Test Tube Republic, Part IX: Biological Weapons Programs

TEST TUBE REPUBLIC: Chemical Weapons Tests in Panama and U.S. Responsibility

IX. Biological Warfare Programs

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.

---

TEST TUBE REPUBLIC: Chemical Weapons Tests in Panama and U.S. Responsibility
I. Introduction
II. Brief History of Chemical Weapons Programs in Panama
III. Storage of Chemical Agents and Munitions
IV. Chemical Weapons Tests
V. Disposal of Chemical Agents and Munitions
VI. Potential Long-Term Dangers Posed by Abandoned Chemical Weapons
VII. Information and Documents on Chemical Weapons: The U.S. Record
VIII. Legal Obligations
IX. Alleged development of biological agents in Panama
X. Conclusions and Recommendations
Appendices
Endnotes