Deadly Allies
A listener-supplied addition to the Time Capsule Project, from Alan Watt's Feb. 2, 2020 blurb, "A Perfect Storm".
Deadly allies are not a nouvelle idea. Here’s Alan Watt talking about those ticks we’ve been given.
“But one good book was put out by a journalist [John Bryden] in Toronto who, I think he worked with the Toronto Star, I think at the time. But he put a book out, a good one. One book out of many books across the world being put out on this very subject. But his was [about] Canada’s contribution to bio-warfare. Because Canada, during World War II, and afterwards for a long time, had led the field in bio-warfare research.
So, [Bryden] wrote a book called Deadly Allies, Canada’s Secret War. In it he [writes] about World War II and how money was thrown [around] like crazy, like it always is in panic situations. Governments are always broke until it comes to warfare purposes, have you noticed that, and suddenly they’ve got all this money to throw around. Deadly Allies goes into the stories, declassified, factual, of recorded stories, no conspiracy theory, of big companies in Canada, where money was thrown at them to develop bio-weapons for long-term protracted warfare. Meaning, the war against Germany (or whoever it happened to be) could last for a generation, or even two. This is how they look at things — way down the road.
But in the bio-warfare industry they had big laboratories, some of them were awfully well known even years later to do with blood scandals and tainted blood and so on. Some of the guys who worked in these laboratories talked about how callous they were, when they were holding vials, or picking up stuff at railway stations and so on. I know people who did the same in Britain by the way. [Alan chuckles.] Not too long ago. They were calloused, they would toss these packages up in the air, and there could be enough plague in it to wipe out a good-sized city. This is how callous they were.
It’s a good book to read, Deadly Allies. It’s well worth it. Because you find that many of the things that were developed during World War II and afterwards, including all the rust diseases for crops, to destroy enemy’s crops and things, and their animal food supply…they had a form of disease which really, you could pretty well put it down to the same thing as mad cow disease the effects that it had. Then they developed stuff transmissible by ticks, they could infect the ticks, drop them on deer from the air and watch the disease that ticks were contaminated with affect the deer that they were dropped on. I think we’re still suffering from some of that today.
Unfortunately, here’s the thing too, getting back to Deadly Allies. There are laboratories and every country’s got them, regardless of all their international treaties on bio-warfare and what they can do, and what they can test, and what they can’t test and so on. Of course, I said years ago that the big, big laboratories that deal with even vaccines also deal with creating new types of viruses and bacterium, and rust, as they call it, for crops and all the rest of it. They deal with all these things. So really, technically, they’re all part of the same system, it depends what it’s used for at a particular time, according to the designation of the title you give them.”
Borrow the book at archive.org:
Deadly Allies : Canada's Secret War, 1937-1947
Excerpts from the book, Deadly Allies: Canada’s Secret War 1937 – 1947:
Maybe, I wondered, I should have tried coming first at night, perhaps a moonless one. The sun denies the shadows of Grosse Ile’s history - first as a quarantine station and graveyard for thousands of immigrants, mostly Irish, seeking new lives in a new land, but never crossing that last short stretch of water. It is estimated that twelve thousand lie buried where the long grass slopes to a pretty cove called Cholera Bay. It is easy to imagine throngs of men in rough woolen suits and women in long dresses, shawls and kerchiefs silently watching as our boat nears shore. Grosse Ile has its ghosts.
That kind of past should be sufficiently sombre for any small corner of Canada, but this island a few miles downstream from Quebec City has an even darker side. Here, during the Second World War, Canada mass-produced deadly germs - anthrax – for Britain and the United States. It was the first such germ warfare station among the Western nations and has been a closely guarded secret to this day.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/la-grosse-ile
...The National Research Council had been established in 1916 as an advisory body to promote scientific and industrial research. Such was the primitive state of science in Canada, in both industry and the universities, that it was decided that the NRC should operate labs of its own, and in 1932 research and administrative headquarters were established in a brand-new building at 100 Sussex Street in Ottawa.
That year Sir Frederick Banting, the Nobel prize-winning discoverer of insulin, was named to the NRC’s board of governors and on September 11,1937.
In 1940 the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research occupied the top floor and specialized primarily in physiological research, the study of living organisms. Since the beginning of the war, at Banting’s urging, Drs. Dudley Irwin and Colin Lucas had been studying the effects of toxic compounds on live animals, testing mustard gas in the eyes of rabbits and the new poison gases developed by the university’s chemistry department on mice. Wilbur Franks, as part of Banting’s aviation medicine team, was working on the concept of a pressure suit for pilots to prevent blacking out during rapid acceleration. The experimental animals were quartered on the roof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Banting
...The building also contained pathology labs, a very large autopsy theatre, library, offices, and on the second floor, the University of Toronto’s department of bacteriology, headed by Dr. Philip Greey, remembered by his students for his dapper dress and quick wit. A tunnel ran under College Street to link the building with the Toronto General Hospital.
The Connaught Labs are a little harder to define. Established in 1914 to do research into preventative medicine and produce vaccines, it had offices in the university’s School of Hygiene building and research and production facilities out at “The Farm,” 140 acres of land and buildings on the city’s outskirts where it kept its live-animal requirements.
...Banting himself talked to Charles Mitchell, the Department of Agriculture pathologist. Mitchell already had been testing how well hog’s blood (as a germ medium) sticks to sawdust and introduced Banting to his boss at the Animal Diseases Institute, E. A. Watson. He also was interested, and said he would clear the institution’s co-operation with the Deputy Minister of Agriculture. Banting solicited suggestions on spreading plant pathogens like wheat rust from the NRC’s biology department and received a promise from Defries, now head of the Connaught, that Hare would do “influenza work.”
...The influenza reference is interesting. A virus, it is easily grown in large quantities in the laboratory and can be stored for a long time. Not usually fatal in itself, it gives rise to complications like pneumonia which made it a disease to be feared before the general availability of antibiotics. Millions died in the great influenza epidemic of the First World War. As late as 1985, because of the ease with which new strains are developed, it was considered a prime agent of biological warfare. Banting and Defries apparently had in mind the danger of it being deliberately introduced in military camps.
Canadian bioweapons
...Banting had received written observations on germ warfare from the scientists he and Greey had approached to be members of their M-1000 Committee. In the light of subsequent events, the thoughts of each are instructive. Professor Murray’s were the most lengthy, eleven foolscap pages in his tiny, cramped hand. He began by observing that the concept of bacterial warfare was not new, and cited short stories of de Maupassant and claims that the Germans in Africa deliberately polluted wells with feces and dead animals during the last war as they retreated across the Kalahari Desert. Then he gave his imagination free rein.
...He listed at length possible animal and human diseases, with suggestions on how they could be distributed. He particularly favoured using insects - lice in slum areas, fleas and rats in city dumps, mosquitoes and ticks - as well as break-apart containers dropped from aircraft or contaminated letters sent through the mail. He envisaged enemy agents disguised as kitchen staff injecting infection in the food of restaurants and hotels.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/15/1089845/brazil-dengue-wolbachia-mosquitos/
https://substack.com/home/post/p-155350618?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
From Deadly Allies on Lord Rothschild:
...The only bit of encouragement Banting got was from the urbane Lord Victor Rothschild, a multi-millionaire and Cambridge graduate attached to military intelligence. Banting appreciated that he was in favour of bacterial warfare research, but bridled under the younger man’s condescension. He also recorded in his diary that Rothschild “seems to be familiar with all the ideology of Communism.”
https://espionagehistoryarchive.com/2018/03/27/victor-rothschild-soviet-spy/
More on big bugs...
https://peacemagazine.org/archive/v05n1p12.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Big_Buzz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States