CUBAN SUGAR EVENT

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31047, 30 April 1966, Page 15

CUBAN SUGAR EVENT

IS.Z PA. -Reuter— Copyright) NEW YORK, April 29. Agents of the United States Central Intelligence Agency contaminated a consignment of Cuban sugar bound for the Soviet Union in 1962 in an attempt to damage Cuban trade, says the “New York Times.”

The saboteurs struck when the ship carrying the sugar, the British freighter Streatham Hill, put into San Juan, Puerto Rico, for repairs. They used a harmless but unpalatable substance to contaminate part of the consignm.nt which had been unloaded to facilitate the repair work, the newspaper said in the fourth of a series of articles on the C.I.A. President Kennedy was furious when he was informed of the incident by a White House aide and immediately

ordered steps to undo the saboteurs' work. “It would be unfair to conclude that this was a typical C.I.A. operation,” the newspaper said.

; “On the other hand, it cannot be dismissed as merely the unwise invention of some agent who let his anti-Commu-nist fervour get out of control.” “There is good reason to believe that a high-level political decision had been taken to sabotage, where feasible, the Cuban economy.” The journal said that the San Juan plot emanated from this general policy and may or may not have had specific political approval. The abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 was a classic example of what can happen when a major international operation undertaken in secrecy is politically approved on the basis of information from its most fer-ve-t advocates and is carried out by those same advocates, said the “New York Times.” In the end, the newspaper went on, the scheme acquired a momentum of its own beyond anything contemplated by either its advocates or those who supposedly controlled them. PRESIDENT’S WISH Afterwards President Kennedy expressed the desire “to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. “He ordered a thorough investigation which led to tightened political control. “By general agreement of virtually every official interviewed, the C.I.A. does not now directly make policy and its operations are under much more rigorous surveillance and control than before. “Nevertheless,” the journal added, “there continue to be —and probably always will be —instances when the controls I simply do not work.”