Science Vs - Did the CIA Plant a Virus in Cuba?

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

When the Cuban government rounded up and killed thousands of pigs in 1971, people were angry and confused. Castro claimed they were trying to stop an outbreak. But then rumours started spreading that something much bigger was behind it all. The CIA.  To find out more, we speak to Professor Virgil Suarez, journalist Drew Fetherston, Professor Mary Louise Penrith, ex-CIA Carol "Rollie" Flynn and Professor Loch Johnson. Here’s a link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/3ksSP0o A huge thanks to Dan Guillemette, Rebeca 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, Professor Jose Sánchez-Vizcaíno, 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

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. On today's episode, we're diving into a decades-long conspiracy theory involving the CIA and a deadly virus. And I first learned about it from my friend, Dan Gemat. Everything is sounding good. It's ba-ba-ba. It's working, working. So Dan is in podcasting, and he was working with a colleague, Rebecca Ibarra, on this podcast called Scattered. A lot of the show had to do with Cuban history.

And over the course of just doing the research of the show, we kept hearing about this crazy event that kept happening to people in Cuba. It goes back to Cuba in 1971, and Dan knew the perfect person to tell me about what happened, Virgil Suarez. I don't know exactly what you need from me, but Dan mentioned the story, and suddenly I felt the need to talk. This is Virgil.

He's a poet and English professor at Florida State University, and he grew up in Havana in the 1960s. Virgil told me that his childhood was pretty idyllic. He has these memories of playing baseball down the street and picking mangoes off trees. Even though I had an idyllic childhood, there were also all these weird things that would happen. It was an uncertain time in Cuba. Fidel Castro and his guerrilla army had toppled the latest in a line of dictators. And Castro was trying to build a communist nation. He'd taken

over private businesses and started rationing food. And while little Virgil didn't know exactly what was going on, he knew that the adults in his life were nervous. I had memories of my parents leading these very secretive lives. And so I remember late night visits from friends and they would sit in the dark by candlelight. And as a child, I would walk into a conversation and then I would recognize that they would be hushed and or the subject matter would be briefly changed. Right. So there was a lot of hush talking, a lot of whispering going on. And one day, he started hearing whispers about something really strange. The family pigs. And this is the reason that Dan told me that I should call up Virgil in the first place. It's where this crazy event that he was talking about begins. So Virgil's family, like a lot of others in Cuba at the time,

raised animals like pigs for food. And Virgil, he liked having these pigs around. These are spotted pigs, white and blonde and brown. Or they would have a patch, like half of their face would be black and the other half would be white. And people started to hear that the government was coming for these pigs. Neighbours are alerting neighbours over the back fence, right, saying, hey, are they saying that they're going to come and confiscate our animals?

It wasn't long after that men from the army did show up, knocking on doors and demanding that people hand over their pigs. They were saying that some kind of virus had been infecting a bunch of them. There's an epidemic. You must give up your animals. We are taking them with us. And then they did go house by house, herding all these animals,

kind of like walking down the street, like almost in parade form, to the corner. On the corner of the street, the army had built this huge fire. Virgil remembers seeing the soldiers club the pigs and then throw them into the flames. So there were just a lot of crazy sounds, smells, you can imagine, popping and crackling and a lot of squealing and a lot of,

just a lot of horrible sound, right? It was pandemonium. I mean, there was just a lot of people screaming, people fighting with these guys. As a kid, so what was your understanding of why this was happening? I initially thought it was some sort of crazy move by the government. I mean, but we didn't know why. It was like taking food away from people and then just destroying it. Official documents from Cuba showed that every privately owned pig in Virgil's province was destroyed. And all around the country, pigs were getting killed by the government. In total, more than 400,000 pigs were killed. That was more than a quarter of all the pigs

in Cuba at the time. And that made people angry. Many Cubans didn't believe there was a virus at all. Some thought Castro just killed the pigs to terrorize and control the people. And from then on, it really, things changed, right? People became much more fearful. Like, for example, shortly after that, my parents decided that they were going to leave Cuba. We need to get the heck out. Virgil and his parents fled Cuba soon after. But what Virgil's family didn't know at the time was that the epidemic that the soldiers were talking about,

it was real. Cuban scientists had detected that a virus was killing pigs. And so to stop the spread, they burned pigs in virus hotspots. And it worked. Cuba controlled the outbreak. But having to kill so many pigs, it was devastating. And soon, people started asking questions about where this mysterious virus came from. They got into Cuba and all of a sudden started killing their pigs. Cuba was pretty isolated at the time,

and this virus had never been in the country before. In fact, it had never been anywhere near the region before. So how did it get into Cuba in the first place? An idea took hold. People started saying that this virus was intentionally released into the country by one of the most powerful governments in the world, the United States. So did they do it?

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Today on the show, we're investigating a pig virus outbreak in Cuba in 1971. And amid the coronavirus pandemic, all this feels really familiar, right? A virus outbreak, a conspiracy theory about where it came from. But when I did what any hard-nosed podcaster would do and googled this Cuba thing, right away I found a newspaper article written in 1977 where the journalist said they had pretty solid evidence that the U.S. really was behind this. I tracked down one of the authors. I was in my mid-30s and I was at the peak of my powers then. This is Drew Featherston. He was working at Newsday, a newspaper out of Long Island at the time. And Drew was one half of a team that did a lot of this kind of reporting. The other half

was a reporter named John Cummings, who died a few years ago. My particular genius at the time was being able to get along with John. John was a pretty difficult guy, but he was an honest and, you know, very straightforward reporter. Drew and John had just gotten a lot of attention for a scoop they had. They'd worked out that back in the 1950s, the US Army had released a bacteria into the air in San Francisco to see how far it would spread. They were testing how vulnerable the U.S. was to biological warfare.

The Army thought the bacteria was harmless, but it got into a hospital and someone died. And the Army actually confirmed it. I do remember being shocked when the Army called me back and said, yes, we did that. So Drew and John decided to keep chasing this biological warfare beat. See what else the US government was up to. We were kind of just getting started, and we were just casting around.

John Cummings starts calling around. And he gets a hot tip that something fishy had happened at this US army base called Fort Gulick, which is around Panama. And right away, somebody said to him, oh yeah, Gulick, that's where the African swine fever virus came from. African swine fever. The contact went on, saying it was the CIA that had plotted to take the virus from the Army base

and release it into Cuba. Cummings had been on the phone for a while and he hung up and turned around and he said, that had plotted to take the virus from the army base and release it into Cuba. Cummings had been on the phone for a while and he hung up and turned around and he said, I think I got something here. Neither of them knew anything about African swine fever. So Drew runs over to a local library and pulls out a bunch of medical journals. He starts reading about the African swine fever outbreak in Cuba

in 1971. And he said, something definitely felt weird about this. Because it was so anomalous. It was in Africa. There had been cases, I think, in Portugal and maybe Spain. And then

all of a sudden, bingo, it's in Cuba and they had to slaughter a half a million hogs. And the idea that the CIA might have done this, it wasn't shocking to Drew or John. Cuba and the US weren't exactly good mates. It seemed like the US was constantly trying to mess with Cuba in these sneaky ways. Like in the 1960s, the CIA trained an army of Cuban exiles

to try to overthrow Castro's government. This is known as the Bay of Pigs. It was a huge failure. And since then, it was like the CIA couldn't keep their paws out of the country. They kept trying to assassinate Fidel Castro. And now, John and Drew were hearing that they'd released this virus, African swine fever, into the country. And going after the piggies, it would make sense.

Because at the time, Cuba was really trying to ramp up its pork production. And that's the moment when the virus hit. So, African swine fever. That was the disease running rampant in Cuba. It was the reason that rampant in Cuba. It was the reason that officials killed Virgil's pigs. So what do we know about this weird virus? And can you actually intentionally release it?

I read everything I can lay my hands on about African swine fever. This is Professor Mary Louise Penrith. Actually, her official title is Extraordinary Professor. She works at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and she's studied African swine fever for decades. And Mary-Louise told me that this virus is not dangerous for people. It doesn't even make us sick. But for pigs, it's really nasty. It is very dangerous for pigs, it's really nasty. It is very dangerous for pigs.

It is as if a pig gets it. It's got an extremely good chance of dying. More than 95% of pigs that get infected die. And Mary Louise says that when a pig does get infected, it can get real ugly. The pig just gets very ill. It can't get up. It bleeds from all its orifices and it dies.

So did you say they bleed from their orifices? Yeah, well, everything's bleeding. They're bleeding in the gut and all the organs are bleeding. They can actually drown in their own fluids. It's a horrid way to go. And so the Cuban authorities at the time killed thousands of pigs to stop the outbreak. Did they have to do that?

Yeah. It is the traditional way to deal with an outbreak is to cull all the pigs and dispose of them safely. Even today, to get rid of this, farmers often have to kill a lot of pigs because there's no treatment and no vaccine. And even after the pigs are dead, this virus is still a threat. And that's because African swine fever is weirdly hardy. Like a vial of infected blood can be infectious for years, which is why it made sense for Cuba to burn the pigs' bodies so they could kill the virus good and proper.

So if you're picking a disease to take out a bunch of pigs and mess up a pork industry, this virus, it's a pretty good one to go for. So I asked Mary Louise, how would you intentionally spread this? And she was like, well, since the virus can linger on, say, infected meat for ages, if you want to start an outbreak... Well, the way obviously to go about it would be to get yourself a load of infected pork and go and dump it on a landfill where you knew pigs grazed. That's the obvious, simple way to do it. Yeah, you could serve up some infected pork to some local pigs and hope they munch it up. And while pigs don't love eating pork, Mary Louise actually said they were reluctant cannibals. She said if pigs are hungry enough, they'll do it.

And once you have one infected pig, this virus can also spread through piggy coughs and sneezes, which means it could move fairly easily from pig to pig to pig. Now, Mary Louise was just talking generally. She's not pointing fingers at the CIA. But back at Newsday in the 1970s, John Cummings had sources who were. So while Drew was leafing through the dusty medical journals in the library and getting his head around what this virus was, John started calling out more of his contacts. I think he used three, possibly four sources.

And they told him a story of a mysterious unmarked container, which one person said had the virus in it. Here's what they said happened. In the early 1970s, the container was handed off from that U.S. Army base. But somebody told him, yeah, okay, it came out of Gulick. To somewhere in Panama. It wound up at Bocas del Toro. To a tiny island in the Caribbean.

Put on a trawler and taken to Navassa Island. And finally to Guantanamo Bay. And that's where they lose track of it. But then a few months later. Some weeks after that handoff, there was an outbreak. The first sick pigs were found in early May around Havana. Now, we don't know much about the people who told this story to John. Drew says they were John's sources and they were super secretive.

They wouldn't talk to Drew. He did know that some of them had been trained by the CIA to fight in the Bay of Pigs. So these people had worked with the CIA before. And John spoke to a guy who said he was on that trawler and had been well paid for passing this vial along. Ultimately, the sources told John that they were convinced the CIA was involved here.

And so Drew and John published their story, saying there was a link between the CIA and the outbreak. But they never did find a smoking gun. I don't think anybody ever said to us, OK, this CIA operative gave us a piece of paper that said, here's what we're going to ask you to do. So the link between the CIA and this group that brought the virus was, I guess, implicit rather than explicit. Naturally, we tried, we called the CIA. They didn't confirm or deny it. And now, here we are.

Almost 50 years since Drew published that article. So I wanted to know, with all the time that's passed, could we get to the bottom of this? Could new science help us to unravel what really happened? And would the CIA admit to it after all these years? I mean, what kind of person was that? What kind of monster? What kind of Frankenstein? Only a terrorist who's suicidal and doesn't care about consequences

would, you know, wage a biological warfare campaign. That's coming up after the break. Welcome back. Today, we're trying to get to the bottom of whether the CIA released a pig virus into Cuba in 1971. We know it's technically possible that the CIA could have done this, and in fact, it's not that difficult. And we know they had a motive, to make life difficult for the communist regime in Cuba.

The big question now is, did they do it? I emailed the CIA and put in a FOIA request asking for any information the CIA had on African swine fever in Cuba. And experts who do this kind of thing had told me, good luck, it could take ages before you hear anything. So I started asking around to ex-CIA agents who would talk. And pretty quickly, I found a big reason to doubt that the CIA would do this. Because this plan, it could have backfired. I mean, it's the argument against, you know, bio-warfare. Most sophisticated governments

don't think that's a good idea because you can't control it. This is Carol Flynn. She goes by Rolly, and she worked for the CIA for three decades. Rolly had never heard of this plot to release a pig virus into Cuba, and she didn't believe it. She said it would have been stupid and dangerous to do this. And the minute you deploy it, it's out and can infect you. Maybe not in the first wave, but eventually. It's just not smart. Only a terrorist who's suicidal and doesn't care about consequences would wage a biological warfare campaign. There's only about 100 miles between Cuba and Florida.

So would the CIA really have released a virus that could have made its way back onto U.S. shores and then threatened U.S. pigs? Raleigh was like, no way. But as I dug into this, it looked like in the 60s and early 70s, when the pig outbreak happened, the CIA was kind of in its wild, wild west days. Total unleashed mode. There was very little government oversight,

and even US politicians didn't know what the CIA was up to. And so I wondered if maybe back then the CIA was kind of up for anything. And so I got in touch with a guy who knows a lot about just how far the CIA was willing to go back then. Hi, this is Mark. Are you Wendy? Yeah, I'm Wendyke. Are you Wendy? Yeah, I'm Wendy. How are you doing? You have military punctuality. This is Locke Johnson, and I called him up right on time because back in 1975, just four years after the pig virus outbreak,

Locke worked on this huge investigation into all the dodgy stuff the CIA was up to. People in Congress at the time were suspicious of the CIA after they'd been outed for their role in Watergate, among some other creepy stuff. And so they created this committee headed up by Senator Frank Church to find out what else had been going on in the bowels of intelligence agencies like the CIA. And Locke, he worked closely with Frank Church. What was your first day like? Well, it was bedlam, I can tell you.

Holding hearings and deposing witnesses and writing speeches for Frank Church. Holding his hand when things got rough. So they get down to work, and immediately they start discovering a bunch of shady things. Like, they uncover all these plots to assassinate world leaders. Not just Fidel Castro, but heads of other countries, like in the Congo. And maybe for us today, it sounds like just another day at CIA headquarters. But back in the 1970s, this was a revelation to people like Locke.

So, I mean, it was like scales falling away from our eyes when we saw these things. I mean, I must tell you, Wendy, when I was in graduate school, I had a roommate who smoked quite a bit of pot. And he said, you know, the CIA kills people overseas. And I said to him, what's wrong with you? You ought to lay off that pot for a while. I mean, you're becoming delusional. And it turned out he was exactly right. That's exactly what the government was doing. Locke and the committee also started looking into this creepy lab that the CIA worked with, where there was a bunch of research into biological warfare

going on. According to an employee recruitment brochure, it had one of the world's largest animal farms and best facilities for studying dangerous organisms. Locke's team realized that this lab had housed all kinds of sketchy stuff. And we discovered that the CIA had stored out there inside the military some really bizarre things. Cobra venom, shellfish toxins. I mean, about every kind of poison you can think of. What?

Oh, yeah. Enough to have killed, you know, a small town of 50,000 people. That's how many chemicals they had out there. That was outrageous. These agencies are out of control. And one virus the CIA had sitting around in another lab? African swine fever. The US government had actually been studying this virus for decades.

Now, Locke says that the church committee didn't find any plots to release this pig virus into Cuba, but he did uncover something that felt very similar. It's early on in his work with the commission. He's sent to the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas. It's a hulking, windowless building. And Locke starts digging into their classified documents. So I'm leafing through these papers, and most of them are pretty boring.

And then I come across that one document which talks about Bunga. Who the hell knew what Bunga was? I certainly didn't know. Bunga, Locke soon found out, is a parasite that infects sugarcane. The document he found was from 1964, so that's seven years before the pig virus outbreak. The Department of Defense had sent this proposal to the CIA, and they said, if you want to mess up Cuba, spray the Bunga parasite onto their sugar cane. It'll cut production way down and even help, quote, the expansion of US influence over the world's sugar market, end quote.

And the proposal didn't stop there. They said to make things even worse for Cuba, you should release hoof and mouth disease to go after their cows. This suggested that they were up for an all-out assault on Cuba's food supply. I was stunned. I was stunned that someone in the Department of Defense thought that this was a good idea. I mean, what kind of person was that? What kind of monster, what kind of Frankenstein was over there in the bowels of DOD concocting this proposal. Did you see anything in those documents that would suggest

they did end up going through with any of this? No, I didn't. And after pouring through those LBJ files for a week, I found nothing that would indicate that any of these operations were carried out. So, you know, my hunch is that the United States does not do that kind of thing. But I could be wrong, Wendy. Keep in mind, back in grad school, I would have told you the United States doesn't target foreign leaders for murder either. We don't think they did this Bunga and hoof and mouth disease thing either,

mainly because we couldn't find evidence of an outbreak of either disease in Cuba around this time. And Raleigh, the ex-CIA agent, told me not to read too much into these kinds of proposals. She said that in her experience, there were often wild suggestions at the CIA that didn't go anywhere. Raleigh was like, you know, in this way, being a CIA agent is a lot like being a podcaster. Well, it's very similar to, I'm sure, the kind of things you do, you know, if you're having like a story conference and people come up with wacky ideas and everybody knows they're wacky ideas, but when everybody laughs, it says, yeah, right, no way. You can't completely censor people for their harebrained ideas. People have them and then you shut them down. But poisoning pigs or doing something that should infect innocent bystanders in a population,

that's unconscionable. That wouldn't happen. But of course, Raleigh worked with these guys for decades. She might have drunk a bit of the old CIA Kool-Aid. So I called up a bunch of academics who research US-Cuban relations at this time And none of them were quite so certain that the CIA was off the hook for this In fact, one Cuban academic, who didn't want to go on the record Told me that the idea that poisoning pigs was some line the US wouldn't cross Was kind of preposterous She said, the US and Cuba were basically at war.

They were enemies. The CIA had trained an army 10 years earlier to try to overthrow the Cuban government. That ended up killing thousands of Cubans. If they were prepared to kill people. Why not pigs? Next week, we find out just how far the US was willing to go. Hello? Hello. I just got this big manila folder from the CIA.

What? What, what, what? Like it just like came to you in the mail? Came to me in the mail. This is the sound. Oh, ****. Okay, it says, Dear Ms. Zuckerman, we enclosed 25 documents totaling 79 pages. That seems like a lot.

It totally shows that they were, they had eyes on this. They definitely had eyes on this. That's coming up next Thursday on Science Versus.