New clues on Iraq’s smallpox threat.
CIA: Russian scientist
may have shared weaponized strain lethal up to 24 miles.
Dec. 4 — Did Saddam Hussein get a vaccine-proof smallpox strain from a Moscow lab — a type of smallpox so easily transmitted that once airborne it remains deadly for up to 24 miles?
“WE NEED to know because we need to know everything that is in the inventory of Saddam Hussein,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
A Central Intelligence Agency informant says the smallpox was brought to Iraq by a Russian scientist, Nelja Maltseva, who died two years ago. She is known to have visited Iraq in 1972. But now the CIA informant says she went back in 1990 to help Saddam’s bioterror experts.
“It’s unclear exactly what she was doing in Baghdad because by then, smallpox had been eradicated world wide. So if that is true — and we just have one unnamed source to go on — it would be troubling,” said Dr. Jonathan Tucker, a biological and chemical weapons proliferation expert.
On Wednesday, Maltseva’s former colleagues strongly denied that she helped Saddam in any way.
“She had not been in Iraq at that time. She could not take this viruses,” said Russian scientist Svetlana Marennikova.
What is known is that Maltseva studied the rare smallpox strain after an Asian epidemic in 1971.
American scientists say the outbreak was caused by an accident at a nearby Soviet weapons lab which was experimenting with smallpox.
“It seems likely that, in fact, they did weaponize it, which almost certainly means they brew it up in large quantities — many pounds, some people say, even tons of smallpox,” said Dr. Alan Zelicoff of Sandia National Labs.
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The CIA thought the information was important enough to brief President Bush. But aides say Bush did not press Russia’s President Vladimir Putin about the smallpox experiments when they met in St. Petersburg last month, because even Putin probably can’t get his military to admit what they did.
“I don’t know what the Russians might have in their inventory. We are in constant contact with the Russians on this issue,” said Secretary of State Colin Powell.
In fact, U.S. officials suspect Russia might still have a secret bioweapons program, but the bigger threat is that their scientists might have shared their secrets with Iraq.
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