AIDS: Made in America part 5

The Henle’s
Just Love Those Kids to Death

The reader of Hillary Johnson’s magnificent history of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Oslers’ Web meets Gertrude and Werner Henle, a husband and wife biological research team who emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1930’s, in the earliest pages of the book:
“…the Henles were known reverentially as the ‘mother and father’ of Epstein-Barr virus; those who had the opportunity to study with the distinguished team universally referred to themselves as children of the Henles”.
One such worshiper was biologist Dr. Evelyne Lennette who, according to Johnson, ‘was a self-described child of the Henles.’
When the names of Werner and Gertrude Henle are couched in such gentle family analogies, it is hard to think of them in terms of biological warfare weapons development. Hard but necessary. Let’s start looking at the Henle’s presence in the literature of biowar research by referring to an early but valuable document titled “Bacterial Warfare. A Critical Analysis of the Available Agents, Their Possible Military Applications, and the Means for Protection Against Them” by Theodor Rosebury and Elvin A. Kabat, with the assistance of Martin H. Boldt. The paper was originally written in 1942.
A place to start in an analysis of Bacterial Warfare is the References cited by the authors, and when one does that one can note in the 306 citations the following:
30. Burnet, F.M. 1940 [refer to Exhibit One]
31. Burnet, F.M. & Rountree, P.M.
46. Cox, H.R. 1940
47. Cox, 1941
296. Henle, W. 1941

These references are selected from the total list because, as we shall see in the pages ahead, Frank Burnet has ties to a Dr. Carleton Gajdusek and to a Dr. Henry Kissinger; while Dr. Herald Cox has ties to Hilary Koprowski; and, Werner Henle casts a shadow of his presence over both AIDS and CFS, and has ties with all the major people who appear in the literature of these plagues. In fact he and his wife, Gertrude, are cited several times in both Edward Hooper’s seminal history of AIDS, The River,[ eleven citations in the index ] and in Hilary Johnson’s seminal history of CFS, Osler’s Web, [six citations].
And it must be noted that the Henle’s appeared in the Progress Reports of the Special Virus Cancer Program with dramatic frequency: P.R. # 8; P.R.# 9; #10; #12; #13; and #14. In 1977 in P.R.#14 alone, Werner Henle’s current research is cited 27 times, with additional citations for Gertrude! Let’s see what Werner and Gertrude were up to in the late 1950’s …the time frame where the evidence strongly suggests that Hilary Koprowski was busily translating the mycoplasmal studies of Huebner and the retroviral studies of Sigurdsson into a viable biological co-factor pathogen, while Fritz Deinhardt was concurrently studying hepatitis and how the cholesterol-producing liver re-acts to cholesterol-consuming mycoplasma.
When one examines the work of the Henle’s during this critical period one begins to feel that they were not just the loving god parents of all those sick children at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia [CHOP]. In fact, Fritz Deinhardt as a fellow in the Henle’s laboratory was actually reporting to the Henle’s as his boss during his hepatitis research. Furthermore, it turns out that the expenses for all of this was being paid for by the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board! And talk about the Henle’s love of children given their long service at CHOP, well, Fritz Deinhardt, their research Fellow, turned up at the Willowbrook Home for Handicapped Children where he experimentally exposed the children to hepatitis so that he could study the progress of the disease on a controlled (and totally defenseless) group of human guinea pigs.
It was shortly after his hepatitis experiments upon the Willowbrook children that Deinhardt flew off to the Belgian Congo with Hilary Koprowski. In the Congo, at the chimpanzee farm at Camp Lindi, the Henle’s employee Deinhardt experimented on the chimps with hepatitis pathogens while Koprowski experimented more or less on the record with polio pathogens. That, at any rate, was the cover story and such work did, in fact, go on. However, as Edward Hooper has so astutely pointed out: when one adds together the chimps used for polio experiments and those used for hepatitis experiments, the total falls dramatically short of the number of chimpanzees that were used for medical research at Camp Lindi! Something other than polio and hepatitis was being researched and that we declare with confidence was the co-factor pathogen of immunosuppressant mycoplasma and retroviral visna.
The Henle’s, who loved children, are the godparents of AIDS.
But how about all of those researchers who said of the Henle’s that the latter were their figurative father and mother? Evelyne Lennette, for example?
Well, it turns out that there was an Edwin Lennette working with none other than Robert Huebner and together they were studying such esoteric matters as the induction of lymphoma and xenotropic viruses. And later on Edwin Lennette would work with a veterinarian named Dharam Ablashi who came to be regarded as an expert in chronic fatigue syndrome. Later still Dharam began to work closely with Evelyne Lennette in the same specialized field: both were ‘experts’ in CFS. But there was more to Edwin Lennette than that. During World War Two he had worked for the Rockefeller Institute in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil with none other than Hilary Koprowski.
Furthermore, there is evidence that the pathogen labeled HIV-2 which, strangely enough is the dominant strain of HIV found in former Portuguese colonies, and in Brazil which is culturally and linguistically linked to Portugal, has genetic links to two of Lennette’s special fields of study: equine encephalitis and yellow fever.
So, just where are we? Well, Edwin Lennette and Hilary Koprowski had worked together for the Rockefellers in Brazil during World War 11. Then, Lennette turned up working with Robert Huebner who had discovered the role of the PPLO or mycoplasma in the ‘spontaneous degeneration’ of the adenoids and the suppression of the immune system.
Later, Koprowski began work at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia where he co-operated with Werner and Gertrude Henle who, in turn, had contracts with the United States Army to do research into hepatitis for which enterprise they recruited a research fellow named Fritz Deinhardt. About the same time they acted as the intellectual ‘father and mother’ to another Lennette engaged in microbiological research, Dr. Evelyne Lennette. Dr. Evelyne Lennette would later emerge as a dictatorial leader of research into an AIDS ‘mirror image’ called CFS when the latter disease hit the world with dramatic virulence in 1981.
Oh what tangled webs we weave…But the question is: was there a link between Evelyne Lennette and her figurative father-mother figures, the Henle’s, and the Edwin Lennette who had worked with both Koprowski and Huebner and other scientists who in turn had spawned AIDS and delivered it to humanity?
Hillary Johnson named her study of CFS astutely when she titled it “Osler’s Web”, for in this great book the same cast of characters who appear in Edward Hooper’s equally magnificent history of AIDS [The River] are woven together in a complex far too intricate to be simply coincidence. There’s a master spider in the shadows.
We’ll answer further questions of Lennette involvement in the later chapter: ‘The Rockefellers’ Stable of Talent” below. In the meantime, let’s take a further look at the Henle’s.
In chapter four above, we noted that Hilary Koprowski, when he joined the Wistar Institute in 1957 had entered into an agreement with the Clinton State Farms (Prison for Women) wherein he could vaccinate newborns with some of his mystery vaccines. It turns out that Werner and Gertrude Henle also had their own agreement with that institution wherein they could vaccinate female ‘volunteers’ with a hepatitis vaccine being developed by their research fellow, Fritz Deinhardt. The Henle’s then co-operated with Deinhardt to write a report to the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board titled ‘Viral Hepatitis’.
An Interlude: David Carr: Pretreated! But for What?
In 1959 a British sailor named David Carr from Manchester died of AIDS-related illnesses such as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia [PCP] and cytomegalovirus [CMV]. How is it possible that a death can occur in 1959 that is tied to an acquired immune deficiency disease, when the disease now known as AIDS was not even existent in the world? And how can we suggest that Hilary Koprowski and others were responsible for the development of AIDS when, at the time of David Carr’s death in 1959, the whole ‘Koprowski Krowd’ was still labouring in the fields of militarily-financed research in Philadelphia and the Congo?
The answers to these and other questions suggest that some three to six years before Carr’s death, he had been infected with a precursor disease agent based upon the earliest application of Huebner’s mycoplasmal research. Just where was Carr during that latter time frame? It turns out that four years before, in 1955, Carr had joined the Royal Navy. At that time he had received the usual battery of vaccines given recruits into the military. However, in 1956 (three years before his death) in addition to the usual vaccines, Carr had been given an ‘ATT’ injection and, it was noted on his medical records, he was ‘pretreated’! But, the records do not say what he had been pretreated for. According to Edward Hooper, to whom we are greatly indebted for this information, a senior British Navy medical officer commented when asked: “It sounds like he was being pretreated for something he was going to be exposed to”.
Is it possible that David Carr in 1956 had been pretreated with Huebner’s immune suppressing mycoplasma with the view to subsequent treatment with a Sigurdsson retrovirus or other disease pathogen which would flourish when the victim’s immune defence system had been compromised?
We’ll leave the answer to this question until later, but in the meantime we want to make it clear that there existed then and there continues to exist, a level of covert communication between certain factions within allied services that would have been at work in respect to such research at the time Carr received his ‘pretreatment’.
As soon as the potential of Huebner’s discoveries became evident, (i.e. the late 1940’s to the early 1950’s) certain officers in the Royal Navy, and possibly in the Royal Australian and the Royal Canadian Navies, would have been briefed and their co-operation invited in exploring the phenomenon further. The present writers have in their files a confidential memo written by a Canadian military doctor, Major Tim Cook, to his Commander-in-Chief, General Baril. In the memo Major Cook advises Baril that the mycoplasma is not a factor in Gulf War Disease. If Cook really believes that, all well and good, but… we also learned that Major Cook then sent a copy of the memo that he had written for his commanding officer to an officer in a foreign military service! And just who was the recipient of this betrayal of military duty and trust? The memo was sent to Captain Kenneth Craig Hyams of the United States Navy’s biological warfare research organization. The successor group to that for which Huebner had been working in the 1940-50’s.
End of an Interlude
Summary
By the latter half of the 1950’s, Werner and Gertrude Henle were well tied in with two important research streams. One stream, being developed by Koprowski grew out of Huebner’s earlier work with naval recruits and the mycoplasma-induced adenoid degeneration and immune suppression. The other stream, which also grew out of Huebner’s work with the mycoplasma and the latter’s deleterious effect upon the liver, dealt with hepatitis. Both the immune suppressive qualities of the mycoplasma and the damage to the liver had to be tested upon chimpanzees and both Koprowski and Deinhardt began testing programs at Camp Lindi with the co-operation of the Belgian government of the Congo. Furthermore, tests upon women and children under state control in prisons and homes for mentally and physically handicapped children took place. The Henle’s provide an active and important link between Koprowski and Deinhardt and so figure as important contributors to the ultimate achievement of a new microorganism, one which does not naturally exist and which is refractory to the human immune system. Just what Dr. MacArthur knew was coming when he briefed select Congressmen on June 9, 1969.
However, besides the fatal pathogen promised, AIDS, MacArthur had promised another pathogen, one which would disable by altering the immune system: CFS. The Henle’s were well positioned to participate in this endeavor as well.