Anthrax attack on Congress and media had roots in planned US biowar attack on USSR and Albania
According to documents obtained by us, the anthrax attacks on the U.S. Congress and the media in October and November 2001 were directly linked to CIA and Pentagon contractors that were developing biological warfare agents in 1983 that were to be used against the Soviet Union and Albania.
On August 4, 2008, we reported on the anthrax investigation: "U.S. intelligence sources have revealed that the FBI has gone slow on the anthrax investigation because of the myriad links to covert programs involving Fort Detrick, the CIA, the Army Dugway Proving Ground in Utah (the home to the only aerosolized dry anthrax laboratory), and contractors SAIC, Battelle, and Hadron Advanced Biosystems (now known as Analex Corporation). Such weapons development would be in contravention of the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty signed by President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev but may have been subsequently ignored by the CIA following Nixon's resignation in 1974. Former President George Bush headed the CIA from November 1975 to January 1977."
As it turns out, in 1983, the Reagan administration was not only violating the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty but was planning to target the Soviet Union with newly-developed biological agents.
The FBI concentrated its anthrax investigation on Fort Detrick and the late badgered scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins. The FBI's motives were to avoid the genesis of the illegal US bio-warfare program, located just across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia's Rosslyn and Court House neighborhoods.
A January 20, 1983, letter from Cabazon Arms,a "CSC-WSI Joint Venture" established by Cabazon Security Corporation (83-180 Requa Avenue, Suite 9, Indio, California) and Wackenhut Services Inc. (3280 Ponce de Leon Blvd., Coral Gables, Florida), as a joint CIA and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) weapons research and development firm on the Cabazon Indian reservation in California, from Cabazon Arms President John P. Nichols to Dr. Harry Fair of Tactical Technologies, located at 1400 Wilson Boulevard, Room 1014, Arlington (Rosslyn), Virginia, states: "On February 15, 1983, I will be forwarding to you a unique lost of agents and production techniques related to biological warfare. The Stormont Laboratories, Inc., business plan I mailed you was to prepare you for what we are sending you in this area. Their products could be utilized in small countries bordering Albania or large countries bordering the Soviet Union. You will be amazed at the scope." Just down the street from Tactical Technolgies was 1911 North Fort Myer Drive, the location of the offices of CIA covert operatives Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines, Ted Shackley, Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero and the center for the shipment of arms to Iran on the ill-fated SS Poet and other illegal arms shipments. Just up Wilson Boulevard from Tactical Technologies was Battelle Memorial Institute, implicated in the anthrax weaponry development.
Tactical Technologies, involved with Hadron and Cabazon, and a CIA front was headquartered at 1400 Wilson Boulevard in Rosslyn.
A stone's throw from Tactical Technologies was 1911 North Fort Myer Drive, the brown building in the center and the headquarters of CIA fronts involving Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines, Edwin Wilson, and the shipping agent for the ill-fated SS Poet.
In a May 25, 1981, Wackenhut Inter-Office memo, Fair is named as "Dr. Harry D. Fair, Chief, Propulsion Technology, Applied Science Division" of the U.S. Army's Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, New Jersey. The same memo states that the Santa Rosa Indians pledged to the Cabazons that their land could be used for the testing of a "rail gun."
It is unclear what Nichols meant by using biological warfare agents in small countries bordering Albania, then a Chinese ally, and large countries bordering the Soviet Union, which included China. However, the possibility that the CIA and its contractors were contemplating a "false flag" biological attack on Albania from non-aligned Yugoslavia that may have been blamed on Moscow and a "false flag" retaliatory biological attack from China on the Soviet Union cannot be ruled out. A Soviet-Chinese war in the early 1980s would have advanced the proto-neoconservative political agenda of extreme anti-Communists in the Reagan administration like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, individuals who would later play a key part in the bogus intelligence that saw the George W. Bush administration invade and occupy Iraq.
On September 10, 1981, the Riverside, California Police Department noted a major meeting at the Cabazon Indian Reservation that was attended by Earl Brian, identified as a "Wisconsin businessman and CIA employee."
Brian, who was reportedly involved in working for William Casey and George H. W. Bush to pay off Iranian mullahs to arrange for the Iranians to hold the U.S. hostages until after the 1980 presidential election, a criminal conspiracy known as the "October Surprise," was the CIA's point man on developing biological weapons. Brian headed up two companies involved with bio-war research and development for Langley, Biotech Capital Corporation and Hadron. Brian was also involved in selling pirated copies of Inslaw, Inc.'s Prosecutors Management Information System (PROMIS) to foreign clients to fund bio-war weapons research and development on the Cabazon Indian reservation.
Brian was also the president of Xonics, Inc., a CIA and Pentagon contractor based in Los Angeles that was involved in radar and telecommunications systems. Hadron was originally incorporated in 1964 as Bio-Rad. The assets of the failed Xonics and Bio-Rad were combined to form Hadron, which ultimately became Analex Corporation. Analex North America was sold in 2007 to QinetiQ in a deal that involved The Carlyle Group, in which George H. W. Bush had a financial stake.
The correspondence between Nichols and Fair also mentioned Stormont Laboratories, founded by Dr. Clyde Stormont in Woodland, California. Stormont, a native of Wisconsin, was a noted professor of professor of genetics and serology. Stormont, a speciaist on equine blood typing, died on September 10, 2002.
Cabazon and associated firm principal directors also discussed in 1988 the development of biological warfare weapons, including those involving cancer and immuno-deficiency and specifically a patent involving cytotoxic T-Lymphocytes, with the Japanese. The primary Japanese entity involved in signing the agreement with the Cabazon interlocking entities on September 14, 1988,was Ajinomoto Co., Inc. of 1-5-8 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo and an "internationally-recognied Medical School in Japan" that received a CIA grant laundered through the Cabazon entity and the American side of the agreement included Meridian International Logistics, Inc. (MIL), a reputed CIA front and CIA and Pentagon liaison to Cabazon Arms, with offices at 15270 Sutton Street, Suite 101, Sherman Oaks, California and 1666 San Onofre Drive, Pacific Palisades, California, and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. MIL had an arms subsidiary, Meridian Arms Corporation (MAC), which dealt directly with Cabazon Arms and Wackenhut.
An undated U.S. government document, classified as "National Security Information: Unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions," attached to the January 20, 1983 letter from Cabazon Arms' Nichols to Fair, states in a paragraph titled "Possible Military Applications Utilizing Hybridoma Technology" and a sub-paragraph titled "Biological warfare," that states "the gene-splicing technology provides the ability to produce pathogenic (harmful) agents (i.e., viruses). In fact, biological warfare weaponry of this nature (both production and supply) is limited only by the imagination of the scientist."
In addition, the letter states that the Cabazon reservation was being used to develop a small machine gun that could be fitted with silencers. The letter states that Peter Zokosky, who was the owner of an arms manufacturer called Armtec Manufacturing and whose wife was mayor of Indio, had the British interested in the machine gun project. In addition, South Korean ammunition makers were involved, along with Swedish arms manufacturers. Chile and Guatemala were mentioned as possible locations for the manufacture of the weapon, called the Cabazon Arms CA 9 SMG. Other markets for Cabazon Arms mentioned in a September 1, 1981, Cabazon letter, were Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and El Salvador. Guatemala and El Salvador are described as the "most sensitive." A March 23, 1982, Cabazon Arms letter also stats that potential markets for the firm's ammunition included Argentina, Taiwan, and Turkey. Cabazon Arms also exported night vision goggles to Guatemala and Jordan.
The mention of Chile and Guatemala is significant. On February 4, 2008, WMR reported: "A stringer for the Financial Times, Anson Ng, who was following a CIA-connected money trail connecting the weapons smugglers to Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) money tranches, including one that led through the Cabazon Indian Reservation in California, was shot and killed in Guatemala City.
On November 27, 1992, a number of dramatic revelations were made in a debate in the British House of Commons, chief among them that a British journalist [Jonathan Moyle] investigating [Chilean arms manufacturer Carlos] Cardoen, Matrix Churchill, and the weapons smuggling ring was murdered in Chile:
The following comments were made by then-MP Ken Livingstone, [later] Mayor of London: 'I must emphasise that we are still talking about allegations that Mark Thatcher [son of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher] was trading arms to Iraq and that he was trying to sell South African arms to Saudi Arabia. However, if there is any shred of truth in the charges, are we to believe that MI5 and MI6 did not warn the Prime Minister of the day about the activities in which her son was involved? Surely the director of MI5 or MI6 must have thought that it was important, if any information of that kind came to light, to warn the Prime Minister immediately that her son was engaged in activities that were illegal in British law and contravened United Nations resolutions. Of course, the director of MI5 or MI6 would have done that.
I shall examine the position of Dr. Carlos Cardoen a little more. He is a major and powerful figure in Chile. According to Mr. Ari Ben-Menashe, Dr. Cardoen is a business associate of Mark Thatcher. A British journalist who went to investigate Dr. Cardoen has been murdered. That is a particularly unpleasant twist to the story . . .'"
The Cabazon Arms letter to Fair also stated that Kuwait was interested in "financing the production of the CA 9 SMG."
Hadron eventually morphed into Analex. On April 8, 2002, this editor wrote an article for CounterPunch on the Analex connection to the anthrax attacks in 2001: "On April 4, ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross broadcast on ABC World News Tonight that after six months the FBI still had hardly any clues and no suspects in its anthrax investigation. A Soviet defector, the former First Deputy Director of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992 and anthrax expert, Ken Alibek (formerly Kanatjan Alibekov), now a U.S. government consultant, made the astounding claim that the person who is behind the anthrax attacks may, in fact, been advising the U.S. government. After having passed a lie detector test, Alibek was cleared of any suspicion.
Interestingly, Alibek is President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems. On October 2, 2001, just two days before the first anthrax case was reported in Boca Raton, Florida and a week and a half before the first anthrax was sent through the mail to NBC News in New York, Advanced Biosystems received an $800,000 grant from NIH [National Institutes of Health] to focus on very specific defenses against anthrax. Hadron has long been linked with the CIA. The links resulted in charges by many former government officials, including the late former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, that the company's former President, Earl Brian, illegally procured a database system called PROMIS (Prosecutors' Management Information System) from Inslaw, Inc. and used his connections to the CIA and Israeli intelligence to illegally distribute the software to various foreign governments."
Also from the CounterPunch article was the following: "William Capers Patrick III was part of the original Fort Detrick anthrax development program, which "officially" ended in 1972 when President Nixon signed, along with the Soviet Union and United Kingdom, the Biological Weapons Convention. Nixon had actually ordered the Pentagon to stop producing biological weapons in 1969. It now seems likely that the U.S. military and intelligence community failed to follow Nixon's orders and, in fact, have consistently violated a lawful treaty signed by the United States . . .Last December, the New York Timesclaimed Patrick authored a secret paper on the effects of sending anthrax through the mail, a report he denies. However, Patrick told the BBC that he was surprised that as an expert on anthrax (he was a member of the UN biological warfare inspection team in the 1990s), the FBI did not interview him right after the first anthrax attacks. The BBC reported that Battelle Memorial Institute (a favorite Pentagon and CIA contractor and for whom Alibek served as biological warfare program manager in 1998) conducted a secret biological warfare test in the Nevada desert using genetically-modified anthrax early last September, right before the terrorist attacks. The BBC reported that Patrick's paper on sending anthrax through the mail was also part of the classified contractor work on the deadly bacterial agent."
On July 30, 2002, this editor filed the following story with Intelligence Online of Paris: The report shows that there was in the months before the anthrax attacks a significant southern California link to biological warfare:
"On March 8, 2001, police in Irvine, California discovered automatic weapons, explosives, and six plastic cylinders containing chemicals beneath the home of Dr. Larry Ford, who had committed suicide on March 2, three days after his Biofem Pharmaceutical, Inc. business partner, James Patrick Riley, was shot by a masked gunman outside the company's headquarters. An associate of Ford was later convicted of the murder. Ford, a devout Mormon who was rumored to have worked at Fort Detrick and the CIA, established a close relationship with South Africa's top secret bio-warfare program, Project COAST. In 1987, Ford, while a professor of gynecology and obstetrics at UCLA, became friendly with Dr. Niels Knobel, a major player in COAST. Ford became a consultant to the South African biowar program and became acquainted with Dr. Wouter Basson, known as "Dr. Death," the head of South Africa's bio-warfare program.
U.S. government investigators are now looking into a link between Basson, Ford, and possibly others involved with anthrax at Fort Detrick, Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center in Long Island, New York; and at South Africa's former biowar center at Fort Klapperkop in Pretoria [now Tshwane]."
Other documentation obtained by WMR shows that Cabazon Indian Security, the joint venture with Wackehut, discussed the purchase of Valleyfield Chemical Products Corporation of Valleyfield, Canada, after its owner, Canadian engineer Gerald Bull, was jailed in the United States for the illegal export of weapons to South Africa. Bull had not only worked for the South Africans but also the CIA, Israel, and was later involved in the building of a "super gun" for Saddam Hussein in Iraq. There is a belief that the 1981 testing that was to take place on the Santa Rosa Indian reservation involved Bull's rail gun or "super gun." Bull was assassinated by the Mossad on March 22, 1990 in Brussels. One of the Mossad assassins was reported recently to have been involved in the "hit" on CIA Patriot missile technology transfer expert U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel William Bennett, who was bludgeoned to death on March 22, 2009, while walking with his wife on an early Sunday morning in Landsdowne, Virginia. Bennett was specifically investigating the illegal theft of Patriot technology by Israel and its sale to Russia and China.
The May 31, 1981, Wackenhut memo states that "Barry Zuckerman and Charles F. Agar, both Canadian citizens, who are involved with a Canadian firm called Mineral Resources International Ltd., as well as both being involved with Canadian financial institutions . . . are interested in the possibility of acquiring this plant [Valleyfield Chemical]. The memo noted that the Wackenhut-Cabazon joint venture would be the foreign marketing representative for the chemical plant after its purchase and that Mineral Resources International already had a joint venture with the Cabazons to explore for oil and gas on the California reservation. The offices of California's U.S. Senators Alan Cranston and S. I. Hayakawa were involved in the agreement between the Cabazons and Canadians.
Cabazon Arms was also linked to First Intercontinental Development Corporation (FIDCO) of 908 15th Street, Suite 6, Santa Monica, California. FIDCO was reportedly a CIA front headed by George K. Pender, that was in charge of a $3 billion fund to reconstruct Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion of the country. FIDCO had direct connections to Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, the influential Chamoun Christian Maronite political family, the Arab Bank in Amman, and the Reagan White House's Michael McManus, Jr., an Assistant to the President. Another CIA front involved with Cabazon was Intersect Corporation, headed by John Vanderwerker, with offices at 18952 MacArthur Boulevard, Irvine, California. FIDCO and Intersect Corporation, as CIA fronts, regularly transferred millions of dollars to finance the CIA's arms and plane sales businesses. Two banks identified in these transactions are Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) and Credit Suisse in Zurich and Geneva. One of the Credit Suisse-Geneva account numbers used by the CIA entities between 1981 and 1983 for these transactions was 027465905482-1.
Intersect Corporation also had a Washington presence. The Washington Post Style section ran a story on January 27, 1980, about an "old hen" social party at the Smithsonian. Among those quoted in the article was an attendee at the social event, John Elliott of Fairfax, and who was cited as working for the "Intersect Corporation" which "does security work for the government."
Intersect and a Glenn Shockley, a principal of both FIDCO and Meridian International Logistics, were involved with a Spring 1981 aircraft transaction worth $7,800,000, with Parvis Lavi of Omega Industries of Plainview, Long Island. The date is significant because of the Reagan campaign's 1980 October Surprise involving the supply pre-election and post-election of military supplies to Iran in return for Iran holding U.S. embassy hostages in Iran until after the November presidential election to ensure President Jimmy Carter's defeat by Reagan. In 1998, Lavi was charged with illegally selling F-14 spare engine parts to Iran. Lavi also had offices in Los Angeles and Rotterdam. Lavi's brother, Houshang Lavi, was involved in a Carter administration deal in October 1980 to sell up to $10 million in F-14 spare parts to Iran in exchange for the hostage's release. However, key parts of the CIA were working with the Reagan campaign to ensure that there was no pre-election hostage release that could benefit Carter's re-election campaign. In 1983, a Swiss company, Alcari SA, sued Omega Industries for failure to pay Alcari $1.2 million in a deal to sell Iran military supplied in 1981, the same time that the Cabazon-connected CIA entities were involved in money transfers worth over $7 million that involved Omega Industries.
FIDCO, a Delaware corporation organized in 1974, brought a complaint on October 28, 1981, in the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, DC against Ship's Overseas Services, Inc. (SOS), a firm organized in 1972. The complaint dealt with the 1975 shipment of steel pipe from Spain for an oil company in Libya. SOS contracted pipe from Gulf Consolidated International, Inc. in Houston and turned a profit with the Libyans, from which FIDCO demanded a share. The case appeared to be a normal business dispute, except for the fact that appearing as a pro se intervenor before the court was none other than Michael A. McManus, Jr., the Special Assistant to President Reagan. However, the court ultimately found in favor of SOS.
In 1988, the chairman of the Hosue Judiciary Committee's Criminal Justice Subcommittee conducted an investigation of the Reagan campaign's October Surprise conspiracy with Iran. However, as WMR has previusly reported, Conyers has been staffed with individuals over the years who are connected not only to the CIA and CIA front operations in Washington, DC, but American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) operatives. The Conyers investigation of the October Surprise went nowhere.
In addition to journalists Moyle and Ng, there would be one more journalist who would be murdered because of his investigation of the arms smuggling and other illegal activities partly based on the Cabazon Indian reservation. Freelance Washington journalist Danny Casolaro was found with his wrists slashed a dozen times in a bathtub at the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on August 10, 1991. One of the last sources Casolaro spoke to was an official of the Cabazon Arms operation. As with journalist Gary Webb, who uncovered the CIA's links to the same Nicaraguan contra elements who were also involved with Cabazon, Casolaro's death was ruled a suicide. Before and after their deaths, Casolaro and Webb were subjected to a concerted disinformation and character assassination campaign conducted by certain sectors of the corporate media, which, in turn, took their orders from their CIA masters.
