"Outbreak: So who is terrorising America with anthrax?
War on Terrorism: Observer special
Ed Vulliamy and Ed Helmore in New York
Sunday October 21, 2001
The Observer
In the summer of 1992, Bill Patrick, America's veteran designer
of biological weaponry, took a call from the CIA he had been
half-expecting for weeks. The agency wanted him to interview a
Russian defector.
Patrick had not thought about devising an agent of germ warfare
since the US programme he ran was scrapped by the Nixon
administration in 1969. But he was now the West's leading
expert on what had come to be known as 'bio-defence'.
The CIA agents escorted Patrick to a safe house on the
outskirts of Washington and introduced him to a short man from
Kazakhstan, to whom he handed his business card, which had
the skull and crossbones on it.
Kanatjan Alibekov smiled in recognition. After two months of
debriefing goons from the CIA and academics with little
knowledge of what he was talking about, Dr Alibekov had found
his opposite number on the American side. Here, in the muggy
heat, was someone he could trust and respect, and who would
understand the story he had to tell.
During 17 years inside the Soviet germ weapons programme,
Alibekov had been promoted to the deputy directorship of
Biopreparat, a supposedly civilian wing of the communist
chemical weapons programme. And from that vantage point he
had enjoyed an overview of the stockpiling of hundreds of tons of
'Bacillus Anthracis' - anthrax - and other germ agents for use
against the United States and other Nato enemies.
Patrick left the debriefing armed with the knowledge that, during
the final days of the Cold War, the USSR was bristling with
chemical weaponry. One single plant at Stepnogorsk in the
emerging independent state of Kazakhstan could have been
producing two tons of anthrax a day. And even if the threat of
world war had gone, the nightmare of bio-terror was just
beginning.
Last week, nightmare became reality in the US. Germ warfare
was declared in a limited, crude and clumsy way: anthrax sent
by mail in small quantities is not contagious beyond a few
people at most, but the dreaded Rubicon in the history of
terrorism had been crossed.
It turned the media into a fortress; it has closed down Capitol
Hill for the first time during what is precariously being called a
'time of peace'.
Now, three questions hang over the latest bio-terrorist crisis
detonated by the carnage on 11 September. Is this 'weaponised'
anthrax? Where is it coming from? And who will be next?
The week opened with anthrax beginning to cloud over public
attention even from a war that its air force - and before long its
troops - would be fighting in Afghanistan. Powder had been sent,
lethally, to the offices of American Media Inc, in Florida, and
now more arrived: at the nearby St Petersburg Times , at the
New York Times and in the office of a name known to everyone
in America - NBC's Tom Brokaw - at the Rockefeller Centre in
the heart of Midtown Manhattan.
On Monday, a child at ABC television in Manhattan was
diagnosed with exposure to the germ and the spectre of
biological terror climbed the green lawns of Capitol Hill and into
the temple of America democracy: an infected letter to Tom
Daschle, leader of the Senate. The following day, investigators
and experts made a discovery even more potent than the letter
itself - the most worrying development yet in the series of
attacks that had already rattled the nation. The type of anthrax
used was of a kind indicating the terrorists had access to germ
weapons capable of inflicting far bigger casualties.
The challenge to serious bio-terrorists in the long term is not to
create anxiety but to pose a threat - to produce germs that
could be spread as a mist that can remain live and be retained
in the nostril and lung. And the following day the experts' worst
fears were realised: 30 people had been exposed to the germ
sent in Daschle's letter. In the ensuing panic, Congress was
closed; no one was dead but there was one serious casualty:
the leadership of America. 'WIMPS!' said the New York Post ;
'The Leaders Who Ran Away From Anthrax'.
The germs sent to Florida, New York and Washington appeared
to be of the same strain - thus connecting one to the other, if not
to any discoverable source. The Manhattan offices of New York
Governor George Pataki were evacuated after being hit.
The US was now playing a gambling game. Not whether, but
who, when and where next? Few expected the next victim to be
a postal worker in Trenton, New Jersey, who developed
cutaneous anthrax after handling the letters to Brokaw and
Daschle. Also positive was a worker at a mail facility that
delivers to the Capitol. More predictable was the vile missive
sent to Brokaw's opposite number, Dan Rather of CBS
television, completing the triad of three major networks. On
Friday, it was the New York Post , the newspaper's offices in
Rio de Janeiro, and a second postal worker in Trenton.
None of this, however, illuminated the path that the toxin had
taken - was it brought from a foreign nation, or made
domestically with the help of a rogue scientist? Nor was it
known whether the attackers can make or obtain larger
quantities than those being dispatched. 'I do think that in one
form or another a state must have been involved,' a germ
weapons expert told the New York Times, 'or it could be the
employees of a former state, such as a Russian scientist'.
For a state to be involved in such an attack on an American
senator would take President George Bush into uncharted
waters even during these remarkable times. On the eve of the
Gulf war, his father debated the use of nuclear weapons against
Saddam Hussein were he to launch a germ attack against the
US. The US had instead sent Saddam a letter reading: 'Your
country will pay a terrible price if you order unconscionable
acts.'
Nor was it clear whether the al-Qaida network of Osama bin
Laden was involved, although the President said he was
convinced of a connection. The CIA circulated an assessment
earlier this year saying al-Qaida had no more than a 'crude'
biological weapons capability.
After the first appearances of anthrax at NBC television and the
New York Times 10 days ago, sections of the US intelligence
community, politicians and experts in the field were quick to see
the hand of Saddam Hussein. First among them was the former
CIA head, James Woolsey. Next came Richard Butler, a former
director of the Unscom (United Nations Special Commission)
project to root out Saddam's massive arsenal of chemical and
biological weapons and supervise their destruction.
Butler went on to say that he believed the connection between
Iraq and the anthrax attacks had been made in Prague. The
argument completed a series of associations: the suspected
suicide pilot Mohamed Atta was known to have met Iraqi
intelligence officials in Prague, and Egyptian authorities had told
the CIA that al-Qaida militants interrogated in Cairo had obtained
small amounts of anthrax in the Czech capital.
In the years following the Gulf war, UN inspectors found the Iraqi
regime had invested vast resources in building up reserves of
liquid anthrax. Iraq told the inspectors - as they were given the
runaround - that all of it had been dumped into the ground, but
Unscom never determined how much was destroyed.
All the week political machinations over blaming Iraq went on
behind the scenes. A finger pointed at Saddam Hussein
strengthened the hand of the powerful Pentagon faction under
Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, anxious to spread
the Afghan war westward against the same regime it had argued
should be top pled on the slipstream of victory in 1991, with US
backing for insurgent Shias and Kurds.
Iraq is the prime suspect because of the quantities of anthrax it
is known to have stockpiled, second only to Russia, and of
Saddam's open sponsorship of international terrorism. During
their inspections, Unscom officials sometimes even found a
geographical proximity between the germ weapons facilities and
a terror network. One former inspector, Raymond Zilinskas,
says the Salman Pak plant was less than a mile from what the
Iraqis had dubbed 'an anti-terrorist training camp'. 'In fact,' says
Zilinskas, 'it was a terrorist training camp.'
Unscom was forced to quit Iraq in December 1998, with the
team believing it had destroyed most of the 8,500 litres of
concentrated anthrax and 19,000 litres of undiluted botulinum
toxin that Saddam admitted he had after years denying a
biological weapons programme. Anthrax production began in
June 1990, on the eve of the invasion of Kuwait.
Some of those Unscom officials now work at a joint 'biodefence'
project between George Mason University in Virginia and Dr
Alibekov's company in the West, Advanced Biosystems - now,
coincidentally, being consulted by the authorities and hosts to
an international seminar on bio-terrorism next month.
These officials say Iraq is likely to have hidden up to four times
as much anthrax as Saddam confessed to having, and twice as
much botulinum. The woman who, close to tears, finally
admitted the anthrax programme to Unscom, British-educated
Dr Rihab Taha (known as 'Dr Germ'), is still in place; and one of
the former leaders of Unscom, Richard Spertzel, now deputy
director of the US bio-weapons research facility at Fort Derek,
Maryland, believes that if Saddam was trying to manufacture a
new generation of bio-weapons, it would be of global potency.
But if the anthrax was coming from Iraq, where had they got it
from, and what kind of chemical was it?
In testimony to the House of Representatives last week, the
man who had now changed his name to Kenneth Alibek recalled
his time as Dr Alibekov, running the Soviet Biopreparat
programme across 40 complexes, manufacturing anthrax, Black
Death, smallpox and other germ agents. The programme's
function, he said, was to 'weaponise' the germs - to stabilise,
dry and mill them into particles for spreading by explosions - or
just aerosol sprays and on air currents. The question now
haunting the US authorities is whether the anthrax now blowing
around the Capitol is of 'weapons grade' or not.
Stepnogorsk, core of the Biopreparat programme, is a place that
appears on no map; the plant is no more than a PO Box number
- 2076. And it was here that Andy Weber, a young military
diplomat and first secretary to the fledgling US embassy to
Kazakhstan, ventured in June 1995.
The decayed plant at which Dr Alibekov had work confirmed all
he had told Bill Patrick in 1992. Weber's team found remnants of
lab equipment, vast chambers and underground filling rooms
where anthrax had been fitted to missiles and bombs.
The team then went on to another, even more shocking location:
Vozrozdheniya Island in the Aral Sea - or 'Voz', as the
Americans called it - which shares a coastline with Uzbekistan.
Here was not only a massive germ-weapons testing range, but
the world's biggest dump for weapons-grade anthrax. What had
happened since the signing of the 1972 Biological Weapons
Treaty was that trains full of anthrax had made the journey
across the steppes to Voz Island and poured the sludge into the
ground.
The dump was a wasteland, cursed by no sign of living animals
but the stench of 'non-human primates' killed in hideous
experiments. The scientists used to envy the doomed monkeys'
daily ration of bananas, joked Weber's Kazak hosts.
From Stepnogorsk and Voz Island led a trail of proliferation - the
former was employing 30,000 people when it was shut down in
1992, among them the bearers of know-how, secrets, weapons
recipes. According to Alibek, 7,000 of them were trained in how
to make a deadly weapon of one type or another. But direct
connections between the anthrax leak to Islamic
fundamentalists in states bordering ravaged Afghanistan were
not the urgent concern of the US or Russian intelligence
services - rather, their worries were over expertise to
programmes already running in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Dr
Amy Smithson at the Henry L. Stimson Centre in Washington
DC wrote a report in 1994 entitled 'Toxic Archipelago' in which
she argued that once Soviet authority over Biopreparat ended,
there were leaks across the Middle East, into territory where
terrorists or their sponsors could easily obtain it.
Among the certain recipients, she says, was Syria, after the
sacking of General Anatoly Kuntsevich by Boris Yeltsin, found
to have committed 'numerous and gross violations' in his
dealings of chemicals with Damascus. Another country was
Iran, says Smithson, which began recruiting unemployed
experts from Stepnogorsk.
Whatever the political and geographical source of the biological
attack on America, the authorities are trying to ascertain what
strain of anthrax is involved. One strain that has emerged as a
potential seed type is known as the Ames strain, which the US
tried to weaponise before its Cold War biological weapons
programme was halted by President Nixon in 1969. Although it
was distributed around the world, it is unclear whether Saddam
got his hands on it.
However, Iraq was able to obtain a virulent form of anthrax,
known as the Vollum strain, from the American Type Culture
Collection, a laboratory in Virginia, before the Gulf war. That was
the strain Iraq used and turned into weapons, according to
Unscom.
But investigators emphasise that a relatively impotent strain
does not rule out foreign sponsorship. They say it is conceivable
that a foreign government or terrorist organisation picked a
domestic strain to throw off federal investigators. 'There's no
indication that it came from the Russian or Iraqi programmes,
but you can't rule that out,' said a federal scientist familiar with
the investigation.
Out of thousands tested, only seven people have proved
anthrax-positive, although dozens more show signs of exposure.
Investigators strongly believe anthrax exposure cases in New
York, Washington and Florida are linked to the 11 September
attacks and that remaining al-Qaida individuals or cells are
behind them - but officials say they lacked concrete evidence or
intelligence to explain who sent the anthrax-contaminated
letters.
Signalling the lack of fresh leads, FBI director Robert S Mueller
III said the government would offer a $1 million reward for
information leading to the conviction of anyone responsible for
anthrax attacks. John Potter, head of the US post office, said
his office would send a postcard 'to everyone in America' within
a week outlining how to handle suspicious mail.
But one place in which the two investigations do overlap is New
Jersey. Of the 133 on the FBI list still being sought, many live or
once lived in the state. Investigators in the anthrax attacks have
focused on a square mile of the Arab-American Ewing suburb of
Trenton, about 40 miles south of Manhattan, where they believe
the letters to Daschle and NBC were posted.
Authorities are especially interested in two Indian-born men
thought to have been part of a planned fifth hijacking on 11
September that was thwarted when all jets were grounded after
the World Trade Centre and Pentagon strikes.
Growing evidence of links between terrorist cells and New
Jersey has put the law enforcement in the state on high alert.
The state FBI office has assigned three separate task forces to
investigate the hijacking, anthrax and potential for attack. It has
deployed hundreds of officers to secure bridges, tunnels, nuclear
power plants, government offices and other potential targets.
Moreover, at least six of the 11 September hijackers are
believed to have lived in Paterson, including Hani Hanjour, who is
understood to have steered the American Airlines jet into the
Pentagon.
Lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, who expressed suspicious
interest in crop dusters, bought a plane ticket to Spain from a
Paterson travel agency, and Nawaq al-Hamzi, another Flight 77
hijacker, and Hanjour rented at least three cars from a
dealership in nearby Wayne shortly before the attacks. The
question now is whether or not the anthrax creeping across the
country and across each hour of news is 'weaponised' or
'non-weaponised'. The administration is doing all it can to urge
prudence.
Tom Ridge, chief of the new White House-based Office of
Homeland Security, on Friday reiterated the assurances of
officials in saying that it was not of weapons grade. It was a
scaling back on what officials had said privately after the
Daschle letter, introducing the new category of 'professional
grade'.
Richard Spertzel was the spearhead of Unscom's early
inspections, a genial man whose grandfatherly looks deceived
the Iraqis, whom he came to infuriate with his stubbornness. It
was he who then had to push his own sceptics into rooting out
Iraq's secret, and finally prized the confession from 'Dr Germ'
Taha. Crucially, Spertzel was the one bio-inspector who showed
less interest in the fixation of toxins to bombs or missiles, as in
their ability to be spread by sprays - he was impressed by
al-Hakam's aerosol generators and spray tanks.
Now, Spertzel is among those to be impressed by the
sophistication of the anthrax that arrived in Senator Daschle's
office. 'If 29 people are being contaminated,' he told The Observer,
'there's definitely an expert manufacturer in there, to make it fine
enough to lodge in the nostrils. It's what you would expect from
weapons grade anthax... |
