In 2002, Kris Newby and her family took a one week vacation to Martha’s Vineyard.
“When we returned home, my husband and I became deathly ill with two tick borne diseases,” Newby told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last month.
“It took us a year, ten doctors and $60,000 to get it diagnosed and who knows how much it took to cure. But it took us five to six years to get over those diseases.”
During that time, Newby made an award winning documentary about her illness titled – Under Our Skin.
When Newby and her husband got better after years of treatment, she told her husband – “I’m done with Lyme disease. I’m going to move on with my life and forget I was ever so ill.”
Newby was hired as a researcher at Stanford Medical School.
“I went to Stanford and pretty much just a couple of weeks after I said I wasn’t going to work on Lyme disease anymore, two things happened,” Newby said. “I was at a random family party in Texas and I met a guy in his 70s. I asked him – where did you work before you retired? And he said – I was in Black Ops in the CIA. And he told me some of the horrible things he did in Vietnam. And at the end of that riff he said – but the strangest thing I ever did was drop infected ticks on Cuban sugar cane workers in 1962. He had no idea that I just spent five years of my life researching Lyme disease.”
“I spent the evening speaking with him, taking copious notes. I didn’t know about the Cold War. He talked about details that I verified later on. And it turns out that the dropping of infected ticks in Cuba was a project of Operation Mongoose, which was a CIA operation to weaken Fidel Castro’s position in Cuba, to bring his economy down. They wanted to diminish Cuba’s largest cash crop – which was sugar cane.”
“Then a friend of mine who also does documentaries went out to Willy Burgdorfer’s house and did a four hour interview with him.
(Willy Burgdorfer was the researcher who discovered the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.)”
“In that interview, Willy said that one of the organisms he was following in investigating the Lyme disease outbreak in the late 1970s was a bioweapon that had been worked on in the bioweapons program early on when he was in the program.”
“So that was two people who led me to believe that this outbreak of freakish tick borne diseases was the offshoot of the bioweapons program,” Newby said.
Newby went on to write a book titled – Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons (Harper, 2019).
Burgdorfer didn’t say that Lyme disease is the result of bioweapons research.
“No and I don’t say that either,” Newby said. “My book doesn’t say that the Lyme bacterium – Borrelia burgdorferi – was weaponized. Instead, it presents evidence that ticks and other tick-borne microbes were weaponized, and this may be contributing to the tick-borne disease epidemic that we’re seeing.”
“What Burgdorfer said was that he was looking at the ticks and the blood of people in the Lyme, Connecticut and Long Island area. And in practically every sample that he tested, he saw a different organism called rickettsia. It’s related to rocky mountain spotted fever, which is the most deadly tick borne disease in the United States.”
“It is known that the bioweapons program was trying to weaponize it by freeze drying and milling it and making it an aerosol that they could spray over large areas and create a great number of casualties.”
“In June 1982, Science magazine published their discovery article, “Lyme Disease – A Tick-Borne Spirochetosis?” And then scientists worldwide began looking for Lyme spirochetes in patients and in ticks. A year later, at the First International Symposium on Lyme Disease, the spirochete was named after Willy – Borrelia burgdorferi.”
“It was blamed for all of the illness. But I believe there was another organism that was involved. It was this weaponized version of a rickettsia. And it was the combo that was making people really sick.”
“This rickettsia, which I call Swiss Agent USA, has never been identified in the United States. Willy claimed discovery in Switzerland, but not in the United States.”
He told you he was asked to keep that discovery a secret?
“Yes. I named it Swiss Agent USA. In the middle of his investigation, he discovered these rickettsias. He knew that this organism had been weaponized. He worked in the program for over a decade. He tested it against all the other known rickettsias, including the weaponized rickettsias. And it comes up negative.”
“In the middle of this investigation, he flies to Switzerland and collects 4,000 ticks on the border of France and Germany and Switzerland. He discovered what looked like the same organism. He names that the Swiss Agent.”
“He brings those back to Montana and develops a test. He tests the mysterious rickettsia in the Lyme, Connecticut area against the Swiss agent. And it comes up positive. That was really mysterious because birds do not fly from Switzerland to Lyme, Connecticut. So how did it get to Lyme?”
“There were panicked calls between him and the bioweapons headquarters and that’s when the cover up started. The public agencies said – this freaky outbreak of tick borne diseases is making people upset. So we need to develop a cover story so people don’t look into the weapon programs.”
Is rickettsia a bioweapon?
“I pushed Willy several times on this. He felt like it was something that was weaponized. He told my documentary friends that on camera He says they were experimenting with it, it got out – accidents happen.”
What’s the history of the military weaponizing insects?
“By weaponization, I mean that the military was stuffing fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes with combinations of deadly and incapacitating bacteria and viruses. Their goal was to create the perfect stealth weapon to drop on enemies. So, on the one hand, the NIH was trying to save lives from deadly diseases, on the other hand, they were creating new, more deadly franken-germs, in what I’d call crude gain-of-function experiments.”
“As we discussed earlier, the CIA ran a pilot study – Operation Mongoose – where infected ticks were dropped on Cuban sugarcane workers, to help destroy Fidel Castro’s number one cash crop.” ·
“The Army funded uncontrolled releases of radioactive, aggressive Lone Star ticks on the US Atlantic bird flyway. Lone stars spread spotted fever and red meat allergy.” ·
“There was a coverup of a potentially weaponized germ that we spoke of. During the Lyme investigation, Willy was told to omit the presence of at least one potential bioweapon.”
“In the 60s, the military moved away from bug-borne weapons, and moved to brewing bioweapons by the ton in large stainless-steel tanks. The germs would be dried, milled, then sprayed from planes, boats, and vehicles. Some of these bioweapons can be spread by ticks.”
“One of Willy’s jobs was to figure out how to reproduce ticks faster. If you were going to put ticks in a cluster bomb, you would need millions of them.”
“Shortly after the series of experiments with Lone Star ticks, they became established near Plum Island on Long Island where the government ran an animal disease research center. It was right across Long Island Sound from Lyme, Connecticut. And then there was a huge outbreak of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in humans. Many people died. Many people became gravely ill. That’s one accident.”
“The late 1960s was the height of the airborne and biological weapons program. There were three completely novel, unusual tick borne diseases that all of a sudden appeared at the mouth of the Connecticut River, right across from Plum Island.”
“How does that happen? Climate change and land use do not create three novel diseases that all of a sudden appear. There was what we call Lyme disease. There was a cattle parasite. And then there was spotted fever. Twelve miles as the crow flies from Lyme, Connecticut is the research center at Plum Island. It was the headquarters for anti-animal bioweapons research.”
“Plum Island did have a tick hatchery with hundreds of thousands of ticks. They probably got their seed ticks from Willy. And they also did open air tick experiments there. Did somehow diseases there jump over Long Island sound? Willy would not elaborate. I pushed him as far as I could, but he died with his secrets.”
“But because Willy was forced to lie in his Science magazine article about the existence of another, possibly engineered rickettsia, you shut off a line of inquiry on this really dangerous combination of tick borne diseases. The foundational science is not good. If the bad actor is really this rickettsia, we have been pouring billions of dollars into a vaccine for Lyme disease – the disease that isn’t quite as bad.”
Are you saying that what is diagnosed as Lyme disease could be something else?
“Because of nomenclature, I would say that Lyme disease has not yet been proven to be a bioweapon. Lyme disease is a bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi – named after the person who discovered it – Willy Burgdorfer.”
“We don’t know if there is a rickettsia burgdorferi because there was a coverup.”
What’s your bottom line statement on whether these diseases that blew up around Lyme, Connecticut in 1968 was nature or a lab?
“I believe there was human intervention in this Lyme outbreak, without a doubt. And I say the Lyme outbreak, which is different from Lyme disease. I say this clearly in my book – I have no proof that Lyme disease is a bioweapon. But I know they weaponized other tick borne diseases. There were unsafe experiments with ticks and tick borne diseases. And that was fuel on the fire of this epidemic.”
“Willy Burgdorfer, the person with the most to lose, said that bioweapons were somehow involved in this outbreak. And he wouldn’t give any details beyond that. And I continue to research the root cause. And my preliminary conclusion, which I haven’t published yet, is that the outbreak was due to multiple accidents associated with the bioweapon program.”
What is your next book about?
“My next book is about Dugway Proving Grounds, which has biological and chemical weapons. They were importing ticks from South America to Dugway for testing for bioweapons. The CIA was funding the Smithsonian to go out to Baker Island in the Pacific to collect ticks. That’s all I can say about that right now.”
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Kris Newby, see 38 Corporate Crime Reporter 23(13), June 3, 2024, print edition only.]