Science Vs - Did the CIA do it? Part II

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

When a deadly pig virus hit Cuba in 1971, some claimed the CIA was behind it all. But could it be true? In part two of our investigation into the outbreak, we finally hear directly from the CIA — and get to the bottom of what happened.  In this episode: ex-CIA Brian Latell, journalist Drew Fetherston, Professor Mary-Louise Penrith and Professor José Manuel Sánchez-Vizcaíno.  Please fill out our Science Vs survey! Link here: https://blythet.typeform.com/to/Z7YOM2QM  New to the show? Some of our fave episodes are ... Hunting an Invisible Killer: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/brhv724  The Mystery of the Man Who Died Twice: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/brhod5   Placebo: Can the Mind Cure You? https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/5whgzd  5G: Welcome to the Revolution? https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/j4h39x  Here’s a link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/2Kn0iSv A huge thanks to Dan Guillemette, Rebecca Ibarra and the team at WNYC's Scattered. This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Nick DelRose, Mathilde Urfalino, Hannah Harris Green, Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang. It was edited by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenney, with help from PJ Vogt. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Bobby Lord and Marcus Bagala. Interpreting by Carmen Graterol and Julia Kaplan. Translation by Silvina Baldermann. Thanks to everyone we got in touch with for this episode including Peter Kornbluh, Professor Piero Gleijeses, Professor Armanda Bastos, Dr. Alexis Albion, Dr. David Williams, Professor Hugh Wilford, Dr. James Lockhart, Professor Louis A. Pérez, Dr. Megan Niederwerder, Steven Aftergood, and Vicki J. Huddleston. And thank you to the Cuban exiles and those who fought in the bay of pigs for speaking to us. A special thanks to the Zukerman family, and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello? Hello. I just got this big manila folder from the CIA. Why? This is the sound. Oh,. Holy. It's very funny, the font that they use.

I was still expecting, like, typewriter for some reason. Hey, Wendy here with Science Versus from Gimlet. This week, we're finding out whether the CIA released a deadly pig virus into Cuba in 1971, leading to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of pigs that would have otherwise been used for food. If you haven't listened to last week's episode, go back and do that now. We talked about the fact that the CIA was known to be meddling in Cuba at this time, and that they had this virus, African swine fever, on hand. Today, I'm on the phone with my editor, Blythe Terrell,

opening up a big envelope from the CIA. All right. It says, Dear Ms. Zuckerman, this is a final response to your 12th of August 2020 FOIA request. I love how they specify that it's final. They're like, don't freaking call us again. Don't get back to us okay it says um we enclosed 25 documents totaling 79 pages that seems like a lot oh my god so so the very first page is this highly redacted

document is it is it redacted document. Is it redacted? Is that exactly what it sounds like? There's just thick black lines drawn through stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Bloody hell. On this document, the contents page is redacted.

Like the f***ing contents page. Hey, how we, so this is one one of the documents from early july 71 so it says it was announced that the troops would be confiscating all pigs because of the african swine fever epidemic the people were very angry and by midnight many had gatherings and started yelling anti-castro slogans so i guess they're just they're just like noting what happened all right and then there's a document about african swine fever spreading. Yeah, they're talking about how many pigs were slaughtered. Okay. It totally shows that they were, they had eyes on this.

They definitely had eyes on this. So I'll just flick through basically the whole 79 pages. And the first paragraph of basically of a lot of these documents is the thing that's redacted which i suppose could be the sentence that's like the pig virus that we introduced into cuba oh it's so frustrating i mean mean, it's interesting, right? Like, they're like, coincidentally, the CIA is tracking the spread of this African swine fever. Very closely. If they were just following it and had nothing to do with it, like, what would need to be redacted from that document? Or, like, what is the secret thing that they would need to keep back?

Like, why do you care so much? Why do you care so much? Why do you care so much? Last episode, we heard about how this virus, which is harmless to humans but super deadly for pigs, caused chaos in Cuba. It was pandemonium. I mean, there was just a lot of people screaming, people fighting, but we didn't know why.

I think I got something. Poisoning pigs, that's unconscionable. That wouldn't happen. These agencies are out of control. Today, we're finally getting answers. Did the CIA really do this? And it's coming up after the break. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train

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Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. Today, we're working out what happened with this pig virus in Cuba. It had never before been seen in this part of the world. And then it appears in Cuba in 1971, devastating their pork industry. How did it all go down? After diving into the declassified documents, one thing was clear. The CIA was following this outbreak closely.

They had sources on the ground who told them that this virus and the way that the Castro government was trying to control it by burning all these pigs had created a pork shortage and it was making people really pissed off at Castro. But with all the redactions, it was impossible to know if the CIA was just following this outbreak because they followed everything that was going on at Cuba at the time or because they had actually planted this virus and were watching to see if their operation was a success. So the next thing I did was track down a former CIA intelligence officer who worked on Cuba around the time of the pig virus outbreak.

I started working on Cuba for the CIA as a very young man in 1964. This is Brian Littell. He worked on Cuba for so long that I heard someone at the CIA call him Mr. Cuba. And once he left the CIA, he started writing books about all this and diving into declassified documents. For just one of his books. I read at least 40, maybe 50,000 pages. Oh my gosh. Of declassified documents. So Brian, he knows his stuff. And he said, particularly in the 1960s, there was a lot of pressure on the CIA

to topple the communist regime in Cuba and to get rid of Castro. And while some classic ideas were thrown around, having Castro shot, delivering him a dose of poisoned pills, soon the CIA started thinking outside the box. They were crazy schemes. And some of them were the result, I think, of two or three martini lunches in Washington clubs, dreaming up ways of trying to get rid of Castro under all this pressure

from the Attorney General of the United States. Like one wild scheme Brian heard about? The CIA came up with it because Castro loved scuba diving. And somebody said, well, how about putting something where he dives? And someone said, yeah, what about a seashell? So there was this idea, you know, we fill a seashell, a very beautiful seashell, with a bomb and just hope

that he finds it. And then he would, maybe he would be killed. It was such a wacky idea that no one, no one ever took it seriously. Yeah, As far as Brian knows, no one actually tried to make this literal bombshell. Much like some of the more sinister ideas we talked about in the last episode, like infecting Cuban sugar farms with a parasite or giving their cows hoof and mouth disease. It does seem like a lot of the ideas thrown around at the CIA end up on the cutting room floor. But when we hear about these plots, it kind of makes it sound like Cuba and Castro were

lambs to the slaughter for the CIA. Like the CIA could just gin up plans over martinis, and if they were game enough to actually do it, then Cuba was going to be cooked. But Brian told me that that's actually not what was going on. In fact, Cuba was no sitting duck. They had their own version of the CIA. And they were good. Very good. Brian went so far as to say that... The world's most capable and successful spymaster was Fidel Castro. And we know that Castro wielded this amazing spy program, thanks largely to a man called Florentino Aspiaga Lombard.

Brian told us about what he did. So, in the 1980s, Florentino worked for the Cubans in their embassy in what was then Czechoslovakia. He was a chief agent there in one of the main cities in Slovakia. That was until... He defected. He went to Vienna. Late on a Saturday evening in June 1987, Florentino went to the heavy iron gates of the US embassy in Vienna,

holding his passport and a thick Cuban intelligence document that he'd stolen. He told a young Marine guard, I'm a case officer for Cuban intelligence and I want to talk to the CIA. And soon, he started talking. A Cuban, you know, who worked for the such and such ministry, he was reporting to you, he didn't really work for you. He really worked for us. And that was the beginning. That was the tip of the iceberg. And the CIA officers who were listening, they were horrified. They were horrified. Oh, no, not really. It can't be. But then he provided them with so much

information that it clearly was true. And of course, the follow-up question must have been, were there any others? Yes, there were. And by the time they finished debriefing him, the CIA officers who were in the know about this were in shock. Nothing quite like this had ever happened. There were as many as four dozen double agents, Cubans recruited by the CIA, who were actually faithfully working for Fidel. Wow. Their spy master.

Basically, from the time of the Bay of Pigs, back in 1961, the CIA's agents in Cuba weren't actually working for the CIA. And years later, even after the US government knew all this, they were still getting outfoxed. Like in the 90s, Brian himself was caught out. I worked with one of their most successful spies. Her name is Ana Montes. And did you know? I did not know. No, I did not know that she was a spy working for Castro.

How did that feel, though? You know, I felt terrible. I felt, you know, here I was, a senior CIA officer at that point. I was a senior executive. I didn't connect the dots. So what does all this mean for the pig virus outbreak and whether the CIA did it? Well, hearing all this, for me, made the conspiracy theory feel a bit less likely. Because I think it actually would have been really hard to get the pig virus into the country with so many Cuban double agents on the inside.

And for what it's worth, Brian told me that he'd never heard of this pig virus plot. While you were at the CIA, while you were doing your research, you heard nothing about the idea of the CIA having a hand in releasing this pig virus? No. Nothing at all? No, no. I don't think we've ever... I can be proven wrong, I suppose, if more declassified documents come out on the subject.

But I would be surprised if the US ever used biological agents against the Cubans. And when I asked the CIA straight out, so did you do this? They flatly denied it, writing to me recently that, quote, CIA unequivocally had nothing to do with the outbreak of African swine fever in Cuba, end quote.

Now, if it wasn't the CIA, it does leave this big mystery about that story we talked about last episode, which journalists Drew Featherston and John Cummings wrote for Newsday. They had sources who told them this complicated story about an unmarked container that was passed around the Caribbean. Someone said that the container had African swine fever in it, and several sources said they were sure that the CIA was somehow involved in all this.

So what's up with those guys? Well, some people who study this stuff had suggested to me that they might have been part of a communist propaganda campaign to make the US look bad. This kind of thing was happening during the Cold War on both sides. Like, the Russians spread a rumour around Africa that the US Army had invented AIDS. So maybe the Cubans planted those sources for Drew and John to find. And then they got plague. And basically, so did I.

I asked Drew Federson what he thought about this. I would say, I would doubt that strongly, only because, or principally because, we asked people about it who were devoutly anti-Castro. We didn't get a call from anybody that said, oh, by the way, have I got a lead for you? It was not something that somebody cooked up and pushed in our ear. I mean, if it was a trap for us, it was so well set.

So, you know, anything's possible. This is a very cloudy world that these plots take place in. Drew reckons that those sources would be long dead by now, so we may never know if they were lying But there's still one more rock to turn over here We're going to have to leave the clouds The world of secretive sources and sneaky spies And talk to some scientists Because there's a group of nerds

Who think they know what happened here. And that's coming up just after the break. Welcome back. So, we've mined the CIA for all they could give us, talking to ex-agents and trawling through their declassified documents. And there's no smoking gun here. We've also peeked into creepy government laboratories and found a lot of dodgy stuff,

but nothing that squarely points the finger at the CIA. Well, there was one place left to look. So while we're stuck at home in our pandemic, it turns out that there's another pandemic going on. A pigdemic of African swine fever. And it's huge. A global outbreak of African swine fever could kill a quarter of the world's pig population. The disease has spread across Asia and parts of Europe. Northeast China has reported an outbreak of the African swine fever. Laos recently reported its first case of African swine fever has hit

the Philippines. Is this the biggest outbreak of African swine fever that we know of? Whoa, it's unprecedented. Yes, definitely. This is Professor Mary Louise Penrith, an African swine fever researcher from South Africa. We met her last episode. And she reckons the story of how this current pandemic started could help us uncover what happened in Cuba. So let's dive in. Mary-Louise said that this African swine fever pandemic actually began in 2007, when seemingly out of the blue, the virus got into the Republic

of Georgia. And from there, it began spreading across Europe and Asia. And Mary Louise was part of the team tasked with finding out how the devil this virus got into Georgia. Yeah, yeah. It's never been in Georgia. And so it must have come from somewhere else. And so you're like a detective to try and find out how African swine fever breaks out? Yeah, it's detective work. Usually I'm part of a detective team. Their first step was trying to find out where the very first pigs got sick. So they pulled out a big map of Georgia and noted the infected farms and then went to them one by one, asking the farmers. Where do you buy your pigs?

Where do you sell your pigs? How do you manage your pigs? And then, you know, just go from farm to farm to farm. Basically, this is pig contact tracing. And after doing this for several weeks, they found something near some of these farms, a possible clue. And it was a giant pile of trash. Kind of an open rubbish dump. In Georgia, a lot of pig farmers let their pigs roam and scavenge. And people told Mary Louise's team

that they'd seen pigs rooting around and eating stuff in this trash dump. And that was interesting to the team, because that dump, it was right next to a busy port on the Black Sea, where ships were constantly coming and going. So it was mainly cargo ships which go anywhere and everywhere, all around the world. And when scientists saw that land waste near the port, what do you think went through their minds? Well, I think what went through their minds was,

is the ship waste dumped here? Is the ship waste dumped here? OK, so here's what these nerds are thinking. They know that African swine fever is endemic in some parts of Africa. It's just always infecting pigs there. They also know that this virus can fever is endemic in some parts of Africa. It's just always infecting pigs there. They also know that this virus can survive for a long time in infected pork or ham. So what if a ship was sailing from one of those places? And for lunch one day, say a sailor had a tasty ham sandwich

with ham that was infected with African swine fever. Let's say this sailor, Christina, wasn't that hungry. So she threw her ham sandwich in the trash. And once the ship went to port, the sailors then dumped their waste on that big open rubbish dump. A hungry pig had a nibble and got infected. Then it started spreading, spreading, spreading.

The virus took off. Pigs running around Georgia spread it from farm to farm, and so did people, probably tracking the virus on their shoes. Within months, more than 80,000 Georgian pigs had died or were destroyed. Now from Georgia, the virus spread far and wide with the help of wild boars that roamed throughout Europe. Professor José Sánchez Vizcaíno, one of the top African swine fever researchers in Spain, told me that boars often like to pop into farms they come across. For a wild boar to go to a domestic farm is like to go to a discotheque, you know? Yes, they have food, they have drink, they have ladies.

I see it from the pig's perspective now. It's like it's a big party. So they jump in, they go in for the party to eat, to drink something, to talk with ladies. So I think that's why the infections happen. So that's how the current pandemic got so bad. And this might seem super weird, tainted pork from some far-off country getting thrown onto

trash piles and pigs eating it. But Jose, as well as Mary Louise, told me that many outbreaks of African swine fever over the last few decades have been traced back to this kind of thing, trash coming from ships or planes. Absolutely. Absolutely. So they give all this garbage to the pigs. So given all this, when it comes to what happened in Cuba,

Mary Louise thinks it's much more likely that the virus accidentally made its way into the country. Say, a plane could have had some tainted pork on it and that pork was carelessly dumped somewhere where a pig could eat it. So for Mary Louise, she's not buying the CIA story. I don't know, it just doesn't seem likely to me. Doing it purposely seems to me much less likely

than actually it happening because of careless pig farming. Because we know, we have all these examples in at least modern history where it happened that way. So why go to the conspiracy theory? Something like that, yeah, something like that. Because the other thing that would make me very dubious about this is that I don't think that African swine fever has ever actually successfully destroyed a pig industry. There have always been pig farmers who could carry on. It would hit an

economy, but it very likely wouldn't take it out. It wouldn't have a very lasting effect. Mary Louise told us that in her experience, people often want to point fingers after one of these outbreaks and pin the problem on some other country. In fact, she remembers this happening in Georgia. Shortly after her team figured out the source of that outbreak, she was talking to a group of animal experts about it. It was all really difficult. I was giving a presentation and, of course, it was all being translated into Georgian, which, like often when you're giving a talk in English and it's translated into another language,

you say, the pigs all died. And they said, oh, oh, oh. And you think, what are they saying? But anyway, this old gentleman started shaking his head during the translation. And at the end of it, he put up his hand and he said he didn't wish to be disrespectful, but this consultant had got it all wrong. It came from Russia. That was it.

And why did he think that? Well, they weren't very friendly with Russia, were they? Yeah, much like the Americans were blamed for releasing the virus in Cuba, the same thing was playing out in Georgia in the 2000s. And there's one final thing that backs up Mary Louise's ideas about the Cuban outbreak. We think we know what country that tainted pork might have come from. While Cuba was pretty isolated in 1971, there were a few countries that had infected pigs and were flying in and out of Cuba. And one of them was Spain. In the 71, we have a lot of virus in this country. This is Jose again. And he said that in the early 70s, he was in college in Spain and learning about this virus. You know, we have

regular flights during these times. So the possibility to have a sandwich, a salami sandwich from Spain that could be infected was very high at that time, for sure. So when you imagine it, they took their trash and saw some pigs and were like, here you go. They take the leftover of the airport to feed the animals. They give it, like candies. But that food was infected. Recently, a team of researchers from Russia and the US analysed genes from African swine fever viruses from around the world, and they found that the virus that infected Cuba in 1971

was the same strain that was floating in and around Spain at the time. So the evidence suggests that the strain in Spain came to Cuba from the plane. Was in Spain, for sure, and that's it. It is always possible that one day someone will find a CIA document stuffed into the bottom of a drawer saying, we did it. But the best evidence we've got right now suggests that this wasn't the CIA. Much like the coronavirus that we're dealing with now,

it just happened. No one's evil grand plan. The US did have a grand plan, though. They wanted to damage the Cuban economy and ultimately make life really hard for people in Cuba. And they didn't need to release a pig virus to do it. They ended up doing it in a completely legal way. With an embargo.

Starting decades ago, the US government stopped US companies from selling food and eventually even medicine to Cuba. And they pressured companies in other countries not to trade with them as well. Throughout the 90s, it was hard to get some foods and medical supplies into Cuba. They had to start rationing soap, and that led to outbreaks of diseases, like scabies. And that is the thing about conspiracy theories. It's kind of scary and a bit exciting

to think about sneaky spies running around with vials of viruses ready to unleash them on the world. But once you really dive into it all, the truth, the facts, the science, it's scary and exciting enough. That's Science Versus. And if you're new to the show, welcome to Science Versus. If you want to hear more about episodes where we dive into mysteries, then we reckon you should check out our pretty recent episode, which is called Hunting an Invisible Killer,

as well as The Mystery of the Man Who Died Twice. Plus, a few of our other favorite episodes are Placebo, Can the Mind Cure You? Just check that one out. And 5G, Welcome to the Revolution. We'll add links in our show notes. And for everyone, while you're looking at our show notes, we have a Science Versus survey there that we would love you to fill out. If you just dabble in Science Versus, listen every now and then, or you're a big fan of the show, we really, really want to hear from you. We want to hear what you love about the show,

what you don't love so much about the show because we want to make it bigger and better. So please click on the link and fill it out and I will be your best friend forever. Best friend not included. Finally, if you want to know more about anything that you heard in these pig virus episodes, as always, we pop the link to the transcript

in the show notes and it is full of citations. So have fun. A huge thanks to Dan Gimet and Rebecca Ibarra for telling me about this pig virus story. They were working on WNYC's podcast, Scattered, at the time, which is a really great podcast. It's called Scattered.

Go check it out. And if you want to know more about ex-CIA agent Brian Littell's work, his latest book is History Will Absolve Me, Fidel Castro, Life and Legacy. Our episodes on this pig virus outbreak were produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Nick Delrose, Matilda Erfolino, Hannah Harris-Green, Rose Rimler, and Michelle Dang.

It was edited by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenny, with help from PJ Vogt. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Bobby Lord, and Marcus Begala.

Interpreting by Carmen Graterol and Julia Kaplan. Translation by Sylvina Balderman And thanks to everyone we got in touch with for this episode, including Peter Kornbler, Professor Amanda Bastos, Dr Alexis Albion, Dr David Williams, Professor Hugh Wilford, Dr James Lockhart, Professor Louise A. Perez, Dr Megan Niederwerder, Stephen Aftergood, Vicky J. Huddleston, and many others. A special

thanks to the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'll fact you next time.