Allegations of Biological Weapons Use - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 263

umentary record of covert actions from this time is very sparse, as these
records did not fall into the scope of the ARRB. Sabotage in Cuba had
been largely discontinued for many years, although it reportedly had a
brief revival during the Nixon administration. 66 The nature of sabotage

targets is not known.
Of course, 1971 was after President Nixon's executive orders renounc-
ing offensive biological and toxin warfare and ordering all weapons
stockpiles destroyed (see Chapters 2 and 15). However, in 1975 the CIA
was discovered to have ignored the executive orders and to have retained
stocks of saxitoxin and cobra venom. 67 Given the agency's willingness to
disregard one element of the presidential orders, it is not unreasonable to
consider that it might also have ignored another.
Furthermore, there was long-standing sentiment, supported by a 1945
legal opinion by the judge advocate general, that attack on enemy ag-
ricultural targets with chemical or biological agents did not constitute
chemical or biological warfare, but was rather a legitimate extension of
traditional methods of economic blockade. 68 Such a belief would have
found ready application to a covert biological attack on Cuban agricul-
ture.
However, after the 1975 embarrassment of being found to have vio-
lated a presidential executive order, and the coming into force of the
BWC in the same year, it is highly unlikely that the CIA would have felt
free to conduct any covert biological attacks. Given their political implau-
sibility, the lack of any verified supporting evidence, and the existence of
credible natural means of introduction of the disease agents, we believe
that all the post-1975 allegations are almost certainly mistaken.
The 1969 and 1971 outbreaks involved animal pathogens in which the
US BW program had long been interested. Newcastle disease (ND) had
been of interest in the BW program since World War II, 69 and African
swine fever since the early 1950s (see Chapter 2). Work on these agents
had originally been conducted at Fort Detrick, but had been moved to
the US Department of Agriculture site at Plum Island, New York, by
the 1960s. Neither introduction would have required more than a small
amount of agent (a few milliliters of liquid suspension would have suf-
ficed), and no specialized devices would have been needed for dissemi-
nation.