or any directive to my knowledge, that impinged on the CIA to destroy biological agents or toxins ....

I joined the TSD/CIA -- TSD being Technical Services Division-in October, 1967, as the Deputy Chief of the Biology Branch of TSD. A few months later ... I assumed the function of the [Branch] Chief ... I held that position until April of 1970 ....

SCHWARZ: At that time was the chain of command running from yourself to a Deputy Director of the TSD, then to Dr. Gottlieb, then to Mr. Thomas Karamessines, who was the Deputy Director for Plans, then from him to the Director of the Agency, Mr. Richard Helms?

GORDON: That is correct sir.


Misrepresenting MKNAOMI

Following a lengthy and unrevealing discussion, Mr. Gordon informed the group that he had personally informed the "Commanding Officer of the U.S. Army Biological Laboratories and the chain of command, [which included] the Chief of the Special Operations Division, the project officer for MKNAOMI ... that it was our desire to cease operating the classified project MKNAOMI."

Some days later, Gordon was allegedly contacted by the Army's project officer, Mr. Charles Senseney, and asked whether the CIA would care to keep the toxins for "potential agency use." He thanked the officer and informed him he would consult with his superiors.

Gordon continued:

GORDON: After the consultation with my project officer and technical consultant, we agreed that the offer was valid for a number of factors. We knew that many years of hard, costly research had gone into the development of shellfish toxin and that those particular quantities, 5 grams or more, were realistic quantities for purposes of experiment, research and development, because if one had to really, in effect, study immunization methods for diseases vis-a-vis -- who knows, cancer, anything of that particular ilk, it would take a considerable amount of this particular antigenic material to develop immunization. So that we know that was a reasonable quantity for that kind of purpose.

It certainly was not a reasonable quantity for [us] ... However, I might add that that particular quantity ... had been on a list of material held for ... many years . . . . And in retrospect, I can see clearly now that our project officer just continued, including myself, to continue the listing, shellfish toxin being one of ... a dozen or more different materials, never questioning the quantities that were being held.5


"Wait a minute!" I cried, "Hold everything!"

"Hush!" said a nearby reader.

"Sorry," I replied.

Gordon had Freudian-slipped and no out:: noticed. Where would he get the idea of studying "immunization methods for diseases vis-a-vis -- who knows, cancer, anything of that particular ilk," from a 5-gram vile of shellfish toxin? I reflected on my knowledge of shellfish toxin learned two decades earlier as a Freshman at Tufts School of Dental Medicine. Shellfish toxin is a neurotoxin, not a carcinogen; that is, it is not a cancer-causing substance. The first thing that popped into Gordon's head was cancer and immunity. "Anything of that particular ilk," Mr. Gordon? How about the new cancer viruses that Gallo was describing before NATO audiences at that time?6How about mutant virus immunosuppression?

I quickly headed for the scientific reference section to look up the effects of shellfish poisoning just to be sure. The clinical features of exposure included numbness and tingling of the mouth, face, and arms and legs, visual disturbances, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea; in more severe cases, muscle weakness, paralysis, and respiratory arrest? In essence, shellfish toxin made a great incapacitating agent for the CIA, but it held no benefit for studying immunity, cancer, or "anything of that particular ilk."

The cross-examination continued. At one point the chairman, obviously upset with Gordon's heightened sense of denial, got tough.

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Let us be clear what we are talking about. President Nixon had decided that the United States should destroy biological toxins. Right! And you answered, 'right.' Then Mr. Schwarz said, 'the matter you discuss that some new President or administration official might come along and say, we would like to have such stuff in order to kill people. Is that right!' And you answered, 'that is right.' 8


When I read this section, my question to Gordon would have been, "Did you have any inside knowledge that the Nixon White House might be quickly changing hands, and that the Kissinger/Ford administration might put some of these materials to immediate use in covert operations in Africa?

Still in a rage, the Chairman then blamed Gordon, as well as his higher-ups, for the whole messy MKNAOMI affair.

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Where does the blame lie? You say it does not lie with you. If you say it does not lie with Mr. Helms, where does the blame lie?

GORDON: You asked the question, who in the CIA made the decision. Now you know that it was the Chemistry Branch Chief, the project director, and his technical consultant.

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: The blame lies with you!

GORDON: The blame lies with the group I have just specified.

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Very well. ..


Later, toward the end of Gordon's testimony, questions were asked by Senator Schweiker about where the toxins originated. Angered by Gordon's hesitance to say or explain the role the United States Public Health Service played in MKNAOMI, Schweiker protested:

SCHWEIKER: Dr. Gordon, the part I have trouble comprehending, in view of your testimony is that labels on these cans are stuck on the top of the cans. You could not possibly pick a can up and put it in a file, without reading the label. One label says very clearly ... paralytic shellfish toxin, working fund investigation Northeast Shellfish Sanitation Center. Then it says, USPHS -- you do not have to be James Bond to figure out that means U.S. Public Health Service, Narragansett, R.I. And my question is why the U.S. Public Health Service is producing a deadly poison for this country, and who is paying for it, and you could see that by just reading the label on the can, so why all the mystery about where these 6 grams came from!

GORDON: Senator Schweiker, ... insofar as the Public Health Service ... being a source of the shellfish toxin material, this reflects a program that had been going on for some years. This is part of the cost in resources and value intrinsic in the quantity of shell toxin that was expended by those two particular Government agencies for many years....

SCHWEIKER: Your testimony is that we have, in fact, been receiving deadly poison manufactured by the U.S. Public Health Service and delivered, indirectly at least, to Fort Detrick. It came to your hands, but first of all to Fort Detrick. And I am wondering whether our House subcommittee that appropriates money for health research is really aware that that is exactly where our health funds have been going.

GORDON: I understand your question, Senator. I do not have a response to it.

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: I understand your view that there is a suggestion here that the committee will have to fully inquire into whether other departments of the Government in addition to the CIA undertook to circumvent the Presidential order ... and we will look into that because we really want to get to the root of the whole question presented here.9


I too wanted to get to the root of the USPHS link to biological weapons experiments. The combined role that agents from USPHS, the NCI, and Merck Inc. played in preparing and administering what was, very plausibly, HIV-tainted hepatitis B vaccines seemed worthy of further investigation. 10,11

Naturally, I reflected on Szmuness's report [10] that the pioneering work on Merck's advanced formula hepatitis B vaccine was accomplished by "Krugman and his co-workers in 1970 to 1973."12 Investigative journalist Robert Lederer keenly observed, as I did, that Krugman headed these initial studies, and that Krugman, like Gallo through Litton Bionetics, received funding for the project from the U.S. Army while serving in New York at the Willowbrook State School for mentally retarded children. 11 Despite a later publication by Szmuness and Purcell (from the CDC) describing hepatitis A and blood screening studies conducted on a group of mentally retarded children,13 Szmuness's New England Journal of Medicine report said Krugman's experimental hepatitis B population was "healthy adults," and that Krugman's hepatitis B study began in 1974. Szmuness's report also noted that the Hilleman/Merck Institute hepatitis B studies began within twenty-four months of Krugman's efforts -- more evidence, though circumstantial, that the early New York hepatitis B vaccine experiments could have been part of the CIA and Army's cooperative Project: MKNAOMI.14

Schweiker continued his assault on Gordon:

SCHWEIKER: Here is a toxin that could kill thousands of people. If you walk into the CIA building you have to be logged in. I do not know why we do not log a toxin that could kill many thousands of people.


I then realized that Fort Detrick logs might be checked to see if Gallo or any other suspects walked in or out with AIDS-like viruses during the early 1970s.

GORDON: I would like to make a comment with respect to what has been in the press a number of times. The only way admittedly, and unequivocally, that is a large amount of material for any purposes of applying it in a lethal form to people -- the only way that you could kill those large numbers of people as related to the quantity of stockpile, is, in my humble opinion, to put some of them in one long line and inoculate each and everyone.


Exactly the procedure recommended by the WHO and administered by USAID vaccination teams working within the twenty Central West African countries to immunize more than 20 million people from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s.15.16

Correctly Assigning Fault: Kissinger Ordered MKNAOMI

Finally, Senator Morgan surmised what I had about the origin of MKNAOMI. Giving Henry Kissinger a break and Gordon the benefit of the doubt, the senator from North Carolina said:

MORGAN: I think the President understood that there would be some problems in the disposal of biological and bacteriological weapons, and I think he must have understood that there would be some need to retain some for research, and I think this is why he asked the Secretary of Defense, who is on the National Security Council, to promulgate some guidelines for doing this very thing.

And according to this memorandum to the President, it appears to me that as of as late as January 25, 1973, these guidelines had not been promulgated. I think what I am saying, Dr. Gordon, is that somebody is trying to tree you, and I think we are treeing the wrong one. I think the fault lies at a higher level.

GORDON: Senator Morgan, I would appreciate some clarification as to how you see the Agency's role in that particular directive, sir.

MORGAN: I think the Agency role would have been to follow whatever guidelines the President and National Security Council may have set up after receiving recommendations from the 000. I think you exercised your judgement, perhaps wrongly, but exercised it, based on the fact of what you understood it to mean -- from what I read, this, as late as 3 years after the original order there had been no program devised or prepared or promulgated for the disposal of these bacteriological or biological drugs, and it was the responsibility of the President to enunciate this program.


In essence, Morgan pointed out that the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, on or about January 25, 1973, had sent a memo to President Nixon asking for clarification as to what should be done regarding stockpiled biologicals. As Isaacson clearly noted in Kissinger, by that time -- at the height of his Watergate embarrassment -- Nixon was too depressed and dysfunctional to make any decisions. Virtually every important directive was made by Kissinger who sat atop the NSC, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the Intelligence Oversight Board, the Operations Advisory Group, the Committee on Foreign Intelligence, the CIA, the 40 Committee, and the Washington Special Action Group.

Therefore, it was Kissinger who had first ordered an interagency review of the nation's chemical and biological weapons capabilities. It was Kissinger who came up with the foreign policy recommendation that Nixon sign the Geneva accord for propaganda purposes. It was Kissinger who, having a vast amount of intelligence on the matter, plus having ordered the official CBW investigation report's rewrite, had to have turned a deaf ear to Gordon's and Karamessines's requests for orders to destroy the nation's deadly biological weapons.

Later in the hearings, Richard Helms, the former director of the CIA, also gave testimony. His statements also indicated that Kissinger oversaw MKNAOMI.

CHAIRMAN CHURCH: Mr. Helms, I am puzzled somewhat. It has been established by your testimony that the CIA had in its possession biological toxins that were subject to the President's order that they should be destroyed.

You have testified that a special study group was set up by the NSC pursuant to that order, and that that study group was not notified of the possession of these materials. And you have said that you did not think it was appropriate to give them that kind of information.

Since this was a study group of the NSC, and since, under the statute you are to take your directions from NSC in covert operations, why wasn't it appropriate to tell this study group that particular capability?

HELMS: Yes, sir, it is true that the statute reads that the Director of Central Intelligence reports to the National Security Council, which, in effect, is reporting to the President. ... They do not necessarily report to the National Security Council staff.


This was the staff, of course, established by Kissinger with Nixon's blessing. Thus, the two men maintained complete control over the passage of intelligence and administrative authority. The NSC staff was considered a separate body from the NSC with different meeting agendas, and Kissinger ran them both (see fig. 11.2).

HELMS: Many of these study groups that were put together on a whole variety of matters over the years would not have been made privy to secret intelligence information unless there was some specific request on the part of Dr. Kissinger, or someone, that they should be so briefed. So this was the custom, not an exception to the rule. 17


Thus, Kissinger never ordered Helms to report to the study group the CIA's stockpile of biological weapons. Apparently, he intended to use them on a mission not even the NSC discussed.
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Re:  EMERGING VIRUSES: AIDS & EBOLA: Nature, Accident or Int

Postby admin » Wed Feb 17, 2016 10:51 pm

Chapter 17: The CIA's Human Experiments

IT was now clear that Kissinger and a few MKNAOMI scientists controlled the fate of AIDS-like viruses engineered for the Army for use in CIA-directed operations. Could the CIA really have gotten away with this? Their reprehensible history foreshadowed the likelihood.

Four months after the Church Committee hearings closed, the House Appropriations Committee renewed the CIA's entire chemical and biological weapons (CBW) budget. Despite revelations that the CIA had misused its authority and resources for the development, storage, and outlawed use of biological weapons, their association with Fort Detrick, the NCI, and the killer germs continued.1,2

The following month, in February 1976, the Senate added additional funds to the CIA's CBW coffer after hearing African intelligence reports alleging Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola. The news was perfect for CIA and Army special operations division patrons. They combined their efforts, and once again, successfully gained Senate approval for additional BW program funding.3

The CIA's Human Experiments

Within a year, however, more military CBW misdeeds gained notoriety. Newspapers throughout North America carried stories about the joint Army-Navy-CIA germ warfare experiments conducted from 1953 to 1970. During this time, tens of thousands of people in New York City and San Francisco were experimentally exposed to airborne germs-Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii. The bacteria, first considered benign, were later determined to be pathogenic since at least one person died, and many came down with pneumonia-like symptoms. The intelligence leak once again prompted hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research.4

This time, senators heard testimony that the CIA had secretly tested unsuspecting human subjects with pathogenic bacteria. The congressional investigating committee -- the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research- was then led by the Honorable Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy. The Massachusetts senator at the time also served as vice president of NATO's Military Committee.4,5

Kennedy opened the session by rhetorically asking, "How can public accountability be maintained when secrecy is a legitimate and necessary component of research on human subjects?" He then called upon Senator Schweiker to advance his concerns about the program and testing of unsuspecting subjects:

SCHWEIKER: Many serious questions have been raised, particularly in regard to the biological simulant tests which have been widely reported in the press. Medical experts have told us that the Army was using simulant agents -- live organisms which we know can infect human beings -- in places like the New York subway system. There have been tests in my home state of Pennsylvania -- in Mechanicsburgh, in the Kittatinny and Tascarora Tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and along Pennsylvania State Highway 16. Some experts have told me that the Army continued to use a certain bacterium long after it was known to cause infection. Officials from the Center for Disease Control have stated that many better alternatives to the known pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigates exist. It has been suggested that the fact that the organisms used as simulants do naturally occur in the environment does not at all insure their safety -- in fact, because they are normally regulated by the environment, their efforts may be harder to detect and control. ...

One thing seems clear, it is very risky indeed to assume that any living organism, reduced to germ warfare size and released in a populated area, is actually, theoretically, ever safe ....

Perhaps most importantly, have the tests ended? If so, could they start up again?

All these questions are vital as we attempt to come to grips with the key issue in these hearings -- the use of Americans as unwitting human subjects for open-air germ warfare testing conducted in the public domain by officials of our own Government.

Since the original news reports appeared, my office has received a number of letters from people who want to know if our Armed Forces, charged with protecting us, could have injured them or their loved ones through indiscriminate open-air testing with disease-producing agents. They do not like the idea that they may have been guinea pigs in germ warfare experiments. In most cases, there is no reason at all to believe that the tests are implicated in these illnesses, and of course no direct proof exists. But I think it is tragic that in a free country like ours these sorts of questions have to occur to people at all. The American people have a right to know what is going on around them, and I hope this hearing will help resolve their lingering doubts.


Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Development, Mr. Edward A. Miller spoke next. He was accompanied by Brigadier General William S. Augerson, the Assistant Surgeon General for Research and Development; and Lieutenant Colonel George A. Carruth, Staff Officer for the Chemical and Nuclear Biological Chemical Defense Division, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans. What follows was published in the Congressional Record:

MILLER: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and Senator Schweiker.

We appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today to present testimony concerning the Army's biological and chemical warfare programs.

It began in 1941 when the National Academy of Sciences, due to national concern, appointed a committee to make a complete survey of biological warfare (BW). In February of 1942, the committee completed its efforts and reported that BW as a weapon was not only feasible but that appropriate steps should be taken to establish a BW program for this country.


In August 1942, President Roosevelt approved the formation of the War Research Service (WRS), with George W. Merck, of the prominent Merck pharmaceutical firm, as its Director .... It became obvious early in the program that the United States was behind other nations in its chemical and biological warfare capabilities.

KENNEDY: Can you ... give us what your assessment is about whether biological warfare is a usable and effective weapon at the present time?

MILLER: We believe that biological warfare could in fact be an effective weapon .... Our present feeling is that it could be effective unless we are well protected against it.

KENNEDY: We are really talking about a wide variety of different organisms or mechanisms under biological warfare, are we not?

MILLER: Yes, we are.

KENNEDY: ... Just briefly, ... give us the parameter of the type of danger we are talking about so that the people can understand ....

AUGERSON: Before referring to the conscious work of men, nature has indeed examples of biological warfare, amply demonstrated in plagues and epidemics. The nature of the beast consists of what the targets might be: people, animals, or plants....

KENNEDY: Let me just ask you about the recombinant DNA issue as it affects this particular question. We have been interested in this subject matter. The committee will have to deal with that in later hearings, but as I understand, there is substantial research being done by the Soviet Union in the DNA area, recombinant DNA. What is the potential for recombinant DNA in this area or biological warfare? Is there significance to it?

AUGERSON: Yes, sir. As with most important scientific accomplishments, it has the potential of great harm as well as great good. There are dangerous applications of genetic manipulation that one can imagine. I would hasten to add, sir, that the Department of Defense has conducted in the last year an inventory, if you will, of the work that we have in hand, and I am aware of no work in recombinant DNA.6


Given the fact that the DOD had specifically requested five years of appropriations for AIDS-like virus development, Augerson apparently perjured himself. This work was obviously based on recombinant RNA and DNA research, and in the interim the field literally exploded, with the Army funding numerous studies in the field.7 His following remark shows how this work was concealed and rationalized.

KENNEDY: You are not doing the work?

AUGERSON: We participate with the National Institutes of Health in the studies and development of guidelines and intend, if we ever do such work, to conform to the established policies and guidelines.

KENNEDY: Just before leaving that subject matter, does the potential in the area of DNA research concern you, how it could be used in --

AUGERSON: Yes, sir.

KENNEDY: In an adverse way?

AUGERSON: Yes, sir; potentially very powerful way of altering the way living organisms work.


Miller then summarized the history of biological warfare. He said the Army's research was based on the "vulnerability of the military, the ground forces of the Army, in particular," and required the Army to work with the USPHS, the NIH, and the DHEW to "aggressively" overcome "those problems with respect to the known [biological] agents."8

Later in the hearings, senators learned that research and development efforts on medical aspects of germ warfare "have been extensive throughout the history of the program and have involved close cooperative efforts between Army, USPHS, and other HEW agencies. Major accomplishments in this program include development of vaccines," allegedly for protective use only.9

"The records" Colonel Carruth added, "indicate that there were 19 tests ... conducted in the public domain using biological simulants. I will make a distinction, Senator, between biological simulants and nonbiological materials, for instance particles and other materials which were released to check dispersion patterns, but were not living materials. There were 27 of those tests conducted in the public domain (see fig. 17.1 for selected experiments)." 8

BW tests, the officials testified had been conducted on unsuspecting Americans between 1950 and 1969. According to Senator Schweiker, Army officials were well aware that "there was a serious problem" and the public's health was at risk during the tests. 10

Fig. 17.1. Selected United States Biological Weapons Tests on Human Subjects

BIOLOGICAL FIELD TESTING ANTI-PERSONNEL BIOLOGICAL SIMULANTS INVOLVING PUBLIC DOMAIN

LOCATION OF TEST / DATE(S) OF TEST / SIMULANT/AGENT USED


Washington, DC / 18 Aug 1949; 26 Aug 1949; 12-13 Dec 1949; 11 Mar 1950 / Serratia marcescens

USS Coral Sea anchored in Kampton Rds, & USS F.D. Bailey at sea off entrance to Kampton Roads, Kampton Roads, VA 1 trial at anchor, 16 trials at sea off the entrance / 1-21 Apr 1950 / Bacillus globigii (Bacillus subtilis or niger); Serratia marcescens

San Francisco, CA / Sep 1950 / Serratia marcescens; Bacillus globigii

Port Huenene, CA / 10 Sep-24 Oct 1952 / Bacillus globigii

Panama City, FL / Mar - May 1953 / Serratia marcescens; Bacillus globigii

Off-shore, between Port Huenene and Point Mugu, CA near Santa Barbara / 17-27 Aug 1956 / Bacillus globigii

Pennsylvania State Highway #16 westward for one mile from Benchmark #193 / 7 Jan 1955 / Bacillus globigii

Kittakinny and Tuscarora Tunnels, Pennsylvania Turnpike / Aug 1955 / Bacillus globigii

Offshore Hawaii / Jan-June 1963 / Bacillus globigii

Vicinity Ft. Greeley, Alaska / Dec 1963 - Jan 1964 / Escharicia coli

Central Alaska / Jan - Feb 1965 / Escharicia coli

National Airport & Greyhound Terminal Washington, DC / May 1965 / Escharicia coli

New York, NY / 7 - 10 June 1966 / Bacillus globigii

Key West, FL / 1969 / Serratia marcescens

Document recreated from library microfiche, some of which was illegible. These fourteen test sites were extracted from a total of twenty-three listed in Appendix IV-E-1-1 of "Biological Testing Involving Human Subjects by the Department of Defense, 1977." Hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research to examine Army biological warfare research programs, March 8, 1977 and May 23, 1977. Congo Sess. 95-1, pp. 125-126.


Fig. 17.2. Fort Detrick Biological Weapons Contracts and Contractors 1951-1970

FORT DETRICK RDTE TYPE CONTRACTS

CONTRACTOR / NUMBER OF CONTRACTS / CONTRACT DATE / TERMINATION DATE


Bionetics Research Laboratories / 2 / Mar 1966 / May 1967

Univ. of California /12 / Apr 1950 / Sep 1953
-- / -- / Sep 1950 / Aug 1951
-- / -- / Mar 1951 / Jul 1953
-- / -- / Aug 1951 / Aug 1952
-- / -- / Aug 1952 / Oct 1954
-- / -- / Oct 1954 / Oct 1955
-- / -- / Jul 1962 / Dec 1965
-- / -- / Mar 1963 / Dec 1963
-- / -- / Mar 1964 / Feb 1965
-- / -- / Jun 1965 / May 1966
-- / -- / Jun 1966 / Nov 1967
-- / -- / Dec 1967 / Nov 1968*

Univ. of Chicago / 13 / Ju1 1955 / Mar 1957
-- / -- / May 1956 / Sep 1963
-- / -- / Oct 1950 / Feb 1953
-- / -- / Jun 1951 / Jun 1953
-- / -- / Dec 1951 / Dec 1953
-- / -- / Jun 1952 / Jul 1954
-- / -- / Jun 1952 / Mar 1954
-- / -- / Dec 1953 / Dec 1956
-- / -- / Apr 1960 / Apr 1963
-- / -- / Aug 1962 / Aug 1965
-- / -- / Oct 1963 / Oct 1964
-- / -- / Nov 1964 / Oct 1965*
-- / -- / Mar 1966 / Jul 1966*

Litton Systems, Inc. / 14 / Jun 1960 / Sep 1965
-- / -- / Nov 1962 / Feb 1964
-- / -- / Mar 1964 / Nov 1965
-- / -- / Sep 1964 / Jan 1966
-- / -- / May 1965 / Oct 1965
-- / -- / May 1965 / Jan 1966
-- / -- / Jun 1965 / Sep 1965
-- / -- / Mar. 1966 / Apr 1966
-- / -- / Apr 1966 / Jul 1966
-- / -- / Jun 1962 / Jun 1964
-- / -- / Aug 1966 / Dec 1966
-- / -- / Nov 1966 / Jan 1968
-- / -- / Mar 1967 / Mar 1967
-- / -- / Nov 1967 / Nov 1967

Merck & Co., Inc. / 2 / May 1955 / Dec 1956
-- / -- / Apr 1960 / Jun 1961

New York University / 2 / Nov 1951 / Nov 1959
-- / -- / Jan 1954 / Jun 1956

Research Fndn. of State Univ. of New York / 3 / Oct 1952 / Mar 1965
-- / -- / Jun 1969 / Jul 1969

Stanford Research Inst. / 1 / Mar 1964 / Jan 1966

University of Texas / 8 / Oct 1951 / Oct 1954
-- / -- / Oct 1952 / Jul 1959
-- / -- / Sep 1955 / Jul 1958
-- / -- / Jun 1957 / Aug 1958
-- / -- / Feb 1951 / Feb 1953
-- / -- / Aug 1958 / Aug 1960
-- / -- / May 1963 / Oct 1965
-- / -- / Jun 1968 / Jun 1970*

University of Virginia / 2 / Jun 1965 / Apr 1967
-- / -- / May 1967 / Feb 1969*

Document recreated from library microfiche. These Fort Detrick contracts were extracted from twenty-one pages of contractor listings in Appendix 1-C-1-21 of "Biological Testing Involving Human Subjects by the Department of Defense, 1977." Hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research to examine Army biological warfare research programs, March 8, 1977 and May 23, 1977. Cong. Sess. 95-1, pp. 80-100. * Denotes contract under which Robert Gallo and his colleagues may have worked.


The New York subway test and San Francisco open air experiments received the lion's share of discussion. Here Army special operations officers filled the air with Serratia marcenscens and Bacillus globigii, two pathogens not particularly lethal, but known by most experts as being capable of causing respiratory infections.

Past History Foreshadowing Current Events

Dr. Steven Weitzman of the Department of Microbiology, School of Basic Health Science, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook was called in to testify that these tests may have killed many people, particularly "infants, elderly persons, people with cancer, [and] people with lung disease ... [whose] ability to fight off infection by Serratia marcescens is difficult to estimate."11

"In summary," Weitzman continued, "too many uncontrolled variables are present to consider vulnerability testing safe for large civilian populations with a biological simulant."

Since such dangers were professionally recognized, and since the "Army used a number of consultants for the tests," Weitzman concluded that the Army researchers were ill advised.

The official Army report according to Weitzman, "never really dealt with, in any convincing detail, ... the necessity for using actual cities for the open-air tests."

WEITZMAN: It is unclear to me what additional information was gained by releasing bacteria in the New York City subways, for example, that could not be gathered by a similar experiment done in the tunnels of a deserted mine shaft; or why in studying aerosolization patterns unpopulated areas could not be used, instead of populated cities. So, why the tests were conducted in populated cities certainly remains unclear to me.

The only unique information that can be concluded from these tests is that the cities are in fact obviously vulnerable to biological warfare attack. This vulnerability is so obvious that it leads to a consideration of the major point I would like to make.

Since the offensive biological warfare research program was dismantled in 1960, there would seem to be little purpose in spending time analyzing actions taken 20 years ago. Still, some degree of biological warfare research continues in the Department of Defense with a budget in 1975-76 of close to $18 million. While this research emphasizes "defensive research" the distinction between "offensive" and "defensive" is often no more than a semantic one. This was realized in Army reports where they quote as early as 1916 that: "it should be emphasized that while the main objective in all these endeavors was to develop methods for defending ourselves against possible enemy use of biological warfare agents, it was necessary to investigate offensive possibilities in order to learn what measures could be used for defense. Accordingly, the problems of offense and defense were closely interlinked in all the investigations conducted."

That biological warfare continues in this and probably other countries is disturbing, and that was noted also, in 1946: "It is important to note that, unlike the development of the atomic bomb and other secret weapons during the war, the development of agents for biological warfare is possible in many countries, large and small, without vast expenditures of money or the construction of huge production facilities. It is clear that the development of biological warfare could very well proceed in many countries, perhaps under the guise of legitimate medical or bacteriological research.11


Exactly as it had proceeded here, I considered.

WEITZMAN: The question was in fact discussed in great detail by Dr. Meselson in a Carnegie endowment report several years ago, in which they really made the point that in the context of a tactical and strategic war, it is very much in the U.S. interest to preserve and strengthen the restraints that prevent chemical warfare and the proliferation of chemical weapons. It seems that the wealth of the United States allows it to expend enormous quantities on weapons to be used, and in particular we are talking about conventional munitions and tactical combat; very few other countries approach this capability.

The lesson that was really learned from the San Francisco tests was the fact that an individual person, or a small group of people could, in fact, expose the population to large numbers of bacteria; and that once the technology of biological warfare has been developed, it becomes then easy for small countries, or small groups to use this technology ....

To summarize, I have tried to establish the following points:

The first point is that testing in offensive and defensive biological warfare research, and, in particular large-scale, open-air testing, is unpredictable and thus potentially dangerous. Unique conditions develop that are distinct from the usual laboratory or hospital experience.

The second point is that the Army acted irresponsibly in carrying out the vulnerability open-air tests on large urban populations in the 1950s and 1960s. They ignored the ethical problem of informed consent and the potential health problem we already discussed.

The third point is that the continuation of biological warfare research is not in the military interest of the United States since once the techniques are developed, biological warfare can be used by small countries, terrorist groups, and individuals. The proliferation of biological warfare weaponry and techniques can only erode military advantages that the United States now has since biological agents are cheap to produce and can be delivered by a small force in a clandestine manner.11


I paused for a moment to reflect: If it wasn't in the best interest of the U.S. military, then, in whose interest was it? Then it occurred to me that these most controversial, unethical, immoral, illegal, and potentially deadly tests were conducted in the same two cities hardest struck by AIDS. And for no apparent scientific reason. The same information could have been gained without placing the public at risk, Weitzman said.

There had to have been some payoff for these crimes against humanity. Certainly there was lots of money involved. The Army's input had come from covert operations officers serving within the USPHS, NIH, and DHEW -- agencies intimately linked to private firms, like Merck and Litton Bionetics.

I shook my head in disgust. The financial motive and military-industrial connections I would have previously thought absurd, I now perceived as plausible. The harsh probabilities were reinforced as I surveyed the hearings addendum and noted that Merck & Co., Inc. had received two BW contracts during the period in which biological weapons tests involving the "public domain" had been conducted (see fig. 17.2).12

In his final remarks, as a marginally effective precaution, Weitzman recommended stronger informed consent laws be enacted to protect people from such military escapades. Then, most ironically, he recommended the senators pass a law requiring that BW testing programs be supervised by "the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare." He added, "At a time when Federal guidelines are being established for regulating recombinant DNA research conducted in universities and industries," the principle of providing "outside checks and balances ... would seem appropriate." 11

The Rockefeller Commission Overlooked the Worst

According to the Rockefeller Commission's Report on CIA Wrongdoing, in the late 1940s, the CIA "began to study the properties of certain behavior- influencing drugs (such as LSD) and how such drugs might be put to use by [American] intelligence. This interest was prompted [once again] by reports that the Soviet Union was experimenting with such drugs and by speculation that the confessions introduced during trials in the Soviet Union ... might have been elicited by the use of drugs or hypnosis. Great concern over Soviet and North Korean techniques in 'brainwashing' continued .... "13

As a result, a drug program was developed by the CIA in an effort to explore human behavior modification: "Unsuspecting subjects within the United States" and Canada, the commission noted, were used by CIA operatives as guinea pigs in often lethal experiments designed to test weapons ranging from drugs, radiation, electric-shock, chemicals, and biologicals. Such experiments apparently continued until 1967 when allegedly "all projects involving behavior-influencing drugs were terminated."13

The facts, however, were impossible to determine since "all records concerning the program were ordered destroyed in 1973.... A total of 152 separate files" were wiped out. 13 The order apparently came once again from Kissinger.

In concluding the inquiry, the commission -- headed by Nelson Rockefeller -- admonished the CIA, as the Senate had done, for testing "potentially dangerous drugs on unsuspecting United States citizens," and recommended that future agency experiments should "adhere strictly to Department of Health, Education and Welfare guidelines concerning the use of human subjects."13

On the same page, the commissioners addressed another issue involving the Science and Technology Directorate -- the "Manufacture and Use of [false] Documents." I read on with interest. Apparently the CIA had routinely issued medical scientists false names and identification documents for covert operations. The report stated:

The Agency maintains a capability for producing and providing to its agents and operatives a wide range of "alias credentials. Most such documents purport to be of foreign origin. Some, however, are documents ordinarily issued by other branches of the U.S. government or by private United States businesses and organizations.

Among the United States "alias" documents furnished from time to time to Agency personnel and operatives are Social Security cards, bank cards, professional cards, club cards, alumni association cards and library cards. The Agency has recently stopped producing alias driver's licenses, credit cards and birth certificates, unless needed in a particularly sensitive operation and approved in advance by the Deputy Director of Operations.

While the Agency does not produce false United States passports, it has in the past altered a few....

The purpose of alias documents is to facilitate cover during CIA operations .... The Commission found no evidence that any Agency employee has ever used false documentation of this kind to his personal advantage. 13


This information struck me as particularly sobering as I reflected on Henry Kissinger's role in gathering Nazis from post-World War II Germany while American intelligence offered many, with scientific training, lucrative positions. They undoubtedly gave the Nazi researchers alias names and backgrounds so they couldn't be traced or tried for war crimes, I recalled.

The CIA and "The Mad Doctor" in Canada

Despite its proprietary appearance, The Rockefeller Commission was anything but thorough in investigating and reporting CIA improprieties. Had they been, they might have discussed Operation MKULTRA, the agency's most notorious and barbarous mind control experiments. 14

The McDonald Commission -- the Canadian counterpart to the Rockefeller Commission -- had investigated allegations that the CIA had supported Cameron, one of the most prominent research psychiatrists in North America. Cameron had conducted what he called "depatterning" and "psychic driving" experiments. The guinea pigs this time were psychiatric patients of the Royal Victoria Hospital -- a teaching hospital affiliated with McGill University in Montreal.15

From 1957 to 1962, the CIA funneled grants totaling $84,820 to Cameron via the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (SIHE), a CIA front, for funding their "psychic driving" research, code-named MKULTRA Subproject 38.14

Cameron, the director of the Allan Memorial Institute (AMI) from 1943 to 1964, prescribed heavy doses of drugs combined with electro-convulsive (shock) therapy (ECT) in an effort to "depattern" unwanted behaviors, and "drive" into the psyche, alternative thoughts, beliefs, and habits. Although discredited today, ECT had been widely used in the 1950s and 1960s. Cameron, however, pioneered a distinct ECT protocol. Cameron's depatterning was described by John Marks, the author of The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control. Cameron's treatment:

normally started with 15 to 30 days of "sleep therapy." As the name implies. the patient slept almost the whole day and night. According to a doctor at the hospital who used to administer what he calls the "sleep cocktail," a staff member woke up the patient three times a day for medication that consisted of 100 mg. Thorazine, 100 mg. Nembutal, 100 mg. Seconal, 150 mg. Veronal, and 10 mg. Phenergan. Another staff doctor would also awaken the patient two or sometimes three times daily for electroshock treatments. This doctor and his assistant wheeled a portable machine into the "sleep room" and gave the subject a local anesthetic and muscle relaxant, so as not to cause damage with the convulsions that were to come. After attaching electrodes soaked in saline solution, the attendant held the patient down and the doctor turned on the current. In standard, professional electroshock, doctors gave the subject a single dose of 110 volts lasting a fraction of a second, once a day or every other day.

By contrast, Cameron used a form 20 to 40 times more intense, two or three times daily, with the power turned up to 150 volts. Named the "Page-Russell" method after its British originators, this technique featured an initial one-second shock, which caused a major convulsion, and then five to nine additional shocks in the middle of the primary and follow-on convulsions. Even Drs. Page and Russell limited their treatments to once a day, and they always stopped as soon as their patients showed "pronounced confusion" and became "faulty in habits." Cameron, however, welcomed this kind of impairment as a sign the treatment was taking effect and plowed ahead through his routine.


The frequent screams of patients that echoed through the hospital did not deter Cameron or most of his associates in their attempts to "depattern" their subjects completely. Other hospital patients reported being petrified by the "sleep rooms," where the treatment took place, and they would usually creep down the opposite side of the hall. 17

Occasionally, Cameron used an alternative method, including "sensory isolation." He placed patients in a large box for up to thirty-five days. depriving them of all sensory input. He covered their eyes, plugged their ears, or exposed them to a constant sound. Padding was used to prevent their sense of touch, and all ambient smells were eliminated. He sometimes combined ECT, sensory isolation, and drug-induced sleep. These evoked the "depatterning" phase of therapy. "At the end of up to 30 days of treatment -- up to 60 treatments at the rate of two per day -- the patient's mind would be more or less in a childlike and unconcerned state."17

Cameron then attempted to reprogram his literally unwitting subjects with his "psychic driving" techniques. Recorded messages were played for the patients thousands of times through pillow speakers or headphones. First, ten days of "negative signals" were used. These stressed the patient's presumed inadequacies. "Positive" messages were played the next ten days that encouraged the desired behavior. "Psychic driving would take place for continuous periods of up to sixteen hours per day. Taken together, the positive and negative messages might be repeated up to half a million times."18

Cameron's research apparently paralleled several goals set by the CIA's technical services staff. These included obtaining "materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness .... , materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use ... , and substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced."19

In his proposal to the CIA front, Cameron also said he would test curare, the South American arrow poison which, when liberally applied, kills by paralyzing internal body functions. In nonlethal doses, curare causes a limited paralysis which blocks but does not stop these functions. According to his papers, some of which wound up in the archives of the American Psychiatric Association, Cameron injected his patients with curare in conjunction with sensory deprivation, presumably to immobilize them further. Cameron also tested LSD in combination with psychic driving and other techniques.20


Marks further detailed, at the time Cameron was in charge of psychiatry at AMI, Dr. Donald Hebb headed McGill's Department of Psychology. Hebb minced no words when asked about psychic driving. "That was an awful set of ideas Cameron was working with," he testified. "It called for no intellectual respect. If you actually look at what he was doing and what he wrote, it would make you laugh. If I had a graduate student who talked like that, I'd throw him out." Warming to his subject, Hebb concluded, "Look, Cameron was no good as a researcher. ... He was eminent because of politics."20

Following his retirement in 1964, Dr. Robert A. Cleghorn, Cameron's successor as AMI director, reviewed and then halted the mad scientist's work. Cleghorn's private notes described Cameron's research as "therapy gone wild."21 Cameron died in 1967. "Twenty years later his victims are still fighting for redress, while the Canadian government is still trenchantly battling to shield itself and the CIA from blame."14

More Mad Medical Experiments

Many other studies, carried out on unsuspecting Americans, were detailed by Robert Lederer in Covert Action Information Bulletin. According to Lederer's well-documented work:

• In 1952 and 1953, clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide were sprayed over Winnipeg, Manitoba; St. Louis, Missouri; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Fort Wayne, Indiana; the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland; and Leesburg, Virginia. Despite claims of harmlessness, a military report noted respiratory problems [among some of those exposed].

• In 1955, the Tampa Bay area of Florida experienced a sharp rise in whooping cough cases, including 12 deaths, following a CIA bio-war test whose details are still secret, involving bacteria withdrawn from an Army CBW center.

• From 1956 to 1958, in the poor Black communities of Savannah, Georgia, and Avon Park, Florida, the Army carried out tests with mosquitoes that may have been infected with yellow fever. The insects were released into residential areas from ground level and dropped from planes and helicopters. Many people were swarmed by mosquitoes and then developed unknown fevers; some died. After each test Army agents posing as public health officials photographed and tested victims and then disappeared from town.22

• In 1976, the Humane Society of Utah questioned the mysterious deaths of 50 wild horses who had drank from a spring near the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground, a CBW research center.23,24

Lederer also advanced the 1978 "mass suicide" of 900 Black North Americans in Jonestown, Guyana, as a "highly suspicious incident that could bear scrutiny as a possible CBW test." He wrote that a Philadelphia activist who "extensively investigated the incident" -- John Judge -- found that many of the lethal drugs used at the scene "were the same ones tested under MKULTRA."23

The Guyanese Chief Medical Examiner testified in court that 80 percent of the bodies he examined showed signs of forcible injections. Jim Jones, the self-proclaimed leader of the "People's Temple" which moved to Guyana from San Francisco, and one of his aides, had CIA connections. The father of Jonestown leader Larry Layton was head of CBW Research at the Army's Dugway Proving Grounds in the 1950s. The elder Layton admitted contributing $25,000 to the People's Temple. According to Judge, "Public exposure [in the mid-1970s] of experiments in U.S. prisons and mental institutions was, in all likelihood, a major impetus for relocating this testing to the jungles of a virtually unknown country."23,25


Besides these events, directly or allegedly related to MKULTRA, the Army's history is replete with deadly "civilian" medical experiments most often practiced on southern blacks, prisoners, the mentally handicapped, and Third World populations.23,26,27

Marshall Shapo, the author of A Nation of Guinea Pigs: The Unknown Risks of Chemical Technology, reported that numerous new drugs had been tested in Third World countries long before similar tests were allowed in the United States. For instance, the birth control pill was first tested on Haitian and Puerto Rican women who were not informed about the possible side effects. The trials were conducted by the G. D. Searle pharmaceutical company in 1956.26

Lederer also reviewed examples of horrific experiments involving prisoners exposed to infectious diseases and carcinogenic chemicals.28 Between 1965 and 1968 "70 prisoners, mostly black, at Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia, were the subjects of tests by Dow Chemical Company of the effects of dioxin, the highly toxic chemical contaminant in Agent Orange." Dow, I recalled, a documented biological weapons contractor, had also supplied Gallo with experimental reagents used in his 1970s viral research, and in 1995 funded the development of AIDS-like monkey viruses by Dr. Narayan at the University of Kansas Medical Center. Lederer noted the Philadelphia study was "the second such experiment commissioned by Dow, the previous one carried out on 51 'volunteers,''' believed to also involve prisoners.29,44

A series of experiments that bears particular scrutiny in light of AIDS were the mind-altering drug tests and aversion therapy measures, including electroshock treatment, used on prisoners in the California prisons of Vacaville and Atascadero in the 1960s.30 Some of these were particularly directed against gay inmates, attempting to "convert" them to heterosexuality. Blanche Wiesen Cooke, a New York history professor, has raised question of whether AIDS may have developed as one result of such experiment. Clearly, these experiments need more investigation.23


Tuskegee Genocide in the Name of Science

Another outlandish example of scientific treachery carried out in the name of public health was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

In 1932, the USPHS, allegedly interested in studying untreated tertiary (final stage) syphilis, selected an experimental group consisting of 400 poor, uneducated black males from rural Tuskegee, Alabama, to serve as study subjects. The men were never told about their life threatening disease, and worse, they were consistently denied treatment. Another 200 healthy black men served as control subjects. Both groups were carefully observed for decades. According to James H. Jones, author of Bad Blood -- the authoritative book on the case -- "as of 1969, at least 28 and perhaps as many as 100 men had died as a direct result of complications caused by syphilis. Others had developed syphilis-related heart conditions that may have contributed to their deaths."31 Additional study victims included the untreated men's wives, many of whom also became infected, and some of their children who "may have been born with congenital defects."23

A cartoon depicting the immorality, published in the Denver Rocky Mountain News, appears in fig. 17.3.

Fig. 17.3. "400 Untreated Syphilis Cases" In USPHS Study

Image
Under the USPHS's microscope were "400 untreated black syphilis cases" many of whom were observed until death. Source: Lederer R. Precedents for AIDS? Chemical-biological warfare, medical experiments and population control. Covert Action Information Bulletin 1987;28:35. Originally appeared in the Denver Rocky Mountain News.
THIS IS A NO-TREATMENT STUDY BY YOUR PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE

The experiment continued until 1972, when an outraged federal worker blew the whistle to the press, and nationwide condemnation forced the government to cancel the project. This employee had protested privately as far back as 1966, only provoking increasingly high-level secret meetings which resolved to continue the project. In 1972, as they reluctantly ordered its end, federal health officials hypocritically joined the press denunciations while implicitly defending the study as legitimate in its time. The survivors still received no treatment until eight months later, on the eve of congressional hearings. The federal office supervising the study was the predecessor of today's Center for Disease Control (CDC) unit in charge of the AIDS program. The CDC, a journalist wrote in 1972, "sees the poor, the black, the illiterate and the defenseless in American society as a vast experimental resource for the government." 23,32


Renewed Tuskegee Syphilis Study attention occurred during the confirmation hearings of Dr. Henry Foster, President Clinton's nominee for United States Surgeon General. Congress, following the national press, learned that Foster had served as an obstetrician at the Tuskegee clinic while the syphilis study was ongoing. He was also alleged to have attended a conference wherein the study was discussed. When questioned why he failed to intercede on behalf of the patients, Foster denied any knowledge of the experiment. 33

Guardians of Ignorance

The Foster disclaimer was reminiscent of the congressional example set over a quarter century earlier at the height of Senate hearings on chemical and biological warfare.34 On August 8, 1969, prior to his signing of the Geneva accord, President Nixon received numerous petitions. One plea came from Senator Yarborough, who warned Nixon about developing "a kind of 'super germ' or new strains of germs for which the body has not evolved antibodies and for which vaccines have not been developed." A genetic recombinant, he explained, was likely to produce "epidemic results" since it is "a self-replicating weapon -- it proliferates itself, not only in the affected individuals but also in the entire population."34

Yarborough cited numerous examples of official negligence and ignorance in the face of impending disaster. In the text he sent Nixon was a story published in the July 25, 1969, edition of Medical World News entitled, "Biological Warfare: Off Limits to Doctors." The article relayed a conversation between a congressman and a prominent physician:

CONGRESSMAN'S QUESTION: What amount of VX nerve gas currently being tested in the open air over Dugway Proving Ground in Utah can kill a man?

PHYSICIAN'S ANSWER: I don't know.

CONGRESSMAN'S QUESTION: Were you aware that the Army's own maps show a permanent biocontaminated area about 17 miles outside Dugway?

PHYSICIAN'S ANSWER: Not until I read about it in yesterday's papers.

The doctor who was thus forced to admit ignorance . . . was the Surgeon General of the United States Public Health Service, William H. Stewart .... "I have primary responsibility within the federal government for the protection of public health," Dr. Stewart noted. To make the paradox more bitter, Dr. Stewart had served as chairman of the blue-ribbon committee set up to determine whether Dugway's testing programs, which killed some 6,000 sheep last year, have safety precautions adequate to protect humans, plants, and animals outside or inside the proving ground.

Much of the information about current U.S. biological warfare programs was apparently off limits to Dr. Stewart .... In the information that has been made available, there is no evidence of any substantial work on ways of protecting the civilian population against a biological attack, or against an air crash, train wreck, lab explosion, or earthquake involving U.S. research or storage facilities. 34


More Links to New York Blood

One of Lederer's footnotes discussed what I realized was another incriminating link between CDC officials in charge of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and public health officers in charge of the New York City Health Department and blood bank. I had already documented the research links between Bethesda hepatitis B investigators Purcell and Gerin, and Szmuness at the NYC Blood Center; and those between Krugman and Hilleman, who through Merck, Army, and Health Research Council of the City of New York contracts had direct access to New York's blood and homosexual vaccine supplies. Now Lederer footnoted that Dr. David Sencer, "the Director of the CDC who approved the continuation of the Tuskegee study in 1969" -- the year Krugman began injecting experimental hepatitis B vaccines into human subjects from New York City35 -- "became New York City Health Commissioner, and a key player in AIDS policy, in the early 1980s."23

Undoubtedly anticipating the major focus of AIDS awareness would be on New York City, its blood bank, and health department, I realized, the CDC prudently placed an agency insider at the helm of the New York City Health Department. Sencer was the ideal candidate for the job -- a veteran media bullet dodger and genocidal germ study administrator.

Later, I referenced The Band once again, seeking anything written about Sencer. I recalled that Shilts had liberally condemned the New York City Blood Center -- America's largest blood bank -- for resisting efforts to screen its stock. The "blood bankers" Shilts noted were "resolutely opposed" to testing the blood supplies even as late as 1984, "arguing almost solely on fiscal grounds."36

Although largely run by non-profit organizations like the Red Cross, the blood industry represented big money, with annual receipts of a billion dollars. Their business of providing the blood for 3.5 million transfusions a year was threatened. Already the high cost of blood had created new markets for self-donation. Prices had to be competitive, blood bankers knew. The cost of testing for hepatitis antibodies, Kellner from the New York Blood Center suggested, would be $100 million annually for the entire nation. That was simply too much.16


As late as March 1984, Dr. Aaron Kellner, the president of the New York Blood Center had argued against testing their blood supplies for an AIDS factor. "Don't overstate the facts," Kellner said. "There are at most three cases of AIDS from blood donation and the evidence in two of these cases is very soft. And there are only a handful of cases among hemophiliacs."36

Besides, Kellner said, the proposed testing would cost his center $5 million to implement. False-positive test results would result in the unnecessary disposal of blood that wasn't infected with AIDS. "We must be careful not to overreact," he said. "The evidence is tenuous."36


At the same time, the National Gay Task Force had gathered its forces on the steps of the New York Blood Center. They denounced blood screening policies as Shilts wrote, despite their knowledge,

... that virtually every gay man there had had hepatitis B and that most had engaged in the kind of sexual activities that put them at high risk for AIDS. Not one of them could in good conscience donate blood, [but] ... here they were, exuding self-righteous indignation at the thought that someone would suggest they did not have the right to make such donations.37


Such were the facts when New York City Health Commissioner David Sencer announced the official decision to move confidentiality "to the top of their agenda." Blood screening dropped to the bottom. Shilts recalled how Sencer "spoke of the need to preserve confidentiality as the city's number-one priority. This pleased the Manhattan AIDS activists and took some of the sting out of the anger they felt about the lack of any city services or education programs. The city was very good on confidentiality, they assured each other." As a result, Shilts concluded, "Symbolism nearly always triumphed over substance in the world of AIDSpeak."38

Though Shilts clearly recalled the allegedly earnest manner in which the CDC had beseeched New York City Health Department and Blood Center officials to assist their federal efforts in identifying tainted blood lots as well as HIV-positive donors, it is extraordinary Shilts failed to realize Sencer's indelible connection to the federal authorities. Saying only that "a handful of cynics pointed out that confidentiality, like the gay bathhouses, was a perfect issue for David Sencer to champion, because it did not require spending a dime;" The Band failed to say that Sencer had quickly metamorphosed as the director of barbarous medical experiments to the protector of New York's most prosperous medical-industrial complex.

Equally suspicious was the fact that when the New York City Blood Center officials finally yielded to public outrage over their opposition to blood screening, the blood bankers selected the hepatitis B core antigen (anti-HBc) test to identify units suspected of HIV infection.36 This radioimmunoassay had been licensed by Abbott Laboratories of Chicago. They had donated the radioactive experimental reagents to Szmuness for his now famous New York homosexual hepatitis B vaccine trial.39 At the time, the less expensive ELISA test currently used to screen blood for HIV was being used successfully in Africa to detect antibodies to orthopoxviruses -- those associated with smallpox. It had apparently been used successfully even years before that.40

Troublesome is the fact that Abbott Lab's principal hepatitis investigator was, like Hilleman at Merck, intimately connected to New York University Medical Center hepatitis B chief Krugman. Dr. L. R. Overby, of Abbott Laboratories, North Chicago, had not only attended the International Symposium on Viral Hepatitis in which the "Hepatitis B Virus Session II" was chaired by Professor Krugman, but Overby and Krugman combined their efforts between 1975 and 1978 to evaluate hepatitis B susceptibility and prevention methods among the gay men Szmuness later vaccinated in New York. Their co-authored paper was published in 1979 in the New England Journal of Medicine. 41,42

The policy to employ the HBc antigen test to screen the nation's blood for AIDS -- lucrative to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually for Abbott and their affiliates -- was set by Thomas Spira, one of the CDC's top viral immunologists. According to Shilts, Spira had spent a few weeks testing the blood of AIDS patients for markers that might identify the presence of a common infection. Though Shilts inaccurately claimed that "no test for AIDS itself yet existed," he recorded:

The trait that distinguished the blood of AIDS sufferers was not difficult to find, considering that virtually everybody in AIDS risk groups -- gay men, intravenous drug users, and hemophiliacs -- had also suffered from hepatitis B at some point in their lives. Although the hepatitis virus usually disappeared after recovery, the blood still harbored antibodies to the core of the virus. Thus, Spira had found that 88 percent of the blood from gay AIDS patients contained hepatitis core antibodies, while all the blood from AIDS patients who were intravenous drug users had the antibodies, and 80 percent of people with lymphadenopathy carried the antibodies. The test might not screen out all AIDS carriers, Spira suggested, but it would eliminate enough to sharply reduce the threat of transmitting AIDS through transfusions.36


The 1984 finding that 88 percent of New York homosexuals carried the core HB antigen is somewhat confusing and questionable since it was appreciably higher than the 68 percent Szmuness recorded among Manhattan's gay men six years earlier in 1978.39,43 Given that AIDS had been a wake-up call for safer sexual practices, particularly in New York's homosexual community, this large increase is remarkable. Instead, it allegedly increased by 20 percent. Had so many more gays been exposed to the hepatitis B virus during that time, and if so, how? If not, was the 88 percent falsely reported to make millions more on Abbott's core antigen test for a group of inside traders?

More Links to Rockefeller

A final nightmarish human investigation discussed by Lederer with potential relevance to my research was the Puerto Rican Cancer Experiment launched in 1931 by the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations in San Juan. The program's director, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, carried out the experiment in which thirteen Puerto Ricans died "after being purposely infected with cancer."25 In a letter to a colleague, obtained by the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Rhoads wrote:

the Porto Ricans [sic] ... are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them.... What the island needs is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. It might then be livable. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more. The latter has not resulted in any fatalities so far.... The matter of consideration for the patients' welfare plays no role here-in fact, all physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.23,44


Lederer relayed the rest of a lengthy and horrifying story. I learned that Dr. Rhoads, rather than being held accountable for his crimes, was later awarded the Legion of Merit, and then appointed to the staff of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This was during the 1950s when the commission was carrying out radiation experiments on unwitting hospital patients, mentally retarded children, prisoners, and soldiers.23

I later learned, the AEC was intimately involved in the NCI's cancer virus research program during the 1960s and early 1970s. Their "Joint AEC-NCI Molecular Anatomy Cancer Program," directed by Dr. Norman Anderson, extensively studied "human embryo tissues during early and mid gestation." Anderson, and a host of ABC and NCI researchers including Robert Gallo's superior Robert Manaker, injected human fetal specimens with various viral mutants in an effort to develop cancers and vaccines. Among their "major findings," announced in a 1971 DHEW publication, was that by bombarding fetuses with ionizing radiation, the researchers were able to cause tumorlike reactions in adults.45,46

Jackie, I considered, now in her second trimester, had no "need to know" what I had just learned about the CIA.
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Re:  EMERGING VIRUSES: AIDS & EBOLA: Nature, Accident or Int

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Chapter 18: Nazi Roots of American Central Intelligence: The Biological Warfare Industry

REALIZING now that anything was possible in the realm of CIA activity and biological experimentation, I continued to search back issues of Covert Action Information Bulletin for leads. I quickly located a fascinating article published in 1986 by Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D., a former Canadian diplomat, and Professor of English at the University of California. The political academician produced an eye-opening expose on the Nazi medical officers who escaped prosecution through their service to American intelligence. His work, and several related articles, documented "the excessive zeal" with which U.S. Army intelligence and later CIA personnel protected war criminals, including the infamous "Angel of Death" Joseph Mengele; his assistant, "the butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie; Walter Rauff, the SS mobile gas chambers supervisor; Friederich Schwend, another mass murderer; and Walter Emil Schreiber, the Nazi chief of medical science, who the CIA brought to the "global preventive medicine" division of the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine (see fig. 18.1). All of this occurred under Project "Paperclip."1

Scott wrote:

t has become only too obvious that the OSS, the wartime precursor to today's CIA, arranged for numbers of wanted criminals to "escape" from camps, and when necessary supplied them with new identities to protect them from justice. Murderers. far from being exempted from such protection, seem to have been among those most likely to obtain it.1-3


18.1. Nazi Medical Doctors and Biological Warfare Experiments Conducted on Prisoners

Nazi Doctors in Demand

In September 1951, after 28 months with the Project Paperclip  medical staff in Frankfurt, Germany, Major General Walter Emil Schreiber was brought to the United States for a six-month stint at the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine in Texas.

Image
Walter Emil Schreiber

As Nazi chief of medical science, "Doctor" Schreiber is directly responsible for some of the most ghoulish medical experiments the Nazis conducted on concentration camp inmates. According to massive evidence revealed during the Nuremberg Trials, some of the experiments cleared and reviewed by Schreiber included:

• Supervising Dr. Karl Gebhardt, later hanged for his crimes, who had operated on young Polish girls using gas gangrene.
• Injecting humans and mice interchangeably with transfers from each other of deadly typhus virus, to produce a live vaccine. Others were injected with infectious epidemic jaundice.
• Sterilizing male prisoners by surgery, X-ray, and drugs.
• Submerging victims in tanks of ice water to measure shock levels.
• Locking prisoners in low pressure chambers to simulate flight at altitudes of up to 68,000 feet, which invariably resulted in the collapse of their lungs.
• Exposing subjects to heavy doses of incendiary phosphorus material.

With grotesque irony, Schreiber’s role in Texas was consultant to the "global preventative medicine” division.

In March 1952, after Schreiber’s presence in the U.S. had been discovered by columnist Drew Pearson, his continuing work for the American military was defended by Air Force General Robert Eaton; “Doctor Schreiber was hired by the Air Force because of his extensive experience in the field of epidemiology and military preventive medicine, coupled with his peculiar knowledge of public health and sanitation problems in certain geographical areas. He has collaborated in the preparation of a treatise on the epidemiology of air travel and has been able to furnish the Air Force with valuable information.”

Apparently, due to the embarrassment and controversy resulting from public exposure of their collaboration with Schreiber, Project Paperclip Officers generously found similar work for him in Argentina and flew him there on May 22, 1952.

Another of the hundreds of Nazi war criminals with whom the U.S. joined forces with, was Major General Kurt Blome. Some of the Nuremberg charges against him included:

• Wholesale practice of euthanasia by injecting intravenous undiluted lethal phenol.
• Executions of tubercular Polish prisoners.
• Various uses of biological warfare, his specialty. He admitted to U.S. Army interrogators in July 1945 that he had conducted experiments on these victims with plague vaccine, on orders of the notorious mass murderer, Heinrich Himmler.

Incredibly, Blome was acquitted by the Nuremberg tribunal, though the prosecutors had gathered a great deal of evidence about his activities. Just two months after his acquittal, he was contracted by four employees of the Army Chemical Corps at Camp Detrick for a discussion about biological warfare. Blome cooperated and also volunteered the names of the other German biological warfare specialists.

In August 1951 he signed a “Project 63” contract as the camp doctor at the U.S. Army occupation force European Command Intelligence Center at Oberusal. A subsequent Defense Department contractual document shows the following entry under the heading of Qualification; “Professor of medicine (sic) with emphasis on research of tuberculosis and cancer and biological warfare.”

 One of the lesser known Nazi doctors, Hubertus Strughold, a Luftwaffe member, was reportedly knowledgeable about the deadly low pressure chamber experiments on concentration camp inmates. Though it is not known whether he came to the U.S. as part of Paperclip or 63, he worked for the U.S. Air Force for many years and is still living. Today at Brooks Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas is the Hubertus Strughold Aeromedical Library; named after the man they fondly call “the father of aerospace medicine.”

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[i]Nazi doctors before Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal; standing at right is Kurt Blome; to his right is Karl Gebhardt.

Preston, Jr. W. The Real Treason. Covert Action Information Bulletin (Winter) 1986;25:26.


Scott explained that not by coincidence, many of these medical sadists ended up in various countries having established "links with neo-fascist elements in the military or interior ministries." All of them collaborated in "repressive operations against the Left," and many appeared to be operating as arms dealers or intelligence assets in CIA-supported operations. Barbie and Schwend, for instance, were active during the CIA-assisted overthrow of Chile's Allende government. The two negotiated arms deals with "the German Bundesnachtrichtdienst (BND: federal intelligence service), itself a descendant of the Gehlen intelligence network [commonly referred to as the "Gehlen Org"] which in 1945 passed from the leadership of the Nazi SS to that of American intelligence, and eventually the CIA." Later it was determined that both Barbie and Schwend were on the U.S. payroll, and worked, after World War II, for U.S. Army Counter Intelligence. 1 The organization, I recalled, for whom Henry Kissinger also worked to uncover such Nazis.1,4

Kissinger, Bolling, and Paperclip

By this time, I was hardly surprised to learn that General Alexander Bolling, for whom Kissinger translated, played a leading role in Project Paperclip and the Joint Intelligence Committee (1IC). This information came from Linda Hunt's meticulously documented expose, Secret Agenda: Nazi Scientists, The United States Government, and Project Paperclip 1945 to 1990.

The JIC, Hunt explained, was involved in Project Paperclip from its inception, and was the "key military intelligence agency" involved in administering "a combined CIA-military intelligence project" that employed former Nazi scientists to investigate numerous mind-control techniques and drugs. It was code-named "Bluebird," later renamed "Artichoke," and paved the way for the CIA's infamous project MK-ULTRA.5

Moreover, according to Hunt's extensive documentation obtained through the FOIA, Bolling, in 1948, became "director of intelligence and godfather to the JIOA [the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency] that ran Project Paperclip." At the same time, Bolling also served as a high ranking member of the Inter-American Defense Board (IADB), a Washington-based group that served to deliver Schreiber, Mengele, and Barbie to safe havens in South America where they continued to work on CIA projects.5

Barbie's history is best known:

Condemned to death by the French for genocidal murders in Lyon, Barbie was concealed and protected for four years in Germany by the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), which was using him as an informant to spy on -- ironically -- the French. After the Communists were dropped from General De Gaulle's cabinet, the Nazi Barbie was reassigned to spy on the "American Houses" set up by the U.S. State Department, which were, according to Barbie's American handler, "stocked with all kinds of leftwing literature." Barbie's reports may thus have helped fuel the attack on this program five years later by Joe McCarthy, whose charges against the State Department were based on documents leaked to him by a source in Army intelligence.6,7


Later, when a 1983 Justice Department investigation of Barbie by Allan A. Ryan revealed evidence of what Scott called, "a conscious, coordinated cover-up," it was noted that officials at the highest levels of the United States government had directed a misinformation campaign. The effort was apparently designed to dispel the impression that CIC ever had an interest in Barbie. In addition, Ryan's investigation revealed contradicting internal memos regarding the government's search for Barbie, and the mistranslation of press statements and internal memos about "Barbie" into "interagency communications about a nonexistent "Barbier."8

Scott noted that this behavior was easily recognized by FBI and CIA observers as a method of withholding files about "Barbier" when pressed to disclose intelligence on Barbie under the Freedom of Information Act. As another example, the Berkeley professor recalled that following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, "the CIA told the FBI it had no CIA-generated material on Lee Harvey Oswald in its files. This was true in the sense that all such documents had referred to a mythical "Lee Henry Oswald."9

The Merk and Merck Networks

Besides disclosing Barbie's ties to the CIA, Ryan's official investigation report connected Nazi and Army intelligence to the "Gehlen Org" and "the Merk net." 1

The Merk net, so named for its leader Kurt Merk, was a network of CIC informants. The Gehlen Org had tried to recruit Merk as its "chief of counterintelligence operations."

Scott wrote that by March 1948 "CIC had established liaison with the CIA in Europe, because of the latter's interest in the Merk net." But American intelligence interest in Reinhard Gehlen "the Nazi chief of intelligence on the Soviet front," went back even further to 1945. This was just three months prior to the creation of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the earliest name given the CIA undercover operations division.1

Scott questioned:

Could Mengele ... a doctor with a penchant for lethal experiments on human guinea pigs -- could even Mengele have been saved as a result of a secret deal between [Allen Welsh] Dulles [director of American intelligence] and the SS? Such a hypothesis would once have been almost unthinkable. But we have since been told that his colleague in the Auschwitz human experiments, Walter Schreiber, was shielded by the Americans from a Polish conviction in absentia, so that he could help guide the postwar researches of the U.S. Air Force in bacteriological warfare .... 1,10


Given the provision of false documents and slight name changes to protect German intelligence assets, I now wondered whether there was any connection between "Merk" and "Merck." My suspicions were fueled even more by Scott's revelation that in 1960, Barbie and other high-ranking Nazi officials, including Alfons Sassen and Friedrich Schwend, had dug into their war chest to establish a CIA front company known as "Estrella." Ostensibly, Estrella dealt in "quinquina bark." The company exported the bark, "as agents for the German drug firm Boehringer, which grew rich on quinine contracts to the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War." 11a And although public registry records are nonexistent, at least one Bolivian arms dealer still remembers Estrella also dealt in the weapons trade. 11a

More importantly, in the Spring of 1944, Merck and Company, Inc. received a large cash infusion from Martin Bormann -- Hitler's top minister overseeing rocket production by the Nazi Peenemunde, and chief financial officer for the Third Reich. This at the time Merck's president, George W. Merck, was advising President Roosevelt, and initiating strategies, as America's biological weapons industry director. According to CBS News correspondent Paul Manning, the lion's share of the Nazi gold went to 750 corporations, largely including Merck, to secure a virtual monopoly over the world's chemical and pharmaceutical industries. This was done not only for Germany's economic recovery, but to assure the rise of "The Fourth Reich."11b

Merck, then, along with Rockefeller partner I.G. Farben, received huge sums of money from the Nazi war chest to actualize Hitler's proclaimed "vision of a thousand-year Third Reich [and] world empire. This was outlined with clarity in a document called 'Neuordunung,' or 'New Order,' that was accompanied by a letter of transmittal to the [Bormann led] Ministry of Economics. 'Bury your treasure,''' Hitler advised Bormann, "for you will need it to begin a Fourth Reich." 11b

Nazis in the Navy and Viruses From the Sky

Besides the involvement of Nazis in bacteriological weapons experiments conducted by the Air Force, General Bolling's JIOA imported several BW experts into the United States for the Navy as well.

Erich Traub, for instance, "in charge of biological warfare for the Reich Research Institute on the secluded island of Riems, where his biological warfare research specialty was viral and bacteriological diseases," and his assistant Anne Burger, went to work for the Navy in 1951 under Project Paperclip. Assigned to the Naval Medical Research Institute laboratory in Bethesda, their work "included conducting experiments on animals to determine the lethal doses of more than forty strains of highly infectious viruses." 5,12 Within ten years, the Navy's Biomedical Research Laboratory (NBRL), along with Litton Bionetics, had become a chief supplier of "cell cultures for cancer research studies to NCI investigators" throughout the world.

By the early 1960s, the NBRL, became closely associated with the University of California, where Peter Duesberg was working on NCI projects. Naval studies, directed by Dr. Mark A. Chatigny and "Biohazards Control and Containment Segment" chief, Dr. Alfred Hellman, also associated with the Atomic Energy Commission, sought to identify the effects of "viral aerosols" on animals and humans. Their principal NCI grant objective was to:

evaluate the effect of selected stress situations ... on induction of viral disease or cancerous trauma, and to evaluate the role airborne particle size might play in such interactions. 13


At the same time, another Navy study was underway to determine "the fundamental biology of tumor cells, and the interaction between tumor cells and viruses" that cause cancer. This study, begun October 1, 1962, relied on the expertise of Dr. Walter Nelson-Rees -- described by Strecker as the keeper of America's cell lines. The Navy-University of California collaborative effort was officiated by the NCI's "Solid Tumor Virus Segment" Vice Chairman, James T. Duff, who, along with Robert J. Huebner, the segment's chairman, worked closely with Duesberg on his studies to determine the structure and regulating mechanisms of cancer viruses (see figs. 8.3 and 18.2).

Following this decade of progress, a 1971 NCI report, shown in fig. 18.2, summarized this study group's proposed course of action:

Continue to develop cell reagents as substrates for human carcinogenesis; attempt to isolate and characterize viral agents from human tumor cells; continue a reference laboratory ... of cells in culture; study oncogenic viral antigens during embryogenesis [development of the human embryo], and continue basic research in the biology of tumor viruses.13


Though by this time I had grown accustomed to shocking new evidence, I still balked on finding these documents linking Hitler's biological weapons chief to the NCI's finest.

The Gehlen Org

The Gehlen Org, the German intelligence agency run by Reinhard Gehlen, was even more powerful than the Merk net. The Org superseded even the Nazi SS because of its prewar connections with the Abwehr or German military intelligence. In fact, Gehlen's organization is largely credited for giving rise to the CIA.

After Hitler, Gehlen served Allen Welsh Dulles, whose "Operation Sunshine" brought Nazis into the U.S. spy service. According to Scott:

What ultimately persuaded Truman in 1947 to authorize an operational CIA, was in fact partly the need to find an institutional home for the postwar Gehlen Org. In 1948 Dulles ... helped write the memo persuading Truman to take on the Gehlen Org, on Gehlen's own terms.1


The Sovereign Military Order of Malta

How had Dulles acquired so much power as to persuade the nation's chief executive to form the CIA-a successful bid to shield Gehlen and the entire German intelligence network from harm's way? Gehlen was a ranking official in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), which maintained inconceivable financial and political influence. 14

Figure 18.2 Navy Studies on Responses to Viral Aerosols

Naval Biological Laboratory (FS-57)

Title: Studies of Environmental and Physiological Factors Influencing Virus-Host with Action

Contractor's Project Directors: Dr. R. I.. Dimmick
Mr. M.A. Chatigny

Project Officers, Dr. A. Hellman
Dr. A. K. Fowler
Mr. W. E. Barkley

Objectives: This contract has four objectives, they are:

1. Virus laboratory hazards evaluation. The objective of this section of the proposal is to evaluate the extent of possible hazards involved in biochemical and biophysical procedures used in virus-tissue culture laboratories.

2. Studies on environmental effects on physical and biological characteristics of viral aerosols. The objective of this section of the proposal is to provide survival data of both "model" and oncogenic viruses as related to environmental parameters (e.g. temperature, RH, RH changes, and trace chemicals - decontaminants) for use in Section 1, and to evaluate the importance of end-spectrum (0.1 to 0.5 urn) (5 to 15 um) particles on virus-host interaction considering both the hazard to humans and animals and the potential for cross contamination.

3. Host-virus interactions. The objective of this section is to evaluate the effect of selected stress situations (physiological as by hormonal imbalance, immunological as by concurrent infection or biochemical, as by exposure to injurious chemical vapors of aerosols) on induction of viral disease or cancerous trauma, and to evaluate the role airborne particle size might play in such interactions.

4. Evaluation of disinfectants and decontamination procedures for selected viruses. The objective of this section is to conduct studies of the decontamination efficiency of selected disinfectants on the viruses selected from Section 2 with the purpose of recommending optimal procedures.

Date Contract Initiated: March 1, 1971

Source: NCI staff. The Special Virus Cancer Program: Progress Report #8. Office of the Associate Scientific Director for Viral Oncology (OASDVO). J. B. Moloney, Ed., Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1971, pp. 224.


Francoise Hervet, the pseudonym of a researcher who spent many years investigating the SMOM explained:

Representing initially the most powerful and reactionary segments of the European aristocracy, for nearly a thousand years beginning with the early crusades of the Twelfth Century, it has organized, funded, and led military operations against states and ideas deemed threatening to its power. It is probably safe to say that the several thousand Knights of SMOM, principally in Europe, North, Central and South America, comprise the largest most consistently powerful and reactionary membership of any organization in the world today ....

To be a Knight, one must not only be from wealthy, aristocratic lineage, one must also have a psychological worldview which is attracted to the "crusader mentality" of these "warrior monks." Participating in SMOM -- including its initiation ceremonies and feudal ritual dress -- members embrace a certain caste/class mentality; they are sociologically and psychologically predisposed to function as the "shock troops" of Catholic reaction. And this is precisely the historical role the Knights have played in the war against Islam, against the protestant "heresy," and against the Soviet "Evil Empire."

The Catholic Right and the Knights of Malta, in particular Baron Franz von Papan, played a critical role in Hitler's assumption of power and the launching of the Third Reich's Twentieth Century Crusade. 14


Hervet further explained that the "SMOM's influence in Germany survived World War II intact." On November 17, 1948, Gehlen received the Grand Cross of Merit award, one of the organization's highest honors. Subsequently, he was installed by American intelligence officials as "the first chief of West Germany's equivalent of the CIA, the Bundesnachtrichtdienst, under West German Chancellor Adenauer." Adenauer had received "the Magistral Grand Cross personally from SMOM Grand Master Prince Chigi."14

Gehlen's brother, in the meantime, "had already been in Rome serving as Secretary to Thun Hohenstein. Conveniently for Reinhard, who was [then] negotiating with American intelligence for the preservation of his Nazi colleagues, Thun Hohenstein was Chairman of one of SMOM's grand magistral charities, the Institute for Associated Emigrations." Hohenstein, thus arranged for "two thousand SMOM passports to be printed for political refugees."14

Meanwhile, throughout the war, another SMOM member, Joseph J. Larkin, the vice president of the Rockefeller-owned Chase Manhattan Bank, had managed to keep the financial institution open in Nazi-occupied Paris. Larkin "had received the Order of the Grand Cross of the Knights of Malta from Pope Piux XI in 1928. He was an ardent supporter of General Franco and, by extension, Hitler."14

More Financial Interests and Intelligence Ties

Somehow I wasn't surprised to learn that financial motives, besides ideological, were at the heart of SMOM and the Nazi-American alliance.

Scott critically reviewed two books by authors with wartime intelligence backgrounds. One by Ladislas Farago, entitled, Aftermath: Bormann and the Fourth Reich (New York: Avon Books, 1975), and the other by William Stevenson, The Bormann Brotherhood (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), and gleaned enlightening facts about the financial assets of the Nazi bureaucracy and Martin Bormann, Hitler's deputy and party chief. The books, Scott wrote:

... point to the role of the extensive postwar assets collected or plundered by the SS and Bormann. This came from three sources: the proceeds from the SS forgery of British pound notes ("Operation Bernhard"), the looting of Jews and other Nazi victims, and, most significantly, the corporate contributions to a special fund set up to guarantee the survival of German multinationals abroad after the impending collapse of Hitler. Soon after the war, OSS found the extensive documentation of a meeting in Strasbourg on August 10, 1944 to establish this fund, between representatives of the SS, Party, and firms like Krupp, I. G. Farben and Messerschmidt.

But as the Cold War encouraged the U.S. to see the German corporate presence in Latin America in a more friendly light, the role of these firms in providing new careers for war criminals abroad was ignored. In fact, it was the key to the postwar status of the Kameraden.15


After the war, documented evidence revealed that perhaps as many as 2,000 Nazi officials, many of them doctors and scientists, made their way into corporations operating in Latin America and the United States with the help of American intelligence. The infamous "Rat Line," the underground railway leading from Germany to Italy, served as the main conduit for Nazi travelers. Operated by the Austrian office of the CIC, Army intelligence, thus, maintained intimate ties to the Kameradenwerk set up by Barbie with assistance from the Vatican and the SMOM.

The most prominent Nazis known to have escaped by this route included Barbie himself who escaped to Bolivia (with Croatians); Friederich Schwend to Peru (with Croatians); Walter Rauff to Chile (with Croatians); Alfons Sassen to Ecuador; and Otto Skorzeny, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, and Heinrich Muller, all to Argentina. The Kameraden "maintained close political, social, and business ties. By most accounts, Josef Mengele was its leading representative in Paraguay"1,16

... Otto Skorzeny (acquitted of his criminal charges by the intervention of western intelligence) became a sales representative of Krupp. Hans Ulrich Rudel (never charged, but an unrepentant Nazi ideologue in the post war era) became a sales representative of Siemens. Walter Rauff (designer of the gas ovens at Auschwitz found his first employment in Latin America with a subsidiary of I. G. Farben (an employer of slave labor at Auschwitz) Franz Paul Stangl. chief of the Treblinka extermination camp, found postwar employment in Latin America with Volkswagen, as did Eichmann with Mercedes- Benz. And so on.1,17


Following Barbie's escape, the CIC provided Barbie with a package of false documents, funds, and references for his new identity as "Klaus Altmann." This information was revealed by author Magnus Linklater in, The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection. A photograph of Barbie showing his alias and Bolivian intelligence ID is reprinted in fig. 18.3.

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Fig. 18.3. Nazi War Criminal Klaus Barbie's False Bolivian Intelligence Identification Showing Him as Klaus Altmann Hansen
Source: Scott P.D. How Allen Dulles and the SS preserved each other. Covert Action Information Bulletin 1986;25:4-20


But U.S. intelligence played an even more decisive role in exfiltrating Nazis into the military-medical-industrial complex by protecting the proceeds of "Operation Bernhard." Western intelligence officials, Scott reported, knew enough about the British currency forging operation to protect the postwar pound. Thus, before the British government recalled the old and issued new notes, the SS profits were assured in the neighborhood of $300 million which "had been converted to genuine currency."1

Much of this money apparently made its way to the Vatican, and from there into Joseph Larkin's hands at the Chase Bank.14

The man charged with laundering the Nazi war chest was Friederich Schwend, who between 1945 and 1946 became "an important link in setting up the SS escape route to the Vatican .... 1

Indeed the Vatican did have a program underway for the exfiltration of anticommunists. This was the work of Bishop Alois Hudal of the Collegium Teutonicum, a priest close both to Pius XII and the future Paul VI as well as a public admirer of the Third Reich. After an interview in Rome with former Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller, Hudal had begun the work of supplying Vatican documentation for such prominent fugitives as Muller, Eichmann, and perhaps Martin Bormann.18 It was Hudal who gave ... the necessary introductions to the International Red Cross and other "officials who, for a bribe, could smooth the fugitive's path."19


The combined efforts of Hudal and others, Stevenson wrote, helped hundreds of Nazis to escape. 1,20

Farago detailed Heinrich Muller's exodus. Driven from Merano, north of Italy, to Rome in Schwend's chauffeured Mercedes, he deposited some of the Nazi war chest at a Croatian seminary and made the historic contact with Bishop Hudal. In 1972, documents found in Schwend's possession reported that:

the bulk of the money the bishop [Hudal] needed was placed at his disposal by ... a financier named Friederich "Freddy" Merser, partner of Friederich Schwend in Operation Bernhard. The money came from the hoard Schwend had amassed in Swiss accounts.21


However, Scott warned that both Farango and Stevenson withheld the most damaging evidence linking the Kameradenwerk and Operation Bernhard to U.S. Army intelligence. Apparently, from 1945 to 1946, while Schwend was making crucial arrangements to free hundreds of Nazi's through "the Rat Line," Schwend was working for American intelligence. U.S. documents revealed that "after passing into the hands of the 44th CIC Detachment he was used as an informant by American intelligence agencies." 11

Corporate Collaboration

"The real treason," however, according to William Preston, Jr., a professor of history at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was that for years before World War II, and after, "a secret, conspiratorial alliance between various American corporations and their Nazi collaborators ... betrayed and subverted U.S. national interests." Preston, who headed the Fund for Open Information and Accountability, Inc., wrote:

This link between a "fraternity" of top business executives and the country's deadliest wartime enemy, the Third Reich, this collaboration between capitalism and fascism, has been suppressed by the politically powerful, for their own political purposes. Yet the magnitude of the crime and the damage it did, harm that included injuring and killing allied and American fighting men and women, were not approximated in any other case of disloyalty for which the government has exacted retribution.22


Charles Higham, author of Trading With the Enemy: An Exposure of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949, wrote that "the Fraternity" of subversive business leaders shared ideological and economic reasons for collaborating with the Nazis:

Anti-semitism, sympathy for Hitler, distastes for the Roosevelt New Deal and its supposed Jewish-communist components blended with major financial, industrial, and technological alliances between German and American enterprises. During the 1930s members of the Fraternity supported the Black Legion, a Klan type fascist organization based in Michigan; financed the American Liberty League's hate campaign against FDR; plotted a "bizarre conspiracy" to replace Roosevelt with General Smedley D. Butler; and initiated red-baiting propaganda that anticipated the House Un-American Activities Committee's worst excesses.

. . . But a much more dangerous set of activities developed during the late years of the decade and continued throughout the war. These included: sharing patents; the secret shipment of oil and aircraft production data, photographs, and blueprints of military and naval bases, and enough material on weapons to give the Germans a "clear picture of American armaments" as well as of Alaskan and Northwest defense systems; sending oil to Spain and Vichy France that was reshipped to the Nazis; refueling German tankers and U-boats; supplying tetraethyl lead (an essential for aviation gasoline) to Germany and Japan; manufacturing in subsidiary companies abroad an array of communications and electronic equipment that aided the German development of artillery fuses, rocket bombs, and radio technology; maintaining crucial radio links to enemy nations in Latin America for intelligence transmissions ... cooperating closely in financial matters through the Chase Bank in Paris and The Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.

All this and more took place in a business-as-usual atmosphere that sought to conserve and strengthen the corporations' own worldwide marketing preeminence and postwar position in the defeated nations. It reflected not only the prewar economic arrangement, but the continued intimacy among elites now temporarily estranged by the variers of international politics but still seeing eye-to-eye on matters of corporate profit and surviva1.22,23


Hervet further revealed that before the war ended, Gehlen Org-Rockefeller banking intermediate Joseph Larkin, was "encouraged" to deposit General Franco's money as well as transfer the Third Reich's bank account to the Chase Bank in Paris. This was done even though "the Reichsbank was under the personal control of Hitler."24

In addition, Hervet's long list of SMOM members was especially disturbing:

After the appointment of Knight of Malta William Casey as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and another Knight, James Buckley, as head of the U.S. propaganda against Eastern Europe at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, several historians noted with interest President Reagan's call during the summer of 1982 for a "crusade" against the "Evil Empire" in Eastern Europe.

In addition to Casey, and James Buckley, its current members, or Knights, after the feudal fashion, include Lee Iacocca, John McCone, William Buckley, Alexander Haig, Alexandre de Marenches (the chief of French Intelligence under Giscard d'Estaing, himself a Knight of SMOM), Otto von Hapsburg, and various leaders of the fascist P-2 Maxonic lodge in Italy.24

Others included:

• Paul-Louis Weiller: Grand Cross of Merit SMOM, a close friend of Richard Nixon, member of the board of directors of Renault and several other French industrial corporations, former administrateur of Air France, whose son married the cousin of Spanish King Juan-Carlos.

• Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: Munich correspondent of William Buckley's National Review.

• Admiral James D. Watkins: Chief of naval operations during the Reagan administration.

• Thomas Bolan: law partner of Roy Cohn. Bolan is also counsel to the Human Life Foundation of which former CIA officer and Managing Editor of National Review, Priscilla Buckley (William's sister) is a Director.

• Jeremiah Denton: Long-time U.S. Senator from Alabama; former rear admiral, captured by the Vietnamese while murdering people. POW 1965-1973, consultant to Pat Robertson of Christian Broadcasting Network, 1978-1980.

• Pete Domenici: Long-time U.S. Senator from New Mexico.

• William A. Schreyer: Long-time president and chairman of Merrill Lynch.

• Bernard Dorin: French attache to Ottawa 1957-1959, Ambassador to Haiti 1972-1974, and Ambassador to South Africa from 1978 until at least 1981.

• Prescott Bush, Jr.: Brother of George Bush past president and CIA director.

• Clare Boothe Luce: Board of directors of the Washington Times and the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund (NFF), one of many front groups for Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church which channeled $350,000 to the AMERICARES foundation in Connecticut.

• J. Peter Grace, chairman of Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty Fund -- a CIA front infested with Nazi collaborators; chairman of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), another CIA-funded organization; and President of W. R. Grace, a major American chemical company, who along with Dow Chemical company, employed convicted Nazi war criminal Otto Ambros. The State Department acknowledged Grace's help in bringing Nazi war criminals to the U.S. through Project Paperclip.

• Myron C. Taylor: President Truman's envoy to the Vatican.

• James Jesus Angleton: former chief of counterintelligence for the CIA; liaison to the Warren Commission following the Kennedy assassination.

• John Farrell: Past president of U.S. Steel.24


Rockefeller, Nazis and Eugenics

While perusing the internet, I came upon a most relevant article concerning The Rockefeller Foundation's support for "eugenics" -- the movement aimed at killing or sterilizing people whose heredity, according to author Anton Chaitkin, "made them a public burden."25

The Rockefeller Foundation, Chaitkin chronicled, became the prime promoter of depopulation activities by the United Nations. Moreover, evidence showed "the foundation and its corporate, medical, and political associates organized the racial mass murder program of Nazi Germany."

Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller, Chaitkin recalled, created the Rockefeller Foundation in 1909, and by 1929 had invested "$300 million worth of the family's controlling interest in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey," now called Exxon, into the Foundation's account.

According to Chaitkin, this money created the field of "Psychiatric Genetics," and funded the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity. The Rockefellers' chief executive in charge of these institutions "was the fascist Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, assisted by his proteges Otmar Verschuer and Franz J. Kallmann."25

In 1932, Chaitkin recounted, the British-led eugenics movement designated the Rockefellers' Dr. Rudin as the president of the worldwide Eugenics Federation.

Only a few months later Hitler rose to power and "the Rockefeller- Rudin apparatus became a section of the Nazi state." Rudin then headed the "Racial Hygiene Society."25

Rudin and his staff, "as part of the Task Force of Heredity Experts chaired by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, drew up the sterilization law." In the United States, this law was described as a "model law," and was adopted in July 1933 as published in the September 1933 Eugenical News (USA) with Hitler's signature attached.

Rudin's protege Verschuer and his assistant, Auschwitz medical chief, Josef Mengele, jointly authored reports for special courts to reinforce Rudin's "racial purity law against cohabitation of Aryans and non-Aryans." They also produced films to help sell their racial cleansing ideas.

"Under the Nazis," Chaitkin noted, "the German chemical company I.G. Farben and Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey were effectively a single firm, merged in hundreds of cartel arrangements. I.G. Farben was led, up until 1937, by the Warburg family, Rockefeller's partner in banking and in the design of Nazi German eugenics."

During the war, I.G. Farben built a huge factory at Auschwitz to capitalize on Standard Oil/I.G. Farben patents to make gasoline from coal with the help of concentration camp slave labor. The SS was then assigned to select and guard the inmates deemed fit for I.G. Farben's workforce. Those judged unfit were killed.

Moreover, Chaitkin reported additional Rockefeller-linked Nazi atrocities:

In 1936, Rockefeller's Dr. Franz Kallmann interrupted his study of hereditary degeneracy and emigrated to America because he was half-Jewish. Kallmann went to New York and established the Medical Genetics Department of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry published Kallman's study of over 1,000 cases of schizophrenia, which tried to prove its hereditary basis. In the book, Kallmann thanked his longtime boss and mentor Rudin.

Kallmann's book, published in 1938 in the USA and Nazi Germany, was used by the T4 unit as a rationalization to begin in 1939 the murder of mental patients and various "defective" people, perhaps most of them children. Gas and lethal injections were used to kill 250,000 under this program, in which the staffs for a broader murder program were desensitized and trained.25


Chaitkin detailed additional links between Rockefeller interests and the horrific medical experiments conducted by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.

In 1943, Josef Mengele's superior, the director of Rockefeller's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity in Berlin, Otmar Verschuer, secured funds for genetic experiments from the German Research Council. In a progress report Verschuer wrote for the Council he stated, "My co-researcher in this research is my assistant, the anthropologist and physician, Mengele .... With the permission of the Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler, anthropological research is being undertaken on the various racial groups in the concentration camps and blood samples will be sent to my laboratory for investigation."

Mengele and Verschuer were especially interested in studying twins during their "special protein" investigations that required daily blood drawings. Needles were stabbed into people's eyes for eye color experiments. Others were injected with foreign blood and infectious agents. Limbs and organs were commonly removed, occasionally without anesthetics. Women were sterilized, men were castrated, and sexes were surgically altered. Thousands were butchered and their heads, eyeballs, limbs, and organs were delivered to Mengele, Verschuer, and the Rockefeller contingent at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

Later, in 1946, Verschuer, according to Chaitkin, requested assistance from the Bureau of Human Heredity in London to keep his "scientific research" going. A year later, the Bureau moved to Copenhagen, and its new Danish facility was built with Rockefeller money. It was here that the first International Congress in Human Genetics convened. A decade later Verschuer became a member of the American Eugenics Society -- an organizational done of Rockefeller's Population Council.

According to Chaitkin, Dr. Kallmann directed the American Eugenics Society from 1954 to 1965. He helped rescue Verschuer by testifying at his denazification hearings. And it was Kallmann who created the American Society of Human Genetics, organizers of the "Human Genome Project," currently a $3 billion effort to map the genetics of humanity along with each race's special disease susceptibilities.

During the 1950s, "the Rockefellers reorganized the U.S. eugenics movement in their own family offices, with spinoff population-control and abortion groups," and the Eugenics Society's address changed to the Society for the Study of Social Biology, its current name. Moreover, "with support from the Rockefellers, the Eugenics Society (England) set up a sub-committee called the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which for 12 years had no other address than the Eugenics Society."25

In conclusion, Chaitkin observed, "the Rockefeller Foundation had long financed the eugenics movement in England," and is "the private international apparatus which has set the world up for a global holocaust under the UN flag."
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Chapter 19: The CIA in Africa

AMONG the COINTELPRO strategies proposed during the Nixon era and carried out by the CIA to help resolve the "Negro Question" -- the challenge posed by black militants that Kissinger and Hoover feared was African based and communist inspired -- was the encouragement of "cultural nationalism" and "black capitalism."1-7

The CIA during the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations played "with the fires of a revolutionary black consciousness" to expand America's political and economic power in Africa.6 Under Kissinger's direction, the CIA organized the State Department, the U.S. Information Agency, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and other organizations to combat black militarism. According to CIA observers, the American intelligence community sought to influence the policies of newly independent African states "by creating and subsidizing an American elite of Afro-oriented black leaders whose positions in the civil rights movement were invaluable," though often unconscious, cover for the CIA's principle aim -- "to emasculate black radicalism in Africa, and eventually at home."8

Meanwhile, the Nixon administration quietly expanded contacts with South Africa's white governments. This resulted in what Robert Smith, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, called "a number of concrete developments, ranging from major new economic undertakings, such as ... [the] Azores agreement with Portugal [located off the Northwestern coast of Africa] to the authorization of previously forbidden sales of jet aircraft to Portugal and South Africa."9

This new, more "right-wing U.S. policy" had been established by Henry Kissinger in his "secret policy memorandum of 1969." The effort resulted in a CIA-South African armed forces collaborated attack on Angola in the early 1970s.9 The organizational chain of command for the Angola operation is seen in fig. 19.1.

The censored and "bewildering" memorandum from the National Security Council meeting between Nixon, Kissinger, and their staff was finally deciphered in 1983 by researchers at the Center for National Security Studies in their report, The Consequences of "Pre-publication Review": A Case Study of CIA Censorship of the CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. 10

Fig. 19.1. Organizational Chain of Command of the CIA's Covert Military Operation in Zaire/Angola

Image

THE PRESIDENT
NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL DOMINATED BY HENRY KISSINGER 1969-1976
OPERATIONS ADVISORY GROUP (FORMERLY THE 40 COMMITTEE)
INTERAGENCY WORKING GROUP CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
DIRECTORATE OF OPERATIONS I (CLANDESTINE SERVICES)
AFRICA DIVISION
HORN & CENTRAL BRANCH
ANGOLA TASK FORCE
KINSHASA STATION:

("A temporary office responsible from headquarters for planning, supervision and operation of the Angola paramilitary operation, August 1975-June 1976.")

EAST ASIA DIVISION
(VIETNAM OPERATIONS)
EUROPEAN DIVISION
NEAR-EAST DIVISION
SOVIET BLOCK DIVISION
LATIN AMERICAN DIV.
DOMESTIC CONTACTS DIV.
FOREIGN RESOURCES DIV.
TECHNICAL SERVICES DIV.
SPECIAL OPERATIONS GRP.
DIVISION "D"
COVERT ACTION STAFF
COUNTERINTEL. STAFF
FOREIGN INTEL. STAFF

Adapted from John Stockwell's In Search of Enemies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978, p. 262. Mr. Stockwell was the Chief of the CIA's Angola Task Force during the late 1960s and early 1970s.


The center's report stated that most bewildering of all examples of intelligence censorship was a series of items concerning Africa. The National Security Council in December 1969, apparently censored certain passages including one that, once restored, read:

The purpose of this session was to decide what American policy should be toward the governments of southern Africa.

A few lines down, the censors cut in midsentence: "There was sharp disagreement within the government on how hard a line the United States should take with the .. ." Restored, it goes on: "... white-minority regimes of South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonies in Africa."

Then two words were cut from this sentence: "Henry Kissinger talked about the kind of general posture the United States could maintain toward the ___ _ __ and outlined the specific policy options open to the President." The missing words turn out to be: "white regimes."

Finally, the censors cut a reference to the fact that Kissinger had sent a National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM 39) to departments interested in southern Africa. NSSM 39 was in fact published and widely discussed in 1974. It took the view that the various movements for majority rule in southern Africa were unlikely to succeed soon.10

All of this led the security studies investigators to conclude:

To the extent that those censored passages on Africa point anywhere, it is toward a discussion of policy. The Kissinger-Nixon policy was founded on the belief that the Portuguese would hold on to their African colonies indefinitely. Within a few years that premise was shattered, and the whole policy had to be reappraised.10


As a result of their findings, the researchers asked, "Is there any serious argument of security that the American public should not have been allowed, five years afterward, to reflect on the wisdom of the policy and the way it was made? What has it got to do with CIA 'secrets'?"10

One answer, recalling Gallo's speculation that "Portuguese sailors" had carried the AIDS virus from Africa to Asia, might be that the secrecy surrounding African affairs helped conceal Project MKNAOMI and possibly Kissinger's genocidal directives. Gallo's "Portuguese sailers" then, could plausibly have been undercover agents for the CIA.

Kissinger's Appeal

By the end of Ford's presidency, in response to increasing congressional pressure, Kissinger finally revealed some of his secret intelligence community undertakings. He appealed to a Senate Committee on Government Operations for continued support for the CIA. To accomplish this, he pleaded for trust and "sounder" relations between the executive and legislative branches of government. Kissinger said:

The present relationship has reached a point where the ability of the United States to conduct a coherent foreign policy is being eroded. This is certainly true in the intelligence field. One has only to look at the recent leakage -- indeed, official publication -- of highly classified material and the levying of unsubstantiated charges and personal attacks against the executive to see the point the relationship has reached and the harm we are doing to ourselves.

Fundamental changes are taking place in the world at an unprecedented rate. New centers of power are emerging, altering relationships among older power centers. Growing economic interdependence makes each of us vulnerable to financial and industrial troubles in countries formerly quite remote from us....

I am aware of the benefits of a certain amount of dynamic tension between the branches of our government. Indeed, the Founding Fathers designed this into the Constitution with the principle of the separation of powers. But there is an adverse impact on the public mind in this country and on our national image abroad when this beneficial tension deteriorates into confrontation. We have recently seen this happen. This is why I hope this committee and the Congress as a whole, with the help and suggestions from the executive, can construct an oversight mechanism for U.S. intelligence that can bring an end to the strife, distrust, and confusion that have accompanied the investigations of the past year.11


Kissinger was referring to the Church committee's investigations into the CIA's stockpiling of biological weapons, leaks about covert intelligence operations in Zaire and Angola, as well as the continued fallout over the agency's established role in the Watergate break-ins. He continued:

I look to the development of means by which Congress can participate more fully in the guidance and review of the intelligence activities of this government and by which the executive can direct and conduct those activities with the confidence of being in step with Congress in this vital area of our foreign affairs.11


Superficially, Congress was being asked to rationalize CIA activities in Angola in terms of the country's strategic location adjacent the shipping lanes of the South Atlantic. Giant tankers brought oil from the Middle East around the horn of Africa to the United States.

Moreover, Kissinger argued:

Our foreign policy must cope with complex problems of nuclear and conventional arms races [As Nixon noted, Africa held "one fourth of the World's known uranium ore reserves."12]; traditional and ideological disputes which can trigger wider wars and sweeping economic dislocations; emerging new nations which can become the arena for great-power contests; environmental pollution, food shortages, and energy maldistribution which affect the lives of hundreds of millions; and financial shifts which can threaten the global economic order. In the face of these great challenges our goals are to foster the growth of a rationally ordered world in which states of diverse views and objectives can cooperate for the common benefit. We seek a world based on justice and the promotion of human dignity. 11 [Emphasis added]


Yet, despite this rationale, John Stockwell, the former chief of the CIA's Angola Task Force and the author of In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story, argued that Angola, the focus of Kissinger's covert military operation, had little importance to America's national security.4 Angola, he wrote, was merely Kissinger's folly in seeking an opportunity to challenge the Soviets. Though Stockwell failed to acknowledge the lucrative defense contracts Kissinger was generating for his benefactors, he noted that the foreign affairs secretary had conspicuously "overruled his advisors and refused to seek diplomatic solutions" in the region. "The question was, would the American people, so recently traumatized by Vietnam:' have tolerated "even a modest involvement in another remote, confusing, Third World civil war?"4

Covert Operations in Africa

"Covert action" was the game plan ordered by Kissinger for Angola, and carried out by the CIA in other African nations as well. All of this, occurred at the time the Vietnam War was winding down and Nixon's "war on cancer" was heating up.1-4

Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, became the target of numerous clandestine activities designed to influence black-ruled "governments, events, organizations or persons in support of U.S. foreign policy conducted in such a way that the involvement of the U.S. Government" was not apparent. 1-5

Among the organizations used to conceal intelligence operations and position agents in various parts of Africa were PUSH (People to Save Humanity), AFRICARE, CARE, the Peace Corps, The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the WHO, the World Bank, the CDC, and USAID. In addition, NASA was engaged in Central West Africa, allegedly for famine relief, and The National Academy of Sciences was enrolled "to provide scientific advisory services covering a spectrum of disciplines."13

Philip Agee, co-author of Dirty Work-2: The CIA in Africa,6 and an ex-operative who served in Africa until 1969, explained that, "Secret services -- the CIA and those of the other pro-Western powers" -- provided money, equipment, instructions, and information to "indigenous agents" so as to enable them to take action wherein they hoped the hand of the secret service would not show. I learned from Agee that the official designation of covert action had changed to "special activities" or "special actions." An example familiar to me was the Army's biological weapons handling division termed "special operations."

Agee wrote that these secret military operations in Africa, particularly in Zaire and Angola, continued throughout the 1970s and beyond:

Covert action has often been described as governmental intervention in the wide gray area between polite correct diplomacy and outright military action ...

In the mid-1970s, public revulsion in America to the CIA's political interventions, assassination operations,7 and other dirty work produced hope in some that covert action, at least in peacetime, would be reduced or even renounced altogether. And the early concern over human rights in the Carter administration added to this hope because gross violations of human rights normally result from the CIA's clandestine interventions.

It took just one year for these hopes to be dashed, confirming the belief of many that such hopes were not realistic from the start. In January 1978, one year after taking office, President Carter promulgated an executive order that tightened control over the CIA's covert action operations but at the same time provided exceptions that would allow the President to order the CIA to do everything it had done in the past except political assassinations of heads of state. [Unfortunately, this wasn't the case for lesser heads, that continued to roll.]6


In fact, just seven months following Carter's executive order, Africa Diary carried a report broadcast over Uganda Radio entitled, "CIA Accused of Plot to Assassinate Amin." The article quoted a military spokesman as saying: "It's a shame that a country of the stature of the U.S. should allow its agencies to indulge in such evil schemes and then turn around and pose as a promulgator of peace and champion of human rights." The report referred to a statement broadcast by NBC radio "in which the former CIA director William Colby was quoted as saying the intelligence agency had - tried since 1972 to kill the Uganda leader. Mr. Colby also said, according to Uganda radio, that it was up to Ugandans to assassinate President Amin and that a million dollars had been placed at the disposal of Ugandans to carry out the mission by any means including poison."14

Indeed, the covert actions practiced by the CIA, Agee explained, continually violated "principles of international law, the United Nations charter, and local laws," as well as contradicted the "flowing rhetoric about nonintervention in the internal affairs of other nations."

Agee concluded that "for Africans and others on the receiving end" of America's covert action, any debate "may well seem irrelevant, for the fact is that these operations have never stopped."6

"Human Investments" in Sub-Saharan Africa

A key player in administering CIA operations in Sub-Saharan Africa was Frank C. Carlucci III. Carlucci, while advancing through the ranks of military intelligence, became the point man for CIA-infested "health care" programs in various parts of Africa.9

Before becoming deputy director of the CIA in 1978, deputy secretary of defense in 1980, and national security adviser during the Iran-contra scandal, Carlucci served as chief "political officer," in the African Congo's American Embassy during the early 1960s. There, according to observers, he "became the brains of the Embassy," and "wrote from Leopoldville a daily political analysis, a true calendar of 'destabilization' ... for the management of the Department of State." Later, under Nixon, he was promoted to the position of deputy of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. From here, Carlucci administered covert CIA operations through the DHEW front. 15

In one instance, on February 15, 1975, following the protested arrival of American health officials to Portugal, Carlucci defended, "There are rumors [of covert operations] .... One of them concerns the visit of a group of doctors. The first time I heard of them was in the Portuguese press. Now they are tourists. Does Portugal want tourists to come or not? This has nothing to do with American aid to this country in the domain of health."16

Nonetheless, three weeks later, Portuguese specialists protested:

"Considering the offer of the U.S. to build hospitals in Lisbon, Porto, and a city of the south ... and the offer to send technicians to help in the domain of health and others; considering that these offers originate from the Agency for International Development, an organization well known as an instrument of the CIA; considering that those loans and grants ... serve as cover for the enemy of the Portuguese people ... we call the attention of the government to the real dangers that this type of support hides, and whose consequences have been revealed in Chile, Santo Domingo, Bolivia, Guatemala and in so many other martyred countries."16


On February 28, 1975 while the rumors spread that the CIA had decided to make "human investments" in Portugal, Frank Carlucci, to prove America's "good faith" and desire to "respect the wishes of the Portuguese people," signed two agreements: one for a credit of $1 million for "technicians to come study the improvement of communications and the health services," and the other a grant of $750,000 to Portugal through AID.16 Other examples of various USAID, WHO, and NATO supported vaccination, population control, and "material and child health" programs, along with selected program descriptions, appear in fig. 10.4. These documents were published in 1975 by the Department of State in their Report on the Health, Population and Nutrition Activities of the Agency for International Development for Fiscal Years 1973 and 1974. These programs afforded CIA agents access to virtually every country in Africa. 19

The Zaire-Angola War Continues

By 1974, Angola's neighboring state, Zaire, had been effectively persuaded to initiate "defense operations" against its enemies in Angola. Apparently, both Zaire and Zambia (which shares Zaire's southern and Angola's eastern borders) needed little coaxing. They both, allegedly, "feared the prospect of a Soviet-backed government on their flanks," and communist control over the commercially important Benguela railroad. Zaire's President Mobutu I7 "was especially afraid of the Soviets." During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he had courted "the Chinese at the expense of both the Soviets and the Americans."4

By the spring of 1975, Stockwell wrote, "Zaire's internal problems had mounted until Mobutu's regime was threatened" by civil upheaval. Following fifteen years of independence, Zairian agriculture had not returned to prerevolution levels despite the doubling of the population. By then, more than $700 million had been invested in Zaire by Western institutions. The economy was stagnant, "in part owing to the conspicuous arrogance and corruption of the governing elite" who had been substantially supported by NATO allies -- particularly the United States and West Germany.2,4

In 1975, world copper prices plummeted undermining Zaire's economy. Concurrently, fighting in Angola closed the Benguela railroad. This forced Zaire to export its goods through Zambia, Rhodesia, and South Africa. At this important point in Zaire's short history, Mobutu turned on Western imperialists:

Desperately seeking a scapegoat, Mobutu had turned on the United States, accusing its Kinshasa embassy of fomenting a coup against him. In June 1975, he expelled the American ambassador and arrested most of the CIA's Zairian agents, placing some of them under death sentences.4


Following years of financial support, Mobutu turned on his American financiers, and claimed the CIA was involved in a plot to assassinate him. 19

The precedent for presidential assassinations had been set not long before. In October 1975, Sidney Gottlieb, the same man who had frantically shredded Project MKNAOMI documents on the eve of the Church committee hearings into the CIA's illegal storage and intended use of biological weapons, told Congressional investigators "that the CIA had intended in 1961 to poison the Congolese premier, Patrice Lumumba -- Mobutu's arch rival.21 The CIA assassination attempt was preempted, however, by others who Gottlieb alleged got to Lumumba first.

Gottlieb was a very knowledgeable witness. In 1961 he headed the CIA's chemical division, "which had made up the unused lethal dose and dispatched it to the Congo (now Zaire) for Lumumba's murder."20,22

Kissinger naturally denied Mobutu's allegation of a CIA coup when CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite asked for his reaction:

CRONKITE: A story that has just crossed our desk from Zaire, that the U. S. Ambassador has been declared persona non grata, at least has been asked to leave the country, presumably over the allegation that Americans were involved in a plot against President Mobutu's life. Have you any reaction to that?

KISSINGER: Well, these allegations are totally unfounded, and we regret that this decision has been taken. We do consider Zaire one of the key countries of Africa with which we would like to maintain cordial relations. And the action was based on totally wrong information that fell into the hands of the Government of Zaire, probably as a result of forgery.

CRONKITE: As a result of what, sir?

KISSINGER: It must have been forgery, because we had absolutely no connection with any plot, nor did we know there was a plot.20


Kissinger then directed the interview to a safer topic.

Within five months of this broadcast, however, the National Security Council director once again needed to defend his Central African policies. This time, standing before Congress, Kissinger pleaded for additional support for military operations in Zaire.23 With or without Mobutu's support, he obviously intended to hold this Central African turf.

Kissinger explained:

"There are two significant programs proposed for Africa. Stability in the Horn of Africa has wider geopolitical meaning. To help maintain that stability we propose $12.6 million in grant aid and $10 million in credits for Ethiopia, a strategically located nation"23 [a country in the northeastern part of the continent far removed from the Horn].


Kissinger, then President Ford's foreign policy adviser, continued:

"Zaire would receive $19 million in credits to help modernize its forces and meet its legitimate defense needs in view of increased threats to its security, particularly that posed by the instability in Angola. Our aid would help meet a defense force need recommended by a U.S. military team after careful observation and consultation with the Zaire military."23


Additionally, Kissinger revealed before the House Committee on International Relations that America's share of NATO's African defense budget was $68.5 million. Yet, even this was far less than the $100 million the CIA received to wage covert war in Angola.23,24

History of Central African Aggression

Aside from the Vietnam War, the Angola conflict became America's largest military operation since WWII. In CIA: 40 Inglorious Years, author P. K. Goswami summarized the events leading up to the aggression:

The Angolan people won their independence after long years of intense struggle led by MPLA, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. On November 11, 1975 the People's Republic of Angola was proclaimed, and most nations recognized its independence. However, the victory of the progressive forces dedicated to the struggle against colonialist holdovers, South African racism, and imperialist forays, was seen as a challenge in Pretoria and especially in Washington.

The US administration immediately took an openly hostile stand and tried to bring down the new popular government by force, coordinating its efforts with South Africa. The CIA received some 100 million dollars to assist National Union for the Complete Independence of Angola (UNITA) and National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), counter-revolutionary groups led by CIA puppets Jonas Savimbi and Holden Roberto. US Air Force transport planes airlifted weapons and ammunition to the UNITA and FNLA base in Zaire. US military advisers and instructors appeared in the counterrevolutionary units. American mercenaries took part in military action against Angolans.24


According to John Prados, the author of The Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations From World War II Through IRANSCAM, Angola was viewed as a cold war necessity. Nathaniel Davis, the newly appointed assistant secretary of state for African Affairs was assigned by Kissinger to study the region's political and military challenges. "Davis, according to his own account, had already advised Kissinger against covert support to Savimbi, who was soliciting arms everywhere," explained Prados. "UNITA had been receiving some from the Chinese since 1974, and had had ties to Mao Tsetung for a decade before that." Davis warned Kissinger that the United States would have to confront "probable disclosure," and argued that "at most we would be in a position to commit limited resources, and buy marginal influence."25

Consequently, the interagency group chaired by Davis recommended nonintervention; instead, they urged diplomatic efforts in the hope that the three factions might reach a political settlement. 25This reflected a "basic understanding that Angola was an African, and not a cold war problem." Military intervention, Prados wrote, promised to strain already tense relations across Africa, particularly in so far as Portugal was concerned. Intervention offered only limited benefits and "potentially contributed to increased involvement by the Soviet Union and other foreign powers."25

But Kissinger intervened to gag the Davis group's counsel. Prados documented:

According to the Pike committee, which studied the Angola covert operation in some detail, the Davis group's recommendation was removed from their report "at the direction of National Security Council aides" and presented to the NSC as merely one policy option, the others being to do nothing or to make a substantial intervention. The June 13 report of the interagency group was thus used to frame a stark choice for President Ford, who [Kissinger persuaded to select] ... the intervention option.

Action then returned to the 40 Committee, dominated in 1975, as before by Henry Kissinger. Meeting on July 14, the Special Group directed the CIA to propose a covert action program within forty eight hours. OPERATION FEATURE was the result. Although the evidence is not yet clear, it appears that the top leadership at Langley may have opposed this intervention-the CIA came back to warn of the risk of exposure as well as to estimate a $100 million price tag for the effort, an amount that was not available in the DCI's contingency fund. Nevertheless, the 40 Committee gave the go-ahead and on July 17 President Ford approved an expenditure of $14 million. The CIA, which had advised against Track II in Chile and the Kurdish operation, was again given marching orders, for which it was lukewarm. That a plan was proposed at all was used by Kissinger, in 1976 Senate testimony, to argue that "the CIA recommended the operation and supported it."25


In the end, the intervention played out as its opponents had predicted. As in Vietnam, despite massive allied investments, the Western intruders faired poorly. The situation required reinforcements, and South Africa's regular troops were lured in.

Back home, the CIA's action in Angola resulted in waves of protest. With Southeast Asian wounds still stinging, the American public demanded an end to Kissinger's secret war in Central Africa. By 1976, public outrage forced the U.S. Congress to enact the Clark Amendment designed to ban covert and open aid to UNITA and FNLA.

The Clark Amendment, however, did little to stop the regional aggression. Support for the counterrevolutionaries continued as Kissinger effectively shamed Congress for passing the restrictive amendment. He then politically overpowered his adversaries and continued to direct destabilization efforts in Angola with support from racist South Africa.

Later, in a concerted effort to vindicate himself and rebuild political support for his Angolan initiatives, in February 1976, Kissinger unveiled the CIA operation in Zaire.26 He recalled the region's aggressive history and excused his decision to deploy covert forces in the area this way:

The outcome in Angola will have repercussions throughout Africa. The confidence of countries neighboring Angola -- Zambia and Zaire -- as well as other African countries, in the will and power of the United States will be severely shaken if they see that the Soviet Union and Cuba are unopposed in their attempt to impose a regime of their choice on Angola ....

The means we have chosen have been limited and explained to Congress. Our immediate objective was to provide leverage for diplomatic efforts to bring about a just and peaceful solution. They were not conceived unilaterally by the United States; they represented support to friends who requested our financial assistance.

We chose covert means because we wanted to keep our visibility to a minimum; we wanted the greatest possible opportunity for an African solution. We felt that overt assistance would elaborate a formal doctrine justifying great-power intervention ....

The Angola situation is of a type in which diplomacy without leverage is impotent, yet direct military confrontation would involve unnecessary risks. Thus it is precisely one of those gray areas where covert methods are crucial if we are to have any prospect of influencing certain events of potentially global importance.

We chose a covert form of response with the greatest reluctance. But in doing so, we were determined to adhere to the highest standard of executive-legislative consultation. Eight congressional committees were briefed on 24 separate occasions. We sought in these briefings to determine the wishes of Congress. While we do not claim that every member approved our actions, we had no indication of basic opposition.

Between July and December 1975 we discussed the Angolan situation on numerous occasions with members of the foreign relations committees and the appropriations committees of both Houses and the committees of both Houses that have CIA oversight responsibilities. The two committees investigating CIA activities -- the Church Committee and the Pike Committee -- were also briefed. Altogether more than two dozen Senators, about 150 Congressmen, and over 100 staff members of both Houses were informed .... [emphasis added]


So the Church Committee, I realized, was briefed that the Zaire- Angola arena was a "gray area" targeted for covert military operations, and thus, a likely proving ground for the CIA's preferred "gray area" arsenal. In this case -- biological weapons. Kissinger had effectively incriminated himself and Congress as well. The Church Committee's investigation of the illegal storage and, according to Colby, anticipated use of biological weapons, concealed Project: MKNAOMI's apparent application in Central Africa.

Subsequent Administrations' Policy in Zaire

Stephen Weissman, a U.S.-African relations critic and political science scholar, gathered additional details about the Zaire-Angola conflict. Weissman, who in 1978, was an associate professor at the University of Texas in Dallas, and who later joined the staff of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, Africa Subcommittee, noted how this region represented important NATO interests, though he admitted the actual Russian threat in the region was minimal.26

Weissman chronicled events in the region beginning in March 1977, when an estimated 800 to 1,500 armed, "leftish Katangan exiles returned to their home province from neighboring Angola and nearly toppled the Mobutu Government."

As the poorly paid and politically demoralized 60,000 man Zairian army proved to be ineffective, the regime was forced to call upon 1,200 Moroccan troops, 80 French military advisers, about 50 Egyptian pilots and mechanics, French transport planes, and Belgian and Chinese arms. Although the new U.S. [Carter] Administration was reluctant to lead the counterrevolution (no arms or advisers were dispatched), it did provide tangible aid: $15 million of combat support equipment. ... And President Carter's request for $32.5 million in military aid for Zaire in Fiscal Year 1978 -- half the total for Africa -- indicated a continuing commitment to the Mobutu regime.27


Furthermore, there is evidence of CIA covert action planning in the days before Mobutu was able to clinch his French and Moroccan personnel support. In an open letter of resignation to the CIA Director, Angola Task Force Chief Stockwell charged:

Yes, I know you are attempting to generate token support to help Zaire meet its crisis -- that you are seeking out the same French mercenaries the CIA sent into Angola in early 1976. These are the men who took the CIA money and fled the first time they encountered heavy shelling.27


By June 1977, Mobutu's foreign supporters had contained the Kantangan threat as the exiles retreated to fight a guerrilla rather than conventional war. "Old problems of political fragmentation also prevented the Kantangans from gaining the active support of similarly disposed forces in other areas" of Zaire, Weissman acknowledged. Still the Mobutu regime's military humiliation and demonstrated political weakness suggested that its days were numbered. Most "academic experts and many diplomats expected a military or military-civilian coup" to unseat Mobutu in the near future. The new government was expected "to have, or take account of, anti-U.S. and anti-CIA sentiment" if the U.S. persevered in its close association with Mobutu.26

Nonetheless, Western and U.S. intervention on behalf of Mobutu intensified as did the political cleavages in Africa. While a few, small, conservative, and French-speaking, African governments encouraged Western intervention, many leading countries, not all of them "leftist," criticized such incursion. For example, the official newspaper of "moderate" Zambia stated:

The almost obscene haste with which the west has rushed to pour arms into Zaire reinforces the argument of many Africans that behind every attempted or successful coup on this continent is the hand of a foreign power .... Although Cyrus Vance and others have not come out and said so bluntly, there is little doubt that they are hoping for a full-scale confrontation between Zaire and Angola. It gives them an opportunity to make amends for alleged betrayal of the anti-MPLA forces during the civil war. It is to be hoped that President Carter puts a halt to this political adventurism before he is saddled with his own Vietnam. If he and his administration hope to come out of such a confrontation with their image in Africa unscathed, they need to do some rethinking. 28


Significant reservations were expressed by Nigeria, Tanzania, and Algeria. The Angolan war raised the possibility of future counteraction in Rhodesia and Southwest Africa as well.

The primary rationale for United States involvement, however, continued. Weissman explained:

It was clear that behind such official slogans as 'friendship,' 'historic ties,' and 'territorial integrity,' lurked the fear of a 'pro-Soviet' regime in the geographic center of Africa. Yet there was no evidence that the anti-Mobutu Katangans were Soviet-influenced. Indeed the populist flavor of their propaganda was more reminiscent of Lumumbism than of even Angolan Marxism. Ironically, U.S. support of 'anti-Communist' Zaire probably contributed to the Katangan invasion itself. According to an informed American official, the U.S. did not examine very closely Angolan charges that Mobutu was permitting exile attacks on Northern Angola. Mobutu's assurances that he had 'cut back' support of the Angolan exiles were simply accepted. However the sequence of events suggests that Angola allowed the Katangans to return to Zaire in response to these incursions.26


The crisis in Zaire had, Weissman wrote, "dramatized the long term risks for U.S. interests of two decades of U.S.-CIA intervention" in the region:

By contributing to inter-African polarization and Cold War tension, the U.S. was increasing the chances for a great power proxy war in Central and Southern Africa and diverting its attention from the new, multilateral issues of Third World interdependence that were becoming more and more urgent.26


The long term "instrumental goals" of U.S. anti-Communist efforts in Zaire and Angola were, Weissman continued, "political visibility, 'development,' and African acceptance." With this in mind, the political scholar questioned:

... with increasing consciousness of America's economic, political and military interdependence with the Third World, they are also becoming terminal objectives .... Has U.S. involvement with its Zairian and Angolan friends generally improved American relations with Africa, or has it tended to complicate them?26


In 1979, the CIA secretly brought UNITA's Jonas Savimbi to Washington where he met with then former presidential adviser on national security, Henry Kissinger, and several high-level U.S. officials. This was evidence that Kissinger continued to playa vital role in developing African foreign policy long after he was officially retired from this responsibility.

During his election campaign, Ronald Reagan openly supported UNITA. He hailed Savimbi as a leader who "controls more than half of Angola," then added, "I don't see why we shouldn't provide them with weapons."25

On the eve of Ronald Reagan's inauguration, William Casey, soon to become CIA Director, and Richard Allen, subsequently Presidential assistant on national security, met with UNITA representatives and assured them of U.S. support. After his inauguration, Ronald Reagan firmly demanded that Congress overrule the Clark Amendment.25


Then, in March 1981, Savimbi was again brought to Washington-this time on an official visit. That same month, Alexander Haig, then secretary of state, discussed the need to aid UNITA with NATO representatives in London. Not long after, in December 1981, Savimbi was received by the State Department officially as the "national liberation leader of Angola."25

Such were the methods employed by America's shadow government and its secret militia, the CIA, in initiating political ties, instilling Western loyalists, and establishing an economic New World Order based on "diplomatic leverage" that was wholly immoral and often lethal.

Now I knew, that besides desiring population control in this politically volatile region of the world, Kissinger had directed covert military operations there, and had apparently even discussed with CIA director William Colby (and possibly the Church committee as well) the likelihood of using illegally developed and stockpiled biological weapons in Zaire/Angola. This may have been the information they withheld for "national security" reasons. It thus occurred to me that the AIDS-like virus development option Kissinger ordered for Project: MKNAOMI would have been the ideal untraceable weapons for achieving his goal to "keep our visibility to a minimum" while "influencing certain events of potentially global importance" in this "gray area" of CIA operation.

Later, with Bill Colby's untimely and suspicious drowning in the Spring of 1996, allegedly the result of, like Hoover, a heart attack, it also occurred to me that Kissinger and his benefactors may have been secretly grateful to have a chief Project: MKNAOMI administrator, and potentially devastating congressional witness, forever silenced.
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Re: EMERGING VIRUSES: AIDS & EBOLA: Nature, Accident or Inte

Postby admin » Fri Mar 04, 2016 10:51 pm

Chapter 20: OTRAG: Links to Nazis, NATO, NASA, the NCI, and AIDS

FOR years preceding the end of the cold war, the KGB gathered evidence, that Russian officials ultimately reported, suggesting an American origin of AIDS. Officials alleged that the AIDS virus had been a Pentagon invention -- a germ unleashed for political purposes in Zaire. I Comics, as shown in fig. 20.1, even satirized the allegation.

In response, the CIA waged a counterintelligence campaign against all such foreign and domestic accounts of the origin of HIV. Fort Detrick public relations director Norman Covert wrote that the Soviets spread their "disinformation" in an effort to diffuse blame for "the death of nearly 80 persons near Sverdlosk in 1979 due to accidental exposures to a biological weapon."2 That incident was "deflected for more than a decade by disinformation programs emanating from the KGB," he wrote. "Such disinformation programs included the charge that AIDS resulted from a 'cruel experiment at Fort Detrick, which went awry... .''' The U.S. Army spokesman further alleged "the AIDS charge was disavowed in 1987 by then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who apologized to President Ronald Reagan for the accusation."2

Among the government documents I discovered, while visiting the BPL in search of the Rockefeller Commission report, was a Moscow World Service radio broadcast alleging a Pentagon link to the development of AIDS. I realized that Covert was mistaken. Gorbachev had not laid the AIDS allegation to rest in 1987. In the Spring of 1988, a high-ranking Soviet press official, Boris Belitskiy, offered the latest Soviet position regarding Pentagon involvement in the creation of HIV:1

BELITSKIY: Several U.S. Administration officials, such as USIA [CIA] Director Charles Wick, have accused the Soviet Union of having invented this theory for propaganda purposes. But actually it is not Soviet scientists at all who first came up with this theory. It was first reported in Western journals by Western scientists, such as Dr. John Seale, a specialist on venereal diseases at two big London hospitals and one of the first scientists to point to the viral nature of AIDS.1


Fig. 20.1. Soviet Cartoon Depicting an American Origin of the AIDS Virus

Image
Pravda cartoon showing a Pentagon official and U.S. scientist exchanging money for a vial of "AIDS virus." U.S. diplomats protested vigorously about the slur. Courtesy of Covert Action Information Bulletin 1987 (Summer).28:37.


The host then asked if there had been any new evidence to support Seale's contention. The official replied:

BELITSKIY: Just recently a Soviet journalist in Algeria, Aleksandr Zhukov, managed to interview a European physician at the Moustapha Hospital there, who made some relevant disclosures on the subject. In the early seventies, this physician and immunologist was working for the West German OTRAG (Orbital Transport and Missiles, Ltd.) Corporation in Zaire. His laboratory had been given the assignment to cultivate viruses ordinarily affecting only animals but constituting a potential danger to man. They were particularly interested in certain unknown viruses isolated from the African green monkey, and capable of such rapid replication that they could completely destabilize the immune system. These viruses, however, were quite harmless for human beings and the lab's assignment was to develop a mutant virus that would be a human killer.

HOST: Did they succeed?

BELITSKIY: To a large extent, yes. But when they inoculated the inhabitants of several jungle villages with such a mutant virus on the pretext of giving shots against cholera, this did not produce the immediate results required of the lab. Now, it is well-known that people infected with the AIDS virus can live for several years without developing the disease but at the same time the result was summed up as proving the unsuitability of the virus as a biological warfare agent. The lab was ordered to wind up the project and turn the results over to certain U.S. researchers who had been following this work with keen interest, to such an extent that some of the researchers believed they were in reality working not for the West German OTRAG Corporation but for the Pentagon. In fact, two U.S. assistants had been with the lab throughout the work on this project. Several years after the lab had turned over its findings to the Americans, back came the news of the first AIDS cases in San Francisco. The researcher believes that the Pentagon had tested the mutant virus on convicts in California.1


"Interesting." I remarked to Jackie that evening during dinner when she inquired how my work was going. "OTRAG's alleged work in the early 1970s was essentially identical to the work Gallo and his colleagues published at that time."

"What incentive could Belitskiy have had to make up such a story?" Jackie asked.

"I can't imagine," I replied, "it seems to me he had more to lose than gain by the report," By then, J realized, the Russians were looking for American aid to support parastroika. "But I'd love to learn more about OTRAG," I added.

A week later my speaking schedule directed me to Bloomington, Il. Jackie, now beginning her last trimester, and Alena were traveling along in our motorhome heading to Florida by way of Illinois.

Arriving early, I had a couple of free days to search the Illinois State University library for more information about OTRAG. By good fortune, I quickly came across a couple of reports. One revealed "the complete text of a secret contract" between the government of Zaire and the little known West German OTRAG Corporation. Published in the fall of 1977 in Race and Class, the journal of the Institute on Race Relations and the Transnational Institute in London, the contract disclosed that 29,000 square miles of Southeast Zaire had been leased to OTRAG by Mobutu. The agreement gave the company "complete sovereignty and control over the area."3

The company was ostensibly in the business of developing "cheap satellite- launching missiles for private industry, but the application of its technology to military purposes -- purposes forbidden by the West German government since World War II -- was quickly apparent."3

I found several other articles that appeared in African and European newspapers suggesting links between OTRAG and the West German government, the CIA, and the South African government. Little, however, was confirmed. This led the Informationsdienst Sudliches Afrika [German Information Service of South Africa] to conduct their own investigation. Soon thereafter, they published their shocking findings:3

We have traced OTRAG and its supporters back to those Nazi scientists who worked on the V 1 and V2 rockets during World War II, and who later continued their activity in the United States, France, and Argentina. For example, Dr. Kurt H. Debus, at present Chairman of the Board of OTRAG, once worked at the Peenemunde V2 program and later, until 1975, worked as director of the Cape Canaveral space program.

Richard Gompertz, OTRAG's technical director and a U.S. citizen, once was a specialist on V2 engines and later presided over NASA's Chrysler space division.

Lutz Thilo Kayser, OTRAG's founder and manager, when young was quite close to the Nazi rocket industry, often called "Dadieu's young man," a reference to Armin Dadieu, his mentor, who served as prominent SS officer and as Goring's special representative for a research program on storing uranium. While working for OTRAG, Kayser also acted as a contact for the West German government, a special advisor to the Minister of Research and Technology on matters concerning OTRAG. He was also on the ad hoc committee on the Apollo program transport systems.3

Financing by the German Federal Government

According to its own definition, OTRAG is a private company financed by private funds. Indeed, during a Lusaka press conference Chancellor Helmut Schmidt insisted upon this: "The government has no shares in OTRAG nor does it have any other finger in the pie." The real facts are rather different.

OTRAG is chartered as a transcription company, which means that shareholdings are credited by the government ... that is, OTRAG is subsidized by the government. ...

Kayser's business group was given many strange government orders. For example, in 1976 its technology research group received OM 764,000 for scientific investigations of coal gas ....

A Colonial Treaty

The contract between OTRAG and the government of Zaire, involving the "unlimited use" of nearly 30,000 square miles, made OTRAG sovereign over territories once inhabited by 760,000 people. OTRAG is authorized to conduct any excavation and construction it chooses, including air fields, energy plants, communication systems, and manufacturing plants. All movement of people into and within the OTRAG territory is only with the permission of OTRAG. The state of Zaire is obliged to keep everyone else out and away. The same applies to the air space over the granted territory. OTRAG is absolved from any responsibility for and damage caused by the construction or transport of missiles. Its people enjoy complete immunity from the laws of Zaire in the granted territory. These exclusive rights are granted until the year 2000.3

War Preparations

The governments and the press in Angola, Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique have expressed worries about the development of offensive military weapons using OTRAG missiles in Zaire. The Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, and Cuba have all denounced the OTRAG project as a means by which West Germany may circumvent the restrictions against certain weapons laid down in the 1954 Brussels Treaty. The London Evening Standard quoted U.S. military officials as suspecting the West Germans and France of the secret development of missile forces on OTRAG territory to prohibit an invasion of South Africa. In March 1978 an article in Penthouse by Tad Szulc said, based on secret service sources, that OTRAG was an extension of West Germany's arms companies Dornier and Messerschmidt -- developing and testing cruise missiles and middle-range rockets on OTRAG territory. France and the U.S., the article said, were also participating in the project. ...3

Despite all this, the West German government continued to insist that OTRAG was a peaceful project. A question in Parliament by Representative Norbert Gansel "whether the Federal Government was able honestly to deny that OTRAG missiles are being used for military purposes" was given this false response: "According to our own investigations, the missiles, still in a state of development, are not fit for military purposes. However, in an interview with the magazine Der Spiegel, OTRAG chief Lutz Kayser admitted that "of course everything could be used militarily .... "3

The history of OTRAG underlines the close contact between the company and the Ministry of Defense in Bonn. Chairman Debus would not name the three high NASA officials who inspected and praised OTRAG's concept. ... A CIA agent told a British journalist that the Boeing Company had provided OTRAG with Cruise missile technology... .3


In another article about OTRAG published in New Scientist, Farooq Hussain, a research student at the Department of War Studies, at King's College, London, reported that the "private West German company" had offered "cut-price satellite launches -- from a private range in Zaire that is half the size of England -- to any country or commercial organization able to afford it."4

Hussain heartily criticized the earlier report by former New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc published in Penthouse. Szulc alleged that West Germany [along with the United States] was "supplying small arms to Zaire, having secret projects to develop nuclear weapons, and of hiding the funding for the Zaire project."

Hussain, however, confirmed that OTRAG's initial research was "sponsored by the West German government" and "carried out at Deutsche Forschungs-und Versuchs-Anstalt fur Luft und Raumfahrt, the Federal Rocket Research Institute at Lampholthausen, near Stuttgart. This project was led by Eugen Sanger and Wolf Pilz, two wartime scientists from the Nazi rocket facility at Prenemude. They were joined by a brilliant young engineer, Lutz Kayser."

Following Sanger's death in 1970, his widow helped Kayser form a company which continued work on the low cost launcher at Lampholthausen under government contracts worth £7 million. But by 1974 the West German government [allegedly] decided to devote its rocket research efforts solely in the direction of a joint European launcher which was based on familiar missile technology. Kayser, determined to continue with his project, formed OTRAG, but he continued to make use of the facilities at Lampholthausen for rocket motor test bums. Kayser recruited the former director of the V-2 programme, Dr. Kurt Debus, who was also the director of Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida until 1975.

Under the terms of the UN Space Treaty an individual or private company cannot place satellites in orbit without the sponsorship of a government. This problem was resolved in part by the signing of an agreement between OTRAG and Zaire ....

The OTRAG agreement with Zaire -- which was never [as] secret as Penthouse claimed-has rightly caused uproar. The terms are reminiscent of the deal made by Cecil Rhodes with King Lobengula. The size of territory -- 100,000 sq. km-was [allegedly] determined for launch safety precautions and is in a thinly populated part of the Shaba province .... 4


It suddenly struck me that Hussain's Department of War Studies affiliation might have biased his prose. First, it occurred to me that an area that included 760,000 African natives might be called something other than "thinly populated." Then, it seemed odd that the Shaba province, the center of covert CIA military operations in the region, might be determined the safest launch site. The area was as close to a war zone as one could get without being in the middle of it.

Hussain continued:

... OTRAG has use of this area of Zaire rent free until the firm becomes profitable. After that the Zaire government receives 25 million Zaires annually- and retrospectively from 1976-paid into any bank designated by President Mobutu Sese Seko. But this is not inflation-proof, and Zaire's inflation is currently running at around 70 percent.

OTRAG promises to launch a Zaire military reconnaissance satellite for free-although it doesn't say when. Zaire does have the option of the first satellite launch, but it loses all the rent due up to that point, unless it pays for the launch in foreign exchange. This is made easier by providing Zaire launch facilities at a 20 per cent discount.

Zaire cannot withdraw from its contract with OTRAG until the year 2000, but OTRAG can withdraw at any time.

By 1981 OTRAG intends to begin operating at around 10 launches per year.... 4


Hussain went on to deride OTRAG for having little hope of attracting customers. "The value of reconnaissance satellites for Third World countries is extremely doubtful," he claimed, "because the data received requires experienced technicians and large computer facilities to interpret."

NATO's Yellow Press?

Either Hussain wasn't keeping up with realities in his area of special studies, or he was moved to produce disinformation for NATO, I realized.

OTRAG's project seemed to fit the Western allies need exactly. During my research I had stumbled on a North Atlantic Assembly report by Christian Brumter, Head of Studies at the University of Paris. Brumter reviewed NATO's space and upper atmospheric objectives.5 He noted that cooperation between Germany and the United States was discussed first in 1960 and "again in 1969, on the basis of a study by the Economic Committee which, after having recognized the exploration of outer space as one of the common goals which can help relieve world tensions, regretted that 'the current national space programmes are duplicative and extremely costly.' This clearly raised the problem of the relations in this field between the United States and some European countries."5

In 1971, the NATO Assembly (see civil and military structure in fig. 20.2 and commanders in fig. 20.3) recommended that Alliance member counties:

• Continue or undertake European action in the space field in view of the creation of a single European space body.

• Continue the development and perfection of launchers capable of placing in orbit satellites weighing more than 600 kg and which would guarantee European independence in the telecommunications field by harnessing the scientific and industrial efforts of European industry ....

• Continue to improve space cooperation in the INTELSAT programmes and through technical and commercial agreements at the bilateral or multilateral level, especially in the post-Apollo programme.5

And regarding "meteorological questions" intended to be answered through satellite technology as in the case of ERTS, in 1962 "NATO's program of space research for peaceful purposes, recommended that a long-range weather forecast system be established by NATO.... " And the Assembly "also requested that 'in accordance with NATO's policy of good neighbor relations, information be made available to the neighboring friendly nations, not only in Europe but also in Africa."5

So, in 1975, when USAID called for NASA to develop these systems, and Zaire was chosen as the central site for satellite launching and data collection, NATO's program had been on the drawing board for over a decade. And OTRAG's program evolved virtually simultaneously with NATO's.

This knowledge, combined with the fact that OTRAG's space program served all the needs articulated by Kissinger's State Department, made me think that Hussain and not Szulc was purposely spreading disinformation.

Fig. 20.2 NATOs Military Structure and Command Centers

Image

Fig. 20.3. Major NATO Commanders

Image

The military structure and command centers of The North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO is governed by the North Atlantic Council composed of representatives from member nations. Its 'Science Committee" is responsible for overseeing the development and deployment of chemical weapons. NATO allegedly does not use biological weapons. However, while OTRAG was setting up a missile base in Southeastern Zaire, NATO forces were being summoned into action in the same area (Shaba region) by President Carter. Source: Department of State Bulletin July, 1978, pp. 1-12.

Additional evidence for this conclusion came from U.S. Representative W. Tapley Bennett, Jr. who stood before the U.N. General Assembly on October 18, 1976. The congressman, then, defined OTRAG's market and indirectly linked OTRAG to German-American efforts to develop space programs for USAID, NASA, and NATO. He noted:

The year 1976 has been an active and successful year both in outer space and in the U.N. Committee of the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space ....

During the past year, the United States has continued to participate cooperatively with other nations in the exploration of outer space. We have, for example launched Helios-2, built by the Federal Republic of Germany, the second scientific satellite to investigate the properties of interplanetary space close to the Sun. In January we launched the CTS [Communications Technology Satellite], an experimental high-powered communications satellite developed jointly with Canada.

In cooperation with the Agency for International Development [USAID], using the ATS-6 satellite [Applications Technology Satellite), NASA is currently conducting demonstrations of the applications of space-age technology for the benefit of developing countries. These demonstrations will be seen in 27 countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America."

And regarding the Zaire project, Bennett said:

This year the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee has again noted that the Landsat system continues to provide the international community with data and experience in the new field of remote sensing by satellite ....

The Economic Commission for Africa has just endorsed a comprehensive training and station development program for Africa, and the European Space Agency has formulated a plan for rationalizing Landsat data acquisition and use in Europe ... Zaire will be acquiring data on a regional basis.6


The fact is, the Helios-2 project that Bennett alleged was built by "the Federal Republic of Germany," was actually developed by the OTRAG-linked Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm company from Munich. According to Messerschmitt literature, their company built ... HELlOS A & B, [the] Germani American solar probes."7

In summary, OTRAG had arrived at the right place at the right time to succeed financially and in every other way in serving NATO's interests. The evidence showed that USAID maintained connections to NASA and NATO, and all three had acted on Kissinger's behest in Zaire at the time OTRAG leased a sizable share of the country. Run by ex-Nazi's-Debus who had directed Cape Kennedy, Gompertz who presided over NASA's Chrysler space division, OTRAG's founder, Lutz Kayser, whose ties to NASA and NATO leaders on both sides of the Atlantic and connections to America's top military-industrial firms were both evident and unsettling.

Moreover, this knowledge fueled my suspicion that OTRAG was related to Litton Bionetics in a way Beletskiy had not mentioned. Kayser, as an Apollo space program consultant with, like Kissinger, ties to Boeing, may have purchased military hardware from Litton Industries as he had from Boeing. Being a major military contractor, it seemed logical that Litton Industries might have supplied satellite technology along with reagents for biological weapons research to OTRAG.

Given OTRAG's link to Messerschmitt, I thought, which after World War II had contributed greatly to the fund administered by Martin Bormann, Hitler's Deputy and Third Reich Party chief, Kayser was likely part of the Kameradenwerk, and possibly even a member of the SMOM. In either case, he was undoubtedly among the 900 or so Nazi scientists drafted by Army intelligence under Project Paperclip.8

Later, I discussed these findings with Jackie:

"Could OTRAG have been a NATO or CIA front?" she asked.

I decided to search for the answers.

Major Covert Connections

I began my search for additional evidence connecting the CIA to OTRAG by reviewing what I knew about the latter. Kayser had leased 29,000 square miles of eastern Zaire to do any kind of military experiments-anything they wanted with the territory 760,000 African villagers called home. Next, I considered the place and time-1975, at the height of the CIA's paramilitary operations in that exact region. OTRAG, I realized, could have served as a front for several covert CIA and NATO operations including military and satellite surveillance over MPLA forces in Angola; tactical nuclear weapons buildup; scientific efforts to help Gallo and his Litton Bionetics colleagues develop and test the immune-altering viruses ordered by Kissinger through the DOD for MKNAOMI, helping Hilleman at Merck and Manaker at the NCI develop and test experimental cancer vaccines for populations at high risk for viral infections; bringing new technology to Zaire as the Western allies promised; and enhancing NATO and NASA communications systems through the development of ERTS.

During my next U of I library excursion, I learned that a year before Debus left his directorship of Cape Canaveral to head OTRAG's experimental military base in Zaire, Horst Ehmke, the Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany for Research and Technology paid the United States a visit. A joint statement issued simultaneously in Washington and Bonn noted that from March 2 to 8, 1974, Ehmke had met with American officials "to discuss common interests in the programs and plans of both countries in science and technology research and development. Among the notables were:

... the Honorable Roy L. Ash, Director, Office of Management and Budget [and Litton, Industries Inc., President]; the Honorable Edward M. Kennedy, U.S. Senator [and then NATO, Vice President]; the Honorable William J. Casey, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs [and future CIA Director]; ... the Honorable H. Guyford Stever, Director, National Science Foundation; the Honorable James C. Fletcher, Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration; the Honorable Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Counselor of the Department of State [and Kissinger NSC appointee].9


Ehmke, the release said, also visited "the gaseous diffusion enrichment facility at Oak Ridge and the research and development facilities of the Oak Ridge National Laboratories," the site of numerous horrific chemical weapons experiments, cancer virus research studies, and related international conferences.13 Here, "besides traditional fields of cooperation in nuclear energy development and in space research and technology," the German-American contingent considered other areas "particularly appropriate" for joint investments. Biomedical research and technology was among the most pressing.9

Obviously then, Roy Ash had lobbied for Litton firms to playa major role in the German-American "exchange." So Litton Bionetics was likely an industrial intermediary in the OTRAG-Nazi connection.

This made perfect sense. Kissinger was Ash's alternate for the NSC directorship following his service to General Bolling and Rockefeller. The former directed Project Paperclip to take advantage of the Nazis' most advanced aerospace and biological weapons developers. Rockefeller's bank received much of the Nazi war chest. So it made sense Debus and company might be called upon to take charge of Kissinger's most urgent Third World exercise.

"You can't create a new order with the old Germans, with Hitler and all that," argued Klaus Barbie's colleague Alfredo Mingolla in 1982. The fanatical Nazi and admitted CIA agent assigned to infiltrate Reverend Moon's Unification Church added, "You have to find something modern."10 Viral weapons and "Star Wars" certainly fit the bill.

Nazi researchers, I realized, were perfect for OTRAG's assignments. Besides their brilliance in chemical engineering, aerospace, and germ warfare, they established the field of seroepidemiology. They examined all human blood types to determine varying susceptibilities to different diseases. The purpose was, of course, to develop a super-human race; freedom from the mundane illnesses that attacked those of lesser purity. OTRAG's assignment to develop monkey viruses that were "capable of such rapid replication that they could completely destabilize .the [human] immune system," as Belitskiy charged, seemed perfectly suited for Nazi research. I also realized that the Marburg and Ebola fast-acting viruses did just that.

I tried to fathom the relationship between Gallo's work and OTRAG's based on Belitskiy's report. 1,11 Recalling that before 1969 only American organizations stockpiled simian monkey virus "reagents" for later distribution, I knew the WHO's "reference centre" in San Antonio, the NIH, and the NCI were the original monkey virus suppliers for those qualified to study them. 12 So most likely, I realized, in the early 1970s, OTRAG would have needed to get their simian virus testing reagents -- their antibodies, cell lines, and other standard viral research requirements from an American source. Most likely from Gallo or some other NCI source, I thought, not only because he was their top gun in retrovirology, but also because he was heavily funded by the Department of Defense through Litton Bionetics. 13

Indeed Belitskiy's report made the most sense. With it came the realization that Gallo's biological weapons consortium -- Litton Bionetics and the NCI, Merck, and the NYUMC -- would have most probably desired a laboratory operating in a remote area of Central Africa where monkeys were plentiful and populations were expendable. I already knew they maintained laboratories in Central Africa. And upon realizing Gallo's group or Bionetics would have needed to supply OTRAG's researchers with essential experimental reagents, I reckoned, maybe OTRAG was a subcontractor for Gallo or Litton, and, if lucky, I'd find a paper trail here as well.

"It all really does seem to fit," I said to Jackie the evening before we left for our road-trip to Florida.

"Will you be going back to the library again tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Just for a few hours. I need to see if I can find more information about the one organization I know least about -- Litton Bionetics."

Litton Industries, Inc. and Bionetics

Early the next morning, I began my investigation of Litton Bionetics in the corporate microfiche files of the library. Having reread Belitskiy's broadcast along with the Informationsdienst Sudliches Afrika report several times, I realized "based on secret service sources ... OTRAG was an extension of West Germany's arms companies Dornier and Messerschmidt."3 So while I was searching the reference literature on Litton, looking for ties to OTRAG, I decided to investigate these other companies as well to see if their operations paralleled OTRAG's or Litton's. Direct evidence, I realized, given that OTRAG was to have remained top secret, would probably be classified and, therefore, unavailable in the reference literature.

My Litton Industries search was quickly rewarded. Within a few hours, I held several annual reports the corporation had filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 14-16 The information included financial statements and moderately detailed corporate operations reports for the years 1976-1978, the period during which OTRAG was receiving the most media attention.

I immediately learned that Litton Industries, Inc., a Delaware Corporation with its central office in Roy Ash's home town of Beverly Hills, California, was highly diversified. Incorporated first in 1953 under the name Electro Dynamics Corporation, a year later its name changed to Litton Industries, Inc. "The Company," their 1978 report stated, "ranks as a major industrial corporation, serving worldwide markets for commercial, consumer, industrial and defense related products. [It] produces or provides a wide variety of highly competitive products and services which are classified into six major business segments." These included, in order of their percentage of $3,653,209,000 in total 1978 sales: 25% Business Systems & Equipment, 20% Electronic & Electrical Products, 17% Industrial Systems & Services, 16% Marine Engineering & Production, 14% Advanced Electronic Systems, and 8% Paper, Printing & Publishing. As fiscal year 1979 began, the company employed "over 90,000 people, 25 percent of them outside the United States, principally in West Germany, Canada, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom." Yet, despite its apparent success, the company recorded a "net loss" that year "of $90.8 million, or $2.66 per share, including a $172.9 million after-tax loss" from a "settlement agreement" with the Navy.

In terms of West German connections, Triumph-Adler -- Litton's West German subsidiary-the report noted, was responsible for a major increase in corporate earnings. "In anticipation of future market growth, Triumph-Adler acquired Diehl Data Systems of West Germany in April, expanding its business and technological base" in several fields including mu1tistation minicomputers for administrative, technical, scientific and medical applications." 16 Litton's German subsidiary Hellige in particular was hailed for having "achieved its fifth consecutive year of outstanding performance as sales of its electronic medical systems grew by more than 15 percent."15 Other relevant parts of their 1976-1978 reports included:

In June. [1976] Litton Bionetics won the fourth renewal of its contract to manage the operations of the National Cancer Institute's Frederick (Md.) Cancer Research Center. More than 750 scientists and support personnel are engaged in intensive basic and applied research at FCRC on the causes, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of human cancer.


"Holy smoke!" I broke the silence of the library. The revelation that Bionetics managed and operated the entire FCRC for the NCI stunned me.

A major thrust in immunologic control of cancer at FCRC recognizes that cancer is not autonomous in its development and growth, and that natural host mechanisms exist. Research approaches have developed new insights into the cell types involved in tumor destruction, as well as the mechanisms of tumor recognition and killing on the cellular and subcellular levels. The program's scientists believe this work could lead to practical immunotherapeutic approaches to cancer.14

Litton Bionetics further expanded its activities in the rapidly growing U.S. and European markets for biosafety testing. . . . New business came from commercial and industrial firms moving to comply with the new U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act which will soon require the testing of 70,000 industrial chemicals already on the market -- as well as the 1,000 or so new ones introduced each year -- to keep cancer- and mutation-causing agents out of the environment.

The division's in vitro assays primarily involve Ames-type testing procedures where a specially bred strain of bacteria is exposed to test chemicals in a culture dish. This bacterial mutates at a very rapid rate, making it possible to identify potential carcinogens and mutagens at a relatively inexpensive cost in most cases ....

Earlier in the year [1978J. Bionetics was awarded a five-year renewal of its contract to manage and operate the Frederick (Md.) Cancer Research Center for the National Cancer Institute. and also began marketing the first product it has developed for clinical testing laboratories -- a new test for infectious mononucleosis. 16 [Emphasis added]


Infectious mono, I recalled from my pathology training, was caused by the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), which is also associated with Burkitt's lymphoma and nasopharyngeal carcinoma. All three diseases along with EBV were exactly what Gallo's senior Dr. Manaker at the NCI and several other researchers were avidly studying in Central West Africa during the early 1970s,17 I recalled.

I quickly looked up infectious mononucleosis in a medical reference book. Indeed, the infection was most commonly found in that part of Africa. "A survey in Ghana, Africa, found a seroconversion rate of 85% by age 2." Burkitt's lymphoma also "occurs predominantly in Africa," the text noted, "and virtually all African children with BL have very high titers to EBV ... Nasopharyngeal carinoma occurs frequently in southern China and northern Africa. Again, there are high titers of antibodies to EBV almost universally, and the genome is found in the tumor cells."18

Bionetics was operating in Bethesda and Africa at the same time OTRAG was there? There's got to be more proof!

I considered that almost a decade after Manaker and others at the NCI and Merck received federal funding to study EBV, BL, and nasopharyngeal cancer, Litton Bionetics was marketing a test kit based on their research. This was the third time I discovered that taxpayer supported NCI grants had funded pharmaceutical developments from which private concerns were now capitalizing. It seemed most plausible the same had been done with the AIDS test.

To confirm my suspicions, I placed a call to the Frederick Cancer Research Center from a nearby phonebooth. I was told by an administrator that Bionetics Research Lab had been involved in developing an AIDS test and that it had sold the product to a private concern. Soon thereafter, Litton also sold Bionetics Research Labs to Medpath -- among the largest medical laboratories in the United States. Litton Bionetics, I was also informed, was still involved in administering funds for the NCI.

It now seemed even more plausible that Litton Bionetics, having managed Fort Detrick's major cancer virus research for so many years, might have managed OTRAG's "mutant virus" program and the CIA's Project MKNAOMI as well.

More West German Aerospace Business

Besides Triumph-Adler and Diehl Data Systems, Litton's SEC reports noted other connections to West German companies in the aerospace industry.

Litton's Advanced Electronic Systems division billed itself as "the world's leading supplier of aircraft inertial navigation systems (INS) and a major producer of U.S. Cruise missile guidance hardware." In 1977, the company had outfitted "West Germany's Alpha close-air-support jets with Doppler radar navigation systems,"J5 and acknowledged LITEF, the Freiburg, West Germany based military contractor for having "increased its business volume by more than 20 percent." The purchase was pursuant a combat aircraft guidance system that a consortium of British, German, and Italian companies were building for various customers. Then the division disclosed its sales to NATO of missile guidance and satellite reconnaissance technology. Data Systems, another Litton Industries subdivision, the report said:

gained major follow-on business on its NATO Integrated Command System! Telegraphic Automatic Relay Equipment (NICS/TARE) contract, which calls for the integration of computers, teletypes, videodisplays and other peripheral units into a communications network linking NATO members in Europe and North America. Deliveries begin in calendar 1979 and the system becomes operational in the 1980s, when current processing methods will be unable to keep up with the projected number of transmissions. 15


In addition, the company boasted sales to Amecom which:

... began production on a major contract for an airborne system that senses sources of enemy ground based radiation, determines the signals' direction and locates potential anti-aircraft artillery or missile threats. Designated TEREC (Tactical Electronic Reconnaissance), it will be the first operational tactical reconnaissance system deployed in quantity by the U.S. Air Force.15


Such technology, I realized, would have served OTRAG's needs exactly.

Realizing that tactical reconnaissance was exactly what Kissinger had urged CIA forces in Zaire to deploy against the MPLA in Angola,19recognizing that aerial surveillance was what USAID had requested from NASA to help with "agriculture" and "water management" in Central Africa,20 knowing that the Federal Republic of Germany was a partner in Skylab wherein "one of Skylab's most significant payload components was its Earth Resources Experiment package (EREP), a complement to ERTS-1, the Earth Resources Technology Satellite launched in 1972, and the State Department acknowledged that plans for similar stations are under way in Africa,"21 and knowing that the United States and Germany were reducing NATO costs by coordinating their military and scientific programs to reduce duplication of efforts; it seemed most plausible that Litton divisions had supplied OTRAG with a mix of aerospace hardware, software, and germ warfare products needed to carry out the multiple military missions Kissinger defined as urgently needed in Central Africa.

My next step was to research back issues of the Wall Street Journal and Aviation Week. I thought, for sure, Litton would have announced these large business dealings and perhaps provided additional intelligence.

Litton Industries in the News

Knowing that OTRAG had been developing its prototype launch vehicles that peaked NASA's interest in 1976, and was likely to be in full swing by 1980, I directed my Wall Street Journal search to this period.22-27

Indeed, I found the Wall Street Journal had announced virtually all of these transactions between Litton Industries and its West German customers and affiliates.

Among the first entries I came on was one that cheered "a $32.9 million Air Force contract for electronic reconnaissance sensor equipment."24 This order, I realized, may have supplied the military equipment needed for the USAID and NATO satellite reconnaissance effort developing at that exact time in Zaire.

Then a couple months later, the Wall Street Journal announced NATO's purchase of$II.3 million of "computerized communications systems from Litton Data Systems" -- a group intimately connected with the Litton division, that included their West German Hellige Company and Litton Bionetics. 14,25

I also learned that this $11.3 million NATO contract had followed a much larger $40 million award for a "communication system" to supplement a "NATO computerized Satcom system." A requisition most likely destined for Zaire because of the unique nature and timing of the purchase. 26

Undoubtedly, then, a mass of circumstantial evidence indicated that the Litton organization was in the satellite reconnaissance business, and linked to OTRAG through its West German Hellige Division, Litton Bionetics, as well as NATO purchasing.26

Moreover, just as I had suspected, the satellite reconnaissance systems administered by USAID and NASA for allegedly "humanitarian" and "agricultural" purposes had actually been designed, purchased, and directed by NATO officials.27

I photocopied all the incriminating evidence in haste, not wanting to hit the road too late, and then returned to the motorhome to share my findings with Jackie.

"Since Litton Bionetics was subcontracting for the Special Operations Division of the Army and the CIA during Kissinger's Project MKNAOMI, the allegations that OTRAG was subcontracting for the Pentagon were apparently accurate. The results of their biological weapons development program, then, could have easily been tested in the same region of Zaire that OTRAG operated," I explained.

"So you think they intentionally released the new viruses in Zaire?" she asked.

"Well it's certain the deliberate release in that region could have served, besides population control, three CIA Kissinger-directed programs," I replied. "The covert military Operation FEATURE, Project MKNAOMI, and COINTELPRO.

"Isaacson was right," I concluded, as we headed south. "Kissinger was devilishly brilliant."

A Twisted Web

Later that week, I digested the articles I had photocopied. I learned that Tad Szulc's allegation that OTRAG was an extension of West Germany's arms companies Dornier and Messerschmidt was apparently accurate. Besides testimony by an unnamed CIA official who stated that "the Boeing Company had provided OTRAG with Cruise missile technology,"3 my search of Aviation Week revealed a number of confirming details. The first fact: Boeing owned a 12% share of Messerschmitt-Boelkow which it sold to Siemens Corporation in July 1978.28

Moreover, besides being engaged in all facets of the aerospace industry, both Messerschmitt and Dornier maintained medical research and technology subsidiaries, making OTRAG a suitable acquisition if not secret military affiliate.

Also during the period that I searched the financial and aerospace literature, the West-German-based Teledyne Corporation purchased increasing amounts of Litton Industries stock so that by 1978 it owned 27 percent of the company.29 Meanwhile, another German-owned company -- Grummann Aerospace -- was Litton's fiercest competitor for American defense contracts and had worked as Teledyne's chief subcontractor building navigational computers and data processing systems.30 Apparently, Teledyne grew tired of losing revenue to Grummann and invested more heavily in Litton Industries, which Grummann had battled to secure the $1 billion NATO radar-reconnaissance work up forbid in 1977.31 All this underscored, for me, the twisted web of NATO's dealings with the allied German- American military-medical-industrial complex.

Fraudulent Claims

In my search for Litton Industries announcements in the Wall Street Journal, I ran across numerous articles in 1978 that focused on the company's criminal activities. One such article detailed a Supreme Court decision to have the company reimburse the Navy for hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent charges. On Tuesday, October 3, 1978, a Washington correspondent explained:

Litton Systems, Inc., a subsidiary of Litton Industries Inc., lost its Supreme Court bid for dismissal of an indictment charging Litton with filing a fraudulent claim on a Navy submarine project.32

The indictment of Litton stemmed from a $30 million claim filed against the Navy in 1972 by Litton's Ingalls nuclear shipbuilding division ... 33


Then in a second court action, Litton agreed to settle a dispute that required congressional committee review.34 The staff reporter wrote:

The Navy and Litton Industries, Inc. settled a $1.09 billion shipbuilding contract claims dispute with an agreement that saddles Litton with a $200 million loss and the Navy with $447 million in additional payments.

The settlement, which must be reviewed by Congress, resolves a nine-year dispute between the company and the Navy over a contract to build five amphibious assault ships called LHAs.

"Loss" for Fiscal Year

Charles Thornton, Litton's chairman, said: "The settlement will result in a substantial loss for the current fiscal year," in which record earnings had been expected previously. In the nine months ended April 30, Litton earned $53.8 million on sales of $2.7 billion, almost equal to the $55.9 million it earned on sales of $3.4 billion in fiscal 1977.

He said the company will take a pre-tax loss of $333 million this year, which works out to an after-tax loss of $174 million. The loss is composed of the $200 million called for in the settlement, plus $133 million start-up costs at the Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard of Litton's Ingalls shipbuilding division.

Besides the dispute over the LHA program, the agreement also covers contracts for 30 DD963-class destroyers the company is building for the Navy at Pascagoula. The estimated costs of these contracts at completion is $4.73 billion.

Under the settlement, Litton waives all claims against the Navy under the LHA contract, signed in 1969, and the destroyer contract, signed in 1970. Litton will also withdraw two suits filed against the Navy under the LHA contract and pending in the federal court of claims .... "34


I instantly realized, that the period in which the contested contracts were signed, between 1969 and 1970, was just after Nixon gave Kissinger the NSC directorship he had been considering for Litton's president, Roy Ash. Instead, I recalled, Roy Ash was given the chairmanship of the President's Advisory Council on Executive Organizations -- his title: "Assistant to the President of the United States" -- and his company, Litton Industries, Inc., was then awarded well over $5 billion in military contracts along with the privilege of developing AIDS-like viruses for a New World Order.33-38
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Re: EMERGING VIRUSES: AIDS & EBOLA: Nature, Accident or Inte

Postby admin » Thu Mar 10, 2016 7:03 am

Chapter 21: Marburg, Ebola, and Chilling Propaganda in The Hot Zone

IN late March, we made our way back from sunny Florida to New England. Again my seminar schedule gave us three leisure days, which I spent exploring the libraries of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The ladies spent the time admiring the blossom-bedecked town at its spring peak. Though their assignment was less confining, I assure you mine was far more engaging.

My first day's assignment was to track down the Marburg virus along with Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. All were relative newcomers to the virology scene. All were believed to be HIV relatives if only for their decade of common emergence. Marburg had struck three vaccine production facilities almost simultaneously in 1967. Two outbreaks occurred in two West German cities and another in Yugoslavia. Oddly, the virus then disappeared until 1975, when it once again reared its ugly head in of all places South Africa. Then, less than two years later, two larger outbreaks erupted in southern Sudan and northern Zaire (see map fig. 21.1).

I thought it curious that the European outbreaks occurred virtually simultaneously in 1967 and then eight years later in South Africa. I knew that to be about the time Gallo and his colleagues at the NCI, Litton Bionetics, Merck and allegedly OTRAG began experimenting with similar viruses to produce an assortment of potential bioweapons. Moreover, the Sudan and Zaire outbreak areas were literally war zones, and South Africa was not too far off geographically and militarily. So I began my search for Marburg's origin with these factors in mind.

Fig. 21.1. Map of Central West Africa

Image

In Search of Marburg

A MEDLAR search at the UNC medical library immediately led me to an abstract in the October 1977 issue of Tropical Diseases Bulletin. The text discussed three papers that described the "isolation and characterization" of the Marburg virus from the blood of a Zairian patient who "became ill during a large outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in northern Zaire and southern Sudan in the second half of 1976. Material from Zaire was originally sent to Antwerp [Belgium] and from there specimens were dispatched to Porton Down and Atlanta."1

Porton Down was England's biowarfare laboratory, and Antwerp was close to where Gallo had presented his research before NATO on the "entry of foreign nucleic acids into cells" in 1970. Antwerp was, therefore, likely to have been another Western alliance BW research lab.2

The Tropical Diseases Bulletin reported that the three viruses -- Marburg, Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan -- were "morphologically indistinguishable," although antibody studies confirmed distinct differences between the strains that broke out in Germany and Yugoslavia in 1967, and those that hit the Ebola river valley in 1976. Thus, the Sudan and Zaire strains were named Ebola to distinguish them from the original Marburg virus. 1

Another reference I reviewed that morning was Marburg Virus by Rudolph Siegert who was affiliated with the Hygiene Institute of the Philipps University in Marburg (Lahn), Germany.3

Siegert, caught up in the mystery of Marburg, explained:

In Europe no new diseases have been observed in many decades. Thus a mysterious hemorrhagic fever which broke out simultaneously in Germany and Yugoslavia in 1967 stimulated considerable interest; it posed a demanding challenge for clinicians, microbiologists, epidemiologists, and the public health service.

The disease appeared in mid-August and affected 31 persons in Marburg/ Lahn, Frankfurt/Main, and Belgrade. Seven cases ended in death. At first, only employees of the Behringwerke, the Paul Ehrlich Institute and the Institute for Sera and Vaccines Torlak became ill.... The common source of the infections was soon traced to certain shipments of monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) from Uganda .... There can be no doubt that the pathogen responsible for the "Marburg monkey disease" fulfills the morphologic and biologic criteria for a virus. This is indicated by its cell-dependent replication, as well as its complex structure and helical symmetry. The genetic material is RNA.3


Siegert agreed with most authors, that the structural pattern of the "Marburg virus" exhibited many features similar to a group of viruses known as rhabdoviruses. These included the culprits responsible for rabies and vesicular stomatitis. A more technical name for the Marburg virus was coined from the monkeys who passed it to the victims in Marburg -- Rhabdovirus simiae.3

The Marburg virus expert described the horrifying clinical features of the disease and then focused on several specific cases. In one instance, a nurse who had no contact with a victim's blood became infected. Siegert thus concluded it seemed "likely that she acquired the infection by way of contaminated air or contact with excreta."4

Reporting on the epidemiology of the European outbreak, Siegert noted that although all the infected monkeys had died or been slaughtered, the killer germ had been identified from cell cultures obtained and frozen before the monkeys were incinerated. At least ten infected monkeys were believed to have been responsible for the twenty cases among Marburg veterinarians and animal caretakers. Frankfurt's cases were traced to two more monkeys from "the same animal catching station in Uganda," and those in Belgrade were infected by one more.

Siegert continued:

Four shipments were determined as possible sources; they had arrived in Europe between July 20th and August 10th, 1967, and comprised a total of 500- 600 animals. Their distribution to the affected institutions was quite various. Frankfurt received only 10 per cent, and this small number in two batches. It is hardly likely that all the monkeys were infectious from the start; in that case an increased mortality would be expected, which was reported only from Belgrade. Presumably the infection spread during the course of three weeks in the groups of monkeys kept in quarantine for 25 days in Belgrade and in Marburg for up to 29 days. The animals probably became contagious five to eight days after exposure. Even if we assume this minimal time, the first monkeys must have acquired the infection before their arrival. ... In cases involving several monkeys in separate cages in the same room, aerogenic transmission is suspected .... 4


Human cases of Marburg disease, Siegert explained, had only been reported in Germany and in Yugoslavia, "although numerous shipments of monkeys from the same dealer were sent simultaneously from Uganda to the USA, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland. [Emphasis added]" This prompted a Central African investigation wherein no evidence was found that the disease had occurred in animals or natives there. Thus most experts concluded that "the reservoir of the Marburg virus" though not found in Cercopithecus aethiops or other animals, must be "in the native habitat of the monkeys in Africa."4

So the virus did not make its home in monkeys. It resided somewhere in the local habitat of Central Africa. How interesting, I thought, knowing Uganda was just across the border from OTRAG's base. I wonder if OTRAG or Litton Bionetics rhabdovirus experiments might have infected the monkeys that were later sent to labs in Europe. Odd that Siegert didn't mention the name of the "monkey dealer." He documented everything else meticulously. Obviously it had to have been a large facility to simultaneously ship 500-600 animals.

A Bogus "United States Antigen"

What Siegert documented next was even more remarkable. The CDC apparently sabotaged international efforts to locate the source of the outbreak.

Siegert wrote:

Monkeys themselves did not seem to be the probable natural reservoir of the virus, since in spite of their widespread use in experiments, transmission of this hemorrhagic fever in laboratories has not been otherwise observed. The fact that all infections of monkeys proved lethal under experimental conditions, even after minimal dosages, also supports this contention. For this reason it came as a great surprise when [CDC] seroepidemiologic studies indicated a wide distribution of the Marburg virus, not only among monkeys from Central Africa, but also among those from Asia.4


These findings, Siegert explained at length, were highly "inconsistent." Blood studies using guinea-pig-derived antibody, run by the "Special [Virus] Studies Laboratory" of the CDC in 1968, "indicated that of 129 African green monkeys from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda, 50 per cent reacted positively." Furthermore, "no differences were found between animals imported into the USA and those studied immediately following capture. The same percentage of antibody carriers was also determined in a limited number of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans." according to the CDC researchers.

But numerous other international studies failed to show this high presence of Marburg virus in the blood samples of various monkey species.4

Moreover, Dr. Seymour Kalter, director of the Southwest Foundation for Research-America's premier simian monkey lab -- questioned the inconsistency Siegert observed. It didn't seem possible, he explained, with such high titers of antibody against Marburg infection demonstrated by the CDC, "that neither illness nor excessive mortality was observed." During experiments, monkeys exposed with Rhabdovirus simiae developed antibodies and died shortly after. Kalter, Siegert, and others therefore questioned: "With such widespread contamination it is ... difficult to imagine why no cases have occurred until now involving humans having close contact with monkeys."4

The explanation ultimately focused on "the specificity of the antigen used" to detect the antibodies diagnostic for Marburg infection. To study the problem, Kalter and another group of researchers compared the COC's guinea-pig-derived antigen with those developed from monkeys infected with the Marburg virus. The results proved that the "United States antigen probably contained a second component not specific for Marburg virus.... " Thus, the CDC's research methods and materials were faulted for producing falsely positive test results. Siegert wrote:

The authors are convinced that the Marburg virus is absent among the two species [of monkeys] studied in South Africa, or occurs at most only to a limited extent. [Other researchers] point out the possibility that the antibodies might not only have been directed against the Marburg virus but simultaneously against a less pathogenic related virus which circulated in Uganda at the same time.4 [Emphasis added]


In other words, the CDC developed a testing procedure that led the international scientific community astray. The allegedly innocent mistake prompted researchers to conclude the Marburg agent commonly infected monkeys throughout the world. Thus, scientists were beguiled, and the issue remained confused during the first critical years of the investigation when interest in the outbreak peaked.

Even more suspect was the fact that the CDC's testing reagent -- the "United States antigen" -- contained a Marburg-like, "less pathogenic related virus" that had been circulating in Uganda at the same time the deadly germ infected the monkeys destined for Europe. Meaning? The CDC had manipulated a different, but related, less deadly virus from Uganda to produce the bogus "United States antigen." Thus, using Strecker's metaphor again, the CDC had dressed a quadriplegic infant in a disguise. Except this time, when it arrived at the party, party goers saw through the disguise and knew the CDC had dressed and delivered the baby.

These findings were reinforced, Siegert wrote, when researchers finally developed an optimally effective and specific antigen to detect the Marburg virus. With this preparation, no antibody was found "in any of 136 monkeys from Uganda and South Africa, or in 25 serum samples which had been found positive by other teams" using the CDC's "United States antigen."4

"For this reason," Siegert concluded, "it seems inappropriate to refer to the Marburg virus as a simian virus so long as its origin remains unclear. Determination of the virus reservoir is one of the most important tasks yet to be accomplished. It is not impossible that a unique chance event is involved For this reason the risk of future outbreaks cannot yet be determined "4

The WHO on Marburg

Another text I found that morning at UNC's medical library was a 1977 WHO publication written by Dr. I. H. Simpson from the Department of Medical Microbiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.5 Simpson had led one of the WHO-dispatched teams to the Ebola region of Zaire during the 1976 outbreak.

Although Simpson's text lacked the depth of Siegert's, he did provide a few more interesting details about the obscure origins and virus reservoirs of Marburg, and the possible infection routes through intact skin and the air.5

Simpson also described the "alarming" case-fatality rate that occurred during the Ebola outbreaks:

Between July and November 1976, two very extensive and almost simultaneous epidemics of a similar disease occurred about 1000 km apart in Southern Sudan and northern Zaire. Secondary and tertiary person-to-person spread of the infection was a distinct feature of these outbreaks, particularly among hospital staff. In some cases in Sudan as many as eight "generations" of infection were found, but this was unusual. There are believed to have been over 300 cases, with 151 deaths, in Sudan, and in Zaire some 237 cases, with 211 fatalities, have been documented; the actual numbers may be greater. In one Sudanese hospital 76 members of a staff of 230 were infected and 41 died. Throughout the Zaire epidemic and during the earlier stages of the Sudanese outbreak the case-fatality rate was of the order of almost 90%, leading to fear and panic in the local populations. These alarming figures emphasize the tremendous public health importance of this disease.5

The outbreak in Sudan is thought to have begun in the first week of July 1976, with the illness of a cloth-room storekeeper in a cotton factory in Nzara (Western Equatorial Province). Two weeks later a second storekeeper also became ill, followed a further two weeks later by another cotton factory employee. One of his contacts introduced the disease to Maridi, some distance east of Nzara. The source of the original infection has still not been determined. The infection spread swiftly but only through close and prolonged household contact with an active case. Health personnel in particular were involved through contact with patients' blood, and Maridi hospital acted as an amplifier of the disease. When good nursing techniques, supplemented by the use of protective clothing, were introduced the number of contact infections fell dramatically.

In Zaire, the first recognized case occurred during the first week of September 1976 and is thought to have originated at a small mission hospital in Yambuku, just north of Yandonage, Equateur Region. It is thought that parenteral [through the skin] injections may have played a role in transmission. Patients infected in the hospital environment probably then carried the infection back to their villages, setting up new pockets of infection in their homes. The source of the infection in Zaire remains unknown, but it may have been introduced to Yambuku by a patient presenting at the outpatient clinic with a nonspecific febrile illness.5


Besides acknowledging the similarity of Marburg viruses to "the Rhabdoviridae," Siegert also mentioned the possibility that the germs, given their large size and unmistakable appearance, could have evolved from "a whole roster of plant viruses."4 I recalled that because of their large size, plant viruses were among the first viruses studied and manipulated by NCI researchers,6 including Robert Gallo's team.? Thus, it seemed even more plausible that the "natural reservoir" of the Ebola and Marburg viruses was, in NCI laboratories.

The Walter Royal Davis Library

Fortunately, as it turned out, UNC's medical library did not hold the vast majority of references the computer provided. Several were history texts and the rest were government documents. To retrieve these, a kindly librarian told me, I needed to visit the Walter Royal Davis Library a few blocks away. So I packed my gear and headed over to the campus's main library.

A dimly lit upper floor of Davis housed the German history books. After several minutes of perusing its stacks, I came upon two texts about Marburg, both in German. With my rusting memory of conversational German, I plowed through the books in search of clues. They were either nonexistent or I missed them.

I rode the elevator back to the first floor confident that Davis held more for me than dead ends. The government documents department was my next hope.

My first objective was to locate a five-volume set entitled, Virology. The texts were written by a task force from the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and published by USDHEW in 1979. I presented the citation to a librarian who said she would retrieve the books in the library's basement. She turned, left, and five minutes later returned with Virology.

"Are you going to be doing more research in this department?" she asked.

"Very possibly; over the next two days," I said.

"Then you may as well get a pass to the basement so you can access your references yourself."

Twist my arm, I thought, knowing that special treasures always appeared whenever I roamed such places.

"See the fellow at the end of the counter. He'll issue you a pass."

I took her advice. Then I claimed an empty desk and began to read Virology.

The sections dealing with Marburg and Ebola basically reviewed what I had already learned.

Several parts of Virology, though, were very interesting. I learned one most important fact -- researchers preferred working with simian monkey (SV40) viruses because they were "the most malleable and best characterized," which made them easier "to clone and propagate" specific fragments of foreign DNA in mammalian cells.8

Evolution of the Species

Virology also explained that during the late 1960s, researchers advanced a new theory of evolution. Some believed that evolution of species was not so much based on "survival of the fittest." Viruses were thought to playa more important role. Researchers proposed that foreign DNA transmitted to plant and animal hosts by viruses caused organisms to evolve.9

Thus, viruses were not only believed to hold the key to vaccine development and disease prevention, but to human evolution as well. Many researchers claimed that through "future research on viral evolution," a genetically superior race of humans may be synthetically evolved. In the task force's jargon: "Further exploration of the molecular paleontology of endogenous retroviruses could help elucidate the processes of speciation."6

Retroviruses, the report continued, were particularly important in this regard. Studies on the "evolution of viruses," had allegedly provided new evidence in support of the theory "that man originated in Asia rather than in Africa." 10 Taking particular pride in this evidence, the authors then commented that, "accommodations between host and [viral] parasite[s] are alleged to have played a major role in the political and economic development of civilizations."10

The Hot Zone

Early that evening, I caught up with my family for dinner. Jackie and Alena had spent part of the day shopping, and had bought Daddy a gift -- The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston. 11 I had heard about this allegedly true account of the famous Hazleton monkey house outbreak of the dreaded Reston (Ebola-like) virus as I was finishing up work on Deadly Innocence. I just hadn't gotten around to reading it since it seemed off the subject of AIDS. Now, however, the time seemed perfect. So that night in a motel room, as the girls watched television and then drifted off to sleep, I started and finished The Hot Zone.

For a "nonfiction" book, the Random House publication had remained on the New York Times best-seller list far longer than even most works of fiction. Preston, the author of an earlier book entitled American Steel -- about "the Nucor Corporation and its project to build a revolutionary steel mill" -- won several awards for his writing, including the prestigious American Institute of Physics Award, and the McDermott Award in the Arts from M.I.T. How this investigative journalist with no medical background had gone from revealing revolutionary steel industry accomplishments to viral epidemics struck me as suspicious---especially since I knew the steel industry had been targeted, by Bobby Kennedy, for investigation because of widespread corruption, and had in its ranks SMOM Nazi-linked industrialists, including John Farrell, the past president of U.S. Steel.

My suspicions, soon grew feverish. The Hot Zone, I realized, omitted almost all of the relevant scientific facts. Preston completely overlooked the extraordinary research environments in which the AIDS, Marburg, Ebola, and Reston viruses emerged. He gave no hint of the covert military operations that had permeated Central Africa at the time of the major Ebola outbreaks in 1976. He wrote nothing of the political forces effecting African development and population control at the time. He failed to mention the numerous USAID-sponsored immunization programs and widespread vaccine experiments that ran throughout the AIDS belt and the sixteen Central West African countries. Apparently he felt this was immaterial for his "terrifying true story."

Indeed, The Hot Zone was a labor of devout censorship. The only logical explanation for Preston's treatise is that the CIA and military-medical-industrial complex had persuaded the author to produce a marvelous piece of yellow press, and acquired Random House to publish it.

Preston and patrons of The Hot Zone clearly wanted people to know that the world might soon be plagued by viruses far more deadly than AIDS and to be prepared for the worst. What frightened me most about that realization was the probability that those who fanned such fears would make good on their threats.

Viral Propaganda

The Hot Zone's main thesis would be laughable were it not for its seriousness. Through exceptionally gruesome prose, Preston advanced the notion that new human-immune-system ravaging germs most likely emerged from bat guano on the floor of Kitum cave in Southwestern Kenya during the mid-1970s. The viruses were then, allegedly, picked up by neighboring monkeys and delivered around the world by African animal traders.

Preston lost his credibility in the The Hot Zone's opening chapter when he discussed the initial outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus (Ebola strain). Here he alleged the virus claimed its first victim-Charles Monet, a Frenchman, whose job, Preston claimed, was "to take care of the sugar factory's water pumping machinery." In nauseating detail, Preston described Monet's alleged sojourn. Monet then died at "Nairobi Hospital," but not before vomiting into the "eyes and mouth" of Dr. Shem Musoke, who nine days later allegedly "broke with the infection" too.

Terrifying? Yes. True story? Hardly.

By Simpson's scientific and more accurate account, Ebola's first victim was "a cloth-room storekeeper in a cotton factory in Nzara (Western Equatorial Province). Two weeks later, a second storekeeper also became ill, followed a further two weeks later by another cotton factory employee." 5

Giving Preston the benefit of doubt, had he made a mistake, had he thought the Zaire outbreak was Ebola's first, then he should have described events emanating from Yambuku's and not Nairobi's hospital.

Marburg, Preston continued:

... is an African organism, but it has a German name. Viruses are named for the place where they are first discovered. Marburg is an old city in central Germany, surrounded by forests and meadows, where factories nestle in green valleys. The virus erupted there in 1967, in a factory called the Behring Works, which produced vaccines using kidney cells from African green monkeys. The Behring Works regularly imported monkeys from Uganda. The virus came to Germany hidden somewhere in a series of air shipments of monkeys totaling five or six hundred animals. As few as two or three of the animals were incubating the virus.11


"They were probably not even visibly sick," Preston speculated. "At any rate, [meaning, 'I'm not sure, but let's continue with this allegedly true account anyway'] shortly after they arrived ... the virus began to spread among them, and a few of them crashed and bled out. Soon afterward, the Marburg agent jumped species and suddenly emerged in the human population of the city. This is an example of virus amplification."11

Propaganda is a more accurate description of this example, I thought, realizing it was highly unlikely that quality European vaccine producers would rely on careless "monkey traders" to supply their animals. As I realized earlier that day, and Preston later noted,18 the supplier undoubtedly would have maintained a large quarantined monkey facility in order to be exporting so many expensive monkeys around the world at one time.

Given the bizarre nature and extreme virulence of the germ, it was far more likely, then, that DOD or NCI biological weapons contractors like Litton Bionetics or OTRAG had slipped up somehow and Europe<m vaccine workers paid the price. As Gallo and numerous others published, 13 and the Army's director of defense Research and Engineering explained, cancer- causing monkey viruses were being manipulated at the exact time, and for the first time in history, simultaneously in Uganda, Bethesda, New York, and elsewhere. At this time, "new infective microorganisms" that differed from "any known disease-causing organisms" were being produced by the billions. Many were likely to have escaped accidentally.14

Fort Detrick's accident record, for instance, was appalling. I recalled that during the 1969 congressional hearings on chemical and biological warfare, senators learned that at Fort Detrick, some 3,300 accidents were recorded between 1954 and 1962. "Half of these in laboratories involving the infection of more than 500 men .... There was even one case of a worker who caught plague."15

Even physician Robin Cook's fictional account of the source of these viruses in Outbreak noted a military origin and purpose.17 Preston's account, therefore, seemed an insult to medical intelligence and common sense.

Explaining that the Hazleton monkey house was generally considered a safe haven for monkey immigrants, much of Preston's book detailed the hysteria that ensued when a "honker from Zaire" resembling Ebola broke out among one floor of African monkeys "from the Philippines."18

"What was it doing near Washington?" one of Preston's characters questioned. "How in the hell had it gotten here? What would it do? ... I'm onto something really hot."19

Preston explained that an unidentified African monkey dealer had sold the hot monkeys to a Philippine wholesaler who dealt with the U.S. military. To his credit, Preston explained that the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick was the Hazleton monkey house's chief customer. The operation, he noted, was owned and operated by Hazleton Research Products, a division of (Dow) Coming, Inc.

What he failed to mention was that besides monkeys, Hazleton Research Products sold monkey viruses to military scientists. The NCI's retrovirus chief Robert Gallo was one of their customers.20 Hazleton supplied Rausher leukemia viruses for Gallo's group at Litton Bionetics, and there is evidence that Hazleton obtained monkeys from Litton Bionetics.13 The CIA's Project MKNAOMI was, apparently, another end user.20

Twisted Truth and Tall Tales

For all its deception, The Hot Zone chronicled some important events associated with the famous Ebola virus outbreaks. In each chapter, however, Preston managed to either twist the truth or tell tall tales.

Enter Preston's hero, Eugene Johnson. "Those people who work with Ebola are crazy. To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax."21 Mr. Johnson, was apparently one such crazy person. According to Preston, he was "a civilian biohazard expert who was running the Ebola research program at the Institute." When ever, I thought, would the U.S. Army hire a civilian to run one of its most important, top-secret research projects?

My suspicions intensified when I read that Johnson had "virtually ransacked Africa looking for these life forms, but despite his searches he had never found them in their natural hiding places ... To find the hidden reservoir of Ebola was one of Johnson's great ambitions."21

I found it difficult to believe that some slightly looney civilian was going to spend his hard-earned cash and years of work ravaging through the rain forests of Africa to capture a virus that if touched or breathed might kill him in days.

Preston continued:

Whatever these Ebola proteins do, they seem to target the immune system for special attack. In this they are like HIV, which also destroys the immune system, but unlike the onset of HIV, the attack by Ebola is explosive. As Ebola sweeps through you, your immune system fails, and you seem to lose your ability to respond to the viral attack. Your body becomes a city under siege, with its gates thrown open and hostile armies pouring in, making camp in the public squares and setting everything on fire; and from the moment Ebola enters your bloodstream, the war is already lost; you are almost certainly doomed. You can't fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish .... In Zaire during the 1976 outbreak, grieving relatives kissed and embraced the dead or prepared the body for burial, and then, three to fourteen days later, they broke with Ebola.21


"The virus," Preston wrote, "erupted simultaneously in fifty-five villages surrounding the hospital." This, of course, would have been virtually impossible without the help of a mass vaccination or dissemination program. Otherwise, as Simpson described,5 the virus would have begun to spread slowly: first from one individual to a few others, then perhaps to many more in a couple of villages; then to several others wiping the first ones out. Despite evidence that Ebola can spread through the air, 3,5 aerosolized spread could not reconcile large simultaneous outbreaks in "fifty-five villages" unless Mark Chatigny and Alfred Hellman, the NCI's experts in viral aerosols, dropped them from airplanes.

First it killed people who had received injections, and then it moved through families, killing family members, particularly women, who in Africa prepare the dead for burial. It swept through the Yambuku Hospital's nursing staff, killing most of the nurses, and then it hit the Belgian nuns. The first nun to break with Ebola was a midwife who had delivered a stillborn child .... 22


The nun's blood was "flown to a national laboratory in [Antwerp] Belgium," wrote Preston, without mentioning they co-hosted NATO's bioweapons conference in 1970,23was one of only four labs that in 1977 reported to maintain "optimum biocontainment facilities." Fort Detrick was not listed, nor was Gallo's lab at the NCI or Bionetics. Only the "Special Pathogens Branch" of the CDC, the "Special Pathogens Unit" at Porton Down, Moscow's Institute of Poliomyelitis and Virus Encephalitides, and Antwerp's Institute de Medecine Tropicale Prince Leopold were listed.1

What ever would have possessed the American and British labs to share the word "Special" in their titles? Given the use of the term in the CIA and the military denoted "secret" or "covert," I would have thought they might have avoided the inference.24

The "Maximum Leader of Zaire"

According to Preston, not long after the nun's blood was shipped to Europe, the CDC's Special Pathogens Branch director, Dr. Karl M. Johnson (not to be confused with the eccentric "civilian" Eugene Johnson mentioned earlier), "telephoned a friend of his at the English lab, Porton Down" to request a sample of this especially rare blood. And when news of the horrendous outbreak was received at WHO offices in Geneva, the place "went into a full-scale alert. People who were there at the time said that you could feel fear in the hallways, and the director looked like a visibly shaken man.... "25

By this time, President Mobutu Sese Seko, whom Preston described as the "maximum leader of Zaire," sent his army to the Bumba Zone.

He stationed soldiers around Ngaliema Hospital with orders to let no one enter or leave except doctors. Much of the medical staff was now under quarantine inside the hospital, but the soldiers made sure that the quarantine was enforced. President Mobutu also ordered army units to seal off Bumba Zone with roadblocks and to shoot anyone trying to come out. Bumba's main link with the outside world was the Congo River. Captains of riverboats had heard about the virus by this time, and they refused to stop their boats anywhere along the length of the river in Bumba, even though people beseeched them from the banks. Then all radio contact with Bumba was lost. No one knew what was happening upriver, who was dying, what the virus was doing. Bumba had dropped off the face of the earth into the silent heart of darkness.25


The WHO then made contact with Dr. Johnson who then "became the chief of an international WHO team" that gathered in the capital city of Kinshasa.

Following the orientation, Preston recounted how some of the team flew on to the Bumba region in "President Mobutu's private plane." The prize-winning author described the aircraft as a "C-130 Buffalo troop-transport, an American-made military aircraft that belonged to the Zairean Air Force." He even detailed the plane's interior, noting it had been "equipped with leopard-skin seats, folding beds, and a wet bar, a sort of flying presidential palace that ordinarily took the president and his family on vacations to Switzerland, but now it carried the WHO team into the hot zone, following the Congo River north by east."26 Given Preston's love for fine detail, I thought it odd he failed to mention Mobutu's plane, along with most of Zaire's military hardware, was a gift from Dr. Kissinger; delivered courtesy of the CIA.27

But the most important factor missed in The Hot Zone was the turbulent and bizarre relationship between Zaire's supreme dictator and America's premier imperialist, shortly preceding the 1976 Ebola outbreak.

I recalled that in June 1975, after decades of accepting more than $2 billion in aid from Western allies,28Mobutu expelled the American ambassador and arrested most of the CIA's Zairian agents, placing some of them under death sentences.29 My Africa Diary search showed that preceding this action, the "maximum leader of Zaire" had "criticized the U.S. for following a passive and sometimes negative policy towards Africa. American leaders," he insinuated, "spoke of all continents in their major speeches except Africa. South Africa's policy of granting independence to small tribes under its control was criminal, he said, because it ensured that the free territories would depend completely on South Africa economically." 30

Far worse than his open criticism of Western imperialists, however, was Mobutu's legislative response. In February 1975, he issued orders to nationalize all foreign-owned companies. The Africa Diary reported:

Extensive measures of nationalisation, restriction of imports, establishment of agricultural brigades and cooperatives, a ban on religious instruction in schools and the destruction of all faculties of theology are among decisions made recently by the Political Bureau of the MPR. All places connected with the life of President Mobutu Sese Soko have been proclaimed "places of meditation." 31


"President Mobutu," Azap News Agency reported, had "also declared war on the country's Bourgeoise .... Speaking at the opening session of the National Assembly, the President accused functionaries who had used their positions to grow [rich and influence the nation's] commerce. 'It is not tolerable that the 300 colonial families that pillaged Zaire and who we fought should be replaced by 300 Zaire families,' he said."31

Then, in a move that would have surely and irrevocably irked the ardent Papal supporters of the SMOM, Mobutu "complained that the walls of schools were decorated with photographs of Pope Paul and crosses while they did not have photographs of the President."

"Zaire citizens must first know of the man who sacrifices night and day tor their happiness before knowing of the Pope and other strangers." He also described Christian religious ceremonies such as Christmas and Ascension Day "as a form of [spiritual] alienation repugnant to the public of Zaire."31


Mobutu later denied he wanted "to create a devine [aura] around the presidency by banning religious education."31 He also denied that the decisions taken by the government were communist inspired. He did announce, though, that he had recently visited China and Russia and that these countries along with North Korea would soon begin "construction of munitions and agricultural machinery plants in Zaire."31

Six months later, the CIA was blamed for a failed assassination attempt on Mobutu's Iife.32 A year later, Ebola broke out in Nzara along Zaire's northern border. Four months later, the Ebola valley was hit.

Is there any doubt why Mobutu suddenly reestablished ties with Washington, expelled the Soviet and Cuban diplomats from Zaire, and recanted on many of his social taboos?
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