JFK files: CIA contaminated sugar destined for the Soviet Union

American spies contaminated 800 bags of sugar sent on a cargo ship from Cuba to the USSR in the 1960s, the newly released files on the assassination of John F. Kennedy have revealed.

One of the files analyzed by journalist and blogger Ben Norton and the Washington Post documents a “clandestine operation” by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) just months before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

In August of that year, the CIA learned about a cargo vessel transporting 80,000 200-pound (90 kilograms) bags of brown sugar to the USSR, according to a declassified paper sent to General Edward Lansdale, who was the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for special operations at that time and had a long history of working with the CIA.

The American spies then decided to launch a special operation to contaminate the shipment. They learned that the ship in question would briefly dock at Puerto Rico for minor hull repairs and would have to offload a part of its cargo.

“Through a clandestine operation, which was not detected and is not traceable, we were able to contaminate 800 of these bags of sugar,” the paper reported.  According to the CIA, the contaminated bags would then spoil the entire shipment, making it “unfit for human or animal consumption in any form.”

The plan, however, was not to poison the Soviet people but merely to sour their taste for life.  “The contaminate we used will give the sugar an ineradicable sickly bitter taste, which no process will remove,” the spies said, maintaining that it was “not in any sense dangerous to health.”  Those behind the operation still believed that it would “ruin the taste of the consumer for any food or drink for a considerable time.”

If successful, the operation was expected to inflict financial losses upon the Soviet Union amounting to between $350,000 and $400,000 at that time, according to the document. The fate of the shipment remains unclear as RT could not find any relevant Soviet data related to the case.

In 1960, the U.S. imposed its first serious embargo against Cuba, halting all sugar purchases from the country among other measures.  The move came in response to the Cuban Revolution, which put an end to the rule of the U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

Washington also made its NATO allies abandon Cuban sugar imports as well.  The Soviet Union then stepped in, becoming one of Cuba’s major sugar importers.