This is something I wrote a couple years ago:
THIRTY SECONDS OVER CUBA
In February of 1996 Cuban fighters shot down two supposedly unarmed light
planes which were purported to be assisting Cuban refugees who were
fleeing the island. The light planes would supposedly search for small
boats and rafts headed north and report their location to the American
Coast Guard. The Coast Guard would then rescue the refugees. However, the
supply of refugees had in fact petered out. Most Cubans, for reasons
difficult for most of us to fathom, prefer Cuba, even under Castro, to our
own balmy shore.
So what were those planes really doing? We'll never know. Two were blown
out of the sky by the Cuban Air Force. The subsequent fallout included
heightened sanctions on trade with Cuba and a renewed interest in Cuban
affairs by the U._S. press. Never a paper to be left out of a trend, the
<San Francisco Chronicle> gave us the following:
************************
"IN CUBA, MIGHTY MILITARY MACHINE PLAYS A MULTITUDE OF ROLES
. . . Fear might be precisely the reason that a small Caribbean island,
which nevertheless is one of the most militarized nations in the world,
would scramble MiG-29 fighter planes armed with advance (sic) missiles to
shoot down unarmed Cessnas apparently with little or no warning.
'We are 90 miles from an enemy that is the world's only superpower, and
which took three days to wipe out Iraq,' Carlos Losada Jardin, 44, a
former soldier who spent 37 months with the Cuban army in Angola, said,
explaining Cuba's large military and quick response."
-- <San Francisco Chronicle>, 3/4/96
************************
Consider this: We have only the word of the Cuban-Americans responsible
for the ill fated flight that the planes WERE unarmed. True, most
Americans BELIEVE they were unarmed., but that does not make it true. Moot
point. It matters not a whit to the Cubans whether or not most Americans
believe those Cessnas might have been armed. Neither does it matter
whether they WERE in fact actually armed. What matters is whether the
Cubans believe that they MIGHT have been armed.
Now it could be that those planes were set up by Cuban-Americans in
Florida who sacrificed them in order to gain a propaganda victory. This
could have been easily done by tipping off Cuban intelligence that on this
particular mission, these particular planes WERE armed, and with a deadly
weapon that their pilots fully intended to use once they penetrated Cuban
airspace. As soon as the double agent's disinformation reached Cuban
command the shoot down order would have gone out immediately.
Though this scenario is only a speculation, this is not some wacko
paranoid fantasy. This sort of thing is a standard, time tested and much
used stratagem, well worn, immensely successful, and dating back to
antiquity.
On the other hand, Cuban intelligence had no need of a "tip" to make them
consider that the planes might be armed. On the contrary, they could draw
on their thirty years of experience dealing with covert penetration of
their airspace by light planes and their waters by small boats.
************************
"'There is garrison-state mentality,' said a diplomat, who asked not to be
identified. 'It's not credible that Cuba is going to be invaded by anybody
except mosquitoes, so (large military) is a way of maintaining control.'"
-- <Ibid >
*************************
Again, we have only the anonymous diplomat's word for this, but just for
the sake of argument, let's assume that s/he's telling the truth.
" . . . anybody except mosquitoes . . .", eh?
Now THERE'S a clue. Let's look a little deeper into this mosquito thing.
Just how bad COULD an invasion by mosquitoes be, really? To find out, we
must take a much deeper look than offered by America's lap dog mass media
news. When we're spoon fed the "news," we only get what they put on the
spoon. The best stuff they leave on the plate.
Consider Chemical Biological Warfare (CBW) for example. It's not something
that the powers that be want us to think about, so it's pretty much absent
from the six o'clock news. That doesn't mean it's not happening, only that
we're not being told much about it and what little we ARE told we have to
seek out and think over before it makes sense. But what sort of weapons
CAN arm a Cessna in a meaningful manner? It's a very short list. Factor in
economics, and the list is topped by CBW.
Before we jump to any conclusions, let's examine the history of CBW in
Cuba. It does have a history, one with which Cubans are acutely familiar.
It begins during the Cold War. Return with us then to those wild and
woolly days of yesteryear, when, much like today, Cuban fought Cuban in a
shadow war, a war fought partly on the behalf of personal ambitions and
partly on the behalf of their Cold War, super power, puppet masters. The
year is 1981. The scene is the U. N. General Assembly. The Cuban
ambassador speaks.
************************
"CUBA SAYS U. S. USED BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS TO KILL 156 PEOPLE
UNITED NATIONS (UPI) - Cuba publicly accused the United States Thursday
before the U. N. General Assembly of using biological warfare against the
island nation in a campaign that killed 156 Cubans, including 99 children.
'In less than three years, our country has suffered the scourge of five
grave plagues and epidemics, which have hit our cattle, our plantations
and now our people,' Cuban Foreign Minister Isidoro Malmierca told the
assembly in his policy speech.
'The agencies of the U. S. are using biological weapons against the people
of Cuba.
'Ninety-nine children have died in Cuba,' he charged. 'They were victims
of the hemorrhagic dengue epidemic that took from us a toll of 156 lives.'
Cuban President Fidel Castro has in the past charged that the CIA was
responsible for spreading the diseases in Cuba.
Malmierca said Cuba has been hit successively by 'the swine fever, the
blue mold in tobacco, the sugar cane rot, the hemorrhagic dengue and, more
recently, when we were still in the process of fighting of this one,
hemorrhagic conjunctivitis appears.'"
-- <Houston Post>, 9/25/81
************************
Just how plausible are such claims? Do the Cubans actually believe them,
to the extent that they would actively defend themselves against the
threat such claims imply, or are they just telling more commie lies
because, as is well known, commies believe, "the end justifies the means."
It's hard to tell with a commie. You can't just take his word; you have to
verify everything. Nevertheless, sometimes even commies tell the truth.
************************
"Cuba's charges could not be proved, but they were not farfetched. As
noted above, the United States has frequently destroyed enemy crops. The
CIA tried to overthrow the Cuban government at the Bay of Pigs and mounted
numerous assassination attempts against Castro. Agency -interest- in
sabotaging the Cuban economy with chemical or biological methods against
crops and workers is also a matter of public record . . ."
-- <Gene Wars > by Charles Pillar and Keith R. Yamamoto,
Beech Tree Books-William Morrow, New York, 1988,
ISBN 0-688-07050-7, p 72
************************
Six years after it happened, one incident came to light.
************************
"CIA LINK TO CUBAN PIG VIRUS REPORTED
New York -- With at least the tacit backing of U. S. Central Intelligence
Agency officials, operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced
African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971.
Six weeks later an outbreak of the disease forced the slaughter of 500,000
pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic.
A U. S. intelligence source told Newsday last week he was given the virus
in a sealed, unmarked container at a U. S. Army base and CIA training
ground in Panama with instructions to turn it over to the anti-Castro
group.
The 1971 outbreak, the first and only time the disease has hit the Western
Hemisphere, was labeled the 'most alarming event' of 1971 by the United
Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. African swine fever is a
highly contagious and usually lethal viral disease that infects only pigs
and unlike swine flu, cannot be transmitted to humans.
All production of pork, a Cuban staple, halted, apparently for several
months.
A CIA spokesman, Dennis Berend, in response to a Newsday request for
comment, said, 'We don't comment on information from unnamed and, at best,
obscure sources.
<snip>
. . . on the basis of numerous interviews over four months' with U. S.
intelligence sources, Cuban exiles and scientists concerning the outbreak
-- which occurred two years after then-President Nixon had banned the use
of offensive chemical and biological warfare -- <Newsday> was able to
piece together this account of events leading up to the outbreak.
The U. S. intelligence source said that early in 1971 he was given the
virus in a sealed, unmarked container at Ft. Gulick, an Army base in the
Panama Canal Zone. The CIA also operates a paramilitary training center
for career personnel and mercenaries at Ft. Gulick. The source said he was
given instruction to turn the container over to members of an anti-Castro
group.
The container was given to a person in the Canal Zone, who took it by boat
and turned it over to persons aboard a fishing trawler off the Panamanian
coast. The source said the substance was not identified to him until
months after the outbreak in Cuba. He would not elaborate further.
Another man involved in the operation, a Cuban exile who asked not to be
identified, said he was on the trawler when the virus was put aboard at a
rendezvous point off Bocas del Toro, Panama. He said the trawler carried
the virus to Navassa Island, a tiny, deserted, U. S.-owned island between
Jamaica and Haiti. From there, after the trawler made a brief stopover,
the container was taken to Cuba and given to other operatives near the U.
S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay.
The source on the trawler, who had been trained by the CIA and had carried
out previous missions for the agency, said he saw no CIA officials aboard
the boat that delivered the virus to the trawler off Panama, but added:
'We were very well paid for this and Cuban exile groups don't have that
kind of money . . ."
He said he was revealing the information because he is a member of an
exile group being investigated by the United States in connection with
terrorist activity in Florida. His account was confirmed by another
intelligence source in Miami. The source said he had no proof that the
operation was approved by CIA officials in Washington, but added: 'In a
case like this, though, they would always give them (CIA officials in
Washington) plausible deniability.'
The investigation referred to by the operative on the trawler involves a
federal inquiry into terrorist acts allegedly carried out by Cuban exiles.
Those include bombings and assassination attempts in the United States and
Venezuela."
-- <Newsday>, 1/10/77
************************
Here, as ever, the veracity of the covert action story relies on on
hearsay. Hearsay attributed to anonymous sources, especially when they are
they type of people who would actually do something as morally
reprehensible as CBW is far from ideal evidence. Unfortunately, the very
nature of secrecy makes confirmation of any spook story a tenuous affair
at best. Hearsay is often the only clue there is. However it pays to
consider that a looming felony indictment is one of the few forces
historically known to ever drive the covert operator in from the cold.
When enough such accounts accumulate, a picture begins to emerge. They
contribute greatly to the body of circumstantial evidence that CBW is
indeed an active component of the modern covert arsenal. Before you
dismiss circumstantial evidence as, well, "merely circumstantial,"
consider that the proverbial "smoking gun" itself is, by definition,
circumstantial evidence.
Getting a straight answer about this sort of stuff from "our" government
is every bit as difficult as sorting the germ of truth from any
communist's propaganda.
************************
"To be sure, the very nature of clandestine and surveillance government
precludes the possibility that everything, or even the most interesting
material, will ever surface. FOIPA researchers invariably encounter the
redacted document -- a report or memo with marker scratches over the
important stuff. Even with the FOIPA mandates, the real skinny often will
be withheld in this manner, or in its entirety for the sake of national
security. That excuse has always begged the question of how a people can
be secure if they don't know their own history, but it is the standard by
which government agencies block access to the most important secrets.
Agencies, of course, do not have to release documents they claim do not
exist, thereby excluding them even from being tagged as protected by
national security concerns."
-- Kenn Thomas, editor of <Steamshovel Press>,
writing in <Flatland #13 >
The <Steamshovel Press > home page is:
http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma
For <Flatland >subscription info email:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
************************
" . . . the BW attacks on Germany, Japan, and North Korea will probably
never be decisively verified or disproved. Throughout its history the U.
S. CBW program has worn a remarkably effective cloak of secrecy. During
the 1960s about 85 percent of the work of Fort Detrick's hundreds of
researchers was classified, as were all of Dugway's tests.
Seymour Hersh has suggested that CBW 'overclassification' was designed to
avoid domestic disapproval rather than the enemy's gaze. CBW information
was so closely held that even ranking Pentagon civilians and White House
defense advisers understood little about it. Ironically, data were
routinely disbursed to ten U. S. allies. 'I always figured everything we
sent them they passed on to Moscow,' a recalcitrant former Chemical Corps
officer told Hersh.
Decades-old documents are still kept secret. Research for this book
included a Freedom of Information Act request for BW test data from the
1950s and 1960s. The army acknowledged the existence of at least 1.5
million pages of pertinent information, only a tiny fraction of which has
so far been released."
-- <Gene Wars>, p 51
************************
" . . . nuclear weapons gradually grew to dominate overall defense
strategy . . . at the Pentagon, U. S. posture on both biological and
chemical arms began to change. By the late 1940s powerful military leaders
had concluded that CBW were troublesome anachronisms. . . . it didn't make
sense to continue concentrating on socially repugnant, controversial
weapons of questionable reliability . . . and the very survival of the
corps seemed questionable.
<snip>
. . . corps leaders decided to take action against the public
squeamishness and bureaucratic timidity that were strangling their
efforts. They initiated Operation Blue Skies. This brilliant publicity
maneuver, conceived by outside public relations consultants, was designed
to teach people to 'love that gas,' as one analyst quipped. Numerous
articles placed in the popular press, congressional appearances, lectures,
speeches, and symposia all recycled the antiquated notion that chemical
and biological weapons -- sometimes less lethal than bombs or bullets --
were the most 'humane' of all weapons. One article went so far as to
suggest that CBW research and development offered the promise of 'war
without death.'
Simultaneously Chemical Corps representatives, who argued forcefully that
CBW disarmament presented insurmountable verification problems, began to
release precise estimates of Soviet CBW strength for the first time. In
1960 the head of army research told a congressional committee that
one-sixth of the Soviet arsenal consisted of chemical munitions. If true,
this massive buildup was a frightful problem indeed. It would warrant a
major U. S. response.
According to a 'normally reliable source of Pulitzer Prize-winning
reporter Seymour Hersh, however, the calculations were of dubious merit.
'The Army computed the roof size of the Russian sheds,' the source noted,
'figured out how many gallons of nerve gas could be stored in a
comparably-sized shed in Utah, added a 20 percent fudge factor, and came
up with the estimate.'
It is uncertain whether the Chemical Corps really took seriously its
'humane weapons' fiction or inventive intelligence reports. But Operation
Blue Skies worked. . . . CBW lobbyists had filled the heads of high
officials and the public with fantasies of benign weapons that destroyed
the will to resist without killing the enemy or harming valuable property.
This was comforting imagery compared with nuclear incineration. . . . CBW
research and development appropriations soared."
-- <Ibid>, pp 42-43
************************
So much for outright lies.
As for hearsay, that's another matter. One way you can tell if a commie
(or anybody else, for that matter) is lying or not is to check out who it
is that they cite.
Check out this article by Cuban journalist Alberto Rabilotta, which
originally appeared in the September 23, 1984 issue of <Granma>, the
newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, and was reprinted in <Daily
World> October 10, 1984.
************************
"The epidemic of dengue fever that affected Cuba in 1981 'was simply the
latest in a long list of chemical and bacteriological attacks against the
country' by the United States. The quote comes from an article from the
Montreal, Canada Prensa Latina office on August 6, 1982, which summed up
the charges made by the monthly publication <Covert Action>, put out in
Washington.
Two years later, on September 10, 1984, a well-known counterrevolutionary
leader of Cuban origin, Eduardo Arocena -- who heads the United States
based Omega 7 terrorist group -- told a New York jury that he had been
involved in that action as part of a larger operation.
Arocena's admission confirms what was said in 1982 and, of course, denied
by the Reagan administration. However, we would do well to recall the
charges made by <Covert Action>.
The magazine explained that, since the start of the 1959 Revolution, Cuba
has been the target of Pentagon and CIA chemical and bacteriological
warfare plans, including assassination attempts on Cuban revolutionary
leaders through the use of poison and damage to the economy by burning
cane-fields.
On September 16, 1979, The <Washington Post> reported that the CIA had
prepared a program of war on Cuban agriculture and the Pentagon had
developed a biological agent for use against Cuba in the 1962 October
crisis -- probably a virus.
In 1970 the CIA introduced swine fever in Cuba, as explained in the book
<The Fish is Red>, by former agents Warren Hinkle and William Turner,
which resulted in the necessary slaughter of 500,000 hogs.
On January 9, 1977 <Newsday> magazine made public another bacteriological
attack plan targeting Cuban poultry -- but this one failed.
In 1980, <The Nation> magazine, in an article by Bill Schaap, said Cuba
had been subjected to another swine fever outbreak, blue mold in tobacco
and sugar cane smut; such a combination of epidemics led even those not
very well informed to suspect U. S. involvement in these "natural"
disasters in Cuba.
In 1982, the dengue epidemic broke out in Cuba, leading to high fever and
hemorrhage in one of its forms; the CIA and the Pentagon, according to
<Covert Action>, researched this disease as part of the offensive arsenal
for chemical and bacteriological warfare which can be spread through
natural vectors such as mosquitoes."
-- <Daily World>, 10/10/84
************************
"Mosquitoes," eh? Pesky little critters, aren't they?
More on them later. They are certainly not the only way to spread disease
from the air. Nor is this the first time we have heard of bio-weapons
being used against hogs as a potential means of waging economic warfare.
************************
"BOMBS OF A FEATHER -- OR 30 SECONDS OVER DES MOINES
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) . . . scientists from one of the leading agriculture
schools worked in the 1950s to develop a way to spread hog cholera with
turkey feather bombs, according to the Des Moines Sunday Register.
The copyright article said the scientists from Iowa State University
helped in building and testing a bomb that exploded in air, releasing
thousands of turkey feathers carrying the deadly hog cholera virus.
<snip>
No hog Cholera bombings took place in Iowa, but several preliminary field
tests were conducted in the state which leads the nation in livestock
production. A bomb was dropped near Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, the
newspaper said.
Two feather-filled bombs were detonated 1,500 feet over the base on July
14, 1951, infecting more than 90 research hogs at the base, the article
said. The feathers spread over an area 2.8 miles long and a half-mile
wide, documents said."
-- <Associated Press>, 6/19/82
************************
Note the internal contradiction. Was it one bomb or two? On the other
hand, in light of the following, does it really matter?
************************
"The records did not say whether the Florida open air bombings or the
field tests in Iowa infected any domestic livestock."
-- <Ibid >
************************
Something to think about, eh?
Now back to Cuba. Rabilotta continues:
************************
"This bacteriological weapon is 'ideal' for different reasons, including
the characteristics of the different kinds of virus which cause dengue
(the hemorrhagic type can be fatal in children and adolescents), speed of
propagation, 'if there are favorable winds'; and the difficulty of proving
human involvement in giving rise to it.
Scientific evidence showed that in 1981 and 1982 the epidemic broke out in
three different parts of Cuba (Havana, Cienfuegos and Camaguey) and those
affected were persons who had not been abroad.
There is no doubt about the fact that the Pentagon and the CIA have been
studying the nature of dengue. In 1969, U. S. journalist Seymour Hersh, in
his book <Chemical and Bacteriological Warfare: the Hidden Arsenal of the
United States > reported that in 1959 there had been dengue experiments in
Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the Walter Reed Institute in Washington.
In 1963, the magazine <Military Medicine> ran an article stressing the
need to study bacteriological warfare and, by 1972, the Pentagon and CIA
were working with dengue type 2 virus, which causes hemorrhage.
Most of the article sums up what was said in August 1982 by <Covert
Action> and by other sources, all of which has now been confirmed by
terrorist Eduardo Arocena, who for years was a CIA agent.
The confession from Arocena, who is now on trial for the murder of Felix
Garcia, a Cuban diplomat at the UN in 1980, should lead to a probe of who
authorized such aggression against Cuba [Arocena was recently convicted of
murder, conspiracy to murder, use of explosives, and similar charges. --
Ed.]
Experts are clear that chemical and bacteriological weapons are as
dangerous to humanity as nuclear ones.
The fact that Cuba has been attacked in this way as was Democratic Korea
in the '50s and Vietnam in the '70s) should be carefully considered in the
light of Reagan administration policy in Central America and the
Caribbean."
-- <Daily World>, 10/10/84
************************
For those of you who simply refused to trust the foreign, especially
communist press, we turn to San Francisco's very own <Chronicle>.
************************
"ANTI-CASTRO LEADER GUILTY OF WEAPONS CHARGES
Miami -- A federal jury yesterday found Eduardo Arocena, the alleged
leader of the anti-Castro terrorist group Omega 7, guilty of possessing
illegal weapons and conspiracy to manufacture and possess firearms.
The jury also found co-defendant Milton Badia guilty of the conspiracy
charge. Arocena, already sentenced to life plus 35 years by a federal
court in New York City on murder and terrorism convictions, faces a
possible maximum penalty of 115 years in the Miami case.
In July 1983, FBI agents said they confiscated several weapons, ammunition
and timing devices from Arocena's Miami apartment."
-- <San Francisco Chronicle>, 2/13/85
************************
The <Chronicle> saw fit to omit from its coverage certain testimony which
Arocena gave in his own behalf. For this we turn to <Covert Action
Information Bulletin>.
************************
"What is of more than passing interest is a portion of his testimony in
his own defense. The transcript, for September 10, 1984, reads in
pertinent part as follows:
<snip>
'Q: Whom did you meet in Cuba, Sir?
A: With several high officials of the regime in Cuba, military.
Q: What regime is this, sir?
A: The Communist regime of Cuba.
Q: Sir, weren't you fighting -- I'm sorry.
A: But I clarify this, that these officials are part of the resistance.
Part of the objective was that before me, ahead of me was another ship
with a different mission, a mission that was to be carried out inside
Cuban territory, as stated before . . .
The group that was ahead of me had a mission to carry some germs to
introduce them to Cuba to be used against the Soviets and against the
Cuban economy, to begin what was called chemical war, which later produced
results that were not what we had expected, because we thought that it was
going to be used against Soviet forces, and it was used against our own
people, and with that we did not agree.' (Transcript, pp 2187-2189.)
The implications of this information are very significant and are in
complete conformity with the details set forth in our article, 'The 1981
Cuba Dengue Epidemic' (<CAIB >Number 17). There we indicated that in late
1980 or early 1981 a virulent strain of dengue fever was introduced into
Cuba in a biological warfare operation.
It now seems clear from Arocena's testimony that Omega 7 agents were doing
the dirty work for the CIA and the U. S. government. Why he thought it
would be to his benefit to testify about a part in a biological warfare
operation is hard to explain, but this is not the first time the villains
have provided proof of their own villainy."
-- <Covert Action #22> (Fall 1984), p 35
************************
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