The various governments knew very well from the start of the pandemic that the threat was far greater than just SARS-Cov-2. Any country seriously affected by the pan-demic was particularly vulnerable to a second or third problem that could arise simul-taneously; another pathogen, or a cyber attack.
no government seemed to want to unsettle the population with the scary reality and since everything that has to do with biological weapons is subject to the strictest se-crecy. One could have explained to the citizens that the unpopular measures to con-tain Covid are not only taking place because of the virus, but in order to reduce the country’s particular vulnerability as quickly as possible, so as not to suddenly experi-ence two or three crises at the same time that completely overwhelm us.
No country wants to tell how vulnerable or well protected it is against biological at-tacks, so as not to pass on valuable information to its enemies. Nobody wants to risk unnecessary contact with other people if a second virus suddenly appears that is dan-gerous for people of all ages.
In the book “The Great Influenza” by John Barry we learn vividly how the second wave of the Spanish flu devastated American cities around 100 years ago and the US gov-ernment ordered newspapers to trivialize the situation. The first wave still seemed manageable. The second was hell, as the virus had become more adapted to humans through the mechanism called “passage” after passing through many people.
the Arkansas Gazette newspaper reported:
“Spanish influenza is just a regular flu – the familiar fever and chills.”
Thousands upon thousands of newspapers across the country carried the exact same talking point, that it was just a common flu. In 1918 the publishers were threatened by the US gov-ernment during the Spanish flu: Only print constructive things, such as recommenda-tions for preventive measures. The Los Angeles public health director said: There would be no cause for alarm if normal protective measures are followed. Just wash your hands and that’s enough. 48 hours later, in a panic, he had all public events and meeting places closed. The Bronxville, New York, Review Press and the Reporter reported nothing on the Spanish Flu for a long time. Then people complained about alarmism. Fear was supposedly the bigger prob-lem than the illness.
The Illinois superintendent of public health wanted to propose in a confidential meet-ing that all stores and other companies be temporarily closed. He was rigorously blocked. Fear was killing more people than the epidemic, it was said. At Cook County Hospital there was a death rate of around 40% from influenza. Literary Digest, one of the most widely read publications in the country, said: Fear is the greatest enemy. Tens of other newspapers carried the exact same mantra.
Vicks Vapo Rub advertisements during the Spanish Flu said the illness was “just the old flu, with a new name.” Mayors and governors were quoted churning out exactly the same statements. The U.S. government’s Public Health Service had ready-to-use printing plates made with identical propaganda and sent the plates to tens of thou-sands of newspapers. Millions of pamphlets and posters containing the nonsense were also printed with money from the Red Cross. As health tips there were wisdoms like:
“Be hygienic. Chew your food thoroughly.”
The Journal of the American Medical Association knew better at the time and rejected all the official, dangerous and negligent trivializing propaganda. In any case, people were able to watch with their own eyes as their fellow human beings died away in alarming numbers. The trivialization campaign had a deadly effect on the audience.
Double tap
The publication The Nation reported on a secret U.S. military study, “USNORTHCOM Branch Plan 3560: Pandemic Influenza and Infectious Disease Response,” dated January 6, 2017. New coronaviruses are cited as a major threat to U.S. national security. A particularly quick reaction is essential in an emergency because there could be “follow-up attacks”, which means that an attacker uses a second pathogen against the USA in the middle of the pandemic.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/covid-military-shortage-pandemic
In the documentary film “Hackers Wanted” Dr. John Arquilla speaks out. At around minute 28 he explains that an attacker could combine a cyber attack with a biological pathogen. If the power goes out, this drives people onto the streets in search of information and other necessities, where they then infect each other. During the George W. Bush administration, Arquilla was one of many advisers to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
A statement from the Council of Europe Committee on Combating Terrorism currently expresses exactly what every military and every secret service already knew from the beginning of the COVID pandemic: the danger of a second strike. Worded carefully, it warns that terrorist groups will not forget the lesson from the corona pandemic.
“The damage is rapid and potentially global.”
The statement says that attacks with biological weapons would paralyze societies for long periods of time.
The United States is increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks targeting hospitals, food supplies or other vital facilities during the coronavirus pandemic, senior government officials say. As yet unidentified attackers have already tried to overload the computer networks of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. Hackers would also try to send fake communications after breaking into systems in the healthcare sector, for example, in order to gain control of other systems. U.S. Attorney General William Barr has already warned that there will be “serious” consequences if an attack like the one on the Department of Health and Human Services or a devastating disinformation campaign is traced to an opposing government.
The USA helped China with its biowarfare program
In the 1990s, a critical article in the Washington Post prompted an investigation into the practices of Harvard researchers in China. Now the NY Times reported in a similar style about the technology transfers from America to China:
China uses DNA to track its people, with help from American expertise. Chinese authorities turned to a Massachusetts company and a prominent Yale researcher as they built a vast surveillance and control system.
Millions of people were persuaded to give blood samples using a mixture of coercion and promises of a free health check. These include both Muslim Uighurs, some of whom are interned in concentration camps, but also ordinary citizens. Scientists working for China’s police used equipment from the Thermo Fisher company in the US state of Massachusetts. To compare the Uighur DNA, the Chinese sought help from the famous US geneticist Kenneth Kidd from Yale University. Yale traces its roots to the elites of the British Empire who sabotaged the ancient Chinese imperial dynasties, waged the Opium Wars, and ultimately manipulated the Chinese Civil War between Nationalists and Communists. The Yale secret society Skull & Bones carried out extensive secret service operations in China. Virtually all American ambassadors to communist China were members of Skull and Bones and from the same environment (such as the Bechtel company) came essential help with which China could become a superpower. Thermo Fischer said after the NY Times report that it would no longer sell equipment to Xinjiang, where the Uighurs are being persecuted by the government.Dr. Kidd said he didn’t know how his expertise was used by the Chinese. Between 2016 and 2017 alone, 36 million people were recorded. Dr. Kidd’s Chinese partners are from the Ministry of Public Security, essentially the communist police force. Dr. Years ago, Kidd got along very well with Li Caixia, China’s leading forensic scientist. Starting in December 2014, Li spent almost a full year in Dr. Kidd. Kanatyan Alibekov, former director of one of the Soviet bioweapons programs, said China suffered a serious accident at one of its bioweapons facilities in the late 1980s. Alibekov claimed that Soviet reconnaissance satellites had identified a biological weapons laboratory and facility near a nuclear warhead test site. The Soviets suspected that two separate epidemics of hemorrhagic fever that swept the region in the late 1980s were caused by an accident in a laboratory where Chinese scientists were weaponizing viral diseases. In the 2010 document “War for Biological Supremacy,” Guo Jiwei, a professor at the Third Military Medical University, emphasizes the influence of biology on future warfare. In 2015, then-president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences He Fuchu argued that Biotechnology will become the new “strategic leadership” of national defense, from biomaterials to “brain control” weapons. He is now vice president of the Academy of Military Sciences, which runs China’s military science enterprise. Biology is among the seven “new areas of warfare” discussed in a 2017 book by Zhang Shibo, a retired general and former president of the National Defense University:
“The development of modern biotechnology is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability,”
including the possibility that “specific ethnic-genetic attacks” could be used. The 2017 edition of Science of Military Strategy, a textbook published by the PLA’s National Defense University and considered relatively authoritative, included for the first time a section on biology as a field of military combat, which also discussed the potential for new types of the Biological warfare was mentioned, which could include “specific ethnic-genetic attacks”.
India knows about China’s program
Dany Shoham’s 2015 study, “China’s Biological Warfare Program – An Integrative Study with Special Reference to Biological Weapons Capabilities,” funded by the Indian Ministry of Defense, sheds light on China’s capabilities and how bioweapons research has been hidden and divided among various facilities in the country.
The result of this analysis indicates 12 facilities attached to the defense establishment, plus 30 facilities attached to the PLA, that are involved in the research, development, production, testing or storage of BW [bioweapons].
Even the most modern, huge genetic research facilities are being misused:
…with the obvious option of upgrading through genetic engineering processes on the one hand and the experimental option of modifying certain BWA (at least theoretically) in such a way that their effect against certain ethnic groups is increased.
Years ago, race-specific bioweapons were still considered a thing of the future. Like any dictatorship, China maintains a narrow-minded victim mentality mixed with paranoia. The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported in 2002 that “between 1933 and 1945, at least 270,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed by Japanese germ warfare troops.” This meant Japanese programs and facilities such as Unit 731. The Japanese general in charge worked for the Americans after World War II .
The United States is said to have used biological weapons against Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War (1950-53). China, in turn, appeared to cooperate with the Soviets:
Supposedly the USSR conducted experiments with plague, anthrax and cholera in Soviet-occupied Mongolia towards the end of World War II. Later, trials of various vaccines were conducted by the USSR in Mongolia over a long period of time, what with the continued communist brotherhood between China and the USSR and their strategic cooperation in general and the Chinese people’s awareness of the USSR’s colossal BW program in particular and which (to a certain extent) accompanied persecution.
China joined the bioweapons treaty in 1984, but in a report entitled “Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control Agreements,” the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency claimed:
China maintained an offensive biological weapons program throughout the 1980s. The program involved the development, manufacture, storage or other acquisition or maintenance of biological warfare agents.”
A major institution of China’s National Development and Reform Commission is the Beijing State Research Center for Viro-Biotechnology Engineering, which is affiliated with the Beijing Kawin Technology Share-Holding Company (founded in 1999). Then there is China National Biotech Corporation (CNBC); This has a research and development center in Beijing and various production facilities that are part of a system called the “Institute of Biological Products” (basically vaccines and blood derivatives) and are strategically located in various cities in China.
These include the Changchun Institute of Biological Products, the Chengdu Institute of Biological Products, the Lanzhou Institute of Biological Products, the Shanghai Institute of Biological Products, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products and the National Vaccine and Serum Institute in Beijing .
Numerous universities and military departments are involved. You also have the appropriate carrier systems, including:
Warheads containing bacterial BWA, particularly smoke bombs (probably aerosol bombs) and paper canister-type containers, are manufactured in China by a facility called the Yan’an Bacteriological Factory.42 According to a US Department of Defense report, China is expected to have cruise missiles by 2010 , which have a certain camouflage ability with biological warheads.
The various civilian camouflages of the bioweapons program make it possible to obtain technology and knowledge from abroad.
The practice of this behavior is often encouraged by Chinese scientists who are long-term or permanent residents of various foreign universities and scientific institutes, especially in the United States. It is led by COSTIND and the PLA’s Military Reconnaissance Department.46 The latter department, also known as the Second Department, is China’s main intelligence agency in terms of tracking foreign high technologies with obvious or latent military applications.
Covid-29
General John Allen, General Ben Hodges and Professor Julian Lindley-French published the book “Future War – Threat and Defense of Europe”. With their combined “100 years of professional experience”, they express themselves more clearly than one would expect from think tanks or politicians.
According to the feared scenario, many Western soldiers will contract “Covid-29” in 2029, while Russian and Chinese troops will be significantly less affected. If US forces are reduced by just 15%, it will already be a disaster, because Europe is too weak to defend itself effectively. The USA had concentrated many forces in the Pacific region because of China and was hastily shipping troops to the EU.
But a series of cyber attacks is crippling military and civilian infrastructure. Terror through sleeper cells and deliberately spread misinformation cause chaos. In lightning strikes, the Russians and Chinese make conquests without having to resort to nuclear weapons and are then satisfied with the results. China in particular would not have been able to build up the capacity to be able to create a “Covid-29” without the West.
Properties of a bioweapon
At IACFS/ME 2022, an international conference on chronic fatigue syndrome and LongCovid, Yale immunologist Prof. Akiko Iwasaki presented her latest research results. Even COVID courses that seem mild on the surface can cause all sorts of complicated and long-term damage to the body; also in interaction with other viruses such as Epstein-Barr. Experts speak of an event that “incapacitates masses of people.” Every affected citizen who suffers from long-term problems with concentration and lack of physical strength and chronic exhaustion must be replaced at work and needs help from other people. Western industrialized countries were plagued from the outset by risk factors such as obesity, older average age and cardiovascular problems. In public, civil authorities acted according to their instructions as if the pandemic had a natural origin. However, a lot of things in biosecurity are secret and higher up in the hierarchy the boundaries between civil and military become blurred. The military is certainly interested in the ongoing, mass damage to the population caused by COVID. and for the question of who might have had the motive to intentionally spread a disease that is hitting Western industrialized countries, China’s densely packed urban centers, and Russia’s weak health care system particularly hard. Specialist literature and studies show how the bioweapons logic works. The search is not only for killer epidemics, but also for “incapacitating agents”, i.e. pathogens that weaken an opponent. Even those who do not suffer from significant long-Covid damage experienced short-term symptoms such as significant difficulty concentrating (“COVID brain”) and studies have shown that many do not even notice that their performance has fundamentally decreased. Yale immunologist Prof. Akiko Iwasaki found infections in the central nervous system, autoimmunity disorders, tissue damage and inflammation caused in the body by infection or otherwise. They tested the latter hypothesis by giving experimental mice ACE-I receptors in their lungs infected with COVID. Seven days later, upregulation of cytokines in the cerebrospinal fluid suggested that the inflammation in the lungs had reached the central nervous system. These cytokines remained elevated throughout the 7 weeks of the study. Interestingly, a chemokine called CCII, found in another long-COVID study, was also elevated. The hippocampus – a part of the limbic system involved in encoding memories – was particularly badly affected, with a reduction in nerve generation and a significant loss of the oligodendrocytes that protect the nerves and support the production of the myelin that the Nerves covered. A significant reduction in myelinated axons was also found, which would certainly affect communication in the brain.
Direct infection of the central nervous system is not necessary for significant damage to occur – even with mild COVID. All it takes is an infection or inflammation in the periphery (the body). Many things are reminiscent of chronic fatigue syndrome. People can survive their coronavirus infection relatively without symptoms – and still get long COVID. This is incredibly alarming, given that it’s hard enough right now to get insurers and other care providers to take long-COVID seriously. There is also the problem that COVID could reactivate a latent infection with Epstein Barr virus.
Covid brain
Nature reported this year on a study that scanned the brains of people with a history of the disease. Comparing the two groups, we identified significant longitudinal effects, including (1) greater reductions in gray matter thickness and tissue contrast in the orbitofrontal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus; (2) major changes in markers of tissue damage in regions functionally connected to the primary olfactory cortex; and (3) a greater reduction in global brain size in the SARS-CoV-2 cases.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5
A study by the Stanford University School of Medicine showed weaknesses in brain function comparable to “chemo brain”, i.e. the well-known effects of chemotherapy.
“We found that even a mild course of COVID can cause significant inflammation in the brain, which dysregulates brain cells and would likely contribute to cognitive impairment.”
Affected are memory, attention, logical thinking and the ability to handle more complex tasks or multiple tasks at the same time. A virus that spreads faster and more powerfully than the flu and leads to impairments and even damage to the brain? A virus that makes you stupider? Something like this would be on the wish list of biological weapons experts. A biological attack does not have to correspond at all to the Hollywood cliché of a killer virus with an extremely high death rate and fully disguised soldiers setting up checkpoints. Many people are already cognitively impaired and don’t have the concentration to read real books on a regular basis. Many people cannot function at all without high doses of caffeine and the abuse of amphetamines (in the form of Adderall, etc.) is increasing. If hordes of people get COVID, special diagnostics and treatment would be needed, otherwise the affected person will be left with vague symptoms and poor performance and receive useless advice. Some don’t even notice their decline in performance:
However, they showed significantly poorer episodic memory (up to 6 months post-infection) and a greater decline in vigilance over time on the task (for up to 9 months). Overall, the results show that specific chronic cognitive changes post-COVID-19 are detectable on objective tests even in those who do not report greater symptom burden.
https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/4/1/fcab295/6511053?login=false
Bioweapon logic
When many people think of biological weapons, they first think of highly contagious killer viruses that can spread worldwide. However, B-weapons arsenals offer much broader options, i.e. tools tailored to the respective application. Imagine that the Ukrainians get various symptoms that make them practically incapacitated and bedridden for three weeks. Moscow’s soldiers would therefore have little difficulty conquering the country. If the Poles, Finns and citizens of the Baltics also get sick, the Russians themselves could march through there. After the conquest, the vast majority of those who became ill would recover. The Russians would spread a manipulative narrative that the pathogens accidentally leaked from an American-run bioweapons laboratory in Ukraine. With the corresponding chatter, Moscow has so far kept this expanded propaganda option open. Thanks to the Americans, of all people, we have an idea of what such a biological weapons attack could look like.
Improvised bioweapons laboratories
There are a number of good non-fiction books to get an idea of bioweapons research:
- A higher form of killing
- Baseless by Nicholson Baker
- Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War
- Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas
- The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea
- Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism
- Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-Up
- The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story
Many things that were produced as biological weapons should only have a death rate of around 1%, because then the inhibition threshold for using the weapon is lower and the opponent is slowed down. The opponent must take care of his sick, manage the pandemic and support the economy. But there was also enough anthrax production to wipe out almost the entire world. Huge facilities in Kazakhstan produced the agent, which had a 90% fatality rate and was further developed using laboratory technology from the original anthrax pathogen. There is also a new version of Smallpox with 30% lethality. You can silently fumigate viruses at an airport and the passengers then spread it throughout the country or even internationally. By the time people show symptoms, it’s already too late. In December 1997, the Pentagon announced that it would vaccinate all 2.4 million active-duty soldiers and reservists against anthrax. This requires six injections plus an annual refresher. A group of experts in pathogens and military affairs attempted to investigate this endeavor. This resulted in the book “Germs, Bio Weapons and America’s Secret War”. After 9/11 and the anthrax letters, there was a dramatic expansion of biodefense. And they weren’t just looking at state actors.
In the American bioweapons laboratory Fort Detrick, hundreds of doctors had already become infected with their own pathogens and highly dangerous substances have also disappeared. In 1968, a centrifuge containing psittacosis bacteria burst, causing high fever and extreme pneumonia in those affected. The head of the long-secret US program was George W. Merck from the well-known pharmaceutical company family. Similar to nuclear weapons, corresponding amounts of anthrax and botulinum toxin have the potential to kill billions of people. In open-air experiments, substitute materials were used to test how an attack on Soviet cities could work. In the early days, the main interest was in bacteria, but then shifted to the more complicated and smaller viruses, which did not necessarily have to have a high death rate, because if, for example, you can make some of the enemy’s soldiers sick for weeks with Q fever, The comrades have to look after the sick, which ties up a lot of resources. In 1956, Soviet Defense Minister Georgy Zhukov said that biological weapons were part of modern wars. On an island in the Aral, war materials were being produced in stock, while the Americans in Pine Bluff opened up their arsenal with Q fever, encephalitis, African Rift Valley fever, etc.
US General Lemnitzer said something like this could be used in the Philippines. Under the supposed peace dove John F. Kennedy, the budget for biological weapons was increased and all sorts of large corporations were on board such as GE, Booz-Allen, Lockheed, Rand, Monsanto, Goodyear and General Dynamics. Even General Mills, a breakfast cereal manufacturer, built spray systems for airplanes. New types of missile warheads had a payload of 720 mini-bombs, enough to contaminate 60 square miles. Operation Marshall Plan was a top-secret plan for a biological attack against Cuba that would weaken the country, followed by a U.S. invasion. General Lemnitzer was also behind Operation Northwoods, the plan for false flag attacks to provide justification for an invasion. Defense Secretary McNamara played dumb and said he had never heard of Operation Marshall Plan. There is evidence that crops in Cuba have been damaged by biological pathogens. In the Eastern Bloc there were also repeated accusations directed at NATO, such as the alleged dropping of Colorado potato beetles. The Americans had plans for combined attacks, consisting of two pathogens plus biotoxin, to confuse the enemy. It was mainly older people who would die as a result; the younger ones would be sick for a long time. Thousands of gallons of this mixture were made from staphylococcal enterotoxin B, Venezuelan encephalitis and Q fever. The first effect would have set in after hours, and when it wore off, the next agent would have become acute immediately. You didn’t have to bomb anything, you just had to put the enemy out of action. The classic smallpox have a 33% death rate and are contagious through coughing or contaminated clothing, towels, etc. The trick is to produce appropriate quantities using the freeze-drying process so that the pathogens have a longer shelf life and do not have to be produced fresh and soon become more potent lose. A test of spraying harmless pathogens at Washington airport found that one in 12 travelers would have been infected and spread the pathogen around the world. The incubation period is 12 days, so by the time symptoms become visible it is already too late. There was the idea of using Smallpox to sabotage the Ho Chi Minh Strait during the Vietnam War.
The USA’s “exit” from bioweapons research was just as fake as the ratifications of the ban in other countries. There was no clear distinction between offensive and defensive research, no appropriate mechanisms to vet states, and no limits on quantities. Some important bioweapons researchers were originally physicists and came from the Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb. They talked about how there was no alternative to a world government. Early experiments aimed to make common E.Coli bacteria resistant to antibiotics. There are now more and more resistant microbes, which poses a significant risk and may be covert attacks. The Sverdlovsk accident in the Soviet Urals is said to have killed 1,000 people with anthrax.
Using appropriate techniques, anthrax can be produced quickly, that breaks down with sunlight and oxygen so that the attacked area is not contaminated for decades. You can also insert plague genes into E-Coli or manipulate pathogens so that common vaccines fail. For a long time, with the appropriate accreditation, it was relatively easy for the Iraqis under Saddam Hussein to purchase pathogens from the USA, such as the particularly sensitive anthrax strain Vollum 1-B. In 1989, Soviet defector Vladimir Pasechnik reported that tens of thousands of experts in the USSR were working on biological weapons, developing warheads that could not be stopped. Revelations that the program was ten times larger than previously suspected were confirmed in 1992 by defector Kanatjan Alibekov, the program’s second most important scientist. Pasechnik initially specialized in the study of polymers for biological purposes at the Institute for High Molecular Compounds in Leningrad. The intent was to develop new antibiotics and other treatments. In 1974, at the age of 37, Pasechnik was invited by a general in the Soviet Defense Ministry to set up his own biotechnology institute in Leningrad and was given “an unlimited budget” to purchase equipment in the West and recruit the best personnel available . The laboratory he created was actually part of the nationwide biopreparation program. According to Pasechnik, the institute with around 400 employees conducted research into modifying cruise missiles to spread the plague. The weapon system would operate by flying low to avoid early warning systems and using robotic vehicles to spray clouds of aerosolized pathogens over unsuspecting enemies. The team managed to create an aerosolized version of the plague microbe that could survive outside of a laboratory. This version of the organism has been genetically engineered to be resistant to antibiotics.
During the Gulf War, around 250,000 US soldiers became permanently ill, which was loosely referred to as Gulf War syndrome. There are many possible causes, including side effects of substances intended to protect against chemical weapons and vaccinations against anthrax. While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the vaccine, it never went through large-scale clinical trials. The fear was that Saddam could kill 90% of US soldiers with a single aerosol device and a few kilos of anthrax. Saddam was simply threatened with retaliation with nuclear weapons. In the USA, exercise Civex 93 simulated how hundreds of thousands of citizens fled because of an epidemic. After the Cold War, Americans were allowed to visit the decommissioned plant in Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan, and were amazed at the production hall, which was the size of two football fields. Enough to wipe out all of America. And there were six more production plants in the USSR. According to the documents, Stepnogorsk employed 700 experts, but only 180 of them remained, raising the question of where the rest had disappeared to. Most likely, a large portion ended up at other bioweapons facilities, but some could also have been poached by some other state. The Iranians offered Russian scientists a salary of $5,000 per month. Iraq and North Korea were also interested. The USA and the Russians agreed on a strange deal: money was pumped into the modernization and conversion of Russian facilities for civilian purposes. But every civilian purpose also had a military use. The Russians had Bacillus Cereus, which attacks blood cells, combined with anthrax. As a result, the vaccines and usual treatment methods no longer work. The excuse was that they wanted to study in the laboratory what happens when the two pathogens cross in the wild. Another project should cross Ebola and smallpox. US President Bill Clinton read the novel “Cobra Event,” which is about smallpox, which affects the brain. Programs like Bonfire and Flute worked with peptides to make changes to the brain.
The Tabletop exercise simulated an outbreak in California of a pathogen initially identified as smallpox but then revealed to be a combination with Marburg, a hemorrhagic fever. Tabletop shows how poorly prepared they were. In Exercise Topoff, the outcome was just as bad: a public health participant noted that the hospitals that took part in the exercise “were overwhelmed in less than 24 hours after the epidemic.” A recently closed 200-bed hospital was (fictitiously) reopened but quickly filled until no more patients could be admitted. One participating hospital was unable to dispose of bodies accumulated in the emergency department and wards. The antibiotic supply was a serious problem for hospitals. When their own supplies were exhausted at the start of the exercise, hospitals called the state to request additional supplies. One participant said the state responded that hospitals were essentially on their own when it came to antibiotics. Hospitals attempted to contact area pharmacies but found no antibiotics were available. A hospital official noted that “medical and public health workers and first responders need to feel safe and their families need to feel safe or they won’t show up.” However, hospitals couldn’t offer prophylactic antibiotics to all employees, let alone their patients. The Bacus project was intended to determine whether it was possible for a terrorist group to build a weapons production facility using commercially available materials. How would terrorists go about purchasing components? In a very short time, the necessary equipment was procured from various sources. It took $1.6 million, a few catalogs and the second-hand market. Two pounds of anthrax could have been made quickly. There were no limits to research. The Russians had engineered legionella with a death rate of almost 100% and incorporated diphtheria genes into plague. You can cause the immune system to attack the insulating layer of the nervous system, causing a type of multiple sclerosis.
Square dance
In the summer of 1975, congressional staffer Loch Johnson was searching for classified papers at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, when he came across something he couldn’t believe – a covert U.S. military plan to use biological weapons against Cuba. Johnson worked as a top aide to Senator Frank Church (D-ID), chairman of the Senate select committee investigating government operations related to intelligence activities, the so-called “Church Committee.” He had received a memo dated October 30, 1964 from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to the Secretary of Defense. In response to an earlier presidential request for “new ideas regarding Cuba,” the Joint Chiefs proposed a project codenamed SQUARE DANCE, which Johnson sarcastically described as “their first bright new idea.” Johnson conveyed the details of the SQUARE DANCE project to his superiors on the Church Board of Inquiry:
The proposal called for the destruction of the Cuban economy by introducing a sugarcane plant parasite called bunga by air from the coast. The program would begin with a 30 percent reduction in expected Cuban sugar production, and within three to six years the destruction of the sugar industry would be achieved. But that was not all. Johnson quoted directly from the JCS memo:
The economic and political unrest caused by this attack could be counteracted by actions such as spreading foot-and-mouth disease among draft animals, controlling rainfall through cloud manipulation, mining sugarcane fields, burning sugarcane, and targeting other conventional acts of sabotage the population and sugar cane production are exacerbated and exploited.
In their memo on the SQUARE DANCE proposal, the US Joint Chiefs outlined the project’s strategic value: “[Square Dance] would provide the United States with another option to bring about the collapse of the Castro regime.”
A release of previously secret JFK documents revealed a 1962 intelligence memorandum that discussed the possibility of using biological agents to cause crop failures “that appear to be of natural origin.” A 1963 U.S. Army memo published by the National Archives lists a number of “ideas for exploiting Cuban vulnerabilities,” including initiating “biological warfare against plant and animal tissue (other than humans).” The October 30, 1964 memo, referenced in Johnson’s book National Security Intelligence, published digitally by the National Archives, gives us a clearer picture of what this might have looked like. “Bunga,” also known as Aeginetia Indica, is a flowering weed that acts as a root parasite on nearby plants. It can be particularly damaging to sugarcane crops, which have been Cuba’s main economic output. U.S. intelligence agencies’ sabotage efforts had long targeted sugar crops, including night raids by offshore boats that planted incendiary devices in fields. But that was something different. As in the earlier memo from 1962, the need for denial is mentioned here:
“It seems feasible, Bunga gradually in Cuba and provide a basis for plausible deniability of US involvement.”
The 1964 memo leaves no doubt about the ultimate goal of this program:
The Joint Chiefs of Staff continue to believe that the ultimate goal toward Cuba must be to establish a government in Cuba that is acceptable to the United States.
Johnson makes it clear that he does not know whether this plan to force regime change in Cuba was ever implemented and suggests that the White House may have been skeptical of the idea. But the alarm in Johnson’s own memo is obvious:
Merely writing such a proposal is a reprehensible first step toward the worst kind of foreign policy calamity. I find it even more repulsive than contingency plans for an assassination attempt. These are not the recommendations that should be forwarded to the White House by the intelligence community. Agencies need to have a better sense of what is legally and morally acceptable. …
The result of SQUARE DANCE would have been a parasitic death for the major plant and animal life in Cuba. The CIA’s feeble efforts to assassinate Castro pale in comparison to this Army covert action proposal.
Baseless
Nicholson Baker’s biological weapons book Baseless was published in 2020, in the midst of the COVID pandemic and the associated battle of information. Nicholson Baker has one of the largest collections of declassified U.S. government documents, and it’s amazing how you can move from one thing to the next. Sometimes something just leaks out and you can use this as a starting point to demand the release of further documents or to fight for it in court. Sometimes censored documents are published that contain information about a completely different case that should remain top secret. And that’s how Baker learned about the “Baseless” program of the 1950s during the Korean War. B- and C-weapons capabilities for the US Air Force should be given as high a priority as nuclear weapons. Since then, there have been allegations that the USA secretly used smallpox and other pathogens during the Korean War. Baker knows of the existence of 21 Air Force memos from back then that would provide information. North Korea accused the US of leaving smallpox behind as it retreated to hit communist forces. The USA would have had a partnership with the Japanese, who had a large biological weapons program and who ran the infamous Camp 731 under General Shiro Ishii during the Second World War. North Korea later accused the US again of dropping boxes of contaminated insects. China openly attacked President Truman. In 1952, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a committee’s proposals to use biological weapons where it was militarily advantageous, rather than as a deterrent and last resort. Under massive pressure, American prisoners of war made confessions that, according to the Americans, only came about through brainwashing. The new “Office of policy coordination” (OPC) at the CIA under Frank Wisner was involved in the B-weapons story. Wisner had been a member of the extremely secret Seven Society at the elite university in Virginia and later worked with Kim Philby, the British agent who passed on all sorts of information to the Soviets. The OPC under Wisner sought new opportunities for biological, chemical and radiological warfare.
A particularly sensitive Wisner memo was declassified by Janet Reno under Bill Clinton because of a scandal involving radiation experiments in which people were injected with radioactive material. In the 1990s, the book author Baker printed out the documents from a government website using his slow modem. The Wisner memo was no longer published anywhere else, the website was gone and requests under the Freedom of Information Act were blocked. Certain databases listed names in the context whose role had previously been little known, such as Caryl Haskins, who came from the elite universities, was a director at the chemical company DuPont and started Project Artichoke, a forerunner of MKULTRA.
In 1952, the Chemical Corps worked on insects that were resistant to insecticides and capable of destroying crops. There have also been projects for contaminated insects that transmit diseases to humans, drug-resistant anthrax or tularemia, which is resistant to antibiotics. The military hatched plans to destroy Cuba’s sugar and tobacco crops and also make workers sick. In 1960, the CIA is said to have conducted a bioweapon simulation test in the New York subway system as part of Operation MKNAOMI. It was feared that the Soviets might combine a limited nuclear attack with a biological attack to sicken the fleeing population. Conversely, the CIA collected information about Soviet subway systems, which were part of an extensive network of bunkers for protection in the event of nuclear war. Imagine that frightened citizens in Moscow’s underground shelters suddenly become ill with smallpox in a confined space. Vannevar Bush was considered a luminary and was awarded the Order of the British Empire. He became a board member of the pharmaceutical company Merck, which was also involved in the US bioweapons program. Detailed plans were drawn up to wipe out 70 Russian cities by the Luftwaffe. Then plans for 1,200 cities across the Eastern Bloc, ordered by priority. Particularly spooky is the military logic that one can kill enough enemy civilians so that the enemy state becomes unable to act. The “feather bomb” actually contained bird feathers soaked in biological pathogens. Under Codename Noodle, weapons against crops, especially wheat, were developed at a facility in Pine Bluff. Accordingly, there was a study of the best possible targets in the USSR. In 1953 the harvest in Hungary promptly fell by 40%. Coincidence? Operation “Fiber” revolved around destroying coffee production in Guatemala to overthrow the communist government. Norman Cournoyer, who worked on sensitive matters, said the US used biological weapons in the Korean War. His research partner Frank Olson had lost his nerve with programs for biological weapons and interrogation methods involving drugs and torture. He tried to talk and was soon thrown out of a hotel window.
