This part is about Adam Finnegan and Erich Traub, but part 1 covers
other topics: lyme.
Anne and Dan Benjamin were 2 of the 5 people Finnegan mentioned by
name in the dedication of his book: [https://
I want to dedicate this book to all the injured and sick people in the world, afflicted and affected by these horrific diseases, who struggle to cope and know the 'why' behind their suffering. Why they are brushed aside and neglected by physicians and the medical establishment? Why they suffer and what is the cause of it? Why they can't seem to recover no matter what they do? Why they have no answers and no official recognition of their suffering and most of all, a very real disease.
I dedicate this book to all Lyme and chronic disease activists who genuinely sought and fought for change in the hopes of dealing with this terrible nine-headed hydra of immune tolerance and all of its classic manifestations and co-infecting agents. I thank the girls who worked in TruthCures and those who began to shine light on immune tolerance. A very special **thank you to Jena Blair and Laura Hovind** for teaching me the basics of immune tolerance when I was coming to the realization of what my disease was, and through this were the keys that opened so many other doors critical to the rest of the story.
I want to dedicate this book to John Loftus, for having the compassion to reveal these dark secrets festering underneath Western civilization with many victims, unwarned and unprepared for the steady rise and proliferation of mystery diseases, chronic diseases that evade a diagnosis or admission of illness. This was a courageous and honorable deed that allowed for this entire book to be written. Without John Loftus, none of the keys that unlock so many other doors in the history of biological warfare and bioterrorism, would have been opened. We thank you for your courage, care, and compassion to do what is right at considerable risk, but nonetheless heroic.
Finally, I dedicate this book to Anne and Dan Benjamin, for their work and intelligence on Dr. Traub, with their desire to have this case on war criminals in Paperclip to be 're-opened.' A line of life work I never would have predicted myself to have taken on, the arduous, meticulous work of pasting together the history of some truly sinister intentions they initially took on and discovered. Though I never met them, this book carried on the torch of Light they shined in dark places with their brilliance to achieve and uncover some of the unspeakable evils that lurk in this world.
Dan Benjamin wasn't mentioned in The Belarus Secret, but
there were two references to him in the new introduction Loftus wrote
for America's Nazi Secret. First Loftus wrote: "He was the Justice Department lawyer who let free all the
American corporate executives who had stayed in Germany to help their
Nazi clients. These businessmen had literally given aid and comfort to
the enemy during the war. All the striped-suit traitors were held in a
joint prison camp code named Ashcan/Dustbin." [https://
Then Loftus wrote: "Because of a lack of witnesses, and dwindling resources, Rockler had been finally forced to drop the investigation against Herman Abs and Deutsche Bank. The very next day Abs was appointed economic adviser to the British Zone of Occupied Germany. All of the British residents of Ashcan/Dustbin were quietly released. Several members of the British Royal Family had Nazi dossiers that were quietly returned by American intelligence to the British Secret Service." Which was followed by this footnote: "According to Dan Benjamin, US intelligence had discovered voluminous correspondence between a member of the British royal family and the SS. The British intelligence officer sent to retrieve the dossier was rewarded by appointment as the Queen's personal art advisor. He later confessed to having been a spy for the Russian intelligence service. He was, of course, never prosecuted, in order to protect the Queen."
Grok said that Ashcan and Dustbin did not form a "joint camp", even though Dustbin was sometimes described as the British counterpart to Ashcan, and Grok said:
Camp Ashcan (official code name for Central Continental Prisoner of War Enclosure No. 32) was an American-run facility in the Palace Hotel, Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg. It operated May-August 1945 as a processing and interrogation center for top Nazi leaders (e.g., Hermann Göring, Karl Dönitz) before the Nuremberg Trials.
Camp Dustbin was the British (later British-American) counterpart, initially near Versailles/Paris, then at Kransberg Castle near Frankfurt, Germany. It focused on technical/scientific prisoners (e.g., Albert Speer, Wernher von Braun) for interrogation, often tied to programs like Operation Paperclip.
[...]
Historical records confirm Ashcan and Dustbin existed and held Nazis/industrialists/scientists, but no mainstream sources support Loftus's assertions of American "striped-suit traitors" or British royal Nazi correspondences being processed there. Some references to Ashcan/Dustbin appear in Loftus-related discussions (e.g., interviews, forums quoting his books), but these echo his narrative rather than independently verify it. Dan Benjamin (CIC/treason investigations) does not appear in verifiable WWII CIC histories tied to these claims.
The combined term "Ashcan/Dustbin" appears
to mainly be used by Loftus. There was only one hit on Google Search for
"Dan Benjamin" "Ashcan" "Dustbin", which was Loftus's book.
His book was similarly the only hit for
"Counter Intelligence Corps" "Dan Benjamin".
I wasn't able to determine if Dan Benjamin was a real person or not, but Grok said: "'Dan Benjamin' as a CIC veteran appears to be a figure cited exclusively by Loftus, without external confirmation from military archives, declassified files, or scholarly works on US counterintelligence. This aligns with critiques of Loftus's books as relying on unverified insider sources for sensational claims."
In 2021 Loftus wrote: [https://
It seemed to me that the British government was almost encouraging these Communist spies to escape rather than face a public trial in England. "They were," said Dan Benjamin, a senior agent of the US Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). His wife, Anne, nodded in agreement. She had met her husband in Germany, where she had been assigned by the SIS to run the intelligence archives for former Nazi scientists wanted for recruitment by Field Intelligence Agency Technical, the British version of Operation Paperclip.
Anne and Dan soon realized that there must be a double agent inside the SIS who was sending the cream of the Nazi rocket scientists to Moscow, while the Americans got useless Nazi bureaucrats like Wernher von Braun or scientists who were Nazi war criminals like Albertus Strughold and Arthur Rudolf. The Russians put Sputnik into orbit, while our rockets kept blowing up on the launching pad. After MacLean and Philby defected to Moscow, the American government grudgingly recognized that Dan and Anne might be on to something.
SIS refers to MI6, which is also known as the Special Intelligence Service.
In his book Finnegan wrote: "Just after WWII, the revelations of Igor Gouzenko exposed massive spy rings operating in Britain, Canada, and the United States.[13] As a result, this eventually led to the discovery of Traub's handler, the one who helped him get cleared for Operation Paperclip, Donald Maclean, of MI6, one of the key people who helped set up NATO, defecting to Russia in 1951.[14]" Footnote 13 was "Gusenko, Igor, and Robert Bothwell. The Gouzenko Transcripts: the Evience Pres. to the Kellock-Tascherau Royal Commission of 1946. Deneau, 1982." Footnote 14 was "'LOST BRITON IS SAID TO ADMIT RED TIES; Lords Hear Missing Diplomat's Recording of the Statement Is in Hands of F. B. I.' 1952. The New York Times. The New York Times. October 29, 1952." Neither source said anything about Traub.
Next Finnegan wrote:
John Loftus says it was around this time, Traub began to get nervous, turning down top positions at the USDA's Plum Island, and this aroused the suspicion of military intelligence. Traub's release of large amounts of weaponized insects, such as ticks, mosquitoes, and mites, were carrying much more than harmless, benign tracers, and soon Traub's assistance in the States would be a cornered rat.
Author Linda Hunt was the first to bring forth the military's employment of Erich Traub and Operation Paperclip.[15] John Loftus exposed the Lyme disease connection to biological warfare in The Belarus Secret.[A] In 2004, author Michael Christopher Carroll likewise brought more attention to Erich Traub and the activities around Plum Island in Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory. Now, for the first time, in this book, John Loftus further tells the story of Traub's interrogation by Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Agent Dan Benjamin, to bring forth these startling new revelations of Erich Traub's confession to being a Soviet double-agent of the KGB:
Author Linda Hunt never got the credit she deserved for exposing Nazi scientists who had entered America under Operation Paperclip. Linda Hunt had been the first American journalist to visit Insel Reims, the secret island off the northern coast of Germany. This was where from 1945 onwards Nazi scientist Dr. Eric Traub and Stalin's biological warfare experts continued their joint research on immunological weapons.
Linda Hunt is the giant upon whose shoulders all future biowar researchers have stood. Several authors ripped off her research into the declassified intelligence files and then published her archival discoveries without citation under their own names. But I know the truth.
Ms. Hunt was first to warn the world about the dangers from the Paperclip scientists, but she was not the first one to warn me about the evil Dr. Traub. That credit belongs to Dan and Anne Benjamin, arguably the best husband-wife intelligence team before Bob Baer of CIA married a woman smarter than he was.
After WWII, Dan was an agent in the US Army's elite Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), Dan became the senior CIC agent in charge of anti-communist intelligence for the American zone of occupied Germany, a position he later held for the entire European Command (EUCOM G-2) and then finally at the Pentagon where he was a Department of Army Civilian (DAC) who liaised with CIA.
The Pentagon thought that Dan's charming British wife, Anne, was "just a secretary." In fact, Anne did start as a secretary for the government in the British zone of occupied Germany. But, like her husband, her brilliance was soon recognized.
What Dan's friends in the Pentagon never knew was that Anne was recruited as an officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6). It was Anne who was in charge of the British secret intelligence archives for occupied Germany.
Anne received reports from Frederick "Freddy" Van Den Heuvel. Freddy was the SIS officer in charge of recruiting Nazi scientists, many of whom the British Government protected from prosecution as war criminals.
Freddy's best recruiting agent was Robert Maxwell who ran a German "publishing house" for scientific papers. Publication was a bait no scientist could refuse. Maxwell's publishing company for scientific papers was an SIS front to lure Nazis scientists to come out of hiding before the Russians could find them and drag them off to Moscow.[B]
By 1949, as the SIS archivist in post war Germany, Anne Benjamin had probably learned all that could be learned about SIS recruitment of Nazi scientists, including the evil Nazi genius, Dr. Traub. According to the SIS reports Anne received, the Russians had held Dr. Traub in custody in communist-controlled Eastern Europe after WWII, but SIS somehow arranged Traub's miraculous "escape" to West Germany.
Anne and her American husband, Dan Benjamin, were suspicious. By 1951, it was clear to them that that the senior SIS officers who approved Dr. Traub's escape from the Soviet Army's clutches were none other than Kim Philby and Donald Maclean, the highest-ranking communist spies inside British Intelligence.
Dan and Anne suspected (correctly) that it was this same "Cambridge Ring" of communist spies inside the SIS that had arranged Dr. Traub's immigration to America under Operation Paperclip. Kim Philby's underling (and lover) Donald Maclean was the SIS's scientific liaison to the Americans advising them which Nazis were worth recruiting.
[...]
No one in the Pentagon suspected at the time that Dr. Traub was perhaps the most villainous of all the Nazis to enter America. He was just a German veterinarian with some expertise in animal vaccines, a very profitable market for American pharmaceutical companies. The greed of Big Pharma to employ Nazi scientific experts like Traub led to the Benjamins' warnings being ignored. But soon the American military began to realize that Dan Benjamin may have been right to suspect that there was more to his story.
Dr. Traub had been recruited by Donald Maclean of the Cambridge Five Spy Ring inside SIS. Maclean, the communist agent, had advised the gullible Americans which German scientists should be brought to America under Operation Paperclip. When Maclean defected to Moscow in 1951, the Pentagon realized that Dan Benjamin was the only one who had been asking the right questions about the Nazi scientists whom McLean had sent to America, especially Dr. Traub. Dan Benjamin was asked by the Department of Defense to investigate why Dr. Traub had refused three times to accept a promotion for director of the biological laboratory on Plum Island between Connecticut and New York's Long Island. Was it because the Plum Island job required an intensive investigation for a Top-Secret clearance? Was there something in Dr. Traub's past that he feared would be discovered?
Dan Benjamin personally interrogated Dr. Traub. As the CIA will attest, Dan was probably the best interrogator in American intelligence. He never used torture or truth serums. Dan simply studied everything about his subject before he ever met him. Dan was friendly to Dr. Traub but made it clear to him that the actual interview was an unnecessary formality.
Dan already knew Traub's miraculous "escape" from communist East Germany had been arranged with the help of the communist spy ring inside British SIS. Dan briefly walked Traub through a few of the many contradictions and coverups in Traub's record. Did Dr. Traub have anything he wished to say for the record before he was handed over for sentencing as a spy for the KGB?
The bluff seemed to work. Dr. Traub decided to confess. He admitted that he had been captured by the Russian army at the end of WWII. He admitted that his fake escape from East Germany was arranged by Philby and Maclean because he promised to serve the Soviet Union as a communist spy inside American intelligence.
But Traub claimed he was such an unimportant little guy that the Russians never activated him for espionage. In fact, they never even bothered him again. Traub's explanation was that Soviet intelligence must have had so many other higher-level spies among the Nazi paperclip scientists, that the KGB never needed to contact a low-level veterinarian like him.
Traub said he repeatedly refused American promotions requiring any security clearance because he wanted to keep a low profile so the Russians would not bother with a little guy like him. It was a lie, but it was one that the Eisenhower administration desperately wanted to hear. Traub's public trial could have exposed the Dulles' brothers perfidious behavior.
Instead of following Dan's recommendation to prosecute Dr. Traub as a communist spy and investigate all the other German scientists, the Eisenhower administration ordered the Pentagon to accept Traub's rather dubious explanation. Nevertheless, the Army insisted that if Traub was not going to be sent to prison, at the very least Traub should be fired from all his American contracts and deported back to Germany where he should be placed under continuous surveillance and banned from any classified research.
Instead, The Eisenhower administration allowed Traub to continue serving as a UN health inspector. This UN status plausibly afforded Traub diplomatic immunity from American arrest as a confessed communist spy. To my shame, I did not give Dan's story about this seemingly minor Nazi scientist much priority for a follow up. Even though my time and funds were limited by my health, I did not give up entirely.
In the late 1980's I asked Rachel Verdon, one of my wonderful Lyme Disease volunteers, to request declassification of government records concerning Plum Island. Rachel discovered that nearly all the records were still classified or had been destroyed, including the bioweapons master file named "clandestine attacks on crops and animals" which had been illegally shredded.
Rachel also discovered many open-source documents confirming my sources insistence that the Russians had extensively studied tick-borne disease for more than a half century. Rachel's tireless research was not wasted as it did prove beyond any doubt that the US Government had built a brick wall of secrecy around whatever the communist double agents had done at Plum Island.
I did cooperate openly with another author in a wonderful book called Lab 257 but there was not much that I could tell him while the classification order was still in effect.
Even if Dan Benjamin had mentioned Traub's name, I had quite forgotten it for many years until I was accidentally reminded by Hollywood producers looking into Traub's background with tick experiments at Plum Island. How many German scientists under Operation Paperclip could there be who repeatedly declined promotions to be director of research at Plum Island? Traub had to be the same man who confessed to Dan that he was a spy for the KGB.
Dan and Anne had passed away before I could tell them that I had figured out why Traub never went to prison as a Nazi war criminal turned KGB spy. Traub was untouchable because he could blackmail the Eisenhower administration. It was Traub who designed the insect bombs that the US Air Force had dropped on North Korea and China. It was not his first such war crime.[16]
I hope I don't violate fair use by quoting such a large block of text, but there are several obervations I want to make about the text:
Most references to Dan Benjamin in Finnegan's book come from the long block of text Finnegan quoted from John Loftus. Outside the block of text, I found 3 references to Dan Benjamin with no source cited, and I found 1 reference where the source cited was personal communication with Loftus. So I don't know if Finnegan was even able to verify if Benjamin was a real person, or if he found any information about Benjamin that didn't come from Loftus.
Linda Hunt worked for mainstream media before she wrote a
conspiracy book about post-war Nazis, just like Mark Aarons and Paul
Manning. She is a former CNN reporter who helped popularize the story of
Project Paperclip starting from 1985, when the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists published her article about Project Paperclip
that was based on documents she obtained through FOIA requests. [https://
Loftus wrote that Linda Hunt had been the first American journalist to visit Insel Riems, but Grok and ChatGPT didn't find evidence that she had visited Riems. I didn't find her mentioning that she had visited Riems in her book published in 1991, even though it's not clear if she is supposed to have visited Riems before or after she wrote the book.
Grok didn't find any person who was "the senior CIC agent in charge of anti-communist intelligence for the American zone of occupied Germany", which was the role occupied by Dan Benjamin according to Loftus.
It's a red flag how Traub's handler was supposedly Donald Maclean, who is one of the most famous spies in history. It reminds me of how Rachel Verdon said that Mengele probably took part in the Tuskeegee experiment, and that a participant in the "Clandestine Attacks on Crops and Animals" study was Leo Alexander who is another famous historical figure. In another part of the book, Finnegan also quoted Loftus as saying that the experiments where ticks were released on Plum Island had been carried out by Donald Maclean.
It's also suspicious how Anne supposedly received reports from
Frederick Vanden Heuvel, who is another famous spy. [https://
Loftus wrote that Traub had refused a job as the director of Plum Island three times, and not two times like Mike Carroll wrote. Maybe Loftus was confused by how Carroll wrote that Traub had visited Plum Island at least three times.
Loftus now said that "Clandestine Attacks on Crops and Animals" is a "bioweapons master file", and not a "study" or "document" like earlier. Loftus now suggested that the clandestine attack studies were related to Lyme disease, but in her book Verdon didn't specify if the studies had anything to do with Lyme disease or not. Loftus now said that Rachel Verdon said that the master file had been "illegally shredded", even though in her book Verdon didn't specify the files had been destroyed by shredding, or if the files had been destroyed in a manner that was somehow illegal. In The Belarus Secret, Loftus appeared to indicate that a clandestine attacks document was still in existence and not shredded, because he wrote: "Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret U.S. document confirming that 'clandestine attacks on crops and animals' took place at this time." So he wrote that "there is" a document in the present tense and not "there was" a document (even though I don't know if he referred to the document in an abstract sense where the document would continue to remain in existence even if all physical copies of the document had been destroyed). In The Secret War Against the Jews, Loftus and Aarons wrote that Verdon "has confirmed that a top-secret U.S. study labeled 'Clandestine Attacks on Crops and Animals' once existed, but all copies have been destroyed". In her book Verdon wrote that the response to her FOIA request said that the clandestine attack files had been "destroyed by the Department of the Army prior to the Intelligence Document files being accessioned by the National Archives", but I don't think she would've been able to know if absolutely all copies of the files had been destroyed or not.
Loftus's excuse for why he hadn't mentioned his new revelations earlier seems to be that there was a "classification order" in effect, because he wrote: "I did cooperate openly with another author in a wonderful book called Lab 257 but there was not much that I could tell him while the classification order was still in effect." The Lab 257 book didn't say anything about Donald Maclean.
It's convenient how Loftus said that Dan and Anne Benjamin are both dead, so they are unable to verify if what Loftus said is correct. Most of the main villains in The Belarus Secret had similarly died before the book was published, including Stanislaŭ Stankievič, Radaslaŭ Astroŭski, Francišak Kušal, and Emanuil Jasiuk.
I didn't find information about Dan or Anne Benjamin by googling for
combinations of terms like "Dan Benjamin" "Erich Traub" or
"EUCOM G- or
"Vanden Heuvel" "Anne Benjamin" or
"Anne Benjamin" "John Loftus".
When I googled for the name Dan Benjamin, the first person listed was
a podcaster, but the second person was a diplomat born in 1961, who is
the President of the American Academy in Berlin, who was previously a
"Coordinator for Counterterrorism" at the US
Department of State, and who earlier served as the German bureau chief
for the Wall Street Journal and a German correspondent of
TIME. [https://
Even in the case that the counterintelligence agent Dan Benjamin was a real person, his name sounds Jewish, and if he was in fact a Jew, then a Jewish counterintelligence agent is hardly a reliable source when it comes to information about Nazis. And even if Dan Benjamin was a real person, then his information is still unreliable because it was conveyed by Loftus, who has a habit of making up false information and saying he heard it from former spies.
Finnegan wrote in his book:
My source John Loftus was the first to expose the Lyme disease connection to biological warfare in 1982, in The Belarus Secret, and even noted it was being spread by ticks before it was publicly acknowledged, and the Plum Island experiments had been directed and overseen by one of our allies in British intelligence, a man named Donald Maclean, a confirmed double agent for Soviet Intelligence when he defected to Moscow in 1951:
A few months after it appeared in my book, scientists employed by the US Government published a report that confirmed that Lyme Disease was indeed being spread by ticks. However other government officials lied and denied any American tick experiments ever took place on Plum Island. It was a half-lie to conceal a sensitive political scandal.
The Plum Island experiments had been carried out by one of our allies in British intelligence, a man named Donald MacLean. He was confirmed as a double agent for Soviet Intelligence when he defected to Moscow in 1951.[...][66]
Footnote 66 was "John Loftus, Taken from the rough draft of Introduction to The Sleeper Agent [personal communication] 2022".
Willy Burgdorfer found Lyme disease to be transmitted by ticks in
1981 and published his findings in June 1982. [https://
But then why did Loftus himself say that the 1982 study was published a few months before the revelation that Lyme disease was spread by ticks appeared in his book? Is he somehow falsely trying to predate his revelations so he can take credit as the originator of the Lyme disease bioweapon theory?
Next Finnegan wrote:
Donald Maclean had been instrumental in the formation of joint-agreements between Britain, Canada, and the United States to share research and collaborate on nuclear, chemical, and biological development and testing, and all Top-Secret information relevant to it. Maclean was also appointed head of Chancery at the British Embassy in Cairo, Egypt,[67] a geographic location that would become significant as an intermediary area for biological warfare research taking place in Africa under the Navy's special unit, NAMRU-3.[68] John Loftus is here saying that Maclean was directing these tests, though not actually the one physically conducting the experiments, this was being done by other scientists after WWII, under his direction, and it was Erich Traub who supervised these tests when he came to America under Operation Paperclip which Loftus revealed in The Belarus Secret in 1982:
Even more disturbing are the records of the Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to America. They experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I received some information suggesting that the US tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950s. I explored the old spies' hypothesis that the poison ticks were the source of the Lyme disease spirochete, and that migrating waterfowl were the vectors that carried the ticks from Plum Island all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top-secret US document confirming that "clandestine attacks on crops and animals" took place at this time. The Lyme disease outbreak in America was monitored secretly under the cover of a New England health study.[69]
Footnote 69 refers to America's Nazi Secret and not the original 1982 edition of The Belarus Secret. Finnegan gave the impression Loftus may have already mentioned in 1982 that Maclean oversaw the experiments, but I haven't found Loftus mentioning it anywhere before Finnegan's book.
In the sentence where Finnegan introduced the paragraph he quoted from America's Nazi Secret, he wrote that "John Loftus is here saying that Maclean was directing these tests", even though the paragraph didn't mention Maclean. And Loftus said the tests took place "during the early 1950s", but Maclean moved from the United States to Cairo in 1948, and I believe he never visited the United States again after 1948 (at least LLMs didn't find any evidence for it based on sources like his biographies).
In another part of his book, Finnegan wrote: "It is possible that all samples that were positive were from 1949-1951, only two samples specifically from 1946 were positive and we have covered the probability that Donald Maclean had Traub's weaponized ticks and spirochetes brought to America by 1945 when John Loftus indicates that British Intelligence was testing these ticks at Plum Island and surrounding areas." But in the paragraph in The Belarus Secret, Loftus said the tests took place in the early 1950s, and not 1945. If the tests would've taken place between 1944 and 1948 when Maclean lived in the United States, then did the Nazi scientists who took part in the tests not include Traub? Traub didn't move to the US until 1949. I'm fairly sure that Traub was never even in the United States at the same time as Maclean.
In other parts of the book when Finnegan wrote about Traub's connection to Maclean, Finnegan generally cited personal communication with Loftus, some other weak source, or no source at all:
In chapter 9 Finnegan wrote: "It can be said
with confidence that Traub's weaponized ticks and tick-borne disease had
several developments, resulting in several circulating strains. When
Russia took Insel Riems, they took strains with them. European strains
of the Lyme disease agent were already spreading in Germany and Eastern
Europe before he came to American shores and produced the American
strains. Furthermore, Donald Maclean and British Intelligence would have
been given cultures from what Traub took with him in 1945 when applying
for work in the West, as well as in 1948 when he made his escape. Donald
Maclean is said to have been directing Plum Island tests just after WWII
up to 1948 when he left for Cairo, Egypt, and was vacationing on Long
Island, NY, just south of Plum Island, during his work in
America." Finnegan didn't cite any source for his claim that
Maclean took vacations on Long Island, but I found it mentioned in the
Wikipedia article about Maclean. [https://
In chapter 10 Finnegan wrote: "Maclean had been stationed in Cairo, Egypt since 1948 and had intelligence on the African tick and insect expeditions by the Navy's NAMRU-3 program that was initiated that year, mining disease agents and insects all over the African continent.[10]" Footnote 10 said: "Harry Hoogstraal, leader of the African insect expeditions, worked much of the time in between African tick expeditons, at the University of Cairo, coordinated with the U.S. Navy, which Maclean would have been somewhat privy to." However that seems like poor evidence that Maclean had intelligence on the tick expeditions.
In chapter 10, Finnegan cited personal communication with Loftus and wrote: "According to John Loftus, Maclean was the one responsible for getting Traub back into the United States after the War, and Maclean directed joint-British testing at Plum Island and other testing sites since World War II." However he might have just as well written "According to Mickey Mouse, the moon is made of cheese."
In chapter 10 Finnegan wrote: "As the
communists fighting in the Korean War were obliterating the strategy of
American and U.N. forces in South Korea by the North, according to John
Loftus, a decision was made to employ Traub's weaponized germs and
insects as a last-ditch effort, to sway the war in their favor.[1]" The source he cited was "Loftus, John J. 'Memorandum on
Biological Weapons History.' 2018", which might be some
unpublished document Loftus gave to Finnegan. Then Finnegan cited his
personal communication with John Loftus, who wrote: "Traub and Maclean helped designed the insect bombs that
the Americans and British military had just dropped on North Korea and
China. This was a clear violation of the International Treaty
prohibiting the development or use of biological weapons. This violation
allowed the Russians to blackmail several key members of the Eisenhower
administration into silence." But Finnegan didn't explain how
Loftus knew that either Traub or Maclean were involved in the design of
the insect bombs. As far as I know, Maclean didn't have expertise in
either biology or engineering, so he would've been a weird person to be
designing insect bombs. Maclean moved from the US to Cairo in 1948, and
from Cairo to the UK in 1950, but the Korean war started in 1950, and
the alleged insect bomb attacks are said to have taken place in 1951 and
1952. [https://
In chapter 16 Finnegan wrote: "The FBI, according to John Loftus, was significantly compromised, as Soviet moles in the FBI assisted Maclean in getting Traub cleared for the Paperclip program.[37]" Footnote 37 was "Loftus, J. personal communications, 2018-2023". But Finnegan didn't explain how Loftus is supposed to have known about the Soviet moles.
I didn't even find evidence that Maclean was connected to biological research, or that he had any background in biology. Grok said:
Donald Maclean had no professional involvement whatsoever in biology, biological research, virology, microbiology, medicine, or any aspect of germ or biological warfare programs.
He was a career British diplomat and senior Foreign Office official whose entire professional life revolved around political, diplomatic, and nuclear policy matters. From 1944 to 1948, while serving at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., Maclean held the sensitive position of joint secretary of the Anglo-American-Canadian Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Development. In that role he had access to highly classified information concerning the Manhattan Project, atomic energy policy, uranium supplies, and the early development of nuclear weapons. This nuclear intelligence formed by far the most valuable material he passed to Soviet intelligence. After leaving Washington in 1948, he was posted to Cairo as Head of Chancery, and upon his return to London in 1950 he became head of the American Department at the Foreign Office, dealing with NATO affairs and aspects of the Korean War. All of these responsibilities remained strictly within the spheres of diplomacy, international relations, and nuclear strategy.
Maclean's formal education consisted of a classical curriculum at Gresham's School in Norfolk followed by Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages (French and German) and history. He received no university-level scientific training of any kind. Throughout his diplomatic career there is no record of him ever being assigned to, or even briefed on, any biological research programs, chemical weapons matters, or medical intelligence.
Claims suggesting that Maclean had any connection to biological weapons, Erich Traub, weaponized spirochetes, Plum Island, or related research appear exclusively in fringe conspiracy literature, particularly theories linking Lyme disease to U.S. government laboratories. These assertions are not supported by any declassified MI6, CIA, or FBI documents, nor by mainstream historical biographies such as Roland Philipps' A Spy Named Orphan or Robert Cecil's A Divided Life. Serious historians and intelligence scholars have found no evidence that Maclean ever dealt with biological topics in any capacity.
(I think the tone of some of Grok's statements is too definitive, because for example Grok cannot know that Maclean had absolutely no involvement in any aspect of biological warfare programs. And there might be some serious historian who found a single piece of evidence that Maclean dealt with biological topics in some capacity, but maybe the historian never published the evidence. Initially Grok also claimed that Maclean had no education in biology, but I pointed out that even if Maclean would've taken a single course in biology in high school, it would've amounted to some education in biology. But regardless, Maclean doesn't seem like a person who would be designing insect bombs.)
Annie Jacobsen wrote: "Traub was recruited into
the Accelerated Paperclip program by Dr. Blome's handler, Charles
McPherson, and arrived in America on April 4, 1949." [https://
I didn't find any reference to Charles McPherson in the books by Finnegan, Linda Hunt, or Tom Bower, and the only reference to him in Lab 257 was a memorandum from McPherson that was cited in the bibliography. Finnegan wrote that Maclean was "Traub's handler" who "helped him get cleared for Operation Paperclip". But I didn't find any connection between Maclean and McPherson.
When I showed Finnegan's timeline on Traub to Grok, and I asked what
evidence the timeline contained that Traub was involved in research into
Borrelia or tick-borne pathogens, Grok produced the following
list of 6 points: [https://
Finnegan (The Sleeper Agent timeline) presents the following claims as evidence linking Erich Traub to research on tick-borne pathogens or Borrelia. None of the entries describe Traub personally conducting extensive hands-on experiments weaponizing or modifying any tick-borne agents; most connections remain indirect, supervisory, or heavily interpretive.
1. 1939 - Learning about tick-borne diseases from Karl Beller
In 1939, while serving as assistant to Karl Beller at the University of Giessen, Traub allegedly received instruction on various tick-borne diseases. Finnegan claims Beller taught him about Rickettsia, Babesia, Bartonella, Ehrlichia, and the specific ticks capable of transmitting them. This knowledge is said to come from a chapter titled "Heartwater and Other Animal Rickettsioses" in the Handbook of Virus Diseases. The text further asserts that Beller demonstrated how multiple infections could be combined into a single complex syndrome and that hard-bodied ticks could transmit spirochetes. Finnegan interprets this exposure as foundational preparation for Traub's later supposed use of these agents in weaponized ticks released on the West.
2. 1939 - Access to avian spirochete (Borrelia anserina)
In 1939, Werner Schäfer, described as Traub's associate assistant and protégé at the University of Giessen, published a paper on maintaining avian spirochetes. The cited work is Schäfer 1939 - "The Maintenance of Spirochaeta gallinarum by Passages in Fowl Embryos." Schäfer reportedly received the strain from Dr. Franz Jahnel, and Finnegan states that Traub and Beller were Schäfer's superiors at the institute. The paper itself describes a practical method for keeping fully virulent strains alive in embryonated eggs instead of live chickens for teaching and research purposes. Finnegan interprets this as evidence that Traub came into possession of the avian spirochete (Spirochaeta gallinarum, later renamed Borrelia anserina), which he claims was later weaponized into Borrelia burgdorferi.
3. 1941 - Mention of blood parasites in the horse respiratory catarrh paper
In 1941, during an investigation of a respiratory outbreak in German Army horses belonging to a veterinary company, Traub and his colleagues reportedly conducted experiments that included checks for blood parasites along with equine infectious anemia and infectious respiratory catarrh. The paper is titled "Infectious Respiratory Catarrh in the Horses of a Veterinary Company" (Traub 1941). Finnegan highlights the inclusion of blood-parasite examinations as evidence of Traub's direct laboratory experience with such organisms. He links this work to possible familiarity with agents like Babesia, a common equine blood parasite, and suggests the study of mixed infections could have been useful for creating diagnostically confusing disease presentations.
4. 1953 USDA poultry conference listing avian spirochetosis as a biological warfare concern
In 1953, a USDA poultry conference on biological warfare threats listed avian spirochetosis (Borrelia anserina) among "special agents" of particular concern. Finnegan claims this listing proves that Traub's earlier work with the avian spirochete at Giessen was recognized as a potential bioweapon. He further asserts that this conference provides evidence that Lyme disease (Borrelia burgdorferi) originated from Traub's alleged weaponization of the avian strain, noting the complete absence of subsequent Plum Island research on Borrelia anserina despite the lab's mandate to study foreign animal diseases with zoonotic potential.
5. Vague references to Traub's 1950s U.S. Navy work on pathogens and rickettsia
During his employment at the Naval Medical Research Institute in the early 1950s, Traub was assigned as Supervisory Bacteriologist with responsibilities connected to maintaining approximately 40 strains of viruses and rickettsiae. Finnegan interprets this broad mandate as including tick-borne diseases, even though no specific tick-borne agents are named in the surviving job descriptions or publications from that period. He presents these duties as circumstantial support for the idea that Traub continued working with or supervising research on rickettsial and tick-related pathogens under U.S. Navy auspices.
6. Narrative ties in Traub's later papers on immune tolerance and mixed infections
In Traub's post-war publications on immune tolerance, lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCM), Eastern equine encephalomyelitis (EEE), and related topics, Finnegan occasionally draws narrative connections to "stealth" or mixed/co-infections. These papers are interpreted as conceptually relevant to the creation of complex, diagnostically confusing diseases that could involve tick-borne pathogens. However, none of the actual papers describe direct research on ticks or Borrelia; the links remain purely interpretive and are used to bolster the overall story of Traub developing chronic, hard-to-detect infections.
Key Limitations Noted
All of the connections presented by Finnegan are indirect, relying on supervisory roles, incidental mentions, or broad institutional associations rather than primary evidence of Traub's own experimental work. No quotes or descriptions in the cited papers show Traub isolating, passaging, genetically altering, or weaponizing Borrelia, Babesia, or any other tick-borne pathogen. The 1941 horse paper, for example, mentions blood parasites only in passing while ruling out differentials during a respiratory outbreak and is not a dedicated study on Babesia or spirochetes.
So basically none of the six points showed that Traub himself was involved in research on tick-borne pathogens. Here's my own comments about the points:
In his book Finnegan wrote: "Dr. Karl Beller
published several additional chapters in the Handbook for Virus
Diseases in 1939 while Traub was his assistant Professor. There was
a chapter, 'Heartwater and other animal
rickettsioses.' It is here that Erich Traub gained his important
research on ticks and tick-borne disease." The book has an
18-page chapter titled "Herzwasser und sonstige
tierische Rickettsiosen. Von Prof. Dr. K. BELLER - Gießen". [https://
Finnegan wrote that Traub was the supervisor of Werner Schäfer, who wrote a paper published in 1939 titled "Fortführung von Spirochaeta gallinarum-Stämmen von Eipassagen" ("The Maintenance of Spirochaeta gallinarum by Passage in Fowl Embryos"). The paper said: "Since we have to have a fully virulent Spirochaeta gallinarum strain in our institute for research and teaching purposes, we have tried to replace the expensive chicken passages with a complete, simple and cheap breeding procedure." But Finnegan didn't present evidence that Traub himself did any research on Spirochaeta gallinarum, which was later renamed to Borrelia anserina. On his timeline Finnegan wrote that Schäfer mentioned "that a fully virulent strain of Spirochaeta gallinarum was needed by his superiors at the University of Giessen for teaching and research purposes", even though in the part of the paper Finnegan quoted, Schäfer didn't seem to specify if the spirochetes were required by his superiors or by someone else, because Schäfer simply wrote that "we" at "our institute" needed to have a fully virulent strain of the spirochetes.
In his book Finnegan wrote: "Traub mentions
extensive experiments on horses with blood parasites in a 1941 paper,
linking him to direct experience with disease agents like
Babesia.[16] Adding a weaponized
avian relapsing fever spirochete (Borrelia
anserina) to the mix would cause a complex mix of infections
that would not only be very confusing to physicians and diagnosis, but
also very resistant to treatment." On his website he wrote: "An outbreak of unknown origin occurs in Army horses owned
by a veterinary company, with horses showing signs of broncho-pneumonia.
They set up a handful of experiments to assess the cause of disease.
They set up experiments on blood parasites, equine infectious anemia,
and infectious respiratory catarrh (mixed
infections). They conclude the disease was due to infectious
respiratory catarrh, after finding Streptococcus equi,
Streptococcus pyogenes, and other bacterium that are usually
considered 'harmless' to the horse."
[https://
Finnegan wrote that the JIOA file on Traub's assistant Anne-Lise
Bürger said: "Duties of the position to be filled by
Miss Burger are concerned with the supervision of maintenance of
approximately 40 strains of virus and rickettsias [sic] in serial egg and animal passages in order to
provide stocks of infectious materials for experimental work in [the] virology division and other divisions of the
Naval Medical Research Institute." However it's not clear if
Bürger would've even maintained strains of Rickettsia for Traub
or for other researchers. The file specifically mentioned that the
stocks were needed by other divisions at the institute and not only the
virology division, but Traub appears to have primarily worked on
virological research at the institute, even though I don't know if his
work was conducted exclusively under the auspices of the virology
division or not. And in any case, it's not even clear if Bürger ever
moved to the United States. Linda Hunt wrote that Traub and Bürger's
"work for the Navy included conducting experiments
on animals to determine the lethal doses of more than forty strains of
highly infectious viruses", where she cited the JIOA file on
Bürger, but the file was dated 1950 before Traub is supposed to have
even moved to the United States, so at best the file would've described
the work Traub was going to do with Bürger in the future. [https://
In his book Finnegan wrote that in a USDA conference in 1953,
Colonel Frank A. Todd said: "I believe that records
indicate that several foreign poultry diseases have gained entrance into
this country by the importation of undeclared laboratory cultures, from
smuggled birds, and from importing insect vectors and birds during the
carrier stage or during the incubation period. We also know that raw
garbage, contaminated feeds and veterinary biologics have been factors
in spreading disease in this country." Finnegan didn't mention
Todd saying anything about Borrelia, but Finnegan wrote: "The pathogens that the USDA officials were most concerned
about in 1953, included fowl plague virus, Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV), avian spirochetosis (Borrelia anserina), avian malaria (Plasmodium gallinaceum, Plasmodium
lophurae), Eastern Equine Encephalitis Virus (EEE), ornithosis (chlamydia pneumoniae, psittacosis), and
botulism.[20] Spirochetosis appeared to be a
major concern in poultry,[21] for perhaps the
only time they admit it on record from that point forward, and a main
part of the attack had a lot to do with Traub's weaponized
spirochetes." Footnote 20 referred to a document about foreign
avian diseases published by the USDA, which included a brief description
on methods for diagnosing different types of diseases in birds, which
included a single sentence about avian spirochetosis. But the document
didn't mention that avian spirochetosis was a major concern, and it
didn't specifically even name Borrelia anserina or
Spirochaeta gallinarum. [https://
The rest of the timeline didn't directly describe Traub working
with tick-borne pathogens either. Finnegan mentioned that in 1972 Traub
gave a lecture about the history of LCM where he mentioned that ticks
were able to transmit LCM. [https://
One piece of evidence that was missing from Grok's list of six points was a paragraph Finnegan quoted from Lab 257, where Mike Carroll claimed that an anonymous eyewitness said that a Nazi scientist had released ticks on Plum Island. But Carroll didn't even make it clear if the eyewitness was talking about Traub or some other Nazi scientist, and eyewitness testimony of nefarious actions by Nazis has often turned out to be fabricated.
Finnegan wrote in his book:
Additional references to his work on tickborne diseases can be found in the Navy's approval to hire his former Insel Riems technical assistant, Anne-Lise Bürger. Bürger was approved for work on American shores under contract with the Naval Research Institute to assist Traub in matters of biological warfare, with an impressive resumé in biological research, including rickettsia, a tickborne disease:
Duties of the position to be filled by Miss Burger are concerned with the supervision of maintenance of approximately 40 strains of virus and rickettsias [sic] in serial egg and animal passages in order to provide stocks of infectious materials for experimental work in [the] virology division and other divisions of the Naval Medical Research Institute.[44]
There are, as of yet, no records showing that Bürger ever actually made it to the United States, because much of Traub's published research for the Navy lists Worth I. Capps as his technical assistant.[45] Bürger is never mentioned, nor thanked in any of his American publications, as well as the fact that Bürger published a research paper with Bernard Schneider in 1951[46] when she had been approved in November/December of 1950. She published a follow-up paper with Schneider the same year, with her name changed to Anne-Lise Schneider, indicating she married Bernhard Schneider and stayed at Behringwerke AG.[47] It is a good probability more will be discovered at a later time, but probably not until after this book has been published.
What is significant in Bürger's file, however, is that it is here we find a direct reference to the tick-borne disease class of bacteria, rickettsia, tying a direct link to Erich Traub's Navy work, because essentially, she was to be conducting these tests for Erich Traub, working as his technical assistant. Moreover, this same document establishes, for the record, that there were no scientists skilled enough in America to replace the work she and Traub were doing, and this will become significant when we discuss Willy Burgdorfer's role. It states:
In view of past long association in the fields of bacteriology and virology with Dr. Erich Traub, whom she will assist at the Institute, Miss Bürger's assignment here cannot be as adequately filled by any personnel available in the United States.[48]
Footnotes 44 and 48 both refer to the same document: "National Archives, Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, J.I.O.A. Administrative Records. (1950). Memorandum on Anne Bürger, C. F. Berrens, Naval Medical Research Institute, to Chief of Naval Operations, 27 November 1950, Navy Escape Clause (RG 330). NARS."
In Lab 257, Mike Carroll wrote: "With his 'laboratory assistant' Anne Burger, who came over in 1951, Traub experimented with over forty lethal viruses on large test animals.[4]" Footnote 4 says: "Linda Hunt, author of Secret Agenda, the seminal book on Project PAPERCLIP, believes Burger may not have been Traub's 'assistant,' but rather his mistress. Apparently other PAPERCLIP recruits had imported their mistresses from Germany along with their families when they came to America. No additional information is available to the public on Anne Burger."
In the book Secret Agenda, Linda Hunt wrote: "In addition to the Air Force group, the Navy brought
several biological warfare experts to the United States in the 1950s
under Paperclip. For example, Anne Burger arrived in 1951 to work for a
Navy biological warfare project at the Naval Medical Research Institute
in Bethesda, Maryland. Burger had been a wartime assistant to Paperclip
scientist Erich Traub, who arrived earlier. Their work for the Navy
included conducting experiments on animals to determine the lethal doses
of more than forty strains of highly infectious viruses.[35]" [https://
I didn't find the JIOA file published anywhere. The JIOA file was dated November 1950 but Hunt said Bürger arrived to the United States in 1951, so maybe Hunt relied on some other source as evidence of when Bürger arrived to the United States, or maybe the JIOA file said that Bürger was going to arrive to the US in 1951 so Hunt assumed that Bürger ended up moving to the US in 1951.
Finnegan's footnote 46 was "Schneider, Bernard,
and Anne L. Bürger. 'Uber Das Serologische Verhalten
Des Maul- Und Klauenseuche-Huhnereivirus Und Seine Verwendung in Form
Der Adsorbat-vakzine Zur Immunisierung Von Rindern [Serological Behavior of Foot-and-mouth Disease Hen-egg
Virus and Its Use in the Form of Absorbate Vaccine to Immunize
Cattle].' Mh Prakt. Tier 3, no. 35 (1951): 35-40. Accessed August 3, 2019".
Footnote 47 was "Schneider, B. & A. L.
Schneider. Züchtung des Virus der Maul- und Klauenseuche vom Typ A (Vallée) im bebrüteten Hühnerei. Mhefte prakt.
Tierhk. 3, 206. (1951)". I didn't find
either paper posted online. The title of the second paper is similar to
a paper by E. Traub and B. Schneider published in 1948 titled "Züchtung des Virus der Maul- und Klauenseuche im
bebrüteten Hühnerei" (which is only missing
the text "vom Typ A (Vallée)" that refers to
serotype A in Vallée's classification scheme of FMD). [https://
In the acknowledgements section of The Sleeper Agent,
Finnegan wrote: "I thank my source and book project
friends, John Loftus, Crystal Bennett, Jody Savin, thank you for all the
support and help with research materials and advice and
suggestions." [https://
Jody Savin has worked as a scriptwriter and producer for TV and
movies, so I don't know if Loftus meant her by the Hollywood producers
who were looking into Traub's background. She wrote a book about a
Holocaust survivor which featured blurbs by two people praising the
book, who were John Loftus and some rabbi. [https://
Richard Grove is an author at One Great Work Network, and he has
a podcast called Grand Theft World. He has done interviews with people
like the former spy Bill Binney, the no-virus guy James Corbett, the
Qtard Jew Mel K, and the flat earther Owen Benjamin. [https://
Marja West is an author at One Great Work Network, who calls
herself a "Trauma-Based Mind Control DeActivator,
specifically focusing on handholding survivors of Human
Trafficking". [https://
Angie and Jim from Victurus Libertas were proto-Q people who were
discussing Q-style topics before there was Q, along with people like
Benjamin Fulford, David Willcock, and Robert David Steele. In 2017
Victurus Libertas did a video where they supposedly interviewed Qanon's
predecessor FBIanon. [https://
Steve Shellen is a former actor who now claims he is a targeted
individual who is being targeted with synthetic telepathy. [https://
I don't know why Finnegan listed Rick Spence first. Spence's bio
says: "Professor Spence has been a commentator and
consultant for the HISTORY® network, the International Spy Museum, and
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty." [https://
Rick Spence was a fellow of the anti-terrorism program of the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracy in Tel Aviv, and he received a
Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps Faculty Excellence Award. [https://
Finnegan posted two reviews of books by Spence on OGWN. [https://
Added later: Finnegan posted this response to me: [https://
But I'm not yet sure if he is deliberately producing disinformation, or if he is just a useful idiot who is being fed disinformation by Loftus. So therefore I have been trying to map out his network in the conspiracy movement to see if he is linked to people who are likely to be controlled opposition. For example his connection to Rick Spence is highly suspicious. It's also suspicious how he said he was going to be working with mystery schools, and how he wrote for the website of Mark Passio, who is the son of a special operations officer and who was a priest in Anton LaVey's church.
In his book Finnegan wrote: "In Dr. Kurt Blöme's talks with Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS-Waffen (Schutzstaffel) regarding biological warfare, it was decided to secure strains of rinderpest, but securing it was not so easy. The obstacle was due to established laws across Europe forbidding them from storing the virus due to its highly contagious nature that could wipe out Europe's livestock, which gave them great difficulty in finding strains, and eventually, Himmler decided to send Traub on a trip to Turkey to secure cultures of rinderpest and he made the long journey there and back.[72] Nearing the end of the war, Himmler, had been pushing for more aggressive biological warfare development with his medical and agricultural authorities, Kurt Blöme, Walter Schrieber, and Otto Waldman." Footnote 72 was: "National Archives. Joint intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), JIOA Administrative Records. (n.d.). Interview of ALSOS Scientists: Dr. Kurt Blöme (RG 330 INSCOM dossier XE001248). NARS."
When I asked Grok what other documents support the claim that Traub took a trip to Turkey, Grok answered:
The account of Erich Traub's trip to Turkey to secure rinderpest virus strains for Nazi biological warfare efforts originates almost exclusively from a single postwar interrogation of Dr. Kurt Blome by ALSOS mission scientists. This interview is preserved in the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency administrative records at the National Archives, specifically under RG 330 INSCOM dossier XE001248. Blome described how strict European laws prohibiting storage of the highly contagious rinderpest virus - due to its potential to devastate livestock - made acquisition difficult. When efforts stalled, Himmler ordered Traub to travel to Turkey, where he reportedly obtained cultures before returning to Germany. No contemporaneous German documents, such as travel authorizations, Riems Island laboratory logs, shipping manifests, or reports from other participants, have been identified in declassified archives to independently confirm the mission.
Secondary historical literature consistently traces the episode back to this same Blome statement without adding fresh primary evidence. Michael Christopher Carroll's 2004 book Lab 257 dramatizes Traub's search along the Black Sea coast of Turkey for a virulent strain intended for use against the Allies. However, it relies directly on the ALSOS-derived intelligence and introduces no new archival citations or independent verification. Such accounts often note that the acquired strain proved nonvirulent upon testing at Riems, leading to the abandonment of rinderpest weaponization in favor of continued work on foot-and-mouth disease. Amanda Kay McVety's 2018 scholarly study The Rinderpest Campaigns incorporates the Turkey trip into the broader context of wartime biological research. It acknowledges Blome's limited recollection of acquisition details while accepting the mission under Himmler's push for aggressive development involving Walter Schreiber and Otto Waldmann. McVety's analysis draws from the same postwar intelligence files rather than distinct sources such as Turkish veterinary records, border documentation, or Allied intelligence summaries that could corroborate Traub's movements independently.
Additional works on Operation Paperclip and Nazi scientist dossiers, including Linda Hunt's Secret Agenda and various accounts referencing RG 330 materials, mention the episode only within the framework of Blome's interrogation and Traub's role as lab chief at Riems. These texts provide interpretive context on the biological warfare program but do not present supplementary paperwork such as visa records, expense reports, or Soviet-zone postwar intelligence to verify the journey on its own. Wikipedia entries and derivative summaries uniformly echo the same limited sourcing, often citing Carroll's Lab 257 or the underlying National Archives file.
The earliest reference I found to Kurt Blome's RG 330 dossier was in Tom Bower's 1987 book The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists, even though Linda Hunt had earlier referred to Blome's interrogation by ALSOS without mentioning the RG 330 identifier.
Tom Bower is a Jew who worked for 25 years for BBC Television. [https://
Some of the intelligence documents that were supposedly discovered in the 80s might have actually been fabricated in the 80s. It's suspicious how the documents played a central role in the dramatic narratives presented by Linda Hunt and Tom Bower, who both worked in TV. The story of Traub's trip to Turkey is also told in Linda Hunt's book.
The National Archives has published a listing of 1,704 files in the
RG 330 group which includes files for Blome and Traub, but I didn't find
either file published online. [https://
Linda Hunt's 1985 article about Project Paperclip didn't mention the
RG 330 identifier, even though the sources she cited included a "Secret Alsos Report B-C/250, 'Interrogation of Blome;' July 30, 1945.".
[https://"Alsos" "B-, the only other
reference to the document I found was in a paper by Erhard Geissler,
which included this citation: "'Subject: Interrogation of Blome, Director of German B.W.
Activities. Information on Prof. Hornung,' Report No. B-C/250, 30
July 1945, Alsos Mission, p. 16." [https://
Finnegan gave this citation for Blome's RG 330 file: "National Archives. Joint intelligence Objectives Agency
(JIA), JIOA Administrative Records. (n.d.). Interview of ALSOS Scientists: Dr. Kurt
Blöme (RG 330 INSCOM dossier XE001248).
NARS." I didn't find the XE001248 identifier mentioned before
1990 at Google Books. [https://
The National Archives adopted the RG numbering system in the 40s.
[https://
In 2013 when someone did a FOIA request for files about Blome
including the RG 330 file, the CIA replied: "The
request has been rejected, with the agency stating that it can neither
confirm nor deny the existence of the requested documents." [https://
Now of course it's possible that Traub's trip to Turkey is real, but I would like to see more evidence for the trip apart from a secret intelligence file that was supposedly uncovered by someone who worked for CNN. Or I would at least like to see the file itself instead of having to rely on descriptions about the file by people who are peddling false information about Nazis, like Linda Hunt, Tom Bower, and Adam Finnegan.
Later in his book Finnegan wrote: "Traub would take another mission for the FAO to Turkey to assist them in the setup of an FMD lab there, which took him from 1969 to 1972." And he cited this document: "Traub, E., et al. Turkey: Vaccine Production. FAO Report Number: AGA-DP/TUR/69/533, Accession Number: 120100. (1972)." So if Traub later took another trip to Turkey that is documented outside of secret intelligence documents, then I guess it increases the likelihood that Traub would've also taken an earlier trip to Turkey.
The story of Traub's first trip has a somewhat anticlimactic ending,
which also makes the story more believable, because mundane and boring
stories tend to be more believable than sensationalistic stories. A book
which cited Blome's interrogation by ALSOS said: "Blome did not know any of the details as to how or where
Traub actually obtained the virus. Traub returned to Reims with the
virus and there, in an old building isolated from the main institute, an
attempt was made to infect some cattle by rubbing the virus on their
nose and mouth. One animal was sick, but recovered and the others were
unaffected. Further work was therefore impossible as the strain had
proved avirulent. On reporting this to Himmler at a later meeting, Blome
was told that attempts would be made to secure another strain but he
heard no more concerning the matter." [https://
In a book chapter titled "Conversion of BTW
Facilities: Lessons from German History", Erhard Geissler wrote:
"In the final stage of WWII the institute was
requested to develop a rinderpest vaccine because of German concern that
her enemies might use rinderpest virus for BW attacks. There are
contradictory reports whether at least small-scale experiments with
Rinderpest virus had been performed at Riems by Waldmann's deputy Erich
Traub and his coworkers." [https://
Traub was a virologist, and he did not do much work with bacteria judging from his bibliography. Claims that he researched Borrelia bacteria go back to sources like unpublished intelligence files, or to anecdotal information conveyed by Loftus and Carroll, or to speculation based on his coworkers studying Borrelia.
Even on Finnegan's extensive timeline about Traub, there are only a
few entries about Traub working with bacteria: [https://
"1937 (March) -
Traub supervises researcher John B. Nelson in further looking into the
unusual respiratory infections that resulted in the mouse colony after
the LCM epidemic and the arrival of a new stock of Swiss mice from the
same source, The respiratory infection was a complexity of Mycoplasma
and other infections, due to immunocompromise." Finnegan linked
to three papers about "Nelson's experiments under
Traub", but Nelson was the only author listed in the papers, so
Traub didn't necessarily have any major contribution to the papers.
[https://
"1940 - Traub, Beller, and another colleague carry out experiments on bovine papular stomatitis virus, a virus that closely resembles Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) and Vesicular Stomatitis, but is a poxvirus and a very close relative to vaccinia virus and smallpox. [...] It was in this paper that we can see that he used the virus to weaponize the simulant bacteria Serratia marcescens (then called Bacillus prodigiosus) that would later be used in his American simulant testing activities." In his book Finnegan wrote: "In April of 1940, Traub, Beller, and another colleague published a study of Bovine Papular Stomatitis, a poxvirus similar to smallpox, in 'Studies on Bovine Papular Stomatitis,' a viral infection that looked much like Foot-and-Mouth Disease but is a member of the poxvirus family. They began experiments trying to adapt it to different animals to change its properties.[21] It was in this study, they mixed the virus in broth containing strains of Serratia marcescens (Bacillus prodigiosus), a so-called 'harmless' bacterium to cattle and was used in later simulant tests in America. The filters used hold back the bacteria as the mixture passes through the filter and any virus will pass through it, but the bacteria will be held back. In this case however, the virus had transferred genetic material to the bacteria giving it pathogenic properties and changing its qualities.[22] In other words, he weaponized the simulant bacteria Serratia marcescens.[23]" The original German title of the paper is "Untersuchungen uber die stomatitis papulosa des Rindes", but I didn't find the paper posted online. But how was Traub even able to tell that the virus had transferred genetic material to the bacteria, because genetic sequencing had not yet been invented in 1940? Even DNA had not yet been discovered. And it's unlikely that random genetic material from a virus would even be functional in bacteria, or that the lucky acquisition of a single functional piece of viral DNA would somehow amount to a weaponization of the bacteria. And anyway, the 1940 study was about viruses, where bacteria appear to have been only employed in bacterial filters, like Chamberland or Berkefeld filters, which was a standard technique in virology at the time. So Finnegan may have somehow misunderstood the results of the study.
"1941 - An outbreak of unknown origin occurs in Army horses owned by a veterinary company, with horses showing signs of broncho-pneumonia. They set up a handful of experiments to assess the cause of disease. They set up experiments on blood parasites, equine infectious anemia, and infectious respiratory catarrh (mixed infections). They conclude the disease was due to infectious respiratory catarrh, after finding Streptococcus equi, Streptococcus pyogenes, and other bacterium that are usually considered 'harmless' to the horse." Traub was the only author in the paper about the study, but he might have been part of a team that also included experts on bacterial or parasitical diseases.
"1942 - Traub concludes his lengthy studies of infectious respiratory catarrh with a focus on hemolytic Streptococci, A form of Streptococcus that destroys red blood cells, in: The Presence of Hemolytic Streptococci in the Infectious Respiratory Catarrh Disease of the Horse's Respiratory System (Traub and Gratzl 1942)". This seems like a follow-up to the study in military horses.
"1942 - Traub conducts an investigation into a disease of rabbits in Angora for the Luftwaffe, after rabbits in the area started dying of an unknown disease. The disease caused the rabbits' ears to become droopy, their heads and neck would become twisted and disfigured, in some ways resembling amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and paralytic polio. He finds an invasive bacterium in the brains of the rabbits, known as Listeria monocytogenes, which is a cause of food poisoning (listeriosis) in humans." This appears to have been a case where Traub had to do field work for the military outside his field of expertise, similar to the study where he had to find the cause of a disease outbreak in military horses. Traub was the only author in the paper about the rabbit study, but he may have still been part of a team that also included experts on bacterial diseases.
"1947 - Traub initiates a series of experiments in the immunization of swine erysipelas, (Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae), a bacterium similar to Brucella that causes severe septicemia and big red rashes in swine. Traub concentrated the antigen which were used for vaccines with a unique formulation that could not necessarily be reproduced by other researchers." Here Traub employed a method to develope a vaccine similar to a method that had been earlier applied to the FMD virus at Riems Island.
"1948 - Traub starts a separate series of bacteriological experiments, much like the erysipelas, on Brucella abortus x bang bacterium, constructing a vaccine which he tested in white mice, likely with the addition of the avian influenza antigen to affect the interspecies transfer in adaptation of the bacterium to new hosts, while using the cover of vaccine research." He referred to a paper titled "Immunisierung von Mäusen gegen Brucellose mit konzentrierten Adsorbatvakzinen" ("Immunization of mice against Brucellosis with concentrated adsorbate vaccines"), but I didn't find the paper posted online, and I didn't even find more details about the paper in Finnegan's book. Otto Waldmann and Traub had previously developed a concentrated adsorbate vaccine for FMD at Riems Island.
"1950 - Traub starts his Navy work to
weaponize over 40 pathogens and is place in the position of 'Supervisory Bacteriologist' for the U.S. Navy and
other outfits involved in the tripartite program, to supervise simulant
and live agent tests around the United States, including Plum Island,
Wisconsin, Florida, Kansas, and other testing sites." In his book
Finnegan cited Traub's JIOA file as evidence that Traub's title was
"Supervisory Bacteriologist". The title may
have been applied to microbiologists in general including virologists.
In the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the word
"virologist" is from 1945, and the first
English-language virology journal was established in 1955, so virology
was still a relatively niche field in 1950. [https://
"1951 (September) - Traub returns to the Northeast United States in time to supervise simulant tests on Plum Island conducting work at Plum Island releasing ticks in the biological simulant program. They were claiming to release insects infected with harmless tracer bacteria that they could track and assess how it spreads out." Then as evidence for the supposed simulant release, Finnegan presented the story from Mike Carroll's anonymous source who claimed that in 1951 Nazi scientist had released ticks on Plum Island, but it seems to be Finnegan's unique interpretation of the story that the anonymous source was talking about a simulant experiment. Carroll only wrote that the ticks were "inoculated" but he didn't even specify if the ticks were inoculated with viruses or bacteria, even though he gave the impression that the release of ticks may have been responsible for the initial seeding of the Lyme disease outbreak.
Finnegan didn't list any study where Traub would have modified bacteria through methods like serial passage, or where Traub would have somehow weaponized bacteria (apart from the alleged modification of Serratia marcescens through use as a viral filter, which seems like some kind of a misunderstanding or misinterpretation by Finnegan).
So basically Traub was a virologist and not a bacteriologist, and he primarily worked on animal diseases and not human diseases, and he worked in the DC area and Colombia but not Plum Island, and he had likely moved back to Germany before people from USDA started to work at Plum Island. His main qualification for becoming the creator of Lyme disease seems to have been that he was a Paperclip Nazi, and John Loftus had earlier said that anynymous spies had speculated that Paperclip Nazis were responsible for Lyme disease.
In chapter 6 of his book, Finnegan wrote: [https://
As an assistant professor under Beller at Giessen, Traub had a few students under him, such as Dr. Werner Schäfer, who went to Africa in 1939, and returned by the start of the war to later join Traub at Insel Riems.[5] He and Traub would also publish a paper that year on the virus of LCM in mouse blood.[6]
It was at this time Schäfer retrieved a strain of avian spirochetes, Borrelia anserina, then known as Spirochaeta gallinarum, which was given to him by Rockefeller-funded psychologist, Franz Jahnel. This was the spirochete from birds that was weaponized by Traub and would become in later years, Borrelia burgdorferi, the agent responsible for Lyme Disease, later supported by evidence in a 1989 publication, "Shared flagellar epitopes of Borrelia burgdorferi and Borrelia anserina."[7] Schäfer began growing the spirochetes in chick embryos, acknowledging their need, for a cheap way to maintain the spirochete and to have a fully virulent strain for research and teaching purposes. The results were published in "The Maintenance of Spirochaeta gallinarum by Passages in Fowl Embryos:"
Since we have to have a fully virulent Spirochaeta gallinarum strain in our institute for research and teaching purposes, we have tried to replace the expensive chicken passages with a complete, simple and cheap breeding procedure.[8]
When I pasted the text to Grok and asked if it is possible for Borrelia anserina to become Borrelia burgdorferi, Grok replied:
No, it is not possible for Borrelia anserina to "become" Borrelia burgdorferi. These are two distinct bacterial species within the genus Borrelia, and the claim that one transformed or evolved directly into the other - particularly through work by Erich Traub or Werner Schäfer involving weaponization or lab manipulation - is not supported by scientific evidence.
Borrelia anserina (formerly known as Spirochaeta gallinarum) causes avian spirochetosis, a disease primarily affecting birds (e.g., poultry like chickens and geese). It is transmitted by argasid (soft) ticks and has been known since the late 19th century.
Borrelia burgdorferi (more precisely Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto, with related species in the B. burgdorferi sensu lato complex) causes Lyme disease in humans and other mammals. It is transmitted by hard ticks (primarily Ixodes species) and was first identified as a distinct pathogen in the early 1980s by Willy Burgdorfer.
The 1989 paper titled "Shared flagellar epitopes of Borrelia burgdorferi and Borrelia anserina" (published in Veterinary Microbiology) demonstrates antigenic cross-reactivity - specifically, the two species share at least two epitopes on their flagella. One of these shared epitopes is not found in other Borrelia species like B. hermsii or B. coriaceae. This is based on studies using mouse immune sera and monoclonal antibodies in immunoblots.
This shared antigenicity reflects evolutionary relatedness within the Borrelia genus (both are spirochetes), but it does not mean one species can convert into the other, nor does it indicate genetic transformation, mutation under lab conditions, or weaponization leading to Lyme disease. Flagellar proteins (like the 41-kDa flagellin) are conserved across many spirochetes, leading to cross-reactions in diagnostics, but the bacteria remain separate species with different hosts, vectors, diseases, and genomic profiles.
The quoted passage about Schäfer maintaining Spirochaeta gallinarum (i.e., B. anserina) in chick embryos for research and teaching purposes aligns with historical veterinary microbiology practices - chick embryos were a common, inexpensive method to propagate certain pathogens before modern cell culture techniques. There is no credible evidence linking this to creating or modifying a Lyme disease agent.
Grok said that the time to the most recent common ancestor of anserina and burgdorferi is estimated to be millions of years ago, so it wouldn't have been possible to create burgdorferi from anserina through serial passage within a time span of a few years, and the diversity between different strains of Borrelia burgdorferi is so great that the strains cannot have had a common ancestor less than a hundred years ago:
The genetic distance between Borrelia burgdorferi (the primary agent of Lyme disease) and Borrelia anserina (the agent of avian spirochetosis) is substantial, reflecting their placement in separate major clades within the Borrelia genus: Lyme disease-associated (B. burgdorferi sensu lato, or LB group) versus relapsing fever-associated (RF group, where B. anserina resides as a classic avian/soft-tick transmitted species).
16S rRNA gene sequences (commonly used for bacterial phylogeny) show clear divergence. Studies from the early 1990s (e.g., Marconi et al., 1992) aligned B. burgdorferi sequences with those of B. anserina, B. hermsii, and others, revealing species-level differences sufficient to distinguish them phylogenetically. Typical 16S rRNA similarity between LB and RF Borrelia species is around 95-97% (implying ~3-5% divergence), though exact pairwise values for these two are not uniformly reported in summaries - distance matrices place B. anserina outside the LB cluster with significant branch lengths.
Whole-genome and multi-locus comparisons indicate even greater divergence. The LB group (B. burgdorferi s.l.) and RF group (including B. anserina) form monophyletic sister lineages that diverged from a common ancestor long ago. Some proposals suggest splitting them into separate genera due to genomic differences (e.g., chromosome structure, plasmid content, gene presence/absence like glpQ in RF but absent in LB). Average nucleotide identity (ANI) or similar metrics across genomes would likely fall well below the ~95-96% threshold for species delineation.
Time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) of B. burgdorferi and B. anserina is not precisely dated in available literature for this specific pair, but broader Borrelia phylogenies and divergence estimates place the split between LB and RF clades in the distant past - likely millions of years ago, predating modern mammal-tick cycles. For context, diversity within B. burgdorferi s.l. itself dates back 60,000 years or more in some North American lineages, while transitions (e.g., to louse-borne RF) are more recent (8,000 years in some cases). The LB-RF divergence is far older, consistent with deep phylogenetic separation.
The 16S ribosomal gene is commonly employed for taxonomical analysis
of bacteria. When I searched GenBank for
(,
there were a total of 2,166 results. [https://
I then excluded plasmids, shotgun sequences, and intergenic sequences, aligned the remaining sequences, and I made a percentage identity matrix of the sequences. I thinned out the matrix to remove sequences that had over 99.7% identity to any previous sequence in the matrix, which retained 126 sequences. Then when I sorted the results based on their percentage identity to the common reference strain of B. burgdorferi, it had about 99% identity to other species of Borrelia in the LB group, like afzelii, americana, andersonii, bavariensis, californiensis, garinii, lanei, lusitaniae, maritima, mayonii, spielmanii, tanukii, turdi, and yangtzensis. But the reference strain of B. burgdorferi had only about 96-97% identity to B. anserina:
#exclude plasmids, #shotgun sequences, and intergenic spacers, remove duplicates, and align result brew install seqkit mafft seqkit grep -nrivpshotgun,plasmid, spacer sequence. fasta| seqkit replace -ispn -r-| cat <( seqkit grep -nrpB31 sequence. fasta) -| seqkit rmdup -s| mafft -- thread 7 -- quiet -> borre. fa # compile a utility for making a TSV percentage identity matrix of aligned sequences curl -Ls sars2.net/ f/ pid. cpp> pid. cpp; g++ pid. cpp -O3 -o pid # thin out a TSV percentage identity matrix to remove sequences with higher than #specified identity percent to any previous sequence thin()(awk -F\\ t ' NR> 1{ for( i=2; i< NR; i++) if($ i> x) next; print$ 1} ' x="${ 1- 99} " "${@: 2} ") # omit sequences with over 99. #7% identity to any previous sequence, and sort by distance to the B31 reference isolate of _Borrelia burgdorferi_ ./pid< borre. fa> borre. pid thin 99. 7 < borre. pid| cut -d' ' -f1| seqkit grep -f- borre. fa|./ pid| awk -F\\ t ' NR==1{ for( i=2; i< =NF; i++) if($ i~/ B31/) break; next}{ print$ i,$ 1} '| sort -rn| sed ' s/, \( complete\| partial\) sequence.*// '
100.0000 AF467957. 1 Borrelia sp. B31 16S ribosomal RNA gene 99. 6873 M89938. 1 Borrelia burgdorferi (VS219) rRNA sequence 99. 6134 AF467971. 1 Borrelia sp. MOD- 1 16S ribosomal RNA gene 99. 5595 NR_ 116166. 1 Borreliella americana strain SCW- 41 16S ribosomal RNA 99. 5490 AF467970. 1 Borrelia sp. SCGT- 10 16S ribosomal RNA gene 99. 5228 NR_ 158115. 1 Borreliella lanei strain CA28- 91 16S ribosomal RNA 99. 5228 NR_ 148824. 1 Borreliella californiensis strain CA446 16S ribosomal RNA 99. 5188 KY348800. 1 Borreliella garinii isolate Vanino_ 2011- 11 16S ribosomal RNA gene 99. 4709 NR_ 152696. 1 Borreliella mayonii strain MN14- 1420 16S ribosomal RNA 99. 4547 AJ224136. 1 Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato, 16S rRNA gene, isolate CA2 99. 4502 M60969. 1 B. burgdorferi 16S ribosomal RNA 99. 4148 D67018. 1 Borrelia garinii DNA for 16S ribosomal RNA 99. 3852 KY622012. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone YN67 16S ribosomal RNA gene 99. 3473 NR_ 170496. 1 Borrelia maritima strain CA690 16S ribosomal RNA 99. 3443 OL721871. 1 Candidatus Borrelia sibirica isolate Alt17- 64 16S ribosomal RNA gene 99. 3434 NR_ 036806. 1 Borreliella lusitaniae strain Poti B2 16S ribosomal RNA 99. 2912 AF467969. 1 Borrelia sp. SCGT- 8a 16S ribosomal RNA gene 99. 2857 AB178151. 1 Borrelia garinii gene for 16S rRNA 99. 2821 AJ009753. 1 Borrelia garinii (isolate Far04) 16S rRNA gene, partial 99. 2658 HM802226. 1 Borrelia americana strain SCW- 30h 16S ribosomal RNA gene 99. 2268 AF467975. 1 Borrelia sp. MOS- 1b 16S ribosomal RNA gene 99. 1947 D67024. 1 Borrelia turdi DNA for 16S ribosomal RNA 99. 1863 OR226552. 1 Uncultured Borreliella sp. clone N11 16S ribosomal RNA gene 99. 1222 D67023. 1 Borrelia tanukii DNA for 16S ribosomal RNA 99. 1222 D67021. 1 Borrelia sp. DNA for 16S ribosomal RNA 99. 0985 X57404. 1 Borrelia burgdorferi 16S rRNA, partial 99. 0660 AB037126. 1 Borrelia sp. TM1 gene for 16S rRNA 99. 0560 L40596. 1 Borrelia burgdorferi 16S ribosomal RNA (16S rRNA) gene 99. 0483 AB030751. 1 Borrelia tanukii gene for 16S rRNA 99. 0399 LC572078. 1 Borrelia yangtzensis OP- 014 gene for 16S rRNA 99. 0181 MW301929. 1 Borreliella garinii isolate 382 16S ribosomal RNA gene 98. 9865 EU135597. 1 Borrelia yangtzensis strain QTMP2 16S ribosomal RNA gene 98. 9751 D67019. 1 Borrelia afzelii DNA for 16S ribosomal RNA 98. 9731 AB111523. 1 Borrelia garinii gene for 16S rRNA 98. 9612 NR_ 044732. 2 Borreliella burgdorferi strain ATCC 35210 16S ribosomal RNA 98. 9494 NR_ 104871. 1 Borreliella spielmanii strain PC- Eq17N5 16S ribosomal RNA 98. 9432 AB037125. 1 Borrelia sp. TA1 gene for 16S rRNA 98. 9019 MZ146350. 1 Borreliella garinii isolate TC- T- 119 16S ribosomal RNA gene 98. 8862 EU085417. 1 Borrelia carolinensis isolate SCCH- 10 16S ribosomal RNA (rrs) gene 98. 8771 AB037123. 1 Borrelia sp. KR1 gene for 16S rRNA 98. 8620 NR_ 118688. 1 Borreliella japonica strain HO14 16S ribosomal RNA 98. 8304 NR_ 118689. 1 Borreliella andersonii strain 21038 16S ribosomal RNA 98. 8183 LC572071. 1 Borrelia yangtzensis IG- 213 gene for 16S rRNA 98. 7524 MH781146. 1 Borreliella burgdorferi isolate CA8 16S ribosomal RNA gene 98. 7170 L46695. 1 Borrelia japonica (isolate IKA2) 16S ribosomal rRNA 98. 7162 EU135593. 1 Borrelia yangtzensis strain QLZSP1 16S ribosomal RNA gene 98. 7032 PQ849842. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone JX88 16S ribosomal RNA gene 98. 6582 AB178152. 1 Borrelia afzelii gene for 16S rRNA 98. 6142 M72396. 1 Borrelia sp. 16S small subunit ribosomal RNA 98. 5666 MZ146347. 1 Borreliella valaisiana isolate TC- T- 02 16S ribosomal RNA gene 98. 5412 AJ225165. 1 Borrelia sp. 16S rRNA gene 98. 3168 KY563168. 1 Borreliella burgdorferi isolate 11- 1019 16S ribosomal RNA gene 98. 3142 L40597. 1 Borrelia japonica 16S ribosomal RNA (16S rRNA) gene 98. 1989 AM182231. 1 Borrelia spielmanii partial 16S rRNA gene, strain PJes 97. 9111 U28501. 1 Borrelia burgdorferi strain ESP- 1 16S ribosomal RNA gene 97. 6036 L40598. 1 Borrelia japonica 16S ribosomal RNA (16S rRNA) gene, partial rRNA 97. 2465 AB473531. 1 Borrelia sp. Tick98M gene for 16S rRNA 97. 1935 LC905312. 1 Borrelia sp. C15 gene for 16S ribosomal RNA 96. 9482 OP941213. 1 Candidatus Borrelia caatinga clone PCST 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 9295 MN304842. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone T15 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 8414 MT482696. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone 18GG3 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 7547 MT013213. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone OrietCE 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 7504 LC741324. 1 Borrelia sp. MTNP- 32 gene for 16S ribosomal RNA 96. 6929 AB111850. 1 Borrelia turcica gene for 16S rRNA 96. 6667 MK453304. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone PK37 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 6596 MT013214. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone TabajaraCE 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 6553 OQ725662. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone 54_ 16S 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 6518 MT013210. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone JericoCE 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 6491 U42284. 1 Borrelia anserina 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 6469 MW889882. 1 Borrelia sp. A126 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 6317 MK453305. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone STN357 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 6230 OR058600. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone SSK31 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 6193 KU308247. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone Ticino01_ 2015 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 6027 LC741327. 1 Borrelia sp. SLNP- 13 gene for 16S ribosomal RNA 96. 5986 OP081026. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone 24T 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 5695 MG452684. 1 Borrelia sp. isolate Bsp_ Tick14 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 5485 KY563158. 1 Borreliella burgdorferi isolate 11- 326 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 5333 NR_ 114544. 1 Borrelia coriaceae strain Co53 16S ribosomal RNA 96. 5089 AF228031. 1 Borrelia hermsii strain SB82 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 5077 AB897891. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. gene for 16S ribosomal RNA 96. 5077 AB529427. 1 Borrelia sp. TA2 gene for 16S rRNA 96. 4983 MK367715. 1 Borrelia caucasica strain CHICH- D 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96. 4789 PP729468. 1 Uncultured Borrelia sp. clone mimona1 16S ribosomal RNA gene 96.