The American spy company’s operation aimed to break the style of meals for shoppers and inflict monetary losses on the Soviet Union
American spies contaminated 800 luggage of sugar despatched on a cargo ship from Cuba to the USSR within the Nineteen Sixties, the newly launched recordsdata on the assassination of John F. Kennedy have revealed.
One of many recordsdata analyzed by journalist and blogger Ben Norton and the Washington Publish paperwork a “clandestine operation” by the Central Intelligence Company (CIA) simply months earlier than the Cuban Missile Disaster in 1962.
In August of that yr, the CIA discovered a couple of cargo vessel transporting 80,000 200-pound (90 kilograms) luggage of brown sugar to the USSR, in keeping with a declassified paper despatched to Basic Edward Lansdale, who was the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for particular operations at the moment and had a protracted historical past of working with the CIA.
The American spies then determined to launch a particular operation to infect the cargo. They discovered that the ship in query would briefly dock at Puerto Rico for minor hull repairs and must offload part of its cargo.
“By way of a clandestine operation, which was not detected and isn’t traceable, we have been in a position to contaminate 800 of those luggage of sugar,” the paper reported. In line with the CIA, the contaminated luggage would then spoil all the cargo, making it “unfit for human or animal consumption in any kind.”
The plan, nonetheless, was to not poison the Soviet folks however merely to bitter their style for all times.
“The contaminate we used will give the sugar an ineradicable sickly bitter style, which no course of will take away,” the spies mentioned, sustaining that it was “not in any sense harmful to well being.” These behind the operation nonetheless believed that it will “break the style of the buyer for any meals or drink for a substantial time.”
If profitable, the operation was anticipated to inflict monetary losses upon the Soviet Union amounting to between $350,000 and $400,000 at the moment, in keeping with the doc. The destiny of the cargo stays unclear as RT couldn’t discover any related Soviet knowledge associated to the case.
In 1960, the US imposed its first critical embargo in opposition to Cuba, halting all sugar purchases from the nation amongst different measures. The transfer got here in response to the Cuban Revolution, which put an finish to the rule of the US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
Washington additionally made its NATO allies abandon Cuban sugar imports as nicely. The USSR then stepped in, changing into one in all Cuba’s main sugar importers.
