Investigative journalist and former NSA contractor Wayne Madsen told Press TV on Monday the latest Ebola outbreak in Africa may be a resurfacing of an earlier infection linked to the CIA.

“We see a year [1976] when the US was violating a Senate law that forbid the US from engaging in the Angolan Civil War and we saw Zaire being used as a bait for the CIA and then we saw the outbreak of Ebola in Zaire. The same year that George H. W. Bush was the director of the CIA,” Madsen said.

“In 1980 we saw the outbreak of HIV in Zaire and Angola where the CIA was operating,” he said.

“I think what we need to see is an investigation of how intense the CIA biological warfare program was in Zaire and Angola between 1976 and 1980, and what has hit in Sierra Leon and other countries is the Zaire strain of Ebola.”

Madsen said the militarization of the U.S. Ebola effort in West Africa is suspicious. “It’s very peculiar that the US is sending the military in when obviously health workers, doctors, and other health care professionals are needed,” he said.

CIA and U.S. military involvement in the use of biological pathogens as weapons is well documented. In the 1970s, evidence was revealed by the Church Committee.

“Although such military research was highly classified, by 1975 concern over revelations of myriad intelligence abuses led to a comprehensive investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee, which published a CIA memorandum listing the deadly chemical agents and toxins then stockpiled at Fort Detrick. These included anthrax, encephalitis, tuberculosis, lethal snake venom, shellfish toxin, and half a dozen lethal food poisons, some of which, the committee learned, had been shipped in the early 1960s to Congo and to Cuba in unsuccessful CIA attempts to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro,” Ellen Ray and Willam H. Schaap write in Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way.

Citing the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and the 1978 hepatitis-B experiments as a precedent, researchers also believe the CIA is behind the AIDS epidemic originating in West-central Africa. Many prominent Africans, including  former South African President Thabo Mbeki and Wangari Mathai, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, believe the CIA is responsible.

In the 1980s, John Stockwell, a former CIA paramilitary intelligence case officer stationed in Angola, said there is circumstantial evidence the CIA was involved in spreading the deadly virus.

Stockwell suggested the origin of AIDS may be linked to a mass smallpox inoculation conducted by WHO and that the disease was used by the agency intentionally to target gay men and intravenous drug users.