This report is interesting, and something I hadn't seen before. It's too long to post in it's entirety. Something tells me when all is said and done, the anthrax spores will have come from somewhere inside the old Soviet Union. Probably sold by a corrupt KGB agent for hard currency to Bin Ladin.
gwu.edu
U.S. INTELLIGENCE ON THE DEADLIEST MODERN OUTBREAK
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 61
Edited by Robert A. Wampler and Thomas S. Blanton
November 15, 2001
The September 11th Sourcebooks - Index
In the coming days the Archive will release subsequent volumes on lessons from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, U.S. policy and planning for "Low-Intensity Conflict," CIA guidelines on the recruitment of inteligence "assets," and the use of assassination in U.S. foreign policy.
As noted in Biowar: The Nixon Administration's Decision to End U.S. Biological Warfare Programs, public attention has become intensely focused upon the threat of attack by biological agents, as the continuing reports of anthrax-contaminated mail facilities and congressional offices appear in the news. The effort to determine who sent the anthrax-laced letters, how they have managed to become so widely dispersed, and to come to grips with the health threat posed have revealed the uncertainties surrounding any such outbreak. These uncertainties regarding the cause, pathology and vectors of an anthrax outbreak are mirrored in the case of the most deadly anthrax epidemic known, which occurred at a Soviet biological weapons facility located in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinberg, Russia) in 1979, where at least 68 people died. This incident was a focus of intense controversy and heated exchanges between Washington and Moscow during the 1980s, which would only come to a conclusion with the end of the Soviet Union and a more open Moscow leadership in the 1990s. Still, the heritage of the Soviet biological warfare effort, which was unparalleled in scope and potential lethality, remains a problem today and tomorrow. The documents provided here give a unique perspective on the Sverdlovsk anthrax issue as it unfolded and the questions it provoked, which remain relevant today.
The first reports emerged in October 1979 by way of a Russian-language newspaper in Frankfurt, West Germany that was close to the Soviet emigre community, which ran a brief report lacking any details about a major germ accident leading to deaths estimated in the thousands taking place in Russia.(1) New details emerged in this same paper in early 1980, with reports of an explosion in April 1979 at a secret military installation near Sverdlovsk that released a large amount of anthrax spores into the air, again with a thousand people estimated dead from the disease. There were also reports that the area had been placed under Soviet military control with extensive decontamination efforts implemented. (For these early reports, see Documents No. 1-3) The story gained world attention as major British and West German news papers ran stories on the catastrophe. As these reports emerged, U.S. intelligence began to look more carefully at satellite imagery and signals intercepts from the spring of 1979 and found possibly corroborative signs of a serious accident such as roadblocks and decontamination trucks around Compound 19, a military installation in Sverdlovsk, as well as a visit by Soviet Defense Minister Ustinov to the city. The anthrax explanation also seemed plausible, given the past history of U.S. and Soviet efforts to develop the deadly microbe into a biological weapon.
The reports of a possible anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk linked to an incident at a suspected Soviet biological warfare facility served to further deepen already worsening U.S.-Soviet relations, which were heading back toward a new Cold War in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the 1980s during the Reagan administration, Sverdlovsk would become one of the major points in the U.S. indictment of the USSR, joining with accusations that Soviet allies were using a mycotoxin known as "yellow rain" against troops in Southeast Asia, to build the case that the Soviets were violating the ban on the use of biological weapons imposed by the 1972 Biological Warfare Convention, which both the U.S. and the USSR had signed (see Documents 20 and 21).
The Soviets replied angrily to these accusations, claiming that the deaths in Sverdlovsk were the result of eating tainted meat. A Tass article entitled "A Germ of Lying," which was published on March 24,1980, was typical, in combining the Soviet argument that a natural outbreak of anthrax, which was endemic to the area, with condemnation of the U.S. accusations as part of a plan for "spurring up the arms race and] intensifying tensions in the relations between states," calling into question the validity of the 1972 biological arms convention, and waging psychological warfare against the USSR.(2) U.S. intelligence analysts quickly dismissed the Soviet explanation as not in accordance with the evidence. The consensus in the U.S. government, as seen in CIA and DIA reports (see Documents 4-11), quickly came to focus on the more sinister explanation of an accident releasing anthrax spores into the air, producing a number of deaths from inhalation anthrax soon after the release, and later deaths from consumption of meat from anthrax-contaminated cattle. The analysts felt this explanation better fit the fact that the series of deaths continued for nearly two months, thus requiring the two different vectors for transmission of the disease to humans.
To help develop the case against the Soviets, the CIA asked Harvard biologist Matthew Meselson, a long-time proponent of a ban on biological weapons, to examine the evidence. After reviewing the intelligence reports, Meselson was skeptical of the emerging consensus that an accidental anthrax release was the cause of the deaths, pointing to the absence of any evidence for intestinal anthrax, which he felt cast doubt on the veracity of the intelligence sources, (mostly second-hand reports from Soviet doctors), and thus upon their expertise in assessing the origin and pathology of the Sverdlovsk deaths. Meselson's doubts were increased by the account given by an American professor, fluent in Russian, who was living in Sverdlovsk at the time on a fellowship, who reported he had not seen anything extraordinary happen there in April 1979. (See Document No. 27 for a report on a meeting between Meselson and U.S. officials to discuss his views on the Soviet explanation of the accident and his doubts about the U.S. explanation.)
Other scientists also harbored doubts about the official U.S. accusation, noting that an accidental release of anthrax spores could have been in connection with a defensive biological warfare research program, which was allowed under the 1972 convention. As Miller, et. al. note in Germs, at the heart of the controversy could be seen the differing standards of proof governing scientific and intelligence analyses. For Meselson, the fact that the U.S. accusations regarding the "yellow rain" toxins were eventually found to be unsubstantiated (in part through investigations with which Meselson was associated) likely only bolstered his doubts about the anthrax hypothesis coming from the same intelligence agencies. Other key questions for which there were no clear answers also served to create doubts: How much anthrax was involved, if there was a release: was it a gram or less, or did it range into the kilograms? How many people actually died: was it between 60 and 100, or closer to 1,000? What was the nature of the release, accidental or deliberate, and through what mechanism? |
