CIA Pak Whack Yanks

... Hayden had told Zardari that “many Westerners, including some U.S. passport holders, had been killed five days earlier on the Kam Sham training camp in the tribal area of North Warziristan,” Woodward writes. “But the CIA would not reveal the particulars due to the implications under American law.”

“A top secret CIA map detailing the attacks had been given to the Pakistanis,” Woodward continues. “Missing from it was the alarming fact about the American deaths … The CIA was not going to elaborate.”

The CIA does not comment on drone strikes. Neither Hayden nor Kappes could be immediately reached for comment.

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CIA celebrates Operation ST Circus and the Dali Lama's "Warriors"

From not acknowledging to "paying tribute" to the Dali Lama's "warriors." Betcha didn't know the Dali Lama had warriors. 'Course you did.

Hundreds of Tibetan warriors who doggedly fought a 15-year guerrilla war against the Chinese in Tibet after being trained and armed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) now have a memorial that is likely to ruffle Beijing.

The US has, for the first time, paid a tribute to the resistance forces and acknowledged the CIA's role in training them as the agency is erecting a memorial plaque at Camp Hale, a training base in Colorado for US troops during World War II.

Unknown to the local residents, who were told it was an atomic testing site, Camp Hale served as a training camp for nearly 2,000 Tibetan warriors who were taught the art of guerrilla warfare by the CIA from 1957 to 1972 to fight China's People's Liberation Army that attacked Tibet in 1949 and annexed the Buddhist kingdom within two years.

The event last week saw former CIA agents, Tibetans involved in the operation, and representatives of the US Forest Service and the Tibetan-American community in Colorado gather at Camp Hale.

What once was viewed as underhanded, dirty, possibly illegal, and therefore deemed a national security secret, now is celebrated as vital cog in the struggle 'gin those commies! Ahhh, the sweet smell of progress!

CIA Dispatch: Dengue's Friend in Florida

The Dengue virus in Florida: sweats, headache, body ache, vomiting, oral/nasal/rectal bleeding, feverish visions that the CIA is, somehow, behind it all.

It appears highly unlikely that any “detective work” performed by the CDC and Florida health officials will unearth any evidence of dengue fever being imported into Florida, but the evidence certainly exists. Prior to the recent Key West findings and still today, the CDC has consistently reported that there have been no outbreaks of dengue fever in Florida since 1934, and none in the continental U.S. since 1946. Remarkably, this report is incorrect.

Unknown to most Americans is that dengue fever has been the intense focus of U.S. army and CIA biological warfare researchers for over fifty years. As early as the 1950s, the army’s Fort Detrick in partnership with the CIA launched a multi-million dollar research program under which dengue fever and several addition exotic diseases were studied for use in offensive biological warfare attacks. Indeed, as several CIA documents, as well as the findings of a 1975 Congressional committee reveal that 3 sites in Florida, Key West, Panama City, and Avon Park, as well as 2 other locations in central Florida, were used for experiments with mosquito borne dengue fever and other biological substances.

The experiments in Avon Park, about 170 miles from Miami, were covertly conducted in a low-income African American neighborhood that contained several newly constructed public housing projects. CIA documents related to Project MK/NAOMI clearly indicate that the mosquitoes used in Avon Park were the Aedes aegypti type. Interestingly, at the same time experiments were conducted in Florida there were at least two cases of dengue fever reported among civilian researchers at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Avon Park residents still living in the area say that the experiments resulted in “at least 6 or 7 deaths". One elderly resident told this journalist, “Nobody knew about what had gone on here for years, maybe over 20 years, but in looking back it explained why a bunch of healthy people got sick quick and died at the time of those experiments.”

A 1978 Pentagon publication, entitled Biological Warfare: Secret Testing & Volunteers, reveals that the Army’s Chemical Corps and Special Operations and Projects Divisions at Fort Detrick conducted “tests” similar to the Avon Park experiments in Key West, but the bulk of the documentation concerning this highly classified and covert work is still held by the Pentagon as “secret.” One former Fort Detrick researcher says that the army “performed a number of experiments in the area of the Keys” but that “not all concerned dengue virus.”

In the spring and summer of 1981, Cuba experienced a severe hemorrhagic dengue fever epidemic. Between May and October 1981, the island nation had 158 dengue-related deaths with about 75,000 reported infection cases. Prior to this outbreak, Cuba had reported only a very small number of cases in 1944 and 1977. At the same time as the 1981 outbreak, covert biological warfare attacks on Cuba’s residents and crops were believed to have been conducted against the island by CIA contractors and military airplane flyovers. Particularly harmful to the nation was a severe outbreak of swine flu that Fidel Castro attributed to the CIA.

In 1985 and 1986, authorities in Nicaragua accused the CIA of creating a massive outbreak of dengue fever that infected thousands in that country. CIA officials denied any involvement, but army researchers admitted that intensive work with arthropod vectors for offensive biowarfare objectives had been conducted at Fort Detrick in the early 1980s, having first started in the early 1950s. Fort Detrick researchers reported that huge colonies of mosquitoes infected with not only dengue virus but also yellow fever were maintained at the Frederick, Maryland installation, as well as hordes of flies carrying cholera and anthrax, and thousands of ticks filled with Colorado fever and relapsing fever.

A review of declassified Army Chemical Corps documents reveal that the army may have also been engaged in dengue fever research as early as the late 1940s. Several redacted Camp Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal reports indicate that experiments were conducted on state and federal prisoners who were unwittingly exposed to dengue fever, as well as other viruses, some possibly lethal. Freedom of Information requests filed months ago for details on these early experiments remain unanswered.

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CIA violated ...

There's a newish report out by PHR (Physicians for Human Rights), documenting the various roles played by medical personnel in the CIA torture programs during the Bush years. Many of these so-called medical professionals appear to have a rather unseemly hankering for understanding the effects of torture on the human subject. Fascinating, to be sure, but that "do no harm" thing also seems a quaint anachronism in our doped up and fiendish times.

Now, the CIA part:

said the report appears to demonstrate that the CIA violated "all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation."

Which, with the addition of the words 'has continually,' is pretty much a summary of the CIA, which has repeatedly demonstrated an insistent vector toward human experimentation with drugs and torture, all in violation of "accepted legal and ethical standards" since inception. In 1953, the CIA, in combine with the DoD, sprayed LSD on a small town in France. They or their proxies have jacked up unwitting subjects with all manner of dope and ghoulish enterprise, but especially, the CIA liked LSD. Still do. Today, in the 21st century, the CIA are still whacking up subjects, now "detainees," with who knows what cocktails of drugs and ghoulish enterprise. Well, we have some idea.

Of course, the CIA doesn't have dink-weed operations out there yowling about violations of accepted legal and ethical standards by the CIA. Oh, no. They have Congress for that. And congress do about as much as PHR will manage to do with this report.

CIA in the House! Abarelli talks

Ok, the CIA are not actually in the house. Just the letters, so far as we know, make it in, as Abarelli talks about, what else? The CIA.

CIA calls it way back

More missing the boat, smelling the coffee, hammering own thumb.

Declassified CIA documents on South Korea show that the spy agency was surprised by the 1979 assassination of its dictatorial president by his intelligence chief, did not anticipate the military coup d'etat that ensued, and dismissed the strength of growing unrest that eventually erupted in near-civil war.

Following the coup, in May 1980, protest and civil unrest in the southern city of Kwangju plunged the country into near anarchy. President Jimmy Carter, upon the advice of the U.S. State Department and the CIA, and fearing North Korea might take advantage of the instability, authorized U.S.-led South Korean troops to put down the Kwangju “uprising,” resulting in the deaths of hundreds of protesters.

The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Tim Shorrock, a Washington-based journalist and longtime human rights activist, who published them Tuesday on the Web site of Foreign Policy in Focus, a project of the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies.

Shorrock reports that “months before” the uprising, “in an analysis entitled ‘The Outlook for President Pak [Chung Hee] and South Korea's Dissidents,’ the CIA dismissed the worker and student resistance, as well as the political opposition, as unorganized and ineffectual and unable to muster public sympathy for its demands for greater democracy and worker rights.”

CIA Black Arts

The Black Art of "Master Illusions"

How do wars begin? With a "master illusion," according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA's pioneers in "black propaganda," known today as "news management." In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an "incident" that became the "conclusive proof of North Vietnam's aggression." This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.

The CIA," he said, "loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons - the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two Marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam." An invasion that took three million lives was under way.

More ... not necessarily CIA stuff. Or maybe it is. Ahh, who the fuck knows? For all I know, John freakin' Pilger could be a CIA asset, in some weird logistical experimental, Operation Artichoke kind of way.

CIA Project Dormouse: MK/ULTRA Exposure as cover for Operation Artichoke

Yeah, it's that bad.

Houston stressed that deliberate exposure of the MK/ULTRA program by essentially offering it to the press would serve to placate the brewing feeding frenzy over so-called mind control projects, and would divert any investigative attempts into the multi-faceted Artichoke Project.

"Multi-faceted." Multi-faceted, he said. As in crazy-ass mind-fuck Manchurian candidate kinda shit, tossed in with a leeward bend toward drug-addled, mind-fucked assassination robots, while orthogonally conjoined racism and homophobia wrap it all up in one glowing, multi-faceted bow.

Whew, Abarelli whips out another dose of old-time/new-time CIA torture programs. Or program. It's not at all clear whether Operation Artichoke ever really stopped. One of Artichoke's facets was, and still is, the operating interrogation paradigm of the CIA.


__________________________________
Now, I can finally say without dispute just how ridiculous Spencer Ackerman looks when he writes CIA sponsored drivel in a putative "independent" news outlet. I've been wanting to bust Ackerman on that piece of shit article for a long time.

CIA, with strings attached

Bruce Cameron's marvelous article recounting a brief history of the CIA in Afghanistan, post Soviet withdrawal, brings to light in interesting little factoid:

CIA hardliners also hungered for revenge, with the expressed desire of seeing Najibullah “strung up by a light pole,” one CIA official told then-Newsweek correspondent Robert Parry in 1989.

And, then one day ...

The ousted communist leader Najibullah, who had stayed in Kabul, sought shelter in the United Nations compound, but was captured. The Taliban tortured, castrated and killed him, his mutilated body hung from a light pole, just as CIA hardliners had wanted more than half a decade earlier.

The CIA may fuck up a lot of serious shit, but I suspect that when the CIA want someone dead, they get dead. Except for that damned Castro bastard. Damn you, Castro!

CIA Helped Bush Senior In Oil Venture

Oh, come on! What now? Ain't buyin' it. That is waaay too much of stretch.

No, not really. So, Viva Zapata!

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a ‘real shocker.’

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush’s oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.

According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush’s original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The ‘75 memo describes Devine as an “oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.” The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.

“Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,” the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine’s role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.

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CIA Man Recants on Waterboarding Claim

Wellie, wellie, well, then. Look what we 'ave 'ere then: A former CIA operative, John Kiriakou, the knowledgeable source who tripped the media light fantastic with tales of torture's efficacy, has recanted his earlier fiction. Yes, he did then intone, torture is horrible. But it works! John Yoo fuckin' hoo! Shit works! Rush was ecstatic. And so, too, all those lumbering, yawping hordes of stump growth who just manage the task of placing an adjective next to a noun in calling themselves real Americans.

Except for one small detail, it was a great story.

[Kiriakou] told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.
"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

And the detail:

"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

And now?

"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."

What caused the fess up?

"Now we know," Kiriakou goes on, "that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied."

The CIA, Fort Detrick, and "Ethnic Weapons"

Via Deconstructing the Manifest, Aberelli heaves another load of CIA-SOD secret malfeasance and mad imaginings. Ponder vectors head toward CIA-SOD MK/NAOMI research on retro-viruses, and other research into exploiting gene differentials of ethnic populations for targeted bioweapon deploy. Live testing conducted, targeting poor "Negroes" in Florida, California, black soldiers in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

Oh, and what petro said: buy Aberelli's book!

WRITING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE
by H.P. Albarelli Jr.

I don’t like having to write this article. I don’t like even thinking about it, but over the past few months its subject has come up repeatedly. Many television and radio hosts who have interviewed me about my new book, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, have, on their own, brought up the subject of AIDS and Fort Detrick and the connection between the two. Nearly the entire ten years I worked on the book, this subject consistently loomed in the background like some malevolent poltergeist, and was essentially considered unspeakable by practically everyone I interviewed. Now things are different.

Just a few days ago, one radio host, who had actually read my entire book, asked about the many trips various Fort Detrick bacteriologists and biochemists took throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond to locations in Africa. Trips were to locations like the Belgian Congo and Burundi and French Equatorial Africa. A few media hosts have remarked about the thousands of rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees that Fort Detrick went through in their countless experiments during these same years; resulting in so many mutilated and dead primates that one former Army scientist, Dr. Henry Eigelsbach, told me that sometimes their bodies had to be “scooped up with a back-hoe and loaded into dump trucks” and then carted off for disposal and incineration.

Only yesterday, a very well informed radio host in California, Cary Harrison, at KPFK-FM, asked me about well-documented reports concerning the 1969 testimony of a high-level Pentagon biological warfare official before the U.S. House of Representatives.

Nobody in their right mind wants to think or believe that the American government had a hand in producing the dreadful disease AIDS, certainly not me. My father, as a dedicated and conscientious histologist, worked for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in the 1950s, and went on to devote his life to helping people in any way he could. He would have never done anything to hurt anyone, yet now there is strong evidence that other scientists with the U. S. Army may have done just that. Before his recent death, I asked my father about these reports. He sadly shook his head, and said, “I don’t know what’s happened to this country. I don’t understand it at all. It’s not the country I went to war for; it’s not the same country I was willing to die for.” My father was always a confident man. It distressed me to see him bewildered, but I too was bewildered. I didn’t at all like thinking about Fort Detrick and AIDS.

On July 1, 1969, a high-ranking Pentagon biological warfare official, Dr. Donald MacArthur, appearing before the Defense Department Appropriations Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, told the assembled elected officials that “dramatic progress being made in the field of molecular biology [by Army researchers at Fort Detrick and elsewhere] led [the Army] to investigate the relevance of this field of science to biological warfare. A small group of experts considered this matter and provided the following observations:

1. All biological agents up to the present time [1969] are representative of naturally occurring disease, and thus known by scientists throughout the world. They are easily available to qualified scientists for research, either for offensive or defensive purposes.


2. Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism, which could differ, in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon when we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.”

Dr. MacArthur ‘s testimony went on and he informed the subcommittee that a research program to explore the feasibility of developing such a disease, “a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could be acquired,” would take only about 5 years to complete, and would cost $10 million.

As readers may expect, the Army that year was given its fully requested appropriation. As to whether or not the new biological disease Dr. MacArthur spoke of went into production is unknown, but former Army scientists with Fort Detrick’s Special Operation Division (SOD), speaking under terms of anonymity, say the program had actually already begun several years prior to 1969 under a reformatted Project MK/NAOMI. That project was the ultra-secret joint CIA-SOD program that was organized in late 1950. One former SOD researcher said, “The idea of a man-made disease that the immune system couldn’t handle had been proposed much earlier in the late 1950s with a fair amount of field work conducted in the process.” When I attempted to interview other SOD researchers about the manufacturing of an AIDS-like virus at Fort Detrick people clammed up and shook their heads. Said one microbiologist, “I can’t discuss that. You know as well as I do that if I said anything at all about that it would be like putting a gun to my head.” Said another coyly, “We had ability to do practically anything we wanted to do back then; to create any diseases we wanted to, but what we did and did not do is not a subject I can discuss. Lets just say that nothing was beyond our reach.” Answers such as these provided me with little satisfaction or comfort. I became increasingly uneasy about the smugness of some of the replies. When some replies were made along with what I considered terribly racially-biased remarks, I often wished I had never brought the subject up.

ETHNIC WEAPONS

At about the same time as retro-virus work began, Army researchers at Fort Detrick began intensive research into what it dubbed “ethnic weapons.” These were chemical and biological weapons targeted at various and specific ethnic groups. When I first encountered the term in a conversation with a former colleague of Frank Olson and inquired as to what it meant, he explained, “Weapons aimed at selected ethnic groups. Like Blacks who are particularly susceptible to certain blood diseases, weapons like that for example.” Despite the vagueness of the explanation, I understood.

I was astonished to learn that the Army was conducting research in this area, and soon encountered another scientist who spoke about the subject. I asked where was this research conducted? Both Fort Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal, I was told, and on a few selected university campuses. Are human subjects involved? I asked. Servicemen and others, came the answer. Others? Selected people and groups in the field came the answer. I asked if experiments involved particular ethnic groups with other shared characteristics; for example, Caucasian homosexuals or Black homosexuals or homosexuals, in general? It could, certainly, was the reply.

“We know and understand that there are differences, innate differences, among certain groups of people due their ethnicity,” the former Army scientist said. “This presents certain vulnerabilities that can be exploited through the studied use of selected chemical and biological agents. Which in turn offers some really exciting possibilities… it’s not far fetched at all to think that we can selectively, and very affectively, attack targeted ethnic groups, inflicting measured damage ranging from incapacitation to death.”

The Army scientist I had interviewed drew my attention to an early 1970 paper written by Dr. Carl A. Larson. The paper, later the same year published by the United States Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was simply titled, “Ethnic Weapons.” Larson was head of the Department of Human Genetics at the Institute of Genetics, University of Lund, Sweden. Widely published in medical journals in American and Europe, Larsen held a Licentiate degree from the Medical School of Lund University and was a licensed physician.

Dr. Larson’s paper proposes that differences in gene frequencies between ethnic groups serve as the basis for researching and developing an entirely new grouping of chemical and biological warfare agents—agents with the capabilities of incapacitating or killing a targeted population with ease thus sparing other groups within the targeted population. “For example, the Army scientist explained, “say we wanted to eliminate all those people of a certain ethnic group in a targeted city and we knew that this group was highly susceptible to a certain form of cancer. We would incorporate that cancer into a weapon and through special delivery mechanisms induce the disease into those people.”

Dr. Larson’s paper cites a number of examples of “enzymatic reactions” or “enzyme polymorphisms.” He writes, “Clearly a relative advantage in one environment granted carriers of a mutant gene can be entirely void in another environment…. Careful analyses of enzymatic reaction patterns to a series of drugs are underway, and we may soon have a grid where new observations of this kind can be pinpointed.”

Larson explains that also examined are the possibilities “of the poison-provoking enzyme production, an individual adaptation observed in several instances.” He then cites one poison, milk, explaining that among Europeans intolerance to lactose, or milk sugar, “occurs as a rare recessive trait” but that “milk intolerance in various groups of non-Europeans began to accumulate, it was remembered that malnourished children in east Africa get diarrhea when treated with dried skimmed milk. Then, the enzyme lactase was found to lose its activity in the intestinal mucosa of African infants over the first four years of life.” I found Larson’s discussion of milk quite provocative because I knew from my research into Frank Olson’s work at Fort Detrick that some of it had centered on milk, Asians, and microbiology. However, everyone I interviewed on the subject refused to give me specifics about this phase of Olson’s research.

Interestingly, Dr. Larson also briefly mentions the drug, or “incapacitant”, known as BZ “which before the present renaissance as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) caused epidemic outbursts of Saint Anthony’s fire in the Dark Ages. With ditran-like compounds, BZ shares the capacity to produce transient toxic psychosis, sometimes compared to schizophrenia.”

Larson’s paper goes on, “Surrounded with clouds of secrecy, a systematic search for new incapacitating agents is going on in many laboratories. The general idea, as discussed in open literature, was originally that of minimum destruction.” Subtlety paying his respects to the Army’s earlier joint CIA top-secret drug experiment of 1951 in Pont St. Esprit, France, Larson’s paper states, “Psychochemicals would make it possible to paralyze temporarily entire population centers without damage to homes and other structures. In addition, with the small quantities required for full effect of modern incapacitating agents, logistics problems would be minute. The effective dose of BZ-type agents amounts to micrograms.”

Larson’s “Ethnic Weapons” paper concludes by stating that during the first half of 1969, “several laboratories reported factors engaged in passing over the genic message from DNA, the primary command post, to RNA which relays the chemical signal. The enzymatic process for RNA production has been known for some years, but now the factors have been revealed which regulate the initiation and specificity of enzyme production. Not only the factors have been found, but their inhibitors. Thus, the functions of life lie bare to attack.”

Larson’s paper makes no mention of field experiments in support of ethnic weapons but from other Army sources we know that the United States did conduct such experiments. In addition to the Pont St. Esprit experiment, cited above, others were conducted in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where the U.S. Navy launched a number of experiments at a vital naval supply depot. These surreptitious experiments, in the Navy’s own words, were aimed at “Negroes, whose incapacitation would seriously affect the operation of the supply system.” The Navy secretly employed an aerosol delivery mechanism whereby Asperillus fumigates was employed to simulate Coccidioides. Coccidioides immitis is a lethal fungus that causes valley fever. Fort Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal scientists studied the fungus for years in the 1950s and 1960s. Their experiments revealed that African Americans, as opposed to whites, were much more likely to die from exposure to valley fever.

In addition to Navy’s experiments, there were also a series of SOD experiments conducted in the early 1950s in Florida that specifically targeted African Americans in impoverished areas. In several neighborhoods outside of Miami, as well as at least one location nearby where Disneyworld is today, SOD scientists conducted a number of experiments using mosquitoes as vectors for various biological agents. Files concerning the operations, according to the Army, were destroyed in 1973. Additionally, at about the same time, Fort Detrick researchers working under the CIA’s MK/NAOMI project targeted a number of inner-city minority neighborhoods in Chicago and New Orleans with several aerosol attacks using chemicals thought to be harmless. Perhaps coincidentally, months following the urban experiments, a large number of elderly African American fell seriously ill and died. One former SOD biochemist, interviewed in his Maryland home in 1999, told me, “We weren’t all that sure of the supposed harmless agent used. I don’t even recall what it was. I’d be lying if I said anyone really was all that concerned about the targeted areas to begin with.”

In 1974 and 1975, Dr. Richard Hammerschlag, a biomedical researcher with nearly 20 years of experience with several west coast medical institutions, including City of Hope National Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente Health Research and Cancer Services, sounded a note of alarm about ethnic weapons research at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. After learning of the Army’s experiments with ethnic weapons, as well as learning that the CIA under its revamped MK/ULTRA program, now called MK/SEARCH, was also researching ethnic weapons, Hammerschlag had began warning other scientists of the serious dangers of such research.

At the Chemical Society gathering, Hammerschlag said, “South East Asians, for example, have a different genetic composition than do Caucasians. It’s therefore possible that these people are susceptible to diseases westerners are not, and we know that’s true. Its been learned that certain proteins exist in the blood of specific groups. These proteins occur in multiple forms and are called polymorphysims. We call them blood types, such as A, B, O, and RH. And they appear in different frequencies among different groups of people. For example, blood type B almost never appears in American Indians. But accounts for 30-40 percent of certain population in South East Asia and Southern India.”

Dr. Hammerschlag eventually approached Dr. Larson to speak about ethnic weapons. Larson, according to a 1983 report, told Hammerschlag that if the research continued the efforts could be “suicidal” for humankind. Larson sounded this warning over 25 years ago, and by most accounts the efforts he warned about have continued unabated.

Copyright© H.P. Albarelli Jr. 2009-2010. All Rights Reserved. H.P. Albarelli Jr. is the author of A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments [TrineDay Publishers, November 2010]. Anyone reprinting this article must give credit to its author.

CIA Euro-psyopin'

Now that the blessed Wikileaks has published the remarkable CIA Red Cell document,

Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission—Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough

Wow.

Immediate questions spring forth: will the CIA veer? Will they rely on security through obscurity and still mount the euro-media psyop? After all, and despite the fact that everyone should, who the fuck reads Wikileaks? or the fringe conspiracy lunatics who do? Answers will be forthcoming as we monitor the European press, tell tale signs of media-channeled, message force multipliers highlighting distressed Afghans, tales of Taliban oppression replete.

CIA 'could face court' over Pakistan drone raids

Now they tell them!

The US government's refusal to offer a legal rationale for using unmanned drones to kill suspected militants in Pakistan could result in CIA officers facing prosecution for war crimes in foreign courts, a legal expert has told lawmakers.

"Prominent voices in the international legal community" were increasingly impatient with Washington's silence on the CIA's bombing raids in Pakistan and elsewhere, Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University, told a congressional panel on Tuesday.

Lawyers at the US State Department and other government agencies were concerned that the administration has "not settled on what the rationales are" for the drone strikes, he said.

Now, you must understand that this particular Kenneth Anderson is war-mongering nutjob so far as I have been able to discern. He favours, and believes to be legal, CIA and JSOC planned assassinations against individuals or groups of individuals suspected of being terrorists, insurgents, Taliban, al Qaeda. He derives this belief, no doubt, on the fact that the prohibition on assassinations applied literally to "political assassinations," a condition easily ducked in the age of the gwot.

CIA Baked Birthday Cake for Suicide Bomber in Afghanistan

Search him? Hell, they baked a cake for him!

CIA officers in Afghanistan were so keen to meet the double agent they believed would give them valuable intelligence on al Qaeda, they planned a birthday celebration for his arrival at their U.S. military base, AP reported Thursday.

But before Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al Balawi could eat his cake and share his sources during the meeting on Dec. 30, he blew himself up, killing seven Americans and a Jordanian intelligence officer in the deadliest attack on the CIA since 1983.

The report of the planned birthday gathering is the latest indication that CIA officers trusted and wanted to engage al Balawi, a Jordanian double agent who was invited to Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan's eastern province of Khost after promising to share his knowledge on al Qaeda.

...

Did the CIA test LSD in the New York City subway system?

Whew. Albarelli's book is really turning up the beets.

Albarelli spent more than a decade sifting through more than 100,000 pages of government documents and his most startling chestnut might be his claim that the intelligence community conducted aerosol tests of LSD inside the New York City subway system.

“The experiment was pretty shocking — shocking that the CIA and the Army would release LSD like that, among innocent unwitting folks,” Albarelli told The Post.

A declassified FBI report from the Baltimore field office dated Aug. 25, 1950 provides some tantalizing support for the claim. “The BW [biological weapon] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September 1950, have been indefinitely postponed,” states the memo, a copy of which the author provided to The Post

An Olson colleague, Dr. Henry Eigelsbach, confirmed to Albarelli that the LSD subway test did, in fact, occur in November 1950, albeit on a smaller scale than first planned. Little, however, is known about the test — what line, how many people and what happened.

The purported experiment occurred nearly a year before a more infamous August 1951 incident in the small town of Pont St. Esprit, in the south of France, when the citizens were hit by a case of mass insanity.

More ...

Ah, Pont St. Esprit, where have we heard that before?

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CIA Target a "Gift From Allah"

That inside suicide job that took out seven CIA operatives: Allah takes a vengeful whack the CIA with a double agent fitted with a "martyrdom belt."

In a posthumously released video message, the suicide bomber who killed seven C.I.A. employees on Dec. 30 said that his original target had been his handler from Jordanian intelligence, and that an invitation to meet C.I.A. officers at a remote base in Afghanistan had been an unexpected boon.

“We planned for something but got a bigger gift, a gift from Allah, who brought us, through his accompaniment, a valuable prey: Americans, and from the C.I.A.,” said the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian physician who carried out the attack, in a 44-minute video posted on extremist Web sites Sunday.

“That’s when I became certain that the best way to teach Jordanian intelligence and the C.I.A. a lesson is with the martyrdom belt,” Mr. Balawi said in the video, as translated by IntelCenter, a Virginia company that monitors online postings by extremist groups. The Jordanian officer who had introduced him to the C.I.A. was also killed in the attack.

Mr. Balawi, who had told the C.I.A. he could get access to top Qaeda leaders but turned out to be a double agent, called for more attacks on Jordanian intelligence, noting its cooperation with the United States.

In an earlier video, released 10 days after the attack, Mr. Balawi was shown seated with Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and described the attack as revenge for the killing last year by a C.I.A. drone of the Pakistani Taliban’s previous leader, Baitullah Mehsud.

CIA Requests Own Documents

Told ya' it was "a keeper."

Thanks to Millegan Stews for this one! Though, I confess, I don't know quite what to make of it.

CIA Requests Its Own Documents From Author

In a bizarre about-face, the secretive Central Intelligence Agency has requested documents from an investigative journalist, even though the writer had earlier obtained them from the CIA itself under the Freedom of Information Act.

The strange request was made last week to author H.P. Albarelli Jr., whose recently published book A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, details a myriad of CIA drug experiments and exposes a large number of previously anonymous physicians and business officials who contracted with the agency. The experiments resulted in the deaths of a number of people and sent hundreds more seeking medical help.

“The caller, an agency official, who identified himself by a name I was quite familiar with from past requests,” explained Albarelli, “asked if I would be so kind as to send by fax two documents my book referenced in its narrative and footnotes. I suppose I should have been bowled over by the request, but I wasn’t. It happened once before.”

“The crazy thing,” added Albarelli, “is that all of the requested documents came from my FOI requests to the agency in the early 1990s.”

The documents requested from Albarelli centered on two subjects. The first top-secret CIA document details a meeting between an official of the Sandoz Chemical Company and an undercover CIA operator. The document reveals a close relationship between the firm and the agency, and provides stunning details about a mysterious 1951 outbreak of “insanity” in a small French town, Pont St. Esprit. In a covert experiment, the village was surreptitiously administered the powerful hallucinogen LSD in an attempt to see if there was a viable method of waging war without killing people or destroying property. A related document appears to reveal that famed LSD inventor, Albert Hoffmann, maintained a close relationship with the CIA.

Ahh, some juicy bits...

The second document requested reveals intelligence links between one of the criminals who murdered Frank Olson and the assassination of JFK, including a possible working relationship with suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

The CIA, the ISI, and Johnnie Walker Blue

Who cannot help to laugh at the "warily" part? Really? The CIA and the ISI find each other suspect? Wonder whatever led to that?

C.I.A. and Pakistan Work Together, but Do So Warily

Inside a secret detention center in an industrial pocket of the Pakistani capital called I/9, teams of Pakistani and American spies have kept a watchful eye on a senior Taliban leader captured last month. With the other eye, they watch each other.

The C.I.A. and its Pakistani counterpart, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, have a long and often tormented relationship. And even now, they are moving warily toward conflicting goals, with each maneuvering to protect its influence after the shooting stops in Afghanistan.

Yet interviews in recent days show how they are working together on tactical operations, and how far the C.I.A. has extended its extraordinary secret war beyond the mountainous tribal belt and deep into Pakistan’s sprawling cities.

Beyond the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, C.I.A. operatives working with the ISI have carried out dozens of raids throughout Pakistan over the past year, working from bases in the cities of Quetta, Peshawar and elsewhere, according to Pakistani security officials.

The raids often come after electronic intercepts by American spy satellites, or tips from Pakistani informants — and the spies from the two countries then sometimes drive in the same car to pick up their quarry. Sometimes the teams go on lengthy reconnaissance missions, with the ISI operatives packing sunscreen and neon glow sticks that allow them to identify their positions at night.

Successful missions sometimes end with American and Pakistani spies toasting one another with Johnnie Walker Blue Label whisky, a gift from the C.I.A.

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CIA Operation Azorian: "New Details" Released

More declassification.

In 1974, far out in the Pacific, a U.S. ship pretending to be a deep-sea mining vessel fished a sunken Soviet nuclear-armed submarine out of the ocean depths, took what it could of the wreck and made off to Hawaii with its purloined prize.

Now, Washington is owning up to Project Azorian, a brazen mission from the days of high-stakes - and high-seas - Cold War rivalry.

After more than 30 years of refusing to confirm the barest facts of what the world already knew, the CIA has released an internal account of Project Azorian, though with juicy details taken out. The account surfaced Friday at the hands of private researchers from the National Security Archive who used the Freedom of Information Act to achieve the declassification.
...
In it, the CIA describes in chronological detail a mission of staggering expense and improbable engineering feats that culminated in August 1974 when the Hughes Glomar Explorer retrieved a portion of the submarine, K-129. The eccentric industrialist Howard Hughes lent his name to the project to give the ship cover as a commercial research vessel.

Despite the declassified article, the greatest mysteries of Project Azorian remain buried three miles down and in CIA files: exactly what parts of the sub were retrieved, what intelligence was derived from them and whether the mission was a waste of time and money. Despite the veil over the project, its existence has been known for decades.

"It's a pretty meaty description of the operation from inception to death," said Matthew Aid, the researcher who had been seeking the article since 2007, when he learned of its publication thanks to a footnote he spotted in other documents. "But what's missing in the end is, what did we get for it? The answer is, we still don't know."

CIA Asset Erik Prince: Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy

Well, I'm sure it is "not all," but a fascinating tale from this century's privatized version of Oliver North. A venerable CIA asset has been "thrown under the bus," and he just can't quite believe it.

I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.

Venting ...

CIA Operation Span: Spraying LSD on France

This one's a keeper.

In 1951, the southern French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit experienced what has been described as an episode of "mass insanity," which was blamed on an hallucinant "bread mold" by scientists from the locally-stationed Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company. Few believed this, but the story was forced to stick. For decades, the episode remained a mystery.

Until now. Now, it has been discovered that the localized hysteria in Pont-Saint-Esprit was not the result of mass simultaneous consumption of moldy bread, or any other toxic natural agent. It was the result of a toxic, entirely unnatural agent.

Actually, it was the CIA.

In the recently published book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, H.P. Albarelli reveals documentary evidence that the mysterious incident was the result of the top secret covert CIA LSD experiment, Operation Span, conducted under the umbrella Project MK/NAOMI, cousin to the more notoriously infamous Project MK/ULTRA. The Pont-Saint-Esprit event resulted from a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. When Sandoz Pharmaceutical scientists explained the bizarre affair with bread mold, the company had been selling LSD to the CIA and the US Army for "research."

the Pont-St.-Esprit outbreak in 1951 was the result of a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

...the scientists who produced the bogus cover-up explanations of contaminated bread and or mercury poisoning to deflect from the real source of the events worked for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the US Army and CIA with LSD for research.

Now, and apparently secretly, the French government is expressing some dismay.

According to reliable US sources, the US State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research has been given a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency DSGE (Directorate General for External Security). According to the report the inquiry regards a recently-published account of U.S. government complicity in a mysterious 1951 incident of mass insanity in France in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France.

Favourite part:

When Shane asked a former top ranking Special Operations officer to speak about the division’s projects in general, Andrew M. Cowan, Jr. said, “I just don’t give interviews on that subject. It should still be classified—if nothing else, to keep information the division developed out of the hands of some nut.”

Yes, we wouldn't want "some nut" running around with aerosolized LSD, spraying it on people, now would we?

CIA Hit by Short Haul Af-Pak Blowback

The Pakistani who hit the CIA station in Afghanistan was a "regular CIA informant."

CIA Attacker Driven in From Pakistan
Suicide Bomber Was a Regular CIA Informant, Had Been to Chapman Base Multiple Times

The suicide bomber who killed at least six Central Intelligence Agency officers in a base along the Afghan-Pakistan border on Wednesday was a regular CIA informant who had visited the same base multiple times in the past, according to someone close to the base's security director.

The informant was a Pakistani and a member of the Wazir tribe from the Pakistani tribal area North Waziristan, according to the same source. The base security director, an Afghan named Arghawan, would pick up the informant at the Ghulam Khan border crossing and drive him about two hours into Forward Operating Base Chapman, from where the CIA operates.

Because he was with Arghawan, the informant was not searched, the source says. Arghawan also died in the attack.

The story seems to corroborate a claim by the Taliban on the Pakistani side of the border that they had turned a CIA asset into a double agent and sent him to kill the officers in the base, located in the eastern Afghan province of Khost.

The infiltration into the heart of the CIA's operation in eastern Afghanistan deals a strong blow to the agency's ability to fight Taliban and al Qaeda, former intelligence officials say, and will make the agency reconsider how it recruits Pakistani and Afghan informants.

Ya think?

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