As chief of one of the foremost scientific laboratories, Dr. Callis also served as a scientific ambassador, representing the United States in many foreign lands and helping countries stem and eradicate germ outbreaks. Like Doc Shahan, he too pushed his Plum Island scientists hard to reach new heights. And they did. vaccine may end animal sickness, read the front page of the New York Times in 1967. Foot-and-mouth disease virus, believed to be the cattle plague, the fifth of the infamous ten biblical plagues (Exodus 9:1–7) — the scourge upon Egypt's livestock — might be removed forever from the Earth. They were undoing the divine. Under Callis's direction, Plum Island developed a trivalent vaccine, capable of immunizing against the three major strains of foot-and-mouth virus, A, O, and C. Through trial and error, they grew virus in monkey kidney cell cultures they had cultivated years before, then killed the live virus with acetylethyl-eneimine and added two mineral oils as enhancers. Four years later, Plum Island reached another milestone, when scientists established the first rapid test, a radial diffusion test that quickly diagnosed virus infection and detected viral presence.
"At the moment," said a proud Director Callis, "we're having very good success…. "
6
Symptoms
I'm not allowed to speak. Please — please! Leave me alone!
Between 1964 and 1997, the government of Cuba accused the United States of ten biological warfare attacks after infectious disease outbreaks occurred. While none of these accusations were ever proven conclusively, one event almost certainly occurred.
On May 6, 1971, pigs in a Havana, Cuba, hog farm were diagnosed with African swine fever virus. The virus spread and some 730,000 pigs were slaughtered and set ablaze in deep trenches. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization called the Cuban virus outbreak the "most alarming event" of the year. Pork production, one of Cuba's few commodities, ground to a halt for months. Facing a severe food shortage, Havana residents hid their pigs with relatives in the countryside. The African swine fever virus (ASFV) is devastating to swine; close to 100 percent of infected animals die. Symptoms include acute fever, diarrhea, skin blotching, anorexia, and spontaneous abortion; the highly contagious virus is also transmitted by ticks. The virus is a hardy one — it can survive for months in meat, excretions, and secretions, and for years stored on ice. There is no vaccine and no cure.
Indigenous to East Africa, African swine fever had never before appeared in North America. Except at Plum Island. The USDA lab held no less than seven virus strains in its freezers since 1954, courtesy of the U.S. Army germ warfare program. In June 1963, Plum Island began a long-term project to "develop information on the biological and chemical properties of African swine fever virus aiming at recognition of virus strains… " This research included isolating and growing various virus strains collected from around the world, running experimental vaccine trials, and testing modes of virus transmission using test pigs and different types of ticks.
President Fidel Castro charged America with waging germ warfare against Cuba. "It could have been the result of enemy activity. On various occasions, the counterrevolutionary wormpit has talked of plagues and epidemics… " The "wormpit" was a euphemism for the anti-Castro Cuban exiles living in Miami. Considering the lengths taken by some Cuban-American groups in the United States — often in partnership with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency — the accusation was not terribly far-fetched.[21] A partially declassified 1964 CIA document on Subproject 146 of mk-ultra (the CIA's umbrella code name for its biological warfare program) describes an unnamed plant biologist working on a "philosophy of limited anticrops warfare," including the use of cane smut against sugarcane— perhaps Cuba's most important crop—"to formulate a basic approach to an attack on [deleted material]." The redacted name of the foreign country can only be guessed.
Castro's accusation fell on deaf ears until January 1977, when Long Island's very own Woodward and Bernstein — the Newsday investigative duo of John Cummings and Drew Fetherston2—wrote an explosive story under the banner cuban outbreak of swine fever linked to cia. Every national newspaper carried the lead the following day. Multiple unnamed sources regaled the two reporters with a tale of intrigue and germ espionage. "With at least the tacit backing of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officials," they wrote, "operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971." A source said he was handed the virus at Fort Gulick, a now defunct Army base in the Panama Canal Zone that hosted the Army's School of the Americas. At Fort Gulick, Green Berets trained mercenaries for jungle warfare, and staged joint Army-CIA covert operations in Latin America and the Caribbean. The virus came ashore from an unidentified vessel that landed at the Canal Zone's Mindi Pier, and then it was sealed in a unmarked container at Fort Gulick.
The source said he brought the virus container to a small motorboat, which sped along the coast of Panama to Bocas del Toro near the Panama-Costa Rica border. There, the package went onto a fishing trawler. A CIA-trained source on the fishing trawler told the reporters the virus sailed north through the Caribbean Sea to U.S.-owned Navassa Island, an uninhabited spit that lies between Haiti and Jamaica. After a brief stopover, the package was put ashore one hundred miles north on the eastern shore of Cuba, near the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay in late March. There it was delivered to anti-Castro operatives. Two months later, an outbreak of African swine fever appeared for the first time in North America.
Long Island Congressman Tom Downey expressed outrage. "It is preposterous that the U.S. government tried to destroy portions of the population's food. Who is it aimed at? Is it influencing a government when you do it clandestinely?" Senators Richard Schweicker and Daniel Inouye, both conducting germ warfare investigations at the time, echoed Downey's sentiments. "He's passed the point of being able to be surprised," said a Schweicker aide of his boss. "So many of these seemingly outrageous stories came true."
Where did purified vials of African swine fever virus come from?
According to the federal government, Plum Island is the only location in the United States where African swine fever virus is permitted. No one will say on the record that virus for the Cuban mission was prepared on Plum Island and sent to Fort Gulick. However, given the frequent traffic between Plum Island and Fort Detrick, samples — with or without the USDA's knowledge of the ultimate purpose — could have been sent by courier to Fort Detrick for transshipment to Fort Gulick. Declassified documents uncovered reflect exchanges between the two labs at that time of other virulent germs, like Rift Valley fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, pleuropneumonia-like organisms, tuberculosis (bovine type, strain 854), and equine infectious anemia (New Hampshire virulent strain 1535).
21
After relations between Castro and the Eisenhower administration soured, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961. Fearing increasing Soviet influence in Cuba, a scant ninety miles south of Florida, the CIA employed many of the exiles to launch Operation PLUTO — better known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion — a coup d'etat which failed miserably after a two-day struggle. In the early 1970s, around the time of the ASFV outbreak, Cuban mercenaries, working with CIA operatives Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and others, staged numerous subversive projects that would wind up under the "Watergate" banner. In addition, it is now known that there were multiple assassination attempts on Castro, code-named Operations MONGOOSE and ALPHA-66. One plot involved an operative handing Castro a poisoned cigar; another scheme would hand him a set of diving gear impregnated with tuberculosis bacteria and a toxic fungus. Still another plan called for a chemical that would make his beard fall out. All three attempts failed. 2Cummings would go on to write best-selling exposes about the Mafia and President Bill Clinton.