Bird Flu as a Weapon? A Bit of History of Biological Weapons

[Jan Klimkowski]

Panama is a luverly place to mix up some potions:

US Army Tropic Test Site
As providers of equipment for use around the globe, it is frequently necessary for military materiel developers to meet the challenges posed by the world’s harsh climatic extremes. To ensure that humid tropic challenges are met, Army systems began to be tested systematically in the Panama Canal Zone in 1962, with the establishment of the Tropic Test Center (TTC) under the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command. However, TTC history goes back much farther.

Several "crash" testing programs were instituted in Panama during World War II to ensure that military equipment deployed to tropical locations remained effective. Many years after the war, in 1962, the surviving activities were consolidated into one agency – the Tropic Test Center. Numbering well over 300 people during the Vietnam War days of the 1960’s, the organization has since been downsized and placed under the management of U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground.

The Tropic Test Center mission is to plan and conduct tropic environmental development tests on a wide variety of military systems, materials, weapons, and equipment of all conceivable types, sizes, configurations, and uses. The center’s laboratory facilities provide detailed information on tropic-induced failures and other environmental effects. All testing in Panama is conducted to the same stringent environmental protection standards as similar activities in the United States.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/f...layton.htm

It all started with some covert Nazi business in the jungle:

The 5th Infantry left after WWI and returned to stay in Camp Paraiso from 1939 to 1943. The 2nd FA is the only other major US Army unit to be stationed at Clayton in those Pre WWII years. But we can claim the 33rd as our Canal Zone Reg. since it was born in the Zone.

The 33rd Infantry stayed in Clayton until December 7,1941 when virtually within hours they shipped out to Trinidad to set up the protection for the newly acquired Lend Lease Bases in Trinidad.

With German occupation of Holland the Dutch Queen had fled to Dutch Guiana and soon units of the 33rd Inf. came over to render protection for the queen and to thwart any attempt by Germany to move in more than was already happening. For secret Nazi bases had been set up in the jungles to supply U-Boats that would come up the river for provisions.

The troops of the 33rd Inf. battled hostile indians, the German camps and waylaid the U-Boats in ambush on the river. They were also there to insure the safe passage out of Bauxite ore which was so vital to our aircraft industry. These activities were kept a secret during the war and the 33rd Inf. returned home to Ft. Clayton in Feb.1946.

When the 33rd Inf. departed for war in 1941 they had at 25 years the longest record of continuous CZ service for any unit of the U.S. Army and were rightly considered the premier jungle trained unit in the Army. They were truly Zonians for no other unit like that had been born on the Zone.

http://www.czimages.com/CZMemories/Fort_..._index.htm

More than 130 tests were conducted on San Jose Island between May 1944 and the end of 1947.36 Many of the tests were "drop tests" involving aircraft that dropped chemical munitions into target areas. Others required troops to fire chemical mortars into the test areas, and still others involved more controlled use of munitions. In a very few cases, project reports indicate the use of chemical simulants, but in most live agent was employed.

The project divided the island into eleven areas, six of which were laid in grids for target areas. The three largest target areas, made up of overlapping squares, were about one square mile each in size. The chemical agents tested (and their military codes) included: mustard gas and distilled mustard (H, HD), phosgene (CG), cyanogen chloride (CK), hydrogen cyanide (AC), and Butane.37 One participant remembers that Lewisite was also tested.38

From available documents, the number of munitions tested are known for 18 of the 130 tests conducted on San Jose Island. Some 4,397 chemical munitions were fired in these 18 tests, for an average of 244 munitions fired in each test. Most of the munitions fired - 3,816 - were 4.2" mortars charged with Cyanogen Chloride, mustard, or phosgene, but the chemical munitions also included bombs from 100 pounds to 1,000 pounds in weight and 105mm Howitzer shells.

The San Jose Project also tested chemical munitions on the sea off of Panama in order to determine whether chemical warfare could be effective against enemy ships.39 In addition, according to a military map drawn up in 1946, tests included chemical spray on Iguana Island, which was also used as a conventional bombing range.40

A later military summary stated that "no nerve agents were tested" in San Jose.41 One participant in the project, however, tentatively asserted that nerve agent was tested there. Eugene Reid, a professional chemist by training, was drafted into the Chemical Warfare Service and served in Florida, Dugway Proving Ground and Edgewood Arsenal, as well as on San Jose. "Besides mustard, they were also testing newer things. Nerve gases, that was the hot thing then," Reid said in 1997. When subsequently asked for confirmation, he was less certain whether nerve agents were tested on San Jose. "I suspect very much that they were, but I can't say for sure they were used," he said.42

While neither the United States nor Great Britain had developed nerve agents of its own by 1945, the Allies had captured significant quantities of nerve agent from the Nazis as Germany receded before advancing Allied troops in the Spring of 1945, which is when Reid arrived in San Jose. The British felt that some of the stocks of captured German nerve agent should be "retained for possible use in the Far East" should the Allies invade Japan, an eventuality for which the San Jose Project was preparing.43

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One of the San Jose tests, carried out between August 9 and August 15, 1944, sought "to determine if any difference existed in the sensitivity of Puerto Rican and Continental U.S. Troops to H gas [mustard]." A preliminary test involved ten Puerto Rican troops and ten "continental" (i.e., Anglo-Saxon) troops, which was followed by a fuller test involving 45 Puerto Rican soldiers and 44 "continental" soldiers. The men, who were "unfamiliar with the use of chemical agents," were "given a stiff course in gas discipline and the significance of H [mustard] lesions to casualty production." The tests involved applying liquid mustard to the under-surface of the forearms of each subject, then observed for three days. A summary of the test produced by Defense Secretary William Cohen in April 1998 implied that some men were hospitalized after they "sustain[ed] severe body burns or eye lesions." Men with less severe burns were simply returned to their barracks and expected to meet company formations.

http://www.forusa.org/programs/panama/ar.../part9.htm

During World War II, the military developed an increased interest in biological warfare, both defensive and offensive. The first action of the War Research Service, which was established in 1942 to investigate a variety of unconventional weapons, was to set up antibiological warfare programs in the United States and abroad -- including the Canal Zone and Puerto Rico -- under the auspices of the Surgeon General's office. These programs instructed medical and military officers in defensive measures against biological weapons.99 (This and all subsequent endnotes can be found here.)

In late 1947, the British Navy proposed to use U.S. facilities on San Jose Island to support biological warfare trials at sea, beginning in October 1948. Under the plan, the United States would provide 20 technicians, care for animals used in the experiments, and "shore base facilities" for recreation and ship maintenance. The military's Joint Strategic Plans Committee favored the experiments because they would "facilitate the obtaining of essential basic research data in the BW [biological warfare] field." But with the evacuation of San Jose Island in January 1948, the plan for using that island was scuttled. The experiments may have been carried out instead on Parham Sound in Antigua, which was considered as an alternate site.100

Since plans for the military use of biological agents focused on their transmission through aerial spray techniques, studies of aerosol spray patterns in Panama may have been designed to explore how biological agents could be used there. Dugway Proving Ground's technical library lists a number of such studies.101 However, chemical sprays and smoke devices also rely on aerial and meteorological data.

The National Institutes of Health's Middle America Research Unit (MARU) actively used biological agents in Panama. MARU was established in the 1950s, and worked closely with the Gorgas Memorial Laboratory. Located in a building in Ancon Heights, MARU "handled some of the deadliest and most infectious diseases known to medicine at the time," according to Carl J. Peters, a scientist who worked there in the 1960s. Peters emphasized the measures taken to contain the agents that the MARU technicians were working on, but noted that one lab technician accidentally contracted Bolivian hemorrhagic fever at the lab and died within a few days.

One disease in particular that MARU worked with was Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis (VEE), a naturally-occurring virus which incapacitates but generally does not kill its human victims. Instead, VEE begins abruptly with high fever, chills and aches and an intense aversion to light, then typically is gone within a week or two. In Central America in the 1960s, VEE attacked horses and mules, leaving many dead, and MARU sought to stem the disease's migration toward the United States through development of a vaccine. But Peters writes:

Nobler designs aside, however, the U.S. government had other reasons to be interested in VEE. The symptoms in humans are so incapacitating that VEE had been seen as a potential biological weapon. The army wanted to develop different categories of biological warfare agents: incapacitators as well as killers. With a relatively short incubation period of two to three days, VEE could be an ideal incapacitator: neutralizing an enemy population right before a battle without risk of killing innocent civilians or committing wartime atrocities. With that as a plan, the army had developed a vaccine to protect our troops in case an enemy tried to use it on them, or presumably in case the wind blew the wrong way the day they tried to use it on someone else.102

The army authorized MARU to test a live-attenuated vaccine on horses in the field, and Peters describes such tests on Costa Rica's Pacific coast. The Gorgas Memorial Laboratory also studied VEE among humans in Almirante from 1960 to 1962 and in Darién and the urban communities of Patoistown and Zegla in 1968, as well as in laboratory animals during the same periods. The studies included testing live vaccines of VEE on animal subjects.103

Exercises to test the military usefulness of VEE were carried out in Vietnam in the 1960s and on deserted islands in the Pacific, according to one account, but were put aside because allied troops could not be protected.104

VEE has persisted for long periods in Panama. Troops training at Fort Sherman in 1981 contracted it, an exposure that was linked to VEE in 1970, when the military was actively experimenting with VEE. The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research reported:

An outbreak of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis (VEE) occurred in a unit of military personnel who had gone to Panama for jungle training in 1981. Exposure was linked to training in October in an area of Fort Sherman that was previously implicated over ten years ago. An intensive serological survey identified five cases presenting with fever, chills and headaches. VEE remains a threat to U.S. forces deployed to specific areas of Central America.105

In addition, 1977 news accounts cited intelligence sources who claimed that in 1971 U.S. intelligence agents brought Swine flu from Fort Gulick (Espinar) in Panama to Cuba, where the flu apparently contaminated a large number of pigs. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization called the epidemic of swine flu that hit Cuba in 1971 the "most alarming event" of that year. According to the accounts, an intelligence agent was given a sealed unmarked container and instructed to deliver it to an anti-Castro group in Panama. Cuban exiles interviewed for the report said they received the container off Bocas del Toro in Panama and brought it to contacts to the small island of Navassa, whence it was shipped to Cuba in late March 1971. The first Cuban pigs contracted the flu on about May 6.106 Cuban authorities slaughtered half a million pigs in order to contain the epidemic.107

Apart from the above information, however, we have not located documentation of current contamination by military biological agents in Panama. We also have not found documents indicating the testing or use of Agent Orange or other defoliants in Panama, though we do not discount the possibility that defoliants may have been tested there.

In November 1969, President Nixon issued an executive order renouncing the use of all biological warfare agents, effectively ending any lawful development of the agents. The declaration led to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which outlawed efforts to "develop, produce, stockpile, or otherwise acquire or retain" any biological weapons. The United States became one of the first parties to the convention. The U.S. military subsequently converted stockpiled biological agents into harmless fertilizer.

http://www.forusa.org/programs/panama/ar.../part4.htm