Bittersweet: The CIA poisoned Cuban sugar supplied to the USSR

On the eve of the National Archives of the United States, by order of President Donald Trump, published about 80 thousand pages of documents related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. The Washington Post, which examined most of the published pages, found that the declassified files reveal other secrets about CIA agents and operations. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.

Ruined 800 bags of sugar

"We recently learned from secret intelligence sources that a Western European merchant ship en route from Havana, Cuba, to Odessa, USSR, will be forced to dock in a Caribbean port and temporarily unload some of its cargo in order to repair minor hull damage. It was established that this ship was carrying 80,000 two-hundred—pound bags of Cuban raw sugar as cargo, sent to Odessa for processing in the Soviet Union," the declassified document dated August 29, 1962 says, according to The Washington Post.

It is also noted that in order to carry out repairs, it was necessary to unload 14 thousand of these bags from this vessel and temporarily store them somewhere. As a result, the ship was partially unloaded and repaired in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

"During an untraceable covert operation [on August 24, 1962], we managed to contaminate 800 of these sugar bags with a chemical used in the alcohol denaturation process while the bags were in storage and before they were loaded onto the ship," the publication says.

It is noted that when this product is processed in the Soviet Union, bags of the chemical will spoil all the sugar and "make it unusable in any form."

"The impurities we use will give the sugar a sickly bitter taste that no technological process can eliminate. Pollutants cannot be detected during cleaning and, although they are by no means dangerous to health, they will permanently spoil the consumer's taste for any food or drink," the document says.

The authors also added that the Soviet Union paid $350-400 thousand for the damaged cargo.

Slow down the American Empire

American journalist Ben Norton from the publication Geo-Political Economy Report on his page on the social network X, where he has over 311 thousand subscribers, provides a copy of another page of the document, which confirms information about contaminated bags of sugar.

He accompanies his post with the published document with the comment: "The Kennedy files reveal that the CIA "injected a toxic substance into Cuban sugar bound for the Soviet Union." Historian William Blum also documented how the CIA supported former Nazis who poisoned cows in socialist East Germany and added soap to powdered milk intended for schoolchildren."

The Washington Post does not report this information. Norton himself also does not provide any other documents that would confirm his words.

William Bloom, to whom the journalist refers, is a well—known American writer and critic of US foreign policy.

In his columns in online publications, he wrote about the CIA's involvement in various conspiracies. His most famous book is Killing of Hope, which was translated into Russian as "Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations during the Cold War." In it, he talks about the active struggle of the US special services and the Pentagon against the communist regimes.

According to the author, politicians and diplomats in the United States viewed the entire world as consisting of "communists" and "anti-communists" rather than nations or individuals.

Bloom concluded that as part of the West's large-scale hostile campaign, including interventions, bombing, espionage, financing the opposition, arming terrorist groups, and spreading disinformation, socialist countries had to join the fight and begin to defend themselves.

The historian, who died in 2018, described his mission in this life as follows: "If not to stop, then at least slow down the American Empire. At least to hurt the beast. He's causing so much suffering all over the world."

A lot of unpleasant details

It also follows from the documents that the version of Lee Harvey Oswald (the Kennedy assassin) as a "lone communist" or a "Soviet contract killer" can be considered completely disavowed. But there is enough information about the CIA's surveillance of Oswald for four years, until November 22, 1963.

In addition, they also found out that the American authorities usually mark too many documents "as secret," "clearly abusing this term." It is also reported that Kennedy's special assistant, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., criticized the CIA for "encroaching on the traditional functions" of the State Department.

In particular, the CIA overly uses the State Department to cover its employees in other countries, instead of "developing their own cover for their missions." "In some missions, the number of CIA agents outnumber the number of full-time State Department employees."

In addition, it is reported that the secret service used a former FBI agent "to provide female escorts" during an official state visit in 1959 for someone whose name remained secret. It later turned out that they were talking about King Hussein ibn Talal of Jordan, who died in 1999.

The documents also revealed that James McCord, a senior CIA officer convicted of Watergate burglary, was instrumental in developing a "fluoroscopic scan" that allowed the CIA to "detect hidden technical listening devices for the first time."

And the treasurer of the Mexican revolutionary movement and a friend of Cuban President and dictator Fidel Castro, Manuel Machado Llosas, was a CIA agent. He was supposed to be in Mexico City, where, according to the document, the CIA planned to "use him to report on the activities of the Cuban revolutionaries" and use his friendship with Castro and other Cuban leaders so that he could act as an "asset" for political action.

In addition, the CIA monitored journalists, in particular The Washington Post reporter Michael Getler, who joined the publication in 1970 and died in 2018.

It also became known that the CIA had created a fake Marxist-Leninist organization called the Union for Revolution with mailbox addresses in Boston and Philadelphia. The group's goal was to infiltrate "revolutionary Arab groups" in the Middle East.

Vladimir Vasiliev, chief researcher at the Institute of the USA and Canada of the Russian Academy of Sciences, noted in an interview with Izvestia that it was very important for Donald Trump to return to the "Kennedy case" and accuse the CIA.

— His goal is to discredit the management. There is a lot of pressure on Trump right now. He is openly called an "agent of Putin", a "traitor" and urged to "do something." It is absolutely obvious that Trump is following in Kennedy's footsteps — this can be seen in many points. In this regard, the situation in America is extremely tense right now," the American expert believes.

In his opinion, the CIA kicked Trump out of the White House.

— The current president wants to avenge this. Look at how the tops of the Pentagon and the intelligence community are sweeping now. In this sense, the United States has now reached a very dangerous point. Yes, Trump is taking a lot of risks. And yes, from the point of view of logic, he needs to go to the end," the specialist concluded.