At about the time of the Donovan-Castro negotiations for the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners a plan was devised to have Donovan present a contaminated skin diving suit to Castro as a gift. Castro was known to be a skin diving enthusiast. We cannot put a precise date on this scheme. Desmond FitzGerald told us of it as if it had originated after he took over the Cuba task force in January 1963. Samuel Halpern said that it began under William Harvey and that he, Halpern, briefed FitzGerald on it. Harvey states positively that he never heard of it.
According to Sidney Gottlieb, this scheme progressed to the point of actually buying a diving suit and readying it for delivery. The technique involved dusting the inside of the suit with a fungus that would produce a disabling and chronic skin disease (Madura foot) and contaminating the breathing apparatus with tubercle bacilli. Gottlieb does not remember what came of the scheme or what happened to the scuba suit. Sam Halpern, who was in on the scheme, at first said the plan was dropped because it was obviously impracticable. He later recalled that the plan was abandoned because it was overtaken by events: Donovan had already given Castro a skin diving suit on his own initiative. The scheme may have been mentioned to Mike Miskovsky, who worked with Donovan, but FitzGerald has no recollection that it was.
[…]
Some time in 1963, date uncertain but probably early in the year, Desmond FitzGerald, then Chief, SAS, originated a scheme for doing away with Castro by means of an explosives-rigged sea shell. The idea was to take an unusually spectacular sea shell that would be certain to catch Castro’s eye, load it with an explosive triggered to blow when the shell was lifted, and submerge it in an area where Castro often went skin diving.
Des bought two books on Caribbean Mollusca. The scheme was soon found to be impracticable. None of the shells that might conceivably be found in the Caribbean area was both spectacular enough to be sure of attracting attention and large enough to hold the needed volume of explosive. The midget submarine that would have had to be used in emplacement of the shell has too short an operating range for such an operation.
FitzGerald states that he, Sam Halpern, and [deletion] had several sessions at which they explored this possibility, but that no one else was ever brought in on the talks. Halpern believes that he had conversations with TSD on feasibility and using a hypothetical case. He does not remember with whom he may have spoken. We are unable to identify any others who knew of the scheme at the time it was being considered.
CATTLE MUTILATIONS
On the evening of 7 September 1967 Colorado rancher Agnes King noted that one of her Appaloosa horses, Snippy, had not returned home for her customary drink of water. Two days later King’s son Harry found Snippy dead. Her head had been de-skinned, the cadaver sucked dry of blood and there was a strong medicinal smell. When a lump of Snippy’s body was touched next day by Harry’s aunt, Mrs Burl Lewis, it oozed a green fluid that burned her skin. Even more bizarrely, on the ground nearby were fifteen circular burns. A subsequent radiation survey by United States Forest Service Duane Martin found high levels of radioactivity. Martin stated: “The death of this saddle pony is one of the most mysterious sights I’ve ever witnessed… I’ve seen stock killed by lightning, but it was never like this.”
Snippy was not the first farm animal to be mutilated in strange circumstances—there are cases of livestock mutilations in England in the nineteenth century—but she was the first well-publicized specimen in the modern outbreak of the phenomenon in the US. Associated Press took up Snippy’s story—and neatly linked it to the UFO craze sweeping the States. Many residents of the area have reported sighting unidentified flying objects. One man said his car was followed by a top-shaped object and a student at nearby Adams State College said both his rear tyres blew out as he approached an object as it sat in a field.
A very down to earth autopsy by Dr Robert O. Adams, head of Colorado State University’s Veterinary and Biomedical Science School, concluded there were “No unearthly causes, at least not to my mind” for Snippy’s demise and dismemberment. He noted a severe infection in Snippy’s hindquarters, and speculated that someone had come across the dying horse and slit its throat in order to end its misery. The local carnivorous fauna had done the rest of the damage to the saddle pony.
Adams’ professional opinion did nothing to quell speculation about livestock mutilations, cases of which grew exponentially in the USA over the next decade, being reported from New Mexico in the south to Montana in the north. In “classic cases”, evisceration was apparently done with surgical precision, the animal drained of blood, no tyre tracks or footprints were to be found in the immediate vicinity of the corpse, and the sexual organs removed. In the face of mounting public concerns, Federal authorities launched an investigation of the cattle mutilation phenomenon in May 1979, which was headed by FBI agent Kenneth Rommel. His report concluded that mutilations were predominantly the result of natural predation (see Document, p.79), but that some contained anomalies that could not be accounted for by conventional wisdom. Rommel’s report left the door open for a triumvirate of prime conspiracy theories regarding cattle mutilations (mootilations?), namely that “unexplained” mutilations are the work of satanic cults, government or alien experiments.
The cult hypothesis has the merit of explaining away some of the oddities of cattle mutilations (Satanists “harvesting” bovine organs for ritual use would explain the latter’s absence at the scene of the crime) and, in Idaho, forestry service employees were reported to have seen robed figures near a site of bovine excision on at least one occasion. An investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in 1975, however, found insufficient evidence of cult involvement for action to be taken.
Cattle mutilation researcher Charles T. Oliphant, meanwhile, has asserted that the phenomenon is the result of secret US Government research into “zoonotic” cattle diseases (that is, diseases transmissible to humans), chiefly Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). Oliphant notes the high levels of man-made chemicals found in some of the bovine corpses, as well as the sightings of unmarked black helicopters near mutilation sites. The use of helicopters in the mutilations would help explain why some of the dead bovines appear to have been carried and dropped—but would US officials really do such a thing as dress down, ride around in unmarked vehicles and kill animals? Er, yes, actually, according to Oliphant, who cites the case of plain clothes government officers entering a research facility in Reston, Virginia, to destroy animals suspected of carrying the Ebola virus.
Equally, those black helicopters might be doing aliens’ work, because in Conspiracy World the dark choppers are often held to be “reverse engineered” with ET-technology. Why would aliens—or their Earthling stooges—want to cut up Daisy with their precision tools? Aside from fancying a burger or a T-bone steak? Who knows? The consolation must be that any alien species that needs to cut up cows by the thousand to get it right—whatever right may be—isn’t
DOCUMENT: KENNETH M ROMMEL, “OPERATION ANIMAL MUTILATION”, REPORT OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY, FIRST JUDICIAL DISTRICT, STATE OF NEW MEXICO [EXTRACT]
During the past five years, hundreds of livestock mutilations have been reported throughout the United States. Of the states affected by this phenomenon, New Mexico has certainly had its share of unusual incidents.
Since 1975, over 100 mutilations have been reported throughout the state. Ninety mutilations were reported prior to Operation Animal Mutilation. Another 27 incidents were investigated under this year-long project, which began May 28, 1979. Twenty-five of these cases were reported as mutilations. In each of these 25 incidents, as I have shown in Chapter Four, the rough jagged nature of the incisions together with the evidence at the scene
