During
the 1960s and early 1970s, these agencies, with help from the World
Health Organisation (WHO), the (US) National Cancer Institute (NCI),
and the Rockefeller and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations played leading
roles in the development of cancer viruses for vaccine research
and germ warfare. By 1969, the WHO had provided “prototype
virus strains” for more than 592 virus laboratories in more
than 35 different countries. That year, four of the most active
centres, including the NCI and US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), distributed 2,514 strains of viruses, 1888 ampoules
of experimental vaccines, and about 100 samples of cell cultures
throughout the WHO’s viral network. 70,000 virus isolations
were reported by 1970, and many, cultured for further study, were
breaking out of the laboratories that tested them.
In March of 1970, WHO consultants even reported the likelihood of
massive cancer epidemics from such virus outbreaks. Such “biological
agents,” they noted, “may be used... to achieve the simultaneous
infection of key groups of people, and the military consequences
might well be of major importance....” However, they warned
of the “calculated risk that a virulent mutant might appear
and spread rapidly to produce an uncontrollable epidemic on a large
scale....”
These consultants also predicted that as a consequence of such biological
attacks, “mass illnesses, deaths, and epidemics” would
require the WHO and allied agencies to furnish supplies and personnel
to deal with the resulting medical emergencies.
The first viruses and retroviruses used for cancer and biological
weapons research passed through the NCI. Among the premier labs
specifically researching, developing, and testing immune system
destroying viruses was the Cell Tumor Biology Laboratory at the
NCI. This was headed by Dr. Robert Gallo – the notorious alleged
co-discoverer of the AIDS virus. To date it remains uncertain when
Gallo discovered HIV. It was reported Gallo’s discovery followed
the French Pasteur Institute’s Luc Montagnier’s discovery
of LAV, an identical virus, in 1984, but new evidence suggests he
may have genetically engineered the virus as early as 1970 along
with biological weapons contractors at Litton Bionetics – a
subsidiary of the mega-military weapons producer Litton Industries,
Inc.
Dr. Gallo’s behaviour is, in fact, highly suspicious. As chronicled
by bestselling deceased author Randy Shilts in And the Band Played
On, and more recently by Eleanor Burkitt in The Gravest Show
on Earth, Gallo’s collaborative efforts in search of the
AIDS virus were deceitful and repugnant. The authors’ charged
Gallo’s ego was largely responsible for delaying international
progress in search of the AIDS virus. Following his alleged find,
patents were filed on his and the NCI’s behalf keeping the
French from sharing the royalties associated with the AIDS virus,
its culture mediums, cell lines, experimental reagents, and tests
associated with its discovery, diagnosis, and treatment. In an unprecedented
act of politics and misplaced faith, Gallo was pardoned by President
Bill Clinton in 1994 for several counts of misconduct and scientific
fraud.
Gallo’s Research Anthology
Gallo’s
early publications document his intimate association with Litton
Bionetics – sixth on US Congress’s list of major Army
biological weapons contractors for 1969. The literature describes
a vast number of experiments in which Gallo and co-workers bioengineered
simian monkey viruses, which were humanly benign, to cause a variety
of cancers. In fact, Gallo’s focus was on the principle model
used by cancer virus theorists between 1962 and 1972 during the
NCI’s generously funded, yet largely secret, “Special
Virus Cancer Program” – the leukemia-lymphoma-sarcoma
complex. Leukemias and lymphomas, which were rare at that time,
and Kaposis sarcoma, which was virtually nonexistent, are now the
most common cancers associated with HIV infection.
During the early 1970s, Gallo’s teams extracted the nucleic
acids from these harmless simian monkey viruses, infused their empty
envelopes with cat leukemia RNA, along with chicken sarcoma RNA,
to produce mutants that produced a laundry list of diseases as seen
in AIDS patients today. In fact, to enable the virus to jump species,
Gallo and Litton Bionetics researchers cultured these newly created
germs in human white blood cells to alter their envelope characteristics.
This altered the viruses’ envelop proteins and allowed the
germs to attach to and move through human cell membranes, ultimately
altering the cellular DNA – the blueprint of life. Most astonishing,
in a 1970 publication of the National Academy of Sciences, Gallo
and company celebrated these efforts by offering them to NATO’s
military scientists for further investigation and testing.
HIV-1, HIV-2, and the “Big Bang”
Clearly,
the mass of scientific evidence indicates the development of HIV-1,
and its progenitor HIV-2, evolved during the early 1970s. Allegations
that HIV had been found in tissues of people who died with AIDS-like
diseases before that time have been scientifically and wholly debunked.
According to Dr. Gerald Myers, chief molecular geneticist at the
US government’s Los Alamos Laboratory, something major happened
in the early 1970s to convert HIV-2, or similar simian viruses,
into HIV-1. This could easily have resulted from Gallo and Bionetics
experiments in which HIV-2-like viruses were cultured in human
WBCs.
During the 1996 National AIDS conference in San Francisco, I asked
Dr. Max Essex, Director of Harvard’s AIDS Institute, and co-discoverer
of HIV-2 in West African women, an important question. “How,
other than through vaccines, might HIV-2, a known simian monkey
virus laboratory contaminant, not found in monkeys in the wild,
come to be circulating in African women?” Vaccines, principally
made from monkey serum extracts, and tainted by man-made monkey
virus mutants, occurred to me to be the only plausible explanation.
Essex explained he did not know. He only informed me how his monkeys
became contaminated. “Other researchers had inoculated them
with human tissues [for various non-HIV related experiments] before
they got to our lab,” he said. In other words, human experiments
were again implicated. The question remained – how did African
natives come by HIV-2 and HIV-1 infections in the first place?
Gallo’s speculation that the AIDS virus, like his earlier leukemia
virus discovery, HTLV-1, naturally jumped species from African green
monkey to man is far-fetched, if not totally absurd, especially
in light of what was done in his and affiliated labs in Bethesda
and Northwest Uganda to create human leukemia, sarcoma, and immune
system destroying viruses. Clearly, these man-made creations most
plausibly emerged from NCI and DOD affiliated laboratories. However,
the question of accidental versus genocidal transmission remains.
Early Targeting of Minority America
As
many as two-thirds of African Americans recently surveyed believe
the AIDS epidemic may be genocide. Upon what evidence are such beliefs
based? The targeting of gay and civil rights leaders and groups
at home and abroad by the FBI and CIA during and after the McCarthy
era is well documented. The gay rights movement was seen by American
intelligence officials, such as J. Edgar Hoover, as communist inspired.
Black nationalist groups and civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin
Luther King were likewise considered communist beneficiaries.
During the late 1960s through the 1980s, the CIA worked to: 1) prevent
the coalition of militant black nationalist groups and the beginning
of a “true black revolution,” and 2) prevent the rise
of a black “messiah.” 360 disruptive American intelligence
operations developed under the Communist Counterintelligence Program
(COINTELPRO) Black Nationalist Hate Group’s umbrella, including
“Operation Chaos” which ran from 1968 until 1974. Dr.
Henry Kissinger, as National Security Advisor, played a pivotal
role in this program during the Nixon era, personally oversaw major
CIA and FBI intelligence operations, and directed the military chiefs
of staff to consider these perceived threats to national security
and world economic order.
Only days after the DOD requisitioned $10 million from Congress
to fund the development of AIDS-like viruses, on July 29, 1969,
the House Republican committee, chaired by the Honorable George
Bush of Texas, cited the urgent need for population control activities
to fend off “a growing Third World crisis.” Indeed, there
was extreme American displeasure with Black African culture and
its growing socialist threat. Africa, particularly the resource
wealthy central African nations, would not be allowed to fall under
communist control. Thus, the roots of Third World foreign policy
was established under Kissinger’s anticommunist direction.
During this period, President Nixon appealed for urgent action for
population control. African economic, military, and “humanitarian”
policies were shaped by Kissinger, Nixon, and later Jimmy Carter
to force compliance with American economic and political objectives.
Subsequent World Bank, NASA, and even National Academy of Sciences
(NAS) activities in Africa expressed the imperialist philosophy.
USAID and WHO sponsored immunisation programs in central Africa,
likewise, reflected American intelligence interests, and were even
used by CIA agents to infiltrate the region. The appointment of
Dr. Henry Kissinger in 1968 as National Security Advisor –
the most influential position in the Nixon White House – is
noteworthy. Kissinger’s alternate was Mr. Roy Ash, the President
of Litton Industries – among the world’s largest military
weapons contractors, and parent company of the Army’s biological
weapons contracting firm Litton Bionetics with whom Dr. Robert Gallo
of the NCI worked.
Litton military contracts, during the first Nixon administration,
exceeded $5 billion. Litton Bionetics received approximately $2
million a year during this time under one NCI contract entitled,
“Investigations of Viral Carcinogenesis in Primates.”
Another contract called for Bionetics to supply NCI researchers
throughout the world with primates for cancer studies. At this same
time, Congress supplied the DOD with the same allotment, $2 million
a year, for AIDS-like virus development.
Gallo and Bionetics researchers John Landon and Robert Ting directed
the NCI effort whose “proposed course” was the continuation
of studies wherein “an RNA-dependent DNA polymerase [unique
enzyme identical to the one found in human leukemia and AIDS viruses]
similar to that associated with RNA tumour viruses... [would be]
isolated, purified and concentrated 200-fold, making possible its
further characterisation and study in relation to the leukemic process
in man... with increased emphasis on monitoring and intensive care
of inoculated animals to determine if active infection occurs, effects
of infection, and degree of immunosuppression when used.” This
was, of course, more than six years before Gallo’s alleged
discovery of HTLV-1, and fourteen years before his alleged discovery
of the AIDS virus. “Further studies of human neoplasms at [the]
molecular level will continue,” the scientists wrote.
And though the researchers added, “inasmuch as tests for the
biological activity of candidate human viruses will not be tested
in the human species,” they clearly intended to develop “another
system... for these determinations and, subsequently for the evaluation
of vaccines or other measures of [cancer] control” in humans.
Kissinger’s
Contributions
All
of this occurred while Henry Kissinger controlled The Defense Program
Review Committee, which considered the funding requests for military
expenditures including biological weapons. Upon taking office as
advisor for national security, Kissinger ordered Melvin Laird to
reassess America’s biological weapons capabilities. His subsequent
public urging of Nixon’s signing of the Geneva Accord, outlawing
the use of biological weapons, contradicted his secret appropriations
directives which guaranteed the CIA’s ability to stockpile
biological weapons for covert operations as late as 1975, and likely
beyond.
Between 1969 and 1976, Kissinger also directed the powerful 40 Committee
that authorised covert actions by the CIA in Central Africa in the
vicinity where AIDS and Ebola first broke out. Ebola initially struck
a South African woman in 1975, and then several hundred people in
southern Sudan and northern Zaire in 1976. AIDS, of course, was
initially seen simultaneously in Central Africa and New York City
in 1978.
Under Kissinger’s National Security Council directives, USAID
began focusing vast resources on controlling Third World populations
by the late 1960s. A computer search of “USAID” “Population
Control,” “Vaccines,” and “World Health Organisation”
literature between 1970 and 1975 revealed 733 “USAID-Population
Control” studies. The same search after 1975 found none. The
entire field of “Population Control” had vanished from
view. The subject heading had been terminated and replaced with
the more comforting “maternal and child health.”
A review of US Department of State Bulletins revealed that by 1976
Joseph Califano, who had advised Kissinger to appoint Alexander
Haig as his White House assistant, took the lead in attacking “rapid
population growth” in the Third World. His subsequent policies
included the authorisation of USAID funds for Merck, Sharp &
Dohme (MSD) – related hepatitis B vaccine studies in central
Africa – studies that had actually begun cooperatively with
Litton Bionetics researchers during their “investigation of
viral carcinogenesis in primates.”
The paper trail, in the scientific literature, linking MSD investigators
with Gallo and Bionetics researchers who conducted cancer virus
and hepatitis B vaccine studies simultaneously in New York City
and Central Africa between 1970 and 1974 is lengthy but clear. Through
the New York City Blood Bank (NYCBB) and other biological weapons
contractors at the New York University Medical Center (NYUMC), as
early as 1969, that is, shortly after Kissinger became NSC director,
high risk humans were inoculated with the first doses of experimental
hepatitis B vaccine. Just as the NCI-Bionetics research team proposed
would be their course of action, the new vaccine was composed of
live and attenuated viruses that had only been tested on monkeys.
More astonishing, MSD researchers worked in cooperation with Gallo’s
group at the NCI and Litton Bionetics, and combined, they conducted
similar studies in Central Africa under US Army and USAID contracts.
A “Drug Development Branch” of the NCI served as a conduit
of experimental viruses, vaccines, and drugs between Gallo and company
and MSD. Thus, the alleged channel through which HIV-tainted hepatitis
B vaccines passed between the NCI, Bionetics, and MSD was operating
by 1970.
At that time, besides hepatitis, massive multicomponent vaccine
trials were underway in Central and West Africa. Twenty country
immunisation programs supported by USAID, the CDC, the WHO and MSD
tested for the first time several combined vaccines including measles,
smallpox, and others. During this period, plans to prompt Congressional
legislation freeing MSD and other vaccine producers from liability
and costly litigation from personal injury claims related to immunisation
were made. “Propaganda campaigns” were then initiated
at home and abroad.
One document, discovered during this author’s search of the
scientific literature, expressed a view among leading government
scientists that race, socioeconomic status, concerns over “national
security,” and the safety of the white middle class should
be the principle motive behind Third World and domestic immunisation
practices. “In the United States, the central cities will continue
to seethe with immunisable diseases and thereby create a significant
risk to other parts of the society until these people [‘Spanish-Americans
and Negroes’] are regularly included in immunisation practice,”
Dr. J. D. Millar from the CDC warned.
Other “Special Virus Cancer Program” reports published
in 1971 and 1972 by the NCI were serendipitously discovered by the
author in the basement of the government documents department at
Davis Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. These
books document that Litton Bionetics supplied all other NCI contractors,
including those in New York City, with experimental monkeys, monkey
viruses, monkey virus “hybrids” (that is, genetically
altered monkey viruses), infected monkey tissues, cell lines, and
other reagents needed to facilitate primate cancer studies and the
development of vaccines. Only one percent of this entire program’s
budget went towards assuring biohazard containment. This money was
paid to Dow Chemical Company under a separate contract.
Despite Dow’s efforts, researchers working in New York City
for MSD and the NYUMC, in 1974, reported “more than 70%”
of their quarantined caged monkeys had been environmentally contaminated
with hepatitis and other viruses. Yet, this did not stop these authorities
from developing the first four lots of experimental hepatitis B
vaccine that was used on the first human-guinea-pigs between 1970s
and 1974 simultaneously in Central Africa and Manhattan.
Thus, all it might have taken was one monkey, infected by NCI researchers
at Litton Bionetics’s laboratories, with an AIDS-like virus
infection, or even its neighbour, to have spread the virus through
the first hepatitis B vaccine lots “containing 200,000 human
doses,” to cause the AIDS pandemic we have today.
The CIA and AIDS
In
1975, following a storm of public outrage over the CIA’s involvement
in Watergate, the agency was investigated and chastised by the Rockefeller
Commission and two Congressional committees.
That year, word had leaked from the Army’s “special,”
that is, secret operations division at Fort Detrick, Maryland that
the CIA was illegally storing stockpiles of deadly bacteria, viruses,
and other toxins. As a result, a Select Committee To Study Governmental
Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities met to investigate.
Senator Frank Church presided.
The Church hearings exposed much about the illegal storage of biological
weapons (BW) by the CIA, and their intended use in covert operations.
Unfortunately, the American news media, focusing on a single neurotoxin
purified from shellfish, failed to report the most incriminating
facts. The CIA, according to director Bill Colby, planned to use
its more lethal biologicals in “covert operations” as
directed by the National Security Council, then directed by Henry
Kissinger. Ultimately, the investigators and the media shielded
Kissinger from the Church Committee’s indictments along with
other chief decision makers.
In fact, the CIA’s BW operation began as early as 1947 with
the agency’s metamorphosis from the OSS. Following the war,
the CIA exfiltrated more than 900 Nazi scientists to America, including
Hitler’s chief biological weapons developer Dr. Erich Traub.
At that time, Kissinger, then in his late twenties, served as General
Alexander Bolling’s chief translator. Bolling directed American
intelligence at the time and was “Godfather” to the Joint
Intelligence Committee (JIC), the agency that ran the Nazi exfiltration
program – Project Paperclip.
Kissinger’s other intelligence assignments by 1948 included
overseeing Nazi hunting efforts in more than twenty German towns,
and instructing other intelligence officers in Nazi tracking tactics
at the European Command Intelligence School in Oberammergau. Thus,
I was not surprised to learn that the Defense Department’s
request for funding a five-year AIDS-like virus development program,
beginning in 1970, came when Kissinger oversaw the 40 Committee
which authorised the budget and covert activities of the CIA. The
AIDS-like viruses were readied by 1975.
History records that following the American forces withdrawal from
Vietnam, Kissinger immediately focused anticommunist undertakings
on the resource wealthy region of Central Africa. Zaire and its
neighbours Angola and Sudan were specifically targeted. CIA Director
William Colby’s 1975 Church Committee admission then that his
agency’s interest in BW was for offensive uses during covert
operations at the very time the CIA was secretly operating at full
force in this region – ground zero for the AIDS and Ebola outbreaks
– is noteworthy.
Nathan Gordon, Chief of the chemistry branch of the Technical Services
Division of the CIA gave additional testimony of the agency’s
possible use of extensive virus stockpiles to assistant intelligence
agency scientists in their work on mass immunisation projects, vaccine
development, and cancer research. This was precisely the work conducted
by NCI contractors including Merck, Sharp & Dohme and Litton
Bionetics in Bethesda and Northwest Uganda, and New York collaborators
at the New York University Medical Center and the infamous New York
Blood Bank – the source of more than 10,000 HIV infections
among American hemophiliacs.
Moreover, Church Committee discussions focused on congressional
testimony which documented that the CIA had, in fact, been receiving
“deadly poison[s]” manufactured by the United States Public
Health Service (USPHS) and delivered to Fort Detrick for use in
human experiments and covert operations.
Additional 1977 hearings published in the Congressional Record note
that “George W. Merck, of the prominent Merck pharmaceutical
firm,” had been appointed by President Roosevelt, during World
War II, Director of the War Research Service charged with overseeing
America’s biological weapons industry.
The CIA in Africa
Between
1970 and 1975, Kissinger ordered the CIA to begin a major covert
military operation against MPLA (communist bloc backed) “rebels”
in Angola. Indebted by over $4.5 billion to the International Monetary
Fund, Zaire, headed by President Mobutu – paradoxically regarded
as one of the world’s richest men with “a personal fortune
put at $2,939,200,000 [1984 estimate] banked in Switzerland”
– was wooed by NATO allies during the 1970s to be a staging
area for CIA backed, Portuguese, French, and South African, mercenaries.
American corporate investment, notably in copper, aluminium, and
diamonds, doubled following a 1970 visit by Mobutu to the United
States. Major investors included Rockefeller’s Chase-Manhattan
Bank. In 1975, however, Mobutu turned against NATO allies. He proclaimed
his intention to nationalise foreign owned enterprises, and expelled
the American ambassador. He ordered his military to arrest CIA agents,
and placed some of them under death sentences.
The following year, in October 1976, the Ebola virus broke-out in
fifty-five Zairian villages, first killing people who had received
injections. Mobutu then ordered his army to seal off the Bumba Zone
with roadblocks and shoot anyone trying to leave.
By the end of 1976, the Zairian leader had reconciled his differences
with American intelligence and, thereafter, continued to reap his
Western allies’ economic and “humanitarian” aid.
About the same time, Mobutu signed an agreement with a West German
company named OTRAG (Orbital Transport-und
Raketen-Aktiengesellschaft).
The company leased 260,000 square kilometres of eastern Zaire for
military/industrial purposes. The contract gave OTRAG sovereign
rights to territories inhabited by 760,000 people in the region
not far from what is now called, “The AIDS Highway.”
Believed to be of military and intelligence gathering significance
to NATO, OTRAG’s principals included several Nazi scientists
including Dr. Kurt H. Debus, who worked as director of the Cape
Canaveral space program until 1975 before transferring to Zaire.
Richard Gompertz, OTRAG’s technical director, presided over
NASA’s Chrysler space division. Lutz Thilo Kayser, OTRAG’s
founder and manager, when young was quite close to the Nazi rocket
industry, often called ‘Dadieu’s young man,’ a reference
to Armin Dadieu, his mentor, who served as prominent SS officer
and as Goring’s special representative for a research program
on storing uranium.
In 1977, at the height of OTRAG’s activity in Zaire, Litton
Industries, Bionetics’s parent, received $5 million for medical
electronic equipment from its Hellige division, in Freiburg, West
Germany. Much of Litton’s NATO and West German sales during
this period appear to have been earmarked for OTRAG, which may have
been subcontracting at the behest of the DOD through Bionetics.
Concurrently, cooperative efforts were recorded by NATO and WHO
officials to coordinate preparations for facing possible epidemics
from biological warfare.
These circumstances deserve further investigation especially considering
the recent outbreaks of the world’s most feared and deadly
viruses. Marburg, Ebola, Reston, and AIDS share the dubious distinction
of breaking out in or around areas of CIA/NATO, Bionetics, or OTRAG
operations.
The CIA and The Hot Zone
The
Hot Zone, the alleged “terrifying true story,” that
remained on the New York Times best-seller list for more
than two years, was certainly frightening. Its content, however,
when measured against government documents and scientific reports,
was barely true. Few realise its author, Richard Preston, received
a $20,000 literary grant from the Sloan Foundation to produce this
Random House act of counterintelligence.
An investigation into Alfred P. Sloan’s background revealed
his foundation: (1) supported black educational initiatives consistent
with the CIA’s COINTELPRO Black Nationalist Hate Group campaign;
(2) administered “public management” research and mass-media-public-persuasion
experiments completely consistent with the CIA’s Project
MKULTRA;
(3) funded much of the earliest cancer research involving the genetic
engineering of mutant viruses; (4) funded population control studies
by Planned Parenthood-World Population, New York; (5) funded the
Community Blood Council of Greater New York, Inc., the “council
of doctors” who established the nefarious New York City Blood
Bank; (6) maintained Laurance S. Rockefeller, the director of the
Community Blood Council of Greater New York and the president of
the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, as chairman of the board of the Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and a trustee for the Foundation;
(7) gave in excess of $20,000 annually to the Council on Foreign
Relations; and (8) maintained among its “marketable securities,”
16,505 shares of Chase Manhattan Bank stock (in 1967) along with
24,400-53,000 shares issued by Merck & Co., Inc. (at least until
1973).
In addition, Sloan researchers contributed various reagents to the
NCI’s Dr. Robert Gallo during his early retrovirus research,
and Sloan is well known for its links to the AIDS pharmaceutical
industry.
Could it be that the individuals and institutions most likely to
have created HIV and its relatives are now the ones most capitalising
on its effects? Surely the AIDS pandemic is big business. In the
words of Alfred P. Sloan, “ignorance of the principles of capitalism
and free enterprise is both a danger and an opportunity.” Undoubtedly,
the millions of HIV/AIDS patients and their families will find it
harder than the Sloans to appreciate the opportunity.
__________________________________________________________
Leonard G. Horowitz, D.M.D., M.A., M.P.H. is an internationally
known authority in public health education, a Harvard graduate and
independent researcher, and one of healthcare’s most captivating
motivational speakers. This article is based on Dr. Horowitz’s
book Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola – Nature, Accident
or Intentional? (Tetrahedron, Inc., 1998; ISBN:092355012-7;
US$29.95). Please direct lecture and book requests to Tetrahedron
Publishing Group, P.O. Box 2033, Sandpont, Idaho, USA; (208) 265-2675;
(800)336-9266; Fax: (208) 265-2775, or visit web site at http://www.tetrahedron.org.
Alternately, Australian readers can obtain Emerging Viruses
from Infinity Bookshop, Tel: (02) 9212-2225.
