Biowar in the Andes: The CIA's Next Secret Weapon--Genetic Engineering and
Chemical Biological Warfare

CounterPunch, volume 7 number 11, June 1-30, 2000
Editors, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
Co-writer, Andrew Cockburn

The Steps of Agent Blue

At the Institute for Genetics in Kazakhstan, former Soviet biowarriors
are being financed by the US and Britain to test mycoherbicides

Fusarium oxysporum strains that infect coca plants are closely
related to those that attack yams, a staple in the Andean diet.

McCaffery's Plague

Along with the other enormities presently perpetrated in the name of the
War on Drugs, the United States is now actively preparing to deploy
biological weapons. The weapons consist of plant pathogens designed to
attack coca, cannabis and opium poppy crops.
Research into the project has involved the resurrection of biological
agents developed long ago at Fort Detrick, Maryland, center for the US
biowar program closed down by President Nixon in 1969. Deep-frozen at
the time of the program's termination, they are now being thawed out and
readied for assault on producer countries in the third world. Also
involved are veterans of the Soviet biological warfare effort, now being
funded by the US through the connivance of an obscure UN agency,
employed for this purpose in order to shield the US from well-deserved
charges of violating the internationally negotiated biological weapons
convention.

The work is proceeding despite well attested evidence that the weapons,
if deployed, will have profound and disastrous impact on the ecologies
of the countries in which they are used. Furthermore, the USDA is now
researching the use of genetic modification to enhance the potency of
these bio-weapons. The principal agents under development are microbial
pathogens.

At the Institute for Genetics in Kazakhstan, former Soviet biowarriors
are being financed by the US and Britain to test mycoherbicides-fungi,
specifically Pleospora - to kill opium poppies and marijuana plants. In
the Andes and western Amazon, the US is planning the testing and
widespread application of fusarium oxysporum, an anti-coca fungus. The
FY 2000 budget contains at least $23 million for these programs,
although further appropriations are almost certainly buried in covert
military and intelligence budgets.

The prospect of being on the receiving end of a biological attack is not
alluring to countries such as Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. The Peruvian
government has already banned the testing and or deployment of the
fungi. The Colombian government is similarly queasy, but has been
sharply admonished by the project's supporters in the US Congress that
if Colombia wants its $1.8 billion aid package, it had better take the
fungi too.

Last March, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman,
R-N.Y., added an amendment to the Colombian aid bill requiring President
Clinton to certify that the Colombian government "has agreed to and is
implementing a strategy to eliminate Colombia's total coca and opium
poppy production" using, among other means, "tested, environmentally
safe mycoherbicides." The amendment is still in the bill (which is still
stalled in the senate) despite a submission by Colombian scientists to
the Colombian Ombudsman for the Environment that the use of
mycoherbicide agents in Colombia represents "a great danger both for
Colombian humans as well as for the Colombian environment and
biodiversity".

It is easy to see why the Colombians are worried. The absolute
requirement of this sort of weapon is that it should be "host specific",
ie that it should attack only the intended victim and nothing else.
According to Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Project, which has researched
and publicized this enormity, tests conducted by USDA-contracted
researchers in 1994 and 1995 using the favored strain of the fungus
fusarium oxysporum-EN4-resulted in two non-coca species becoming
infected.

Furthermore, fusarium oxysporum strains that infect coca plants are
closely related to those that attack yams, a staple in the Andean diet.
This is hardly surprising, Hammond points out, in view of the fact that
EN4 is designed to attack different strains of coca and therefore cannot
be entirely host specific. Thus the rare and beautiful Agrias butterfly
may soon fall as one more casualty of the War on Drugs, since its larvae
feed and mature on wild relatives of the coca plant. One of the few
remaining areas where Agrias can be found is the upper Putamayo river
region, a center both of guerrilla activity and coca cultivation in
Colombia and therefore a prime target for the US fungus spraying
campaign.

Meanwhile, back at the lab, USDA researchers have been working to create
genetically modified strains of the fungi, including the cloning of
fusarium strains that attack potatoes, in order to produce something
still more vicious.

However, in their search for instruments of what is officially known as
"bio-control", the government's researchers have also, it seems, reached
back into the past. Sometime before 1969, according to documents
supplied to Hammond under the FOIA, a team from APHIS, the USDA's plant
and animal inspection service, found a virus on a Datura tree imported
from Cauca, Colombia. Someone, it is not clear who, determined that the
virus could be useful as an anti-opium poppy agent, and it was
dispatched to the US biological warfare center at Fort Detrick, Maryland
under the label D-437.

Following Nixon's order to close the place down, D-437 was not destroyed
but put in deep frozen storage, forgotten by all but the researchers who
had worked so happily at Detrick. On April 12 this year, Hammond caught
a brief mention of D-437 on a US Army website, along with the fact that
it was being studied by a Dr Vernon Damsteegt, himself a Detrick
veteran. Following enquiries by Hammond, all mention of the virus and
its custodian was hurriedly removed from the site, which now carried a
fraudulent notification that it had last been updated on April 6.
1969 was the year Richard Nixon launched his war on drugs, using it to
set up what was intended to be his very own secret police force - the
Drug Enforcement Agency, a story chronicled in Edward J. Epstein's great
book Agency of Fear.

Biological warfare was integral to the US war against Vietnam.
CounterPunchers will recall Agent Orange, the hellish brew deployed to
defoliate the jungle. Agent Blue, targeted on rice production, is less
well known. The aim was to wipe out the NLF's food supply. Rice
plantations deemed to be servicing the enemy were duly sprayed and
obliterated. Professor Matthew Meselsen recalls how, early in 1970, he
was taken by a US Army Chemical Corps colonel to survey a valley in an
upland area that had been sprayed with Agent Blue some weeks before. As
they flew over the devastated valley, the colonel proudly explained to
Meselsen that this had obviously been an NLF food supply area since
there were no houses to be seen.

Later, they landed at a nearby village that turned out to be thronged
with refugees from the valley. The refugees explained that they had fled
because the Americans had just destroyed their rice crop. Scrutinizing
photographs he had taken from the air, Meselsen later detected numerous
houses that had been invisible while flying overhead at speed. A simple
calculation revealed that the amount of rice under cultivation in the
valley had been just sufficient to feed the locals, with none left over
to feed hungry Vietnamese guerrillas. Meselsen wrote a report that
prompted some political qualms in the US command in Vietnam, which
recommended to Washington that Agent Blue be terminated. The
recommendation was leaked to the Washington Post, whereupon Nixon
cancelled the program forthwith.

It is a measure of the obtuse barbarity of our present generation of
drug warriors that they make Richard Nixon look sane. Despite abundant
evidence of the dangers of deploying bioweapons such as the fungi in the
wild, the US appears determined to press ahead. CP

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