At 21:31 -0500 11/14/97, John Young wrote:
Fascinating. My original article about Jim Bell's raid is at: http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/editorial/0,1012,800,00.html I like these grafs: Characters like James Dalton Bell are giving federal officials fits these days. Bell, they believe, is one of a new generation of tinkerers and technicians, of college-educated extremists threatening to use biological, chemical, or radiological weapons to achieve their goals. Since the Aum cult's Tokyo nerve gas attack, FBI officials say the number of credible threats to use these weapons has jumped from a handful in 1995, to 20 last year, to twice that number this year. Among the incidents was the 1995 mailing of a videotape to Disneyland, showing two hands mixing chemicals and a note threatening an attack on the theme park. Despite a major investigation, the sender was never caught. Just last April someone sent a petri dish labeled anthrax, an animal disease deadly to humans, to the B'nai B'rith headquarters in Washington, D.C. That proved to be a hoax. The recipes for such poison cocktails are available from underground publishers and on the Internet. One popularizer is an Arkansan named Kurt Saxon. Through books and videotapes, Saxon has been putting out ricin recipes for at least nine years. Convinced that the U.S. will be invaded and that the federal government can't be trusted to defend the country, he has fashioned various homemade explosives and poisons, including cyanide grenades and ricin applicators. In one segment of a $19.95 video, Saxon performs like a sinister Julia Child, blending salt water and solvents with castor beans. ("Pour in about 4 ounces of acetone," he says, "and shake it up nice.") "Uncle Fester," another near-legendary figure in the chem-bio underground, has authored such family classics as Silent Death, Improvised Explosives, and a guide to methamphetamine and LSD manufacture. Fester claims degrees in chemistry and biology, and his Silent Death describes how to produce poison gas, botulin and shellfish toxins, and ricin. Similarly, entire manuals for making homemade explosives--TNT, plastic, napalm--can be downloaded from the Net, as well as plans for building triggers, fuses, and timers. At least 11 online vendors offer books with recipes on biological or chemical weapons, including Silent Death and Kurt Saxon's The Poor Man's James Bond. All are based in the United States. Adding to the problem, many of the chemicals used to make nerve gas and other agents have perfectly legitimate uses and are readily available. "The genie has always been out of the bottle," says one intelligence analyst. "People are just discovering it." -Declan